Michaelmas Read Online Free PDF

beginning to blush. He breathed quickly in an attempt to fight it down.
    "Maybe I'd better take a rain check," Campion said quickly. "Going by your summation, Mel, I'd be better off with forty winks." He turned off his comm unit, leaned back with his arms folded across his chest, and closed his eyes.
    "I'd be glad of another one of these, miss," Michaelmas said to the stewardess, holding up his half-full glass. "You make them excellently."
    Watson got a bourbon and water. He took off the top half with one gulping swallow and then nursed the rest in his clenched hand. He sat brooding at his stiffly out-thrust shoes. After a while, he said forcefully: "Been around a long time, Larry, the two of us."
    Michaelmas nodded. He chuckled. "Every time something happens in South America, I think about the time you almost led the Junta charge across the plaza at Mara-caibo."
    Watson smiled crookedly. "Man, we were right on top of it that day, weren't we? You with that black box flapping in the breeze and me with my bare hands. Filed the damn story by cable, for Christ's sake, like some birthday greet-ing or something. And told 'em if they were going to send any more people down, they'd better wrap some armour around the units, 'cause the first slug they stopped was the last." He put his hand on the sealed, tamper-proof unit he might be said to have pioneered at the cost of his own flesh.
    He took a very small sip of his drink. Watson was not drunk, and he was not a drunk, but he didn't smoke or use sticks, and he had nothing to do with his hands. Nor could he really stop talking. Most of the plane passengers were people with early-morning business—couriers with certificates or portable valuta; engineers; craftsmen with specialties too delicate to be confidently executed by tele-waldo; good, honest, self-sufficient specialists comforted by salaries that justified personal travel at ungodly hours— and they lay wrapped in quilts or tranquil self-esteem, nodding limp-necked in their seats with their reading lights off. Watson looked down the dimness of the aisle.

    "The way it is these days lately, I'd damn near have to send off to Albania for my party card and move south. Foment my own wars."
    "You miss it, don't you?" Michaelmas said in a measured kidding tone of voice.
    Watson shook his head. Then he nodded slightly. "I don't know. Maybe. Remember how it was when we were just starting out — Asia, Africa, Russia, Mississippi? Holy smoke, you'd just get something half put away, and somebody'd start it up again somewhere else. Big movements.
    Crowds. Lots of smoke and fire."
    "Oh, yes. Big headlines. A lot of exciting footage on the flat-V tube."
    "You know, I think the thing about it was, it was simple stuff. Good guys, bad guys. People who were going to take your country away overnight. People who were going to cancel your pay-cheque. People who were going to come into your school. People who stood around in bunches and waved clubs and yelled, "The hell you will!" Man, you know, really, those were the salad days for you and me. Good thing, too; I don't suppose either one of us had enough experience to do anything but point at the writing on the wall. Neither one of us could miss the broad side of a barn, period. Right? Well, maybe not you, but me. Me, for sure."
    "It's not necessary to be such a country boy with me, Horse."
    Watson waved his hands. "Nah! Nah, look, we were green as grass, and so was the world.
    Man, is it wrong to miss being young and sure of yourself? I don't think so, Larry. I think if I didn't miss it, the last good part of me would be all crusted over and cracking in the middle. But whatever happened to big ideological militancy, anyway? All we've got left now is these tired agrarian reformer bandidos hiding in the Andes, screaming Peking's gone soft on im-perialismo and abandoned 'em, and stealing chickens. I wonder if old Joe Stalin ever figured his last apostle would be somebody named Juan Schmidt-Garcia with a