Neil clambered back into the car with as much eagerness as he had scrambled out of it.
He understood that it was neither the claustrophobic interior of the cruiser nor the enervating enwrapment of the rain that he was desperately trying to escape. The actual oppressor was his life as a New Person. Able to feel only fear, he was locked in an emotional closet of such unendurably narrow dimensions that he could not move at all. He was not suffocating because of external entanglements and constrictions; rather, he was bound from within, because of what Shaddack had made of him.
Which meant there was no escape.
Except, perhaps, by regression.
Neil could not bear life as he must now live it. On the other hand he was repelled and terrified by the thought of devolution into some subhuman form.
His dilemma appeared irresoluble.
He was as distressed by his inability to stop thinking about his predicament as he was by the predicament itself. It pried constantly at his mind. He could find no surcease.
The closest he came to being able to put his worry—and some of his fear—out of mind was when he was working with the mobile VDT in the patrol car. When he checked the computer bulletin board to see if messages awaited him, when he accessed the Moonhawk schedule to learn how conversions were progressing, or undertook any other task with the computer, his attention became so focused on the interaction with the machine that briefly his anxiety subsided and his nagging clostrophobia faded.
From adolescence, Neil had been interested in computing, although he had never become a hacker. His interest was more obsessive than that. He’d started with computer games, of course but later had been given an inexpensive PC. Later still he had bought a modem with some of the money earned at a job. Though he could not afford much long-distance time and never spent leisurely hours using the modem far from the backwaters of Moonlight Cove into the data nets available in the outside world, he found his on-line systems engrossing and fun.
Now, as he sat in the parked car along Holliwell Road, and used the VDT, he thought that the inner world of the computer was admirably clean, comparatively simple, predictable, and sane. So unlike human existence—whether that of New People or Old. In there, logic and reason ruled. Cause and effect and side-effects were always analyzed and made perfectly clear. In there, all was black and white—or, when gray, the gray was carefully ensured, quantified and qualified. Cold facts were easier to deal with than feelings. A universe formed purely of data, abstract from matter and event, seemed so much more desirable than real universe of cold and heat, sharp and blunt, smooth rough, blood and death, pain and fear.
Calling up menu after menu, Neil probed ever deeper into the Moonhawk research files within Sun. He needed none of the data that he summoned forth but found solace in the process of obtaining it.
He began to see the terminal screen not as a cathode-ray tube on which information was displayed, but as a window into another world. A world of facts. A world free of troubling contradictions … and responsibility. In there, nothing could be felt. there was only the known and the unknown, either an abundance of facts about a particular subject or a dearth of them, but not feeling; never feeling; feeling was the curse of those whose existence was dependent upon flesh and bone.
A window into another world.
He touched the screen.
He wished the window could be opened and that he could go through it to that place of reason, order, peace.
With the fingertips of his right hand, he traced circles across the warm glass screen.
Strangely, he thought of Dorothy, swept up from the plains of Kansas with her dog Toto, spun high into the tornado, and out of that depression-era grayness into a world far more intriguing. If only some electronic tornado could erupt from the VDT and carry him to a better place …
His fingers passed through the screen.
He snatched his hand back in astonishment.
The glass had not ruptured. Chains of words and numbers glowed on the tube, as before.
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