Cocoon

Keith Laumer

• Publisher: Start Publishing LLC
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781649740298
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Science Fiction
• Index: Literature

Two Billion Years ago, a unit of life had the urge to climb out of the sea. It died. But that didn't count. The urge to climb out was the thing—greater in its force than a million suns to keep the urge is the measure of man. Before becoming a science fiction writer Laumer was an officer in the United States Air Force and a diplomat in the Foreign Service, adding a note of realism to many of his stories. One of science fiction's true luminaries

Two Billion Years ago, a unit of life had the urge to climb out of the sea. It died. But that didn’t count. The urge to climb out was the thing—greater in its force than a million suns to keep the urge is the measure of man.

Sid Throndyke overrode his respirator to heave a deep sigh.

“Wow!” he said, flipping to his wife’s personal channel. “A tough day on the Office channel.”

The contact screens attached to his eyeballs stayed blank: Cluster was out. Impatiently, Sid toed the console, checking the channels: Light, Medium and Deep Sitcom; auto-hypno; Light and Deep Narco; four, six, and eighty-party Social; and finally, muttering to himself, Psychan. Cluster’s identity symbol appeared on his screens.

“There you are,” he grieved. “Psychan again. After a hard day, the least a man expects is to find his wife tuned to his channel—”

“Oh, Sid; there’s this wonderful analyst. A new model. It’s doing so much for me, really wonderful....”

“I know,” Sid grumped. “That orgasm-association technique. That’s all I hear. I’d think you’d want to keep in touch with the Sitcoms, so you know what’s going on; but I suppose you’ve been tied into Psychan all day—while I burned my skull out on Office.”

“Now, Sid; didn’t I program your dinner and everything?”

“Um.” Mollified, Sid groped with his tongue for the dinner lever, eased the limp plastic tube into his mouth. He sucked a mouthful of the soft paste—

“Cluster! You know I hate Vege-pap. Looks like you could at least dial a nice Prote-sim or Sucromash....”

“Sid, you ought to tune to Psychan. It would do you a world of good....” Her sub-vocalized voice trailed off in the earphones. Sid snorted, dialed a double Prote-sim and a Sucromash, fuming at the delay. He gulped his dinner, not even noticing the rich gluey consistency; then, in a somewhat better mood, flipped to the Light Sitcom.

It was good enough stuff, he conceded; the husband was a congenital psychopathic inferior who maintained his family in luxury by a series of fantastic accidents. You had to chuckle when his suicide attempt failed at the last moment, after he’d lost all that blood. The look on his face when they dragged him back....

But somehow it wasn’t enough. Sid dialed the medium; it wasn’t much better. The deep, maybe.

Sid viewed for a few minutes with growing impatience. Sure, you had to hand it to the Sitcom people; there was a lot of meat in the deep sitcom. It was pretty subtle stuff, the way the wife got the money the husband had been saving and spent it for a vacation trip for her Chihuahua; had a real social content, too deep for most folks. But like the rest of the sitcoms, it was historical. Sure, using old-time settings gave a lot of scope for action. But how about something more pertinent to the contemporary situation? Nowadays, even though people led the kind of rich, full lives that Vital Programming supplied, there was still a certain lack. Maybe it was just a sort of atavistic need for gross muscular exertion. He’d viewed a discussion of the idea a few nights earlier on the usual Wednesday night four-party hookup with the boys. Still, in his case, he had plenty of muscle tone. He’d spent plenty on a micro-spasm attachment for use with the narco channel....

That was a thought. Sid didn’t usually like narco; too synthetic, as he’d explained to the boys. They hadn’t liked the remark, he remembered. Probably they were all narco fans. But what the hell, a man had a right to a few maverick no...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Cocoon