The Goliath Stone by Larry Niven, Matthew Joseph Harrington Read Free Book Online Page A

leave the airport, they passed a streetlight—not sodium, it was possible to see what was going on under it. This proved to be two sign-carrying men, both dressed as Jesus, pointing in the air and shouting at each other before a growing pack of onlookers. A couple of alert cart-pushing vendors were already dibbling to the crowd. “More than usual,” May added.
    “Yes, miss. I honestly don’t get why people haven’t thought this asteroid thing through. Obviously someone’s moving it deliberately, and if they just wanted to drop rocks on our heads it would have been a lot cheaper to land on the back of the Moon and shoot them from there. The only danger I see when it gets here is massive currency deflation.” Gomez glanced in the mirror, saw their open mouths, and said, “Did I say something wrong?”
    Toby recovered first. “You know William Connors?”
    “I had him in my car once.”
    May’s eyes went wide, and she put her hand over her mouth. Toby got it a moment later. He couldn’t see the driver’s mouth in the mirror, but her eyes looked like she was grinning. “I used to work with him,” Toby said, having decided that He used to work for me probably wasn’t all that accurate in the light of new information.
    “Oh, that must have been fun!”
    Toby forgot whatever he’d been about to say as he thought about that. “It was,” he realized.
    The highway was huge, and even at this hour very busy. Toby turned off the intercom in case the driver wasn’t too distracted by traffic, and said, “You do get that he’s had four federal agents and a stranger killed for me.”
    “Oh yes.”
    “You also realize that the only people who don’t think I’m dead are the ones who are after me.”
    “And the ones on your side,” May said. As Toby absorbed that, she added, “And the ones on your side know who their opposition is.”
    Toby nodded, thinking, and said, “I wonder what he’s trying to do.”
    “‘Show them all,’ maybe? Or just rule the world?”
    “Probably not, and definitely not. He didn’t respect most people enough to care what their reaction was. And he had a position piece on ruling the world—well, he had one on damn near everything—but the idea was that anyone who was willing to spend all his time telling everyone how to live well didn’t know how to do it himself.”
    “Don’t science fiction writers do that?”
    “No, he covered that. They just tell people who are smart enough to pay to listen.”
    May blinked a few times, then said, “I’m surprised he didn’t write any himself.”
    “Didn’t have the stamina. And if he’d had the energy, he’d have done something … more like he’s doing. Something complex, and significant, that makes lots of money.”
    “Like establishing a nation populated entirely by people who have good reason to regard Mob buttonmen as lightweights?”
    Toby hadn’t thought that through. “Holy cow. You’re right. Every Indian today is descended from people who survived … hell, everything! If you threw all the invasions Sicily’s been through, from the Punic Wars to Patton, at, say, the Seminoles, they’d call it ‘a bad year.’”
    May nodded. “I wonder if—oh, of course they have an Olympic team. That’s why we’re here.”
    “It’s nice when I can figure something out before you do. Not used to that.”
    “So how come you didn’t mention it?”
    “Never occurred to me you didn’t know. Not used to that either.”
    There were datacards in the magazine pouch, and May rummaged through them and found one on the 2052 Summer Olympics. She plugged it into the screen and tapped menu choices until she got through the ads.
    In recent years the International Olympic Committee had remembered what the original purpose of the Games had been: letting everyone see what everyone else could do in battle, without killing each other. Removing the team sports that had been added over past decades had lost them sponsors, but they had gained