Steel Beach Read Online Free Page A

than a huge and handy dumping ground. In some places the garbage was heaped to the third story of the exterior buildings. Give us another thousand years and we’ll pile the garbage a hundred meters deep from pole to pole.
    There was very little movement. King City, on the surface, looked bombed out, abandoned.
    The printer finished its job and I handed the copy to a passing messenger. Walter would call me about it when it suited him. I thought of several things I could do in the meantime, failed to find any enthusiasm for any of them. So I just sat there and stared out over the surface, and presently I was called into the master’s presence.
     
    Walter Editor is what is known as a natural.
    Not that he’s a fanatic about it. He doesn’t subscribe to one of those cults that refuse all medical treatment developed since 1860, or 1945, or 2020. He’s not impressed with faith healing. He’s not a member of Lifespan, those folks who believe it’s a sin to live beyond the Biblical threescore and ten, or the Centenarians, who set the number at one hundred. He’s just like most of the rest of us, prepared to live forever if medical science can maintain a quality life for him. He’ll accept any treatment that will keep him healthy despite a monstrously dissolute life style.
    He just doesn’t care how he looks.
    All the fads in body styling and facial arrangement pass him by. In the twenty years I have known him he has never changed so much as his hair style. He had been born male—or so he once told me—one hundred and twenty-six years ago, and had never Changed.
    His somatic development had been frozen in his mid-forties, a time he often described to all who would listen as “the prime of life.” As a result, he was paunchy and balding. This suited Walter fine. He felt the editor of a major planetary newspaper ought to be paunchy and balding.
    An earlier age would have called Walter Editor a voluptuary. He was a sensualist, a glutton, monstrously self-indulgent. He went through stomachs in two or three years, used up a pair of lungs every decade or so, and needed a new heart more frequently than most people change gaskets on a pressure suit. Every time he exceeded what he called his “fighting weight” by fifty kilos, he’d have seventy kilos removed. Other than that, with Walter what you saw was what he was.
    I found him in his usual position, leaning back in his huge chair, big feet propped up on the antique mahogany desk whose surface displayed not one item made after 1880. His face was hidden behind my story. Puffs of lavender smoke rose from behind the pages.
    “Sit down, Hildy, sit down,” he muttered, turning a page. I sat, and looked out his windows, which had exactly the same view I’d seen from my windows but five meters higher and three hundred degrees wider. I knew there would be three or four minutes while he kept me waiting. It was one of his managerial techniques. He’d read in a book somewhere that an effective boss should keep underlings waiting whenever possible. He spoiled the effect by constantly glancing up at the clock on the wall.
    The clock had been made in 1860 and had once graced the wall of a railway station somewhere in Iowa. The office could be described as Dickensian. The furnishings were worth more than I was likely to make in my lifetime. Very few genuine antiquities had ever been brought to Luna. Most of those were in museums. Walter owned much of the rest.
    “Junk,” he said. “Worthless.” He scowled and tossed the flimsy sheets across the room. Or he tried to. Flimsy sheets resist attaining any great speed unless you wad them up first. These fluttered to the floor at his feet.
    “Sorry, Walter, but there just wasn’t any other—”
    “You want to know why I can’t use it?”
    “No sex.”
    “There’s no sex in it! I send you out to cover a new sex system, and it turns out there’s no sex in it. How can that be?”
    “Well, there’s sex in it, naturally. Just not