A Good Old-Fashioned Future Read Online Free PDF

any industrial spy knows, I’m here in California on a personal vacation.” He heaved his duffel into the back of Tug’s car. Then he straightened, and reached deep into the baggy trouser-pocket of his Can’t-Bust-’Ems.
    The Texan dragged out a slender pill-bottle filled with clear viscous jelly and pressed the crotch-warmed vial into Tug’s unwilling palm, with a dope-dealer’s covert insistence. “I want you to keep this, Tug. Just in case anything should … you know … happen to me.”
    Revel swiveled his narrow head to scan the passers-by with paranoid alertness, briefly reminding Tug of the last time he’d been here at the San Jose airport: to meet his ailing father, who’d been fingerpaint-the-wall-with-shit senile and had been summarily dumped on the plane by Tug’s uncle. Tug had gotten his father into a local nursing home, and last summer Tug’s father had died.
    Life was sad, and Tug was letting it slip through his fingers—he was an unloved gay man who’d never see thirty again, and now here he was humoring a nutso het from Texas. Humoring people was not something Tug excelled at.
    “Do you really have enemies?” said Tug. “Or do you just think so? Am I supposed to think you have enemies? Am I supposed to care?”
    “There’s money in these plans of ours—real foldin’ money,” Revel bragged darkly, climbing into the Animata’s passenger seat. He waited silently until Tug took the wheel and shut the driver’s-side door. “All we really gotta worry about,” Revel continued at last, “is controllingthe publicity. The environmental impact crap. You didn’t tell anybody about what I e-mailed you, did you?”
    “No,” snapped Tug. “That cheap public-key encryption you’re using has garbled half your messages. What are you so worried about, anyway? Nobody’s gonna care about some slime from a played-out oil well—even if you do call it
Urschleim
. That’s German, right?”
    “Shhhhh!” hissed Revel.
    Tug started the engine and gunned it with a bluish gust of muscular combustion. They swung out into the endless California traffic.
    Revel checked several times to make sure that they weren’t being trailed. “Yes, I call it
Urschleim
,” he said at last, portentously. “In fact, I’ve put in a trademark for that name. Them old-time German professors were on to something.
Ur
means
primeval
. All life came from the Urschleim, the original slime! Primeval slime from the inner depths of the planet! You ever bitten into a green almond, Tug? From the tree? There’s some green fuzz, a thin little shell, and a center of clear, thick slime. That’s exactly how our planet is, too. Most of the original Urschleim is still flowing, and oozing, and lyin’ there ’way down deep. It’s just waitin’ for some bright boy to pump it out and exploit its commercial potential. Urschleim is life itself.”
    “That’s pretty grandiose,” said Tug evenly.
    “Grandiose, hell!” Revel snapped. “It’s the only salvation for the Texas oil business, compadre! God damn it, if we Texans don’t drill for a living, we’ll be reduced to peddling chips and software like a bunch of goddamn Pacific Rim computer weenies! You got me wrong if you think I’ll give up the oil business without a fight!”
    “Sure, sure, I’m hip,” Tug said soothingly. “My jellyfish are going to help you find more oil, remember?” It was easy to tell when Revel had gone nonlinear—his Texan drawl thickened drastically and he began to refer to his beloved oil business as the “aisle bidness.” But what was the story with this
Urschleim
?
    Tug held up the pill-bottle of clear slime and glancedat it while steering with one hand. The stuff was thixotropic—meaning a gel that becomes liquid when shaken. You’d tilt the vial and all the Urschleim would be stuck in one end, but then, if you shook the bottle a bit, the slime’s state would change and it would run down to the other end like ketchup suddenly gushing