![]() Loitering on Earth potentially meant finding oneself abruptly classed as biologically unacceptable, a menace to the pristine heredity of the race. had made it easy to emigrate, difficult if not impossible to stay. That had been the ultimate incentive of emigration: the android servant as carrot, the radioactive fallout as stick. law each emigrant automatically received possession of an android subtype of his choice, and, by 2019, the variety of subtypes passed all understanding, in the manner of American automobiles of the 1960s. In connection with this a weapon of war, the Synthetic Freedom Fighter, had been modified able to function on an alien world, the humanoid robot–strictly speaking, the organic android–had become the mobile donkey engine of the colonization program. A meager colonization program had been underway before the war, but now that the sun had ceased to shine on Earth, the colonization entered an entirely new phase. After the owls, of course, the other birds followed, but by then the mystery had been grasped and understood. This plague, however, had descended from above. Medieval plagues had manifested themselves in a similar way, in the form of many dead rats. At the time it had seemed almost funny, the fat, fluffy white birds lying here and there, in yards and on streets coming out no earlier than twilight, as they had while alive, the owls escaped notice. The dust which had contaminated most of the planet’s surface had originated in no country, and no one, even the wartime enemy, had planned on it. In addition, no one today remembered why the war had come about or who, if anyone, had won. Like the apartment owners, the corporation had departed, evidently for good. Mostly the former it had been a costly war despite the valiant predictions of the Pentagon and its smug scientific vassal, the Rand Corporation-which had, in fact, existed not far from this spot. ![]() Here had been the suburbs of San Francisco, a short ride by monorail rapid transit the entire peninsula had chattered like a bird tree with life and opinions and complaints, and now the watchful owners had either died or migrated to a colony world. This ownerless ruin had, before World War Terminus, been tended and maintained. ![]() “In a giant, empty, decaying building which had once housed thousands, a single TV set hawked its wares to an uninhabited room. ![]()
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