Free Watson, Ian - SSC by The Very Slow Time Machine (v1.1) Page A

           “Bloodthirsty
maniac—I don’t care about that—I can’t see anything up there! Where has the
ozone cover gone?”
                 I
turned to Amberson then blankly, still clutching the wet heart.
                 “What?”
                 “The
ozone layer in the upper air, don’t you realize it’s gone? Met Central is
shouting murder about it. The hard radiation is getting through. You’re burning
to death if you stay out here. That’s why there’s no harvest, you fool.
Scattering blood around isn’t going to help!”
                 I
dropped the heart on the ground, where it lay bubbling gently, tiny bubbles of
blood, into the unresponsive warming soil.
                 Amberson
snatched at me, maybe to drag me under the metal sheet with him, but I shook
him off and jumped into my buggy, locked the doors, opaqued the windows.
                 And sat trembling there with the obsidian blade freshly blooded in
my lap.
                 “Considine!”
cried voices over the radiophone.
                 “Considine?” Amberson’s voice—he was back in his sun buggy.
                 “Yes,
I’m here.”
                 “Now
hear me, sun runners all, Considine led you here, and I admit I don’t know how.
But now maybe he’d like to explain why we can’t go outside without being
burnt, and where the harvest is?”
                 I
said nothing.
                 “No?
I’ll tell you. Anyway, it’s coming over Met Central. The ozone layer in the
upper air has finally broken down—the pollution has gotten to it and changed
it—and as the ozone layer just happens to be what filters out the hard
radiation from the sun, we had better get the hell out of here. Reflecting—as we do—on the demise of the honorable sport of the
sun hunt. From now on anyone who spots the sun is going to wish himself
a hundred miles away. So get going sun runners. And bugger you Considine. Let’s
all know this as Considine’s Sunspot—the last sunspot anyone ever hunted for. A nice curse to remember a bloodthirsty fool by!”
                 Tezcatlipoca,
why had you cheated me? Did her blood not flow like milk to your satisfaction?
Was it because I botched the sacrifice so clumsily? Where the Aztec priest used
one swift blow of the knife to unsheath the heart, I used twenty. . . .
                 One
thing Amberson was wrong about. The biggest thing of all. The thing that has given me my present role, more hated than Amberson could
ever have dreamed as he uttered his curse upon me.
                 For
Considine’s Sunspot was not going to close up, ever. It carried on expanding,
taking in more acres hour by hour.
                 Far
more than the ozonosphere had altered in those chemical mutations of the past
few hours. The pall of dirt that had blanketed the Earth so many years was
swift to change, whatever new catalyst it was that had found a home in the
smog; now, starting at one point and spreading outward, the catalyst preceding
(swimming like a living thing—Snowflake’s “childish” nightmare!) on a wave
front from the point of light, the changed smog yielded to the hard radiations
of the naked sun.
                 I
was right—which is the horror of it—I was right. Tezcatlipoca is alive again,
but no friend to man. Nor was he ever friend to man, but cheated and betrayed
him systematically with his magic and his song, and his stink. Tezcatlipoca,
vicious bear, hideous giant coming head in hand, bounding jaguar, using me as
focus for his flames, as plainly as he used Marina (my lost love!) for his map.
                 Considine’s
Sunspot spreads rapidly from one day to the next, gathering strength,
sterilizing further areas of the country, burning the earth clean. Algae beds
consumed faster than they can be covered over. Fuller