The Wonder Effect Read Free Page A

Development Institute would assign him to his job, doubtless the first rung of a dizzying climb to wealth and fame. He was a young man on his way. Or so he thought. He did not know that he was only a neutron ambling toward events.
    II
    Arturo Denzer, in the same sense, was a nucleus. He knew no more about it than Walter Chase.
    Denzer woke to the rays of a rising sun and the snarl of his wake-up clock. He took a vitamin capsule, an aspirin tablet, a thyroid injection; a mildly euphoric jolt of racemic amphetamine sulphate; caffeine via three cups of black coffee with sucaryl; and nicotine via a chain of nonfiltering filter-tip cigarettes. He then left his apartment for the offices of Nature’s Way Magazine, which he edited.
    June’s blossom was in the air, and so was the tingle of the All-Star Game Number One. The elevator operator said to him respectfully, “Who d’ya like in the All-Star game, Mr. Denzer?” Denzer turned the operator’s conversation circuit off with a handwave. He didn’t feel like talking to a robot at least until the aspirin began to work.
    Absent-mindedly he waved a cab to him and climbed in. Only after it took off did he notice, to his dismay, that he had picked a Black-and-White fleet hack. They were salty and picturesque-and couldn’t be turned off. The damned thing would probably call him “Mac.”
    “Who ya like inna All-Star, Mac?” the cab asked genially, and Denzer winched. Trapped, he drummed his ringers on the armrest and stared at the Jefferson Memorial in its sea of amusement rides and hot-dog stands. “Who ya like inna All-Star, Mac?” it asked again, genially and relentlessly. It would go on asking until he answered.
    “Yanks,” Denzer grunted. Next time he’d watch what he was doing and get a sleek, black Rippington Livery with a respectful BBC accent.
    “Them bums?” groaned the cab derisively. “Watcha think Craffany’s up to?”
    Craffany was the Yankee manager. Denzer knew that he had benched three of his star players over the last weekend-indeed, it was impossible to avoid knowing it. Denzer struck out wildly: “Saving them for the All-Star, I guess.”
    The cab grunted and said: “Maybe. My guess, Fliederwick’s in a slump so Craffany benched him and pulled Hockins and Waller so it’d look like he
    was saving ‘em for the All-Star. Ya notice Fliederwick was 0 for 11 in the first game with Navy?”
    Denzer gritted his teeth and slumped down in the seat. After a moment the cab grunted and said: “Maybe. My guess is Fliederwick’s in a slump so Craffany benched him and pulled. . . .” It went through it twice more before Denzer and his hangover could stand no more.
    “I hate baseball,” he said distinctly.
    The cab said at once, “Well, it’s a free country. Say, ya see Braden’s speech on the C.S.B. last night?”
    “I did.”
    “He really gave it to them, right? You got to watch those traitors. Course, like Crockhouse says, where we going to get the money?”
    “Print it, I imagine,” snarled Denzer.
    “Figgers don’t lie. We already got a gross national debt of $87,912.02 per person, you know that? Tack on the cost of the Civilian Shelters and whaddya got?”
    Denzer’s headache was becoming cataclysmic. He rubbed his temples feverishly.
    “Figgers don’t lie. We already got a gross national ...”
    Desperate situations require desperate measures. “I hate p-politics too,” he said, stuttering a little. Normally he didn’t like smutty talk.
    The cab broke off and growled: “Watch ya language, Mac. This is a respectable fleet.”
    The cab corkscrewed down to a landing in North Arlington-Alex and said, “Here y’are, Mac.” Denzer paid it and stepped from the windy terrace of the Press House onto a crowded westbound corridor. He hoped in a way that the cab wouldn’t turn him in to a gossip columnist. In another way he didn’t care.
    Around him buzzed the noise of the All-Star and the C.S.B. “. . . Craffany . . . $87,912.02, and at