John Brunner – Jagged Orbit

Another minute or two passed, he grumpily gazing out of the window, Madison occupied with supervising the reparobot. Finally there was a discreet cough, and Reedeth turned to find the kneeblank standing by the door awaiting re-admission to the corridor beyond. The automatics permitted staff members to leave an office without waiting for the assigned occupant’s authority-something Reedeth had frequently found a nuisance when Ariadne Spoelstra chose to cut short one of their all too frequent arguments-but an inmate had to be let out, to prevent him running away from therapy.

Sighing, Reedeth gave the necessary order; the door slid aside, and man and machine departed.

Abruptly yielding to an impulse that was likely to inhim in arguments not just with Ariadne but with Mogshack himself, he said to the now functioning desketary, “Damn it, I hadn’t finished telling you about Dr. Spoelstra when you went on the blink! Now you just sit there and listen, hear?”

Without allowing time for a response, he categorized those other anatomical attributes of his colleague which he so violently craved and so seldom enjoyed as he would have wished, until at last he ran out of breath in a welter of crude Anglo-Saxon terminology. At the hack of his mind was the vague idea that he could make the red light flash again, and armed with this incontroevidence he could make a formal complaint to Mogshack about the inability of the automatics to cope with the regular language of an abreactive therapy ses

But the lamp remained dark. The desketary merely said in its ordinary voice, “Very good, doctor. I have stored those data. Are they for general release to the staff or to yourself only?”

“Myself only!” Heavens, if Mogshack were to take it into his head to review Ariadne’s file and found that outburst on it duly credited “authority of Dr. Reed.!

But how come the machine had accepted the unobscenity of what he had just said, whereas before it had broken down under what was actually no more than a bunch of compliments? He felt sweat prickle on forehead, nape and palms. The reparobot couldn’t have intervened; it was strictly programmed to restore the authorized status quo. So it could only have been.

Excitement gripped him. He sat down hastily behind the desketary and set about establishing whether that was the only improvement Madison had carried out.

It wasn’t.

Twenty minutes later, tugging at his beard in a regesture of impotent anger, he came to grips at last with the suspicion that had been haunting him for months.

It’s a monstrous injustice, keeping Harry Madison here. It isn’t that he’s crazy. Maybe he never has been crazy. We just don’t understand the peculiar way in which he is sane.

Waiting for clearance at the frontier, Fredrick Campheld his briefcase-symbol of official status-before him like a ridiculous cardboard shield. The hands which gripped it were slippery with sweat. Overflights were not in the city-federal contract here; he had had to ground his skimmer a hundred meters back along the decaying concrete of the ancient freeway and walk to the point where he now stood among a kind of mushroom-forest of lidded concrete tubs. From slits around their rims dark suspicious eyes focused on him, and he knew that invisible hands were poised to let loose a landslide of destruction on him if he made one unprogrammed move.

Looking straight ahead, he contrived to shift his eyes enough to determine that one of the Gottschalks had been here since his last visit-and a senior polly at that, perhaps one of the really top-level reps like Bapuji or even OlaNo monosyllabic would be entitled to dispose of the kind of equipment which betrayed itself to his trained scrutiny. But weaponry analysis wasn’t in his official brief; Bustafedrel was careful to maintain the traditional ficthat armaments were irrelevant to their negotiations with municipal co-contractors. Doubtless, of course, durthe next few days someone from ISM would drop by-casually-and raise the matter while chatting to him, but he wasn’t expected to bring back detailed informa

He was profoundly grateful. He felt horribly naked out here. He felt, in a word, flayed. Which was exactly the effect Mayor Black must have wanted to produce. This whole transaction could far more easily and quickly have been conducted by comweb, but then it would have denied him the opportunity to gloat.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129

Leave a Reply 0

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *