Read To THE LAND OF THE ELECTRIC ANGEL: Hugo and Nebula Award Finalist Author (The Frontiers Saga) for Free Online Page B

deck with a clatter.
    Lennie lurched up and started running, not looking back. Blake took a few steps after him and stopped. Then he turned toward Weed, who was unconscious. He looked at him, then stooped to pick up the knife. Putting the point of the blade into a crack between the support column and the sidewall of a balancing salon, he snapped the knife in two and threw the pieces down the dark mall.
    Goddamn stupid fight! Blake told himself with great annoyance. How stupid to get in that position. I know better. 1 grew up in these arks, I ran with gangs out of self-protection. He knew that criminals and addicts roamed every ark in the world: mindless mini-rioters, vandals in permaplast, the true sons of Attila – each of them bored and frustrated.
    The brontosaurus was still munching placidly. The tyrannosaurus lurched into the background once again, continuing the cycle that would go on as along as the sensatron had power or until something in its electronic guts burned out.
    Blake headed for the nearest elevator cluster and went home.
    The world had barely escaped strangling in its own waste, the planet was gutted, and only the fusion torches and mass accelerators had saved it. They mined the waste heaps, recycled the garbage in a way never before possible, shredding the very molecules with the tiny suns of the fusion torches, stripping the waste down to the atoms themselves, before separating them with the mass accelerators. This technique gave man back most of his precious elements in a form more purified than ever before. Recycling with fusion torches and mass accelerators had given man a second chance, and just in time. Given hope, the birthing masses of the world tried harder, so that although everything was still not perfect at least there was now no fear of using up the Earth's resources completely. Fusion torches didn't plant or harvest food, and mass accelerators didn't distribute it, but at least now there was material, chemicals, power – and hope.
    Man had colonized Mars and had turned the . Moon into something not much more than an exotic, if somewhat distant, port. Satellites now sailed in silent swarms around the planet, gathering solar power, monitoring the weather, feeding down information about the sun and stars. Man was spreading outward at last, but in a painfully slow manner. Probes had gone to the other planets and there had been a few manned missions; and now there was even talk of mining operations starting on the moons of Jupiter as soon as an efficient shielding against the big planet's deadly radiation could be developed.
    Nevertheless, still the population grew. Babies came relentlessly, even though the Pope had at last reversed himself and amended the Church's historical stand on contraception. But he was too late. The more practical-minded of his flock had long since deserted him for theologies that had more relevance. Belatedly, congresses and parliaments made laws, dictators and regents issued edicts, foundations said I-told-you-so, and economists held their heads. There were too many people for the available food and available space. Ecological structures only utilized existing space more efficiently, they did not solve the problem.
    Angered and frustrated, youth had little to do. Most young people took the highroad: drugs and sex, "challenges" and quick thrills. The old cliche of "Live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking corpse" was still operational for a large percentage of the young.
    Blake shook his head sadly and punched out his secret code on the, door lock, thumbed the sonic identifier, stood on the hidden sensor mat.
    Home, sweet home, he thought.

Chapter 4
     
    It was a black-and-gray mountain, made of uncounted megatons of granite and immense continental-plate pressures. It had a thin mantle of decomposed granite and a skirt of pine trees in the lower regions, but raw rock above. A three-dimensional image of the entire mountain was constructed from seismic recordings,