Millennium by John Varley Read Free Book Online

methedrine, Essence of Hysteria, TNT, and Kickapoo Joyjuice. We picked up those half-corpses and tossed them around like beanbags. I could have torn sheet metal with my eyebrows.
    Three-quarters of the wimps had been through the process I had recently seen firsthand. They looked exactly like the people they were replacing. To save time, the other quarter came pre-mutilated. Most were hideously burned. Some were still smoking.
    One is supposed to say the smell of charred human flesh is revolting. It’s not, actually. It smells pretty good.
    Most of the wimps were still breathing. They’d existed an average of thirty years in the wimp tanks, kept alive by machines, exercised mechanically to keep the muscle tone. Theoreticallythey didn’t have the brains to breathe, but the fact is they were too dumb to stop. Most would still be breathing when they hit the ground.
    It didn’t take long to get them all through. When we were done we still had three minutes and forty seconds. I sent one of the team back to the future to see if anyone had located the stunner in Houston. The rest of us kept looking for it on the plane. The messenger returned with the expected bad news, and now we had two minutes and twenty seconds.
    Pinky had calmed down, if you could call it that. She was no longer crying. I believe she was paralyzed with terror. I found Lilly Rangoon, the squad leader, and pulled her aside.
    “I don’t know Pinky well,” I said. “What does she have in the way of twonkies?”
    “Nothing. She’s clean.” Lilly looked away from me.
    That’s a rarity. We were talking about such things as artificial legs, kidneys, eyes—medical implants of any kind that were too advanced for 1955. Pinky was a healthy girl. She would be a great loss to the team, if for no other reason than that.
    At the same time, her lack of medical anachronisms made Lilly’s job a little easier. It would have fallen to Lilly to cut those items out and bring them back with us.
    “Thirty seconds,” someone called out.
    “There’s a minute leeway,” I said. “We’ll have to go on the click. You stay long enough to get her skinsuit and—”
    “
Shut your freaking mouth!
I know my job. Now get out of my aircraft.”
    Nobody talks to me like that. Nobody. I looked into her eyes. If looks could freeze I’d have been a one-legged popsicle.
    “Right,” I said. “See you in fifty thousand years.”
    I hurried to the front, where everyone was hanging back, away from the Gate. Nobody wanted to go. Neither did I. It would have been a lot easier to ride it in.
    I looked back and saw Pinky hand something floppy to Lilly. I knew it was Pinky, though it didn’t look like her, because there was no one else it could be. The floppy thing was her skinsuit.She was no longer a sexy stewardess; without her disguise she was a terrified, naked little girl.
    Lilly gave her a salute, which Pinky did not have the will to return, and sprinted toward me.
    “Start walking through, or I start kicking ass,” I said.
    They did. I turned to Lilly.
    “How old was she?” I asked.
    “Pinky? She was twelve.”
    I didn’t make the rule. I’m not trying to absolve myself by saying that. I think it’s a good rule. If we didn’t have it, I’d write it myself.
    No hardware gets left behind. The penalty for carelessness is death. You bring it back, or you stay with it.
    We couldn’t always work it the way we did with Pinky. That was the
best
way. It could be done because this flight would hit so hard and burn so fiercely that no one would expect to recover more than fifty percent of the bodies in any form at all. If they got ten identifiable corpses it would be miraculous, so one girl who shouldn’t be there would never be noticed.
    Even so, Lilly’s last act before leaving the plane was to grab a wimp of about Pinky’s body mass and toss it back into the future. The balance is critical.
    The worst way? If we’d had to bring Pinky back with us for temporal reasons, Lilly