John Brunner – Jagged Orbit

Lax hands fell away from the keyboard and Anthony Gottschalk looked in sick helplessness at the screen on which while he had been conducting his inquiries a swirl of pretty polychrome patterns had appeared. Among them suddenly, legible letters.

Ha ha ha ha.

In brilliant emerald green and purple overlaid with a silver shimmer.

stop stop stop!

But it didn’t stop. The screen continued to shimmer and irridesce like Ladromide hallucinations. The paper went on pouring out of the fax slot until there was none left on the reel and then splashes of activating liquid began to spray out. Several landed on the back of AnGottschalk’s hand and turned black with exposure to the light

Trembling so violently that even his teeth were chathe stumbled towards the comweb, shouting at it to find him his contact at IBM. One of the girls apin the recklessly open french doors and he looked around for something to throw at her, but she dodged back out of sight before he could launch the ornament his hand fell to. It took more than half an hour for him to locate the man he wanted-it being Saturday-and during the dreadful wait he lived through the ruin of his hopes a score of times. Recruiting had already begun, on the sounding-out level, for the posse with which he planned to invade Marcantonio’s New Jersey estate; votes within the cartel were already pledged on the basis of the higher-than-ever profits he had forerealizability of the Grand Project to introduce the ultimate in personal armaments, the so-called System C design, was yesterday rated five points up on the previhigh thanks to the cunning notion of scaring the pants off every blank on the continent by bringing MorLenigo over.

But without the guidance of Robert Gottschalk, how could it ever be done? There wasn’t even a guarantee on the equipment! He hadn’t dared purchase it on a standard contract, for at this stage he was mortgaging himself-he was in the red to the tune of over half a billion dollars-and letting it be known that “Robert” was actually a machine not a man would have given Marcantonio the chance to capitalize his own reserves and buy something still more advanced.

Nervous, the man from IBM said, “Can I see some of these printouts?”

“Christ, I’m ankle-deep in them! Here!”

“Ah. Well. I’m dreadfully sorry, Mr. Gottbut it looks as though you have a major trauma in that gear of yours, and at least a rebuild job will be called for. You’ll have to tone down the maximization directive, to start with. You’ve introduced a factor of infinity into its calculations, so to speak-”

“What do you mean, I introduced it?” Anthony Gottraged.

“Yes, sir. The circuitry was designed exactly in acwith your specifications, I’d remind you. I beI did state that the unprecedented complexity of the-”

“I want something that works, not a crazy computer talking about temporal feedback and unstable oscilla

“I appreciate that, sir, and it will be taken care of as soon as I can divert the necessary highly trained staff inconspicuously from their regular jobs. Unfortunately we’ve just been granted a contract by Mr. Eugene Voigt of the Planetary Communications Commission for a floor-to-roof overhaul of their own rather elaborate installaso the personnel will not be available until the month after next at the earliest.” He ended on a note of defiance.

“You bastard,” Anthony Gottschalk said. “You son of a double-dealing bitch.”

“Yes, sir,” the man from IBM said, and cut the con

But after three days of stalling Vyacheslav Gottschalk grew suspicious and tapped his own branch of the grapeand on the fifth day Marcantonio’s macoots called to collect Anthony Gottschalk for a family conference, as a result of which he was disinherited and his debts were repudiated.

The release of prototype System C weaponry was inpostponed, for that, and for another perhaps even more significant reason.

“So they finally tracked you down!” Morton Lenigo said. He laughed. “At one stage we thought you must have been dropped in the ocean!”

Diablo didn’t give an answering smile. He knew very well how he had been located-a face as well known as his could have been spotted by any of a thousand X Patriot sympathizers the minute he showed himself on the street after leaving the Etchmark Undertower and seeing Reedeth and Madison into the ambulance the former had ordered to fetch them. He looked around the room, recognizing everyone present: Mehmet abd’Allah from Detroit, Rosaleen Lincolnson from Chicago, Dr. Barrie Ellison from Washington, Jones W. Jones from Newark, NJ. in fact, a representative roster of the powerful from every knee enclave in the States exhis own home town of Blackbury.

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 *