Visions of the Future Read Online Free PDF Page A

considered valuable by someone else? Sometimes values are so hard to define they escape analysis.
    When you come right down to it, my body, your body, everybody is nothing more than a wondrously efficient and complex chemical plant, one that even DuPont can’t duplicate. Better living through chemistry.
    And most of the time, we’re not even aware of the fact that this irreplaceable plant is producing all the time…

    Both Pearson and the ship were rotted out.
    He hadn’t known that when he’d rented it (having no intention of returning it and not worrying about that since both the credslip he’d used to pay for it and his corresponding identification were fakes), but he’d been in too much of a hurry to care.
    The ship had made the Jump in one piece; but when he’d come out into normal space again, he’d found several small but critical components that had come out in many pieces.
    All that was left of it now was a pillar of smoke and vaporized metal climbing into a pale blue sky. He could not bring himself to curse it. He knew the feeling. And it had ejected him, though somewhat less than safely. He was alive, and that wasn’t much. All he felt now was an overwhelming tiredness, a fatigue of the spirit. A numbness of the soul.
    Surprisingly, there was no pain. Inside, Pearson continued to function. Outside, he could move his eyes and lips, twitch his nose, and—with enormous effort—raise his right arm off the flat, sandy ground. His face was no longer merely a small part of an expressive self: it was all that remained. What the rest of his body, encased in the remnants of his flight suit, looked like, he could only imagine. He did not wish to imagine. He knew his right arm was intact, because he could move it. Beyond that, all was morbid speculation.
    If he was lucky, very lucky, he might be able to use the arm to turn himself onto his side. He did not bother to make the effort. There were no more illusions, at last no more illusions, circling languidly in Pearson’s consciousness. On the eve of death, he had become a realist.
    It was a tiny world he’d inflicted himself upon, no more than a very large asteroid, really. Silently, he apologized to it for any damage his crash might have caused. He was always apologizing for doing damage.
    He was breathing, so the thin atmosphere was less tenuous than it looked. No one would find him here. Even the police who’d been chasing him would leave off searching. Pearson was a most insignificant criminal. Not even a criminal, really. To qualify for that label you had to do something modestly harmful. “Criminal” implied someone dangerous, threatening. Pearson was merely irritating to society, like a minor itch.
    Well, he’d finally gone and scratched himself, he thought, and was surprised to discover he had the strength and ability left to laugh.
    It made him black out, however.
    When he regained his senses, it was just beginning to grow light. He had no idea how long this minuscule world’s day was. Therefore he had no idea how long he’d been unconscious. He might’ve been out a day or a week, human time. Though he no longer thought of himself as human. Complete muscular paralysis, save for his face and one arm, had left him a living corpse. He was unable to move about, nor reach the concentrates in the battered survival pack that might or might not still be attached to the leg of his suit, or do more than breathe in the feeble atmosphere that was temporarily keeping him alive. He rather wished he’d blown up with the ship.
    He would not starve, however. He would die of thirst first. Living corpse, Pearson. Brain in a bottle. It gave him plenty of time to reflect on his life.
    Actually, he’d been something of a living corpse all along. He’d never felt for anyone or anything, and not very strongly for himself. Never doing anyone any good and not having the capability to do anyone serious evil, he’d just sort of muddled along, taking up space and other