Modem Times 2.0 Read Free Page B

their Schoenberg rolls out for Christmas Day.
    A crone appeared from behind a large chestnut. She wore a big red coat with a hood, trimmed in white, and she carried a basket. Jerry recognized her; but, to humour her, he pretended to be surprised as she approached.
    “Good luck, dear,” she said. “You’ve got almost seven years left. And seven’s a lucky number, isn’t it?” She wrapped her lilac chiffon round her scrawny throat. Ersatz syrup. Somewhere drums and motorcycle engines began to beat. “Seven years!”
    Jerry knew better. “Twenty-two years and some months according to the SS. Owning your misery is the quickest way of getting out from under. What will happen to individualism under the law?”
    “Obama will change all that, darling. Great lawyers are coming. They will change corporations into individuals. Cross my palm with silver and I’ll tell you the future. Cross it with gold and I’ll explain the present.”
    Checking his watches, Jerry smiled and turned up the collar of his black car coat. He put one gloved hand on the Roller’s gear stick, another on the wheel. He was still searching for his Dornier DoX seaplanes. Last he’d looked Catherine had been aboard.
    “What’s the time? My watches stopped.”
7. HOW TO GET YOUR FREE STATE $2 BILLS
    When asked to imagine the Earth in 2040, many scientists describe a grim scenario, a landscape so bare and dry it’s almost uninhabitable. But that’s not what Willem van Cottem sees. “It will be a green world,” says van Cottem, a Belgian scientist turned social entrepreneur. “Tropical fruit can grow wherever it’s warm. You still need water, but not much. A brief splash of rain every once in a while is enough. And voila—from sandy soil, lush gardens grow. The secret is hydrogels, powerfully absorbent polymers that can suck up hundreds of times their weight in water. Hydrogels have many applications today, from food processing to mopping up oil spills, but they are most familiar as the magic ingredient in disposable diapers.
    —Popular Science
, July 2010
    “B ELONGING, JERRY, IS very important to me.” Colonel Pyat glanced up and down the deserted Portobello. Crows were hopping about in the gutters. Old newspapers, scraps of lettuce, squashed tomatoes, ruined apples. Even the scavengers, their ragged forms moving methodically up and down the street, rejected them.
    Jerry looked over at the cinema. The Essoldo was showing three pictures for 1/6d.
Mrs. Miniver, The Winslow Boy
, and
Brief Encounter
.
    “Heppy deddy?” he asked no-one in particular.
    “There you are!” The colonel was triumphant. “You can speak perfectly properly if you want to!”
    Jerry was disappointed. He had expected a different triple feature. He had been told it would be
Epic Hero and the Beast, First Spaceship on Venus
, and
Forbidden Planet
.
    “Rets!” he said.
8. A GAME OF PATIENCE
    Art, which should be the unique preoccupation of the privileged few, has become a general rule … A fashion … A furor … artism!
    —Felix Pyat
    “T HERE’S ALWAYS A bridge somewhere.” Mo paced up and down the levee like a neurotic dog. Every few minutes he licked his lips with his long red tongue. At other times he stood stockstill staring inland, upriver. From the gloom came the sound of a riverboat’s groaning wail, and an exchange of shouts between pilots over their bullhorns. Heavy waves of black liquid crashed against hulls. The words were impossible to make out, like cops ordering traffic, but nobody cared what they were saying. Further downriver, from what remained of the city, came the mock-carousel music inviting visitors to a showboat whose paddles, splashing like the vanes of a ruined windmill, stuck high out of filthy brown water full of empty Evian and Ozarka bottles.
    Further upstream, scavengers with empty cans were trying to skim thick oil off the surface.
    Jerry called up from the water. He had found a raft and was poling it slowly to the gently curving