2020 Read Online Free Page A

conversion auto-booted a runnable file to access mass storage? Or at least so say the probes. Amazing how the lines hold up. I think I got the power leads identified to the CPU and the bubble memory. Who knows, I might even be able to run that sucker. Or ruin it for good. I mean, it’s really a longshot.”
    “Do what you can,” I smiled automatically, but the room really began to swim around me now. Destroy it! I wanted to shout. Give it to me! I’ll ruin it. I had just been comforting myself with a vision of retirement with Keiko and my rival’s dust refused to settle, if you know what I mean.
    After I hung up different schemes passed through my mind. Get it back from Lance, send it down the trash chute, flush it down the john. But gradually, after twenty minutes of controlled breathing, I settled down.
    I did have qualms of conscience about destroying it, after all. And I was curious about what would happen if Lance tried to run the program ( “ruin it for good,” ran through my mind). Still, I resolved to withhold this latest development from Keiko. I would tell her that we hadn’t made any progress, that it looked like there was nothing to the chip after all.
    As the comet approached, I could lose myself in setting up the imaging equipment, dirty though the atmosphere continued to be. I’d planned to invite Keiko to drive down to Baja with me, but word was even Baja was socked in. So I would have to console myself with beta-testing new Zeiss filters; they were ingenious: including power supply the whole set fit into palm of my hand.
    My specialty is the suitcase-sized observatory. There is a special pleasure in handling such fine equipment, calibrating the sensors, cleaning the lenses, inputting the current project’s program, coordinating frame-action with celestial coordinates, running through simulations whose successes and failures both leave you hanging, peacefully and without messy human contact, somewhere among the stars.
    * * *
    The comet was a big event in the news: icy infalling interstellar material from the Kuyper Belt, a remnant of the formation of the solar system. The best estimate of its mass was a bit over a hundred kilotons, the size of a small mountain, a fairly rare event. A comet that big, impacting the Earth, would cause an untold catastrophe, its energy yield on the order of 20,000 megatons, equivalent to all the nuclear weapons produced in the previous century. But though V. Maro’s 272 year orbit would be close in cosmic terms, no measurable effect to earth was expected beyond an interruption in communications, and an incredible show.
    The latest data on Virgilius Maro —which everyone was calling Virgil now—was everywhere. It was on CNN, VNN, running as an occasional window on the Obit Channel.
    A comet-related story was running on the wallscreen at Keiko’s house the next evening when I arrived for my promised dinner, the titanium urn and what remained of the judge’s ashes in my hands. Yes, I’d told Keiko that the chip inquiry had come to a dead end.
    I was feverish with guilt and lust.
    Unix, wearing a silver microdress decorated with signs of the Zodiac, met me at the door and took the urn from my hands. She set it on the foyer table. “Aunt Keiko’s instructions,” she said. “She’s taking your advice about burying the ashes and the urn in a regular grave. Burying what’s left of Uncle—my dad ’s uncle, actually. Still, she’s been like an aunt to me.”
    “I’m just trying to make her happy,” I said.
    “I can tell.” she smiled. “She’s out back. . . .”
    I found Keiko outside in the neglected kitchen garden, hands dirty but cheerful. She was filling pots with soil.
    “Not much bigger than this,” she said, holding up a parsley seed. I realized she was talking about the chip. “Nothing to it, then?”
    “No,” I said. “Nothing at all. My technician still has the chip, but your husband’s ashes are otherwise intact. I wasn’t sure you