Read Fall Revolution 4: The Sky Road for Free Online

but not, alas,
tall. He wore a denim jacket with a tin button – a badge,
as the Brits called them – pinned to its lapel. The badge
was red with the black hammer-and-sickle-and-4 of the
International.
    ‘What!’ Myra laughed. ‘I know it feels that
waynow, everybody our age feels like that, yeah? But it’ll
come to us all, man, don’t kid yourself.’
    She rolled back on her elbows on the grass and looked up at
the blue spring sky. It was too bloody cold for this, but the sun
was out and the ground was dry, and that was good enough for
sunbathing in Scotland. The grassy slope behind the Boyd Orr
Building was covered with groups and couples of students,
drinking and smoking and talking. Probably missing lectures
– it was already two in the afternoon.
    ‘Seriously,’ Dave said, in that Highland accent
that carried the sound of wind on grass, of waves on shore,
‘if you can live into the twenty-first century, you have a
damn good chance of living for ever.’
    ‘Says who? L. Ron Hubbard?’
    Dave snorted. ‘Arthur C. Clarke, actually.’
    ‘Who?’
    He frowned at her. ‘You know – scientist, futurist
The man who invented the communications satellite.’
    ‘Oh, him,’ Myra said scornfully.
‘Sci-fi. 2001 and all that’ She saw the slight
flinch of hurt in David’s face, and went on, ‘Oh,
don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying it’s
impossible. Maybe hundreds of years from now, maybe in communism.
Not in our lifetimes, though. Tough shit’
    Dave shrugged and rolled another cigarette.
    ‘We’ll see.’
    ‘I guess. And the rate you smoke those things,
you’ll be lucky to be alive in the twenty-first century.
You won’t even get to first base.’
    ‘Och, I’ll last another twenty-four years.’
He sighed, blowing smoke on to the slightly warm breeze, then
smiled at her mischievously. ‘Unless I become a martyr of
the revolution, of course.’
    „I have a rendezvous with death, on some disputed
barricade,“ Myra quoted. ‘Don’t worry.
That’s another thing won’t happen in our
lifetimes.’
    The shadow of the tall building crept over Dave’s face.
He shifted deftly, back into the sunlight.
    ‘That’s what you think, is it?’
    ‘Yeah, that’s what I think.’ She smiled, and
added, with ironic reassurance, ‘Our natural lifetimes, that is.’
    Dave hefted a satchel stuffed with copies of revolutionary
newspapers and magazines. ‘Then what’s the point of
all this? Why don’t we just eat, drink and be
merry?’
    Myra swigged from a can of MacEwan’s, lowered it and
looked at him over its rim. ‘That’s what I am doing right now, lover.’
    He took her point, and reached out and stroked the curve of
her cheekbone. ‘But still,’ he persisted. ‘Why
bother with politics if you don’t think we’re going
to win?’
    ‘Dave,’ she said, ‘I’m not a socialist
because I expect to end up running some kinda workers’
state of my own some day. I do what I do because I think
it’s right. OK?’
    ‘OK,’ said Reid, smiling; but his smile was amused
as well as affectionate, as though she were being naive.
Irritated without quite knowing why, she turned away.
    The city was called Kapitsa, and it was the capital of the
International Scientific and Technical Workers’ Republic,
which had no other city; indeed, apart from the camps, no other
human habitation. The ISTWR was an independent enclave on the
fringe of the Polygon – the badlands between Karaganda and
Semipalatinsk, a waste-product of
Kazakhstan’snuclear-testing legacy. A long time ago,
Kapitsa would have looked modern, with its centre of high-rise
office blocks, its inner ring of automatic factories, its
periphery of dusty but tree-lined streets and estates of low-rise
apartment blocks, the bustling airport just outside and the busy
spaceport on the horizon, from which the great ships had loudly
climbed, day after day. Now it was a rustbelt, as quaintly
obsolete as