John Brunner – Jagged Orbit

In the pleasant, air-conditioned, antiques-furnished study he maintained on the campus of the University of North Manitoba Xavier Conroy sat at his ancient electric typewriter pondering the outline for the networked lecseries he had been invited to give during the comacademic year. He was still having trouble organizing his argument; it was one thing to address a group of captive students in a relatively undistinguished university, something else again to have to try and make himself clear to millions of viewers.

He suspected the contract had been signed out of mere panic-the scandal of discovering that the director of the hemisphere’s biggest mental hospital was himself suffering from advanced megalomania had jolted everyincluding the directors of the major vu-networks, into horrified awareness of the problem of mental hygiene which previously had been smoothed over by such fadoctrines as Mogshack’s about the changing nature of normality.

Due to panic or not, though, the opportunity was too good to let slip. How best to make it clear to viewers that-?

The comweb buzzed. Turning, he saw that the screen was glowing the clear yellow indicating long-distance, and he agreed to accept the. call.

To his astonishment, the face of Lyla Clay appeared; pretty as ever, bearing the traces of tiredness, but breakinto a smile on seeing him.

“Miss Clay! Good lord!” He spun his chair to face her directly. “And to what do I owe this pleasure?”

“I want to come and study under you this year,” Lyla said.

There was a moment of complete silence. Eventually Conroy said, “I’m-ah-very flattered, but.”

“Professor, I’m getting much better at controlling my talent,” Lyla said. “I haven’t taken a sibyl-pill in over a month, and I’m sensing things which.” She bit her lip. “Well, I guess I’ll have to tell you an awful lot. Can you spare the time to listen? I mean, if you say no, I’ll understand, because last time we spoke things were kind of disorganized, and if you’d rather forget the whole episode, say so.”

Conroy looked blank for a moment. Suddenly” he laughed. “Miss Clay, already you impress the hell out of me. I don’t remember ever doing anything sillier in my life than standing up to Mr. Flamen and pledging my belief in what Madison was telling us, when only molater he collapsed into permanent insanity. Oh-I’m sorry. He’d become quite a friend of yours, hadn’t he?”

“Harry Madison was not only the sanest but one of the nicest people I ever met,” Lyla said firmly. “He got me out of a terrible mess just after Dan’s death, and in spite of him being carted back to the Ginsberg I’ve been behaving the way he showed me ever since, and I’m just getting the world to jump through hoops for me. I think you’re wrong, Professor-I mean, I think you’re wrong now and you were right then.”

“I don’t quite follow you,” Conroy said after a pause.

“I’m not sure I follow myself,” Lyla shrugged. “This is something which is so-so inside me that I can’t explain it. It has something to do with having tried to make a living as a pythoness-”

“Aren’t you still at it?” Conroy interrupted.

“No. I had an invitation from Dr. Spoelstra at the Ginsberg to come and audition, you might say, for the new director-but I said no.”

“What have you been doing, then?”

“I went home. I’m calling from there. I’ve just been sitting and thinking for weeks on end. And arguing with my family, but that’s nothing new.” She gave an amusing wry grimace. “It took me a hell of a lot of effort to get around to applying to your university, but I did call up and inquire, and when they told me your course was already full I thought maybe if I appealed to you di.”

“Well, I’d certainly be very pleased to accept you as a student of mine, of course, but I’m afraid you’ll have to furnish a pretty compelling reason.”

“I’m going to try,” Lyla said. “That’s why I called up.” She leaned earnestly to the camera at her end.

“Look, Professor, I’ve read some of your books and met you and listened to you, and what you said back in Flamen’s office has never stopped haunting me. I hope it never will. I don’t know what makes me a pythoness, and apparently no one else knows either, but-but it’s not the right way to tackle whatever the problem is. I don’t know what it is, but I think it may be that people are just shutting themselves away from each other, until it takes someone with a special mental gift and a hell of a dangerous drug to break down the barriers between us. And it doesn’t have to be that way. I told you, I haven’t taken a sib for more than a month; I’ve been walking around my home town looking at people, I’ve been talking to my parents and my brother, and I’ve been getting to-to see them all over again. I’ve got a mind as well as a peculiar talent, and I can control my mind, and I can remember what I learn with it instead of having to sit and listen to the replay of a tape made while I was in trance. Being a pythoness is like being a machine, which just sits there knowing all kinds of asthings but won’t come out and share them until someone puts the proper questions to it. I’m not a machine, but a girl with hormones and emotions and some intelligence and good looks and-” She made a helpless gesture.

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