Galaxies Like Grains of Sand Read Online Free PDF Page A

that the land was capable of yielding. Outlying or self ruling communities were brought under one stringent control. The notorious Mating Centre was set up, governing all marriages and births; only an age without hope could have tolerated its arid regimen.
    But mechanical ingenuity was not enough — as it had never been enough — to ward off disaster.
    Time unrolled itself like a long carpet, down which man ambled toward extinction.
     
    It was the last day of summer in the last year of the eighty-third century AD.
    Humming to itself high in the stratosphere, a vane carried J Smithlao, psychodynamician, over the 139th sector of Ing Land. It began to dive. It sank down, finally levelling out to hover over Charles Gunpat’s estate, selecting its course without attention from Smithlao.
    For Smithlao this was a routine errand. He had come, as Gunpat’s psychodynamician, to administer a hate-brace to the old man. His dark face was bored as he stared at the replica of outside on his telescreens. Oddly enough, as he did so he caught a glimpse of a man approaching Gunpat’s estate on foot.
    “Must be a wild man,” he muttered to himself.
    Under the slowing vane, the landscape was as neat as a blueprint. The impoverished fields made impeccable rectangles.
    Here and there, one robot machine or another kept nature to its own functional image: not a pea podded without cybernetic supervision; not a bee bumbled among stamens without radar check being kept of its course. Every bird had a number and a call sign, while among each tribe of ants marched the metallic teller ants, telltaling the secrets of the nest back to base. When rain fell, it had its allocated dropping place. The old, comfortable world of random factors had vanished under the pressure of hunger.
    Nothing living lived without control. The countless populations of previous centuries and the leechings of war had exhausted the soil. Only the severest parsimony, coupled with ruthless regimentation, produced enough nourishment for a sparse population. Billions had died of starvation; the hundreds who remained lived on starvation’s brink.
    In the sterile neatness of the landscape, Gunpat’s estate looked like an insult. Covering five acres, it was a little island of wilderness. Tall and unkempt elms fenced the perimeter, encroaching on the lawns and house. The house itself, the chief one in Sector 139, was built of massive stone blocks. It had to be strong to bear the weight of the servomechanisms which, apart from Gunpat and his mad daughter Ployploy, were its only occupants.
    It was as Smithlao dropped below tree level that he saw the human figure plodding toward the estate. For a multitude of reasons, this was a very unlikely sight. Since the great material wealth of the world was now shared among comparatively few people, no one was poor enough to have to walk anywhere. Man’s increasing hatred of Nature, spurred by the notion that it had betrayed him, would make such a walk purgatory — unless the individual were insane, like Ployploy.
    Dismissing the figure from his thoughts, Smithlao dropped the vane onto a stretch of stone in front of the building. He was glad to get down; it was a gusty day, and the piled cumulus through which he had descended had been full of turbulence.
    Gunpat’s house, with its sightless windows, its towers, its endless terraces, its unnecessary ornamentation, its massive porch, lowered at him like a forsaken wedding cake.
    His arrival stimulated immediate activity. Three wheeled robots approached the vane from different directions, swivelling light weapons as they drew near.
    Nobody, Smithlao thought, could get in here uninvited. Gunpat was not a friendly man, even by the unfriendly standards of his time; the disgrace of having a daughter like Ployploy had served to accentuate the morose side of his melancholy temperament.
    “Identity?” demanded the leading machine. It was ugly and flat, vaguely resembling a toad.
    “I am J Smithlao,