All the Lives He Led-A Novel by Frederik Pohl Read Free Book Online Page A

more squirreled away, though. We’re still looking for it.”
    “And we’re not the only ones,” the woman said. “Some appear to believe that the funds were banked with the Stans.”
    “Which is of interest to us,” Swinn added, “because of Mrs. Maddingsley’s use of somadone, which comes from the Stans, and we wonder whether your uncle made trips there to secure it for her.”
    I thought they were beginning to get silly, but I just shook my head. “I don’t know.”
    Swinn sighed. The woman gave him another reprimanding look, but after a moment she sighed, too. “Very well,” she said, “you can now go.”
    That was it. They pointed to the door. As I opened it, the woman said, “You have displayed a very sloppy attitude toward providing the Security force with essential information, Sheridan. Do not do this again. Be sure you attend your antiterrorist orientation sessions. Do not miss any of them.”
    And the man said, “You’re very lucky in the employment you have been offered here, Sheridan. You don’t want to lose it. The soft-coal distillation mines at Krakow are always looking for new Indentured workers.”
    And the woman said, “You’ve made a bad start, Sheridan. You can repair it. If you observe anything suspicious among the people you will be working with report to me at once. My name is Major Yvonne Feliciano. To reach me use any communications facility in Pompeii and ask for my code name, which is Piranha Woman. Do it.”
    That was the end of the interrogation.
    On my way out I saw my former fellow passengers sprawled out in the waiting room and eyeing me with malice as I passed through. Obviously they had been made to wait while I went through my own inquisition. I was a little sorry for them. Maybe a little sorrier for myself, with the news about Uncle Devious. I hadn’t expected that information to come out of this particular interview. But there it was.
    I tried to put it all out of my mind. For a while I succeeded.

5
    THE CITY THAT CAME BACK TO LIFE
    When you talk about Pompeii you have to remember that two thousand years is a long time. All those years had made significant changes in the way the city of Pompeii looked.
    What had happened to that old AD 79 Pompeii was pretty obvious. You could see the cause of it, sitting right down the road from the city itself, and what it was was that humongous neighbor mountain named Vesuvius. And AD 79 was the year when Vesuvius blew itself up and cooked Pompeii in the process.
    That was the bad part of that ancient event. Looked at from an AD 2079 viewpoint, it had a lot of good about it. All that rock and ash the volcano dumped on the city had the unexpected and fortunate effect of preserving its bare bones for us two-thousand-years-later people to see.
    (When I say “fortunate” I don’t mean that it was good luck for the actual Pompeiians who lived there at that time, of course. They didn’t get any pleasure at all out of being preserved.)
    So then, two thousand years later or so, the world is getting close to AD 2079 and suddenly somebody comes up with a great idea. They realized that they could make a pot of money out of having a two-thousand-year birthday party for the ancient city. So they did. They turned it into a kind of a theme park and they called it Pompeii’s Jubilee Year, or L’Anno Giubileo della Citta di Pompeii.
    Well, I said that already, didn’t I?
    When the mountain did blow its top, back all those twenty long centuries ago, it took everybody by surprise. It hadn’t done anything of that sort in quite a while—in enough of a while, that is, that those old Romans figured it wasn’t ever going to do it again. So they started building summer homes in and around Pompeii. It was very desirable real estate, especially if what you had been used to was Rome’s cold, wet winters.
    The situation wasn’t all gravy for the Pompeiians, though.
    The city did have a now-and-then history of pretty bad earthquakes. As a matter of