Read Flux for Free Online

know.”
    â€œWhat kind of animal are you, Crove? Can’t you make up a lie and believe it?”
    Crove chuckled. (In the old days, at this level of amusement he would have laughed uproariously. But inured to death or not, he had scars. And he would never laugh loudly again.) “It was my business. As a playwright. The willing suspension of disbelief.”
    The door opened and a very important looking man in a military uniform covered with medals came in, followed by four Russian soldiers. The prosecutor sighed and stood up. “Good-bye, Crove.”
    â€œGood-bye,” Jerry said.
    â€œYou’re a very strong man.”
    â€œSo,” said Jerry, “are you.” And the prosecutor left.
    The soldiers took Jerry out of the prison to a different place entirely. A large complex of buildings in Florida. Cape Canaveral. They were exiling him, Jerry realized.
    â€œWhat’s it like?” he asked the technician who was preparing him for the flight.
    â€œWho knows?” the technician asked. “No one’s ever come back. Hell, no one’s ever arrived yet.”
    â€œAfter I sleep on somec, will I have any trouble waking up?”
    â€œIn the labs, here on earth, no. Out there, who knows?”
    â€œBut you think we’ll live?”
    â€œWe send you to planets that look like they might be habitable. If they aren’t, so sorry. You take your chances. The worst that can happen is you die.”
    â€œIs that all?” Jerry murmured.
    â€œNow lie down and let me tape your brain.”
    Jerry lay down and the helmet, once again, recorded his thoughts. It was irresistible, of course: when you are conscious that your thoughts are being taped, Jerry realized, it is impossible not to try to think something important. As if you were performing. Only the audience would consist of just one person. Yourself when you woke up.
    But he thought this: That this starship and the others that would be and had been sent out to colonize in prison worlds were not really what the Russians thought they were. True, the prisoners sent in the Gulag ships would be away from earth for centuries before they landed, and many or most of them would not survive. But some would survive.
    I will survive, Jerry thought as the helmet picked up his brain pattern and transferred it to tape.
    Out there the Russians are creating their own barbarians. I will be Attila the Hun. My child will be Mohammed. My grandchild will be Genghis Khan.
    One of us, someday, will sack Rome.
    Then the somec was injected, and it swept through him, taking consciousness with it, and Jerry realized with a shock of recognition that this, too, was death: but a welcome death, and he didn’t mind. Because this time when he woke up he would be free.
    He hummed cheerfully until he couldn’t remember how to hum, and then they put his body with hundreds of others on a starship and pushed them all out into space, where they fell upward endlessly into the stars. Going home.

C LAP H ANDS AND S ING
    O N THE SCREEN the crippled man screamed at the lady, insisting that she must not run away. He waved a certificate. “I’m a registered rapist, damnit!” he cried. “Don’t run so fast! You have to make allowances for the handicapped!” He ran after her with an odd, left-heavy lope. His enormous prosthetic phallus swung crazily, like a clumsy propeller that couldn’t quite get started. The audience laughed madly. Must be a funny, funny scene!
    Old Charlie sat slumped in his chair, feeling as casual and permanent as glacial debris. I am here only by accident, but I’ll never move. He did not switch off the television set. The audience roared again with laughter. Canned or live? After more than eight decades of watching television, Charlie couldn’t tell anymore. Not that the canned laughter had got any more real: It was the real laughter that had gone tinny, premeditated. As if the laughs were timed to