The Big U

by Neal Stephenson

  The building’s steel frame was unaffected. The cinderblocks laid within that frame, though, stopped being walls and became a million individual blocks of stone. Uncoupled, they began to dissolve away from the girders, and the floors accordioned down with a boom and a concussion that obliterated the sound of the organ. All the towers went together; and as those tons of debris avalanched into the girders on which the towers rested, the steel finally went too, and crumpled together and sagged and fell and snapped and tore with painful slowness and explosive booms.

  The hundred thousand people watching it plugged their ears, except for the TUGgies, who watched serenely and shut off their OM generators. From the enormous heap of rubble, broken water pipes shot fountains glistening white in the rising sun. Crunches and aftershocks continued for days.

  Not far away, Virgil Gabrielson sat on a curbstone, his hair bright in the sun, drinking water. Between his feet was a stack of mini-computer memory discs in little black envelopes.

  The APPASMU is in the Smithsonian Institution and may be visited 10:00 A.M.–5:30 P.M. seven days a week.

  And the Go Big Red Fan was found unscathed, sitting miraculously upright on a crushed sofa on a pile of junk, its painted blades rotating quietly and intermittently in the fresh spring breeze.

  About the Author

  Neal Stephenson is the author of Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, Zodiac and Cryptonomicon. Born on Halloween 1959 in Fort Meade, Maryland—home of the National Security Agency—he grew up in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, and Ames, Iowa, before attending college in Boston. Since 1984 he has lived mostly in the Pacific Northwest and has made a living out of writing novels and the occasional magazine article.

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  Also by Neal Stephenson

  Cryptonomicon

  In the Beginning…Was the Command Line

  The Diamond Age

  Zodiac

  Snow Crash

  Copyright

  THE BIG U. Copyright © 1984 by Neal Stephenson. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  EPub Edition © NOVEMBER 2007 ISBN: 9780061847387

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