MUDDLE EARTH by John Brunner

Author:John Brunner [Brunner, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

How knowledge could be absorbed from a capsule Rinpoche could not begin to guess, although he did of course eventually find out, but for the next half hour he felt as though his head were going over Niagara Falls without a barrel. At some stage Mrs. Hudson came to mend the fire. At another stage, discerning how much trouble he was having coping with the information flooding his brain, Watson sympathetically dosed him with more of the warming restorative.

Also, to his extreme surprise and disbelief, Nixy not only held his hand throughout but occasionally stroked his hair and face.

And at very long last his mind settled back on an even keel, though he retained a sensation like the mental counterpart of eating too much, as though his bloated brain wanted to emit an impossible burp. He knew—thanks to the pill—that so much data might take days or weeks to digest.

“That must be about it,” Watson diagnosed.

“Well?” Holmes demanded, hunching forward.

Rinpoche swallowed hard. His heart was pounding like a trip-hammer. “Somebody tried to find a way to dispose of rubbish.” That much he had already learned from Spotch. (Half a world away, and how many centuries from this mock-up of the Victorian Age?) “His name was Donald Duckman, and he did it in a desperate attempt to escape being mocked because of the name his parents had inflicted on him. It turned out to send things interstellar distances. There were people out there, or sort of people, who had been ignoring us. When our garbage started arriving out of nowhere, they realized we’d stumbled on the cheapest and easiest means of interstellar travel. Every race in the Galactic Conglomerate wanted to license the technique, barring a few who regard visitors as a nuisance and trade as futile. Eventually the traffic of the whole galaxy will go via Duckman Dumpers, but they’ve already made humans the richest species. Some richer than others, of course, so that at one end of the scale are people who can’t even dream of visiting another planet, while at the other is Nixy’s gramps who bought a whole solar system and is converting it to a private residence using the energy from a nearby nova—”

“Supernova,” Nixy corrected.

“Yes. Well, most humans now live on other worlds. Eventually it dawned on some of the people out there that Earth was rotting to bits because the ones who’d stayed behind weren’t up to managing a planet, especially one that was already in such a mess, so a bunch of sentimental explans hired the Yelignese to tidy up the place and keep it running, but since they’re not human…”

He concluded with a shrug.

“He has assimilated the salient points,” Carnacki pronounced.

“Maybe so,” Nixy retorted caustically, “but what he just said didn’t amount to much more than he’d already picked up from talking to me and other people.”

Rinpoche drew a deep breath. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “Nixy’s quite right. I did know most of it already. There was a woman in Hollywood—I mean Holyrood.

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