The Day of the Boomer Dukes: With linked Table of Contents

By Frederik Pohl

A delightful time travel romp. What happens when a bored criminal from the future returns to a more exciting time in the past? Foraminifera 9-Hart Bailey's Beam is about to find out. He's gathered a cache of high-tech weapons to take back in time with him, with the intention of teaming up with the legendary New York Mafia. Upon arriving in our time he meets a street gang named The Boomer Dukes and he asks them to "take me to your Mafia." From there nothing goes as planned.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wilder Publications, Inc.
• Release date: Nov 27, 2015
• ISBN: 9781515402664

Frederik Pohl

Frederik Pohl (1919-2013) was one of science fiction's most important authors. Among his many novels are Gateway, which won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the Hugo Award, the Locus SF Award, and the Nebula Award, Beyond the Blue Event Horizon, which was a finalist for the Hugo and Nebula Awards, and Jem, which won the 1980 National Book Award in Science Fiction. He also collaborated on classic science fiction novels including The Space Merchants with Cyril M. Kornbluth. Pohl was an award-winning editor of Galaxy and If, a book editor at Bantam, and served as president of the Science Fiction Writers of America. He was named a Grand Master of Science Fiction by SFWA in 1993, and was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.

Book preview

The Day of the Boomer Dukes

by Frederik Pohl

Cover Image © Can Stock Photo Inc. / Catmando

Positronic Publishing

PO Box 632

Floyd VA 24091

ISBN 13: 978-1-5154-0266-4

First Positronic Publishing Edition

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Table of Contents

Foraminifera 9

Shield 8805

Cow

Sandy Van Pelt

Priam’s Maw

Foraminifera 9

Paptaste udderly, semped sempsemp dezhavoo, qued schmerz—Excuse me. I mean to say that it was like an endless diet of days, boring, tedious....

No, it loses too much in the translation. Explete my reasons, I say. Do my reasons matter? No, not to you, for you are troglodytes, knowing nothing of causes, understanding only acts. Acts and facts, I will give you acts and facts.

First you must know how I am called. My name is Foraminifera 9-Hart Bailey’s Beam, and I am of adequate age and size. (If you doubt this, I am prepared to fight.) Once the—the tediety of life, as you might say, had made itself clear to me, there were, of course, only two alternatives. I do not like to die, so that possibility was out; and the remaining alternative was flight.

Naturally, the necessary machinery was available to me. I arrogated a small viewing machine, and scanned the centuries of the past in the hope that a sanctuary might reveal itself to my aching eyes. Kwel tediety that was! Back, back I went through the ages. Back to the Century of the Dog, back to the Age of the Crippled Men. I found no time better than my own. Back and back I peered, back as far as the Numbered Years. The Twenty-Eighth Century was boredom unendurable, the Twenty-Sixth a morass of dullness. Twenty-Fifth, Twenty-Fourth—wherever I looked, tediety was what I found.

*

I snapped off the machine and considered. Put the problem thus: Was there in all of the pages of history no age in which a 9-Hart Bailey’s Beam might find adventure and excitement? There had to be! It was not possible, I told myself, despairing, that from the dawn of the dreaming primates until my own time there was no era at all in which I could be—happy? Yes, I suppose happiness is what I was looking for. But where was it? In my viewer, I had fifty centuries or more to