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The Day of the Boomer Dukes
The Day of the Boomer Dukes
The Day of the Boomer Dukes
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The Day of the Boomer Dukes

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Release dateMay 1, 2011
The Day of the Boomer Dukes

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    The Day of the Boomer Dukes - Ed Emshwiller

    The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Day of the Boomer Dukes, by Frederik Pohl

    This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with

    almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or

    re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included

    with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

    Title: The Day of the Boomer Dukes

    Author: Frederik Pohl

    Illustrator: Emsh

    Release Date: September 10, 2007 [EBook #22559]

    Language: English

    *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DAY OF THE BOOMER DUKES ***

    Produced by Greg Weeks, Stephen Blundell and the Online

    Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

    Just as medicine is not a science, but rather an art—a device, practised in a scientific manner, in its best manifestations—time-travel stories are not science fiction. Time-travel, however, has become acceptable to science fiction readers as a traditional device in stories than are otherwise admissible in the genre. Here, Frederik Pohl employs it to portray the amusingly catastrophic meeting of three societies.

    THE DAY

    OF THE

    BOOMER

    DUKES

    by Frederik Pohl

    Illustrated by EMSH

    There was a silvery aura around the kid ... the cops' guns hit him ... but he didn't notice....


    I

    Foraminifera 9

    Paptaste udderly, semped sempsemp dezhavoo, qued schmerz—Excuse me. I mean to say that it was like an endless diet of days, boring, tedious....

    No, it loses too much in the translation. Explete my reasons, I say. Do my reasons matter? No, not to you, for you are troglodytes, knowing nothing of causes, understanding only acts. Acts and facts, I will give you acts and facts.

    First you must know how I am called. My name is Foraminifera 9-Hart Bailey's Beam, and I am of adequate age and size. (If you doubt this, I am prepared to fight.) Once the—the tediety of life, as you might say, had made itself clear to me, there were, of course, only two alternatives. I do not like to die, so that possibility was out; and the remaining alternative was flight.

    Naturally, the necessary machinery was available to me. I arrogated a small viewing machine, and scanned the centuries of the past in the hope that a sanctuary might reveal itself to my aching eyes. Kwel tediety that was! Back, back I went through the ages. Back to the Century of the Dog, back to the Age of the Crippled Men. I found no time better than my own. Back and back I peered, back as far as the Numbered Years. The Twenty-Eighth Century was boredom unendurable, the Twenty-Sixth a morass of dullness. Twenty-Fifth, Twenty-Fourth—wherever I looked, tediety was what I found.


    I snapped off the machine and considered. Put the problem thus: Was there in all of the pages of history no age in which a 9-Hart Bailey's Beam might find adventure and excitement? There had to be! It was not possible, I told myself, despairing, that from the dawn of the dreaming primates until my own time there was no era at all in which I could be—happy? Yes, I suppose happiness is what I was looking for. But where was it? In my viewer, I had fifty centuries or more to look back upon. And that was, I decreed, the

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