Spacetime Donuts Read Free

glad you were hip enough to come over here," he whispered. The Governor was still extolling the bright future in store for the lucky Users in his care. Silver raised his hand and continued, "You know what I got in this hand? ZZ-74, man. That's what really put me on top. ZZ-74." He winked, then turned back to his original position facing the Governor's fat, talking back.
    ZZ-74? Vernor had never heard of it before. No one else in the bar's Nest had bothered to go hear Silver's secret message, but surely many others in the City had. ZZ-74? His attention was drawn back to the Governor's speech.
    "We need more Andy Silvers. I urge any citizen who feels able to withstand the titanic mental pressure of merging with the greatest computer the world has ever seen to come forward. Andy Silver is going to put together a team of Dreamers willing and able to get Phizwhiz moving again. More than ever before . . . Us is Users and Users is Us!" The Governor seemed about to leave, but struck with a sudden afterthought, he turned to Silver, "Andy, what do you want to call this team?"
    Silver looked at the Governor coolly, "The Angels," he said, "We'll be the Angels."
    They gave Silver a floor in the main Phizwhiz building downtown, and the next day Vernor was there. Half the Dreamers in town seemed to have gotten there before him. After waiting two hours to get into the building, he gave up and went back to the library. It might, after all, be wise to study some more science and ride out a few more heavy trips before putting his mind on the line. Maybe the whole thing was a hoax, a trick by the Governor to get acid-heads to volunteer for some kind of brain obliteration. Although LSD was legal, it was clear that the Governor disliked freaks.
    But Andy Silver's feat was not a hoax, as became evident over the next few months. New gadgets began appearing in the stores. The shows on the Hollows improved greatly. There was a rash of exciting fads. The laws against gardening and painting were dropped, and many people took up these enjoyable, but slightly dangerous hobbies. One man went on a rampage, killing six with his gardening tools, and paintings and slogans which were not good for the public to see began appearing on the sides of buildings and in the walktubes; but Andy Silver prevailed upon Phizwhiz to let the gardening and painting continue. There was even talk of legalizing laboratory science again.
    The Us was not entirely happy with all the changes in Phizwhiz's behavior which Andy Silver was bringing about. For his part, Silver made no secret of his revolutionary sentiments . . . occasionally going so far as to state that Phizwhiz should be destroyed. But the public was so enchanted with the life and excitement which he had brought, that it would have been politically impossible to arrest him—even if the Us had been sure it wanted to.
    Silver had assembled a core of four other Angels from the many who had volunteered: three men and a woman. Most people never made it past the initial screening, and all the rest, except the four we're talking about, failed the actual machine test . . . losing their minds in the process. Applications for a position with the Angels dropped off drastically as the word of this got around, and Vernor could now have gotten in for a test easily enough, but he hesitated to do this. It would probably be better to get some ZZ-74 first.
    A number of other people had heard Silver mention ZZ-74 on the Hollows. Lots of people, including the loach, were looking to score some, but there wasn't any around. The general consensus was that ZZ-74 must be a drug which was being manufactured in an underground laboratory . . . perhaps by the mysterious Professor G. Kurtowski.
    Since the Us had not yet been able to obtain and analyze a sample of ZZ-74, they could not be sure that it was safe, so it was declared illegal, although the government was all too eager to legalize ZZ-74, if only they could find the formula and