Year of the Jackpot 28

static. Served him right.
He climbed the hogback, sat down on the bench he had
dragged up theretheir "memorial bench," sacred to the
memory of the time Meade had hurt her knees on the gravel
sat down and sighed. His lean belly was stuffed with veni-
son and corn fritters; he lacked only tobacco to make him
completely happy. The evening cloud colors were spectacu-
larly beautiful and the weather was extremely balmy for
December; both, he thought, caused by volcanic dust, with
perhaps an assist from atom bombs.
Surprising how fast things went to pieces when they
started to skid I And surprising how quickly they were go-
ing back together, judging by the signs. A curve reaches
trough and then starts right back up. World War III was
the shortest big war on recordforty cities gone, counting
Moscow and the other slave cities as well as the American
onesand then whoosh! neither side fit to fight. Of course,
the fact that both sides had thrown their ICBMs over the
pole through the most freakish arctic weather since Peary
invented the place had a lot to do with it, he supposed. It
was amazing that any of the Russian paratroop transports
had gotten through at all.
He sighed and pulled the November 1951 copy of the
Western Astronomer out of his pocket. Where was he? Oh,
yes, Some Notes on the Stability of G-Type Stars with
Especial Reference to Sol, by A. G. M. Dynkowski, Lenin
Institute, translated by Heinrich Ley, F. R. A. S. Good boy,
Skisound mathematician. Very clever application of har-
monic series and tightly reasoned. He started to thumb for
his place when he noticed a footnote that he had missed.
Dynkowski's own name carried down to it: "This mono-
graph was denounced by Pravda as romantic reactionariism
shortly after it was published. Professor Dynkowski has
been unreported since and must be presumed to be liqui-
dated,"
The poor geekl Well, he probably would have been atom-
ized by now anyway, along with the goons who did him in.
He wondered if they really had gotten all the Russki para-
troopers? Well, he had killed his quota; if he hadn't gotten
that doe within a quarter mile of the cabin and headed
right back, Meade would have had a bad time. He had shot
them in the back, the swinel and buried them beyond the
woodpileand then it had seemed a shame to skin and eat
an innocent deer while those lice got decent burial.
Aside from mathematics, just two things worth doing-
kill a man and love a woman. He had done both; he was