John Brunner – Jagged Orbit

Worse yet: she wouldn’t have believed Dan’s unsupword, but having seen Flamen’s recording she couldn’t contest the necessity any longer. Echo-traps had been the-mental, if not physical, and hence even worse-death of at least three pythonesses she knew of.

So there were endless problems to worry her: falling into the echo-trap (for what conceivable reason?), the uncertain consequences of trying to metabolize the reof the drug in the non-trance state, and that weird hangover which had caused her to speak what amounted to an oracle during the skimmer-flight to Flahome.

Applying her Punch key, with its unique magnetic pattern, to the lock of the apt’s door, she struggled to decide whether or not the same person had been reto as the one whose presence had driven her into an echo-trap. Allegedly-but pythoness talent was too fragile to take kindly to laboratory examination-there must have been some exceptionally powerful personality present in the audience, one whose aura of authority overwhelmed her best attempts to move away and tackle another subject.

Flamen himself? It was unlikely; they had spent half an hour or so running over the three oracles she had managed to utter in complete form, and concluded that none of them applied to him. He had been very obvirelieved.

She slipped rapidly under the deadfall, which was inwhen the lock was fitted with the proper key and remained safe until the door was closed again, and shut out the world with a slam.

Tossing her yash to the peg-it missed and she had to pick it up and make a second try-she called, “Dan?” No answer.

Going to the icebox, she found a partly-eaten loaf with mold on it and some peanut butter so old the oil had separated. But she wasn’t hungry. In the freezer comthere was a range of blue and green and brown phials which had to be kept very cold to prolong their usable life; in one of the brown ones labeled in Dan’s handwriting she found one and a half joylets and took them.

Nothing much happened. They were probably stale. She went to the kitchen wallboard and scrawled joylets in bold chalked capitals at the foot of the current shoplist. And there was no mescal ready or anything else like that, and right now she couldn’t face the chore of preparing some. No liquor, no joints, no nothing in the place. She thought of Mikki Baxendale in her luxury penthouse and felt a stab of pity for Dan who had come so near to money.

But the bed hadn’t been fixed and she started to be angry with him instead. Dumping herself like a badly-stuffed doll into a patched inflatable chair, she leaned back and scowled at the ceiling.

She had never felt like this before after a session. Ordinarily she was excited, pleased at the hints of relewhich peeped out of the doggerel of her oracles, eager to trace clues half-hidden in a tangle of sub-conassociations, and by nightfall-or whenever-very sexy.

She fingered herself experimentally. It was like toucha corpse.

So once again back on the worn groove of her puzzlethankful that the joylets had at least lifted her depression far enough for her to regard the effort of concentration as worthwhile.

If one of the audience had obsessed her to the point of creating an echo-trap for her, the likeliest assumpwas that the same person was being referred to when she spoke of someone in the hospital being more rational than the director. Who? What kind of a patient could be in the Ginsberg not because he was crazy but because he was too sane?

It was no use cracking her skull, she decided at length. She’d never been able to analyze her own oracles unshe wanted Dan here to talk to, the tape to play over and over so that the words etched deep into her conscious mind. Where the hell had that stupid mack gone, anyway?

To distract herself she jumped up and started on a whirlwind round of the apt with the polycleaner, gulping dust and rubbish. The morning’s mail had dissolved into the sludgy mess of books before the Lar, and she scooped it all up in handfuls and threw it down the toilet. The fourth time she tried to flush the pan the water failed and the last grayish lump lay mocking her, irremovable.

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 *