Grand Junction by Maurice G. Dantec Read Free Book Online

grown up faster than any member of his generation. He has grown up even faster than Gabriel Link de Nova, about whom one wonders if he will ever grow up, if he will ever be more than a child.
    He is barely twenty-two years old, but he already possesses the experience of a man twice his age. Chrysler Campbell, who isn’t the type to be careful of anyone’s feelings, nor to be overly polite to anyone, even complimented him one evening as they were returning from HMV, where they had concluded an important deal with Gabriel.
    “You know, I’m almost ten years older than you—but I almost feel like it’s the other way around. You think incredibly fast. Your analytical faculties are amazing, and it’s as if you possess by intuition what takes most people years of experience in the field. You act like a predator instinctively. I saw it even when you were a kid in Omega 13.”
    Chrysler had let a few seconds pass, then sighed: “I hope you’ll never have to kill anyone. They wouldn’t have a chance.”
    He remembers what he said to Chrysler Campbell that night, as he drove them in the Ford F-350 pickup toward the southern part ofthe Territory. “If that does happen, I’m counting on not giving them a chance.”
    Chrysler had smiled, shaking his head. He had turned to look out the truck window at Monolith Hills in the distance. “That’s exactly what I mean.”
    The moon is at its zenith, round and slightly reddish. It slants rays of starry silver across the vast desert plains, the bare rocks, the scrubby brush barely surviving around the few isolated shrubs and the dead trees fossilizing in the sand.
    It is almost unbelievably beautiful, Yuri thinks to himself. The world is still beautiful. It’s dying, but it is still beautiful. The desert is taking over. Men are disappearing. Civilization is being snuffed out. But it is still beautiful.
    It is all utterly incomprehensible.
    In Junkville, the streets are ramps of packed dirt or gravel covered with pounded scrap metal and errant drifts of sand caught in contrary winds from the Canadian heat shield or what remains of the Great Lakes, now giant Midwestern deserts.
    The roads wind among the artificial hills covered with collapsible houses, makeshift shelters of various types, and sometimes the characteristic silhouettes of mobile homes—a true bit of luxury—or the more common, capsule-shaped Combi-Cubes.
    Like any city, any
urba
, Junkville has formed according to the force and hierarchy of the powers that be.
    To the north, on the border with Omega Blocks, or to the east, toward Vermont, is where the people who have managed to rise slightly above the general squalor live. For example there is Little Congo, five hills grouped together where Junkville’s aristocracy dwells, those cosmopolitan procurers who sell, to the even richer denizens of the old Monolith Hills strip, all the new flesh that ends up here in search of refuge.
    Young women and men come to Junkville strung out, ready to do anything for a chance to get near the cosmodrome again, to touch a fingertip to the fire of their dreams. They are ready for anything. Absolutely anything. Their sex, their age, their physical condition—those things don’t matter much at all.
    They were ready for anything before the Fall.
    And now they will be ready for even worse, if they survive.
    *   *   *

    Yuri takes the gasoline-powered Kawasaki from its parking compartment adjoining the service module and pulls it carefully away from his Combi-Cube.
    He drives east toward the quarter of the old kings, and then turns full south. Road 34, running evenly north-south, takes him—floating a few centimeters above the ground—across a long expanse of stone and silicon. The sun is already high in a steel-gray sky streaked with gold light.
    Pluto Saint-Clair’s house is on the northern face of the butte. The interior streets of the hill villages are often unnamed, even unnumbered—you have to have a precise description of