The Fourth Science Fiction MEGAPACK ®. Айн Рэнд

was time for their generation to eat breakfast in the kitchenette. No one spoke to them. They had twenty minutes in which to eat, but their reflexes were so dulled by the bad night that they had hardly swallowed two mouthfuls of egg-type processed seaweed before it was time to surrender their places to their son’s generation.

      Then, as was the custom for whoever had been most recently disinherited, they began preparing Gramps’ breakfast, which would presently be served to him in bed, on a tray. They tried to be cheerful about it. The toughest part of the job was having to handle the honest-to-God eggs and bacon and oleomargarine, on which Gramps spent so much of the income from his fortune.

      “Well,” said Emerald, “I’m not going to get all panicky until I’m sure there’s something to be panicky about.”

      “Maybe he doesn’t know what it was I busted,” Lou said hopefully.

      “Probably thinks it was your watch crystal,” offered Eddie, their son, who was toying apathetically with his buckwheat-type processed sawdust cakes.

      “Don’t get sarcastic with your father,” said Em, “and don’t talk with your mouth full, either.”

      “I’d like to see anybody take a mouthful of this stuff and not say something,” complained Eddie, who was 73. He glanced at the clock. “It’s time to take Gramps his breakfast, you know.”

      “Yeah, it is, isn’t it?” said Lou weakly. He shrugged. “Let’s have the tray, Em.”

      “We’ll both go.”

      Walking slowly, smiling bravely, they found a large semi-circle of long-faced Fords standing around the bedroom door.

      Em knocked. “Gramps,” she called brightly, “break-fast is rea-dy.”

      There was no reply and she knocked again, harder.

      The door swung open before her fist. In the middle of the room, the soft, deep, wide, canopied bed, the symbol of the sweet by-and-by to every Ford, was empty.

      A sense of death, as unfamiliar to the Fords as Zoroastrianism or the causes of the Sepoy Mutiny, stilled every voice, slowed every heart. Awed, the heirs began to search gingerly, under the furniture and behind the drapes, for all that was mortal of Gramps, father of the clan.

      * * * *

      But Gramps had left not his Earthly husk but a note, which Lou finally found on the dresser, under a paperweight which was a treasured souvenir from the World’s Fair of 2000. Unsteadily, Lou read it aloud:

      “’Somebody who I have sheltered and protected and taught the best I know how all these years last night turned on me like a mad dog and diluted my anti-gerasone, or tried to. I am no longer a young man. I can no longer bear the crushing burden of life as I once could. So, after last night’s bitter experience, I say good-by. The cares of this world will soon drop away like a cloak of thorns and I shall know peace. By the time you find this, I will be gone.’”

      “Gosh,” said Willy brokenly, “he didn’t even get to see how the 5000-mile Speedway Race was going to come out.”

      “Or the Solar Series,” Eddie said, with large mournful eyes.

      “Or whether Mrs. McGarvey got her eyesight back,” added Morty.

      “There’s more,” said Lou, and he began reading aloud again: “’I, Harold D. Ford, etc., do hereby make, publish and declare this to be my last Will and Testament, revoking any and all former wills and codicils by me at any time heretofore made.’”

      “No!” cried Willy. “Not another one!”

      “’I do stipulate,’” read Lou, “’that all of my property, of whatsoever kind and nature, not be divided, but do devise and bequeath it to be held in common by my issue, without regard for generation, equally, share and share alike.’”

      “Issue?” said Emerald.

      Lou included the multitude in a sweep of his hand. “It means we all own the whole damn shootin’ match.”

      Each eye turned instantly to the bed.

      “Share and share alike?” asked Morty.

      “Actually,” said Willy, who was the oldest one present, “it’s just like the old system, where the oldest people head up things with their headquarters in here and—”

      “I like that!” exclaimed Em. “Lou owns as much of it as you do, and I say it ought to be for the oldest one who’s still working. You can snooze around here all day, waiting for your pension check, while poor Lou stumbles in here after work, all tuckered out, and—”

      “How about letting somebody who’s never had any privacy get a little crack at it?” Eddie demanded hotly. “Hell, you old people had plenty of privacy back when you were kids. I was born and raised in the middle of that goddamn barracks in the hall! How about—”

      “Yeah?” challenged Morty. “Sure, you’ve all had it pretty tough, and my heart bleeds for you. But try honeymooning in the hall for a real kick.”

      “Silence!” shouted Willy imperiously. “The next person who opens his mouth spends the next sixth months by the bathroom. Now clear out of my room. I want to think.”

      A vase shattered against the wall, inches above his head.

      * * * *

      In the next moment, a free-for-all was under way, with each couple battling to eject every other couple from the room. Fighting coalitions formed and dissolved with the lightning changes of the tactical situation. Em and Lou were thrown into the hall, where they organized others in the same situation, and stormed back into the room.

      After two hours of struggle, with nothing like a decision in sight, the cops broke in, followed by television cameramen from mobile units.

      For the next half-hour, patrol wagons and ambulances hauled away Fords, and then the apartment was still and spacious.

      An hour later, films of the last stages of the riot were being televised to 500,000,000 delighted viewers on the Eastern Seaboard.

      In the stillness of the three-room Ford apartment on the 76th floor of Building 257, the television set had been left on. Once more the air was filled with the cries and grunts and crashes of the fray, coming harmlessly now from the loudspeaker.

      The battle also appeared on the screen of the television set in the police station, where the Fords and their captors watched with professional interest.

      Em and Lou, in adjacent four-by-eight cells, were stretched out peacefully on their cots.

      “Em,” called Lou through the partition, “you got a washbasin all your own, too?”

      “Sure. Washbasin, bed, light—the works. And we thought Gramps’ room was something. How long has this been going on?” She held out her hand. “For the first time in forty years, hon, I haven’t got the shakes—look at me!”

      “Cross your fingers,” said Lou. “The lawyer’s going to try to get us a year.”

      “Gee!” Em said dreamily. “I wonder what kind of wires you’d have to pull to get put away in solitary?”

      “All right, pipe down,” said the turnkey, “or I’ll toss the whole kit and caboodle of you right out. And first one who lets on to anybody outside how good jail is ain’t never getting back in!”

      The prisoners instantly fell silent.

      * * * *

      The living room of the apartment darkened for a moment as the riot scenes faded on the television screen, and then the face of the announcer appeared, like the Sun coming from behind a cloud. “And now, friends,” he said, “I have a special message from the makers of anti-gerasone, a message for all you folks over 150. Are you hampered socially by wrinkles, by stiffness of joints and discoloration or loss of hair, all because these things came upon you before anti-gerasone