Sidney's Comet Read Online Free

causing visions of home furnishings, autocars and bright clothing to float across his brain. Uncle Rosy seemed to look directly at him with concerned, benign eyes, and Sidney felt a force compelling him to reach for his back pocket. Dutifully, he brought forth a tiny red, yellow and blue volume. Gold leaf lettering on the cover announced its title: Quotations From Uncle Rosy.
    Touching a button on the book cover, Sidney auto-leafed through the pages, only half-conscious of people around him doing the same thing.
    “I can’t believe our Uncle Rosy wrote this more than three centuries ago,” a woman said. Then, in the precise and emotionless tone of a Freeness Studies Instructor, she commanded, “Turn to page one-three-four.”
    She paused momentarily as pages auto-flipped.
    “There will always be non-believers,” the woman read reverently, “dangerously insane people who will stop at nothing in their attempts to disrupt our holy order. They will predict all manner of plague and catastrophe, insisting that God disapproves of the manner in which we live.” She closed the volume, and Sidney looked up to see her smile softly. She had flaxen hair, and with a glance toward the square she said, “They are wrong, citizens. This is God’s land.”
    The group closed their volumes, murmured, “Truly we are blessed.”
    Sidney waited as people destined for lower floors took places in the back of a large elevator, then he roiled on and stood at the front. Mentoing sub-five-oh-three, Sidney felt a click in the back of his brain as the car’s computer accepted his command. The doors closed.
    * * *
    Sayer Superior Lin-Ti looked up, and his words slowed as he stopped reading from the text. “Those voices,” he said, “you understand who they were?”
    A short youngsayerman rose and responded: “Yes, Sayer Superior. They were the beings whose realm was invaded by Earth’s garbage. The ones who turned the garbage into a fiery boomerang comet.”
    “And why did they speak to Malloy?”
    “We have heard stories, Sayer Superior. I believe Malloy was a . . . well . . . a dolt of some sort. And they wanted him to botch up Earth’s plan to stop the comet.”
    “That is correct. To put it bluntly, Sidney Malloy was a no-talent jerk . . . working in the lowest level of the most useless department in the government. . . . ”
    * * *
    It was shortly after noonhour, the beginning of Carla’s daily shift. Her rotatyper platform stood to one side of the sprawling Presidential Secretaries Pool, and beyond the tap-tap-whir of memo-activated machinery she heard the faint, gelatinous purr of Harmak.
    She thought of Sidney as she adjusted her earphones, of the strange way he had behaved at the demonstration and of his attempts to be more than a datemate with her. Lately, Sidney had been most persistent.
    Carla watched the letter “e” appear on her rotatyper screen, then called out, “Lower case V period, return, tab, upper case.”
    She paused to make an entry on a Time and Motion form, then watched the typists encircling her platform as they mento-activated the keyboards in front of their chairs. One did upper case, another lower case, yet another was responsible for numbers, and so on. Six typists sat around each rotatyper caller, although Carla had heard of a new machine developed by the Sharing For Prosperity people that would accommodate ninety-five typists, each having only one key to operate.
    All across the floor Carla could see great mounds of paper. There were stacks of paper on desks, on sidechairs, on windowsills, on the floor, spewing out of computers and in autocarts which rolled back and forth down each aisle delivering and removing. Brown and gold pamphlet meckies rolled along the aisles as well, full to bursting on all four sides with red, green, yellow and blue government pamphlets. A round, four-faced head on a stick neck rose from the center of each meckie’s rack, above which was a square top hat that proclaimed