John Brunner – Jagged Orbit

She broke the connection with a look of actual disas though about to vomit on her desketary, and Reedeth said foolishly to the uncaring air, “But that’s not what I.”

Aware that the comweb connection had been severed, the desketary said, “I’m sorry?”

“Oh, go to hell!” Reedeth roared, and stormed out of the office.

“Man is not a rational being, he is a rational animal, and to claim that in debasing the influence of the gonads and other glands, in producing a perfectly plastic, peryielding, perfectly unirritating conformist dummy you have cured a severe mental disorder is exactly equivalent to boasting that you have eliminated the risk of tinea pedis by amputating at the ankles.”

There was an “atmosphere” at the Prior home that evening to which a number of factors each contributed noticeably.

Having reluctantly brought his sister Celia back from the Ginsberg Prior had found his wife Nora- talking on the comweb to Phil Gasby’s wife and the latter on being introduced had said, “Ah yes, she’s the one who’s spent so long in the State lunatic asylum, isn’t she? I trust they know what they’re doing to let her out. Snff.” End of conversation and beginning of neighborhood-wide scan

Celia’s presence annoyed Nora, who smashed a dish containing reheated deep-frozen beef Bourguignon in the middle of the dinner table shortly before her brothwas due to arrive and disappeared to her room with a shout to the effect that she had married only Lionel of the Prior family and not all his mentally deranged relatives. Her customary ill-temper had been exacerbated earlier by his attempts to explain why engaging the celebrated kneeblank Pedro Diablo as a colat Matthew Flamen Inc. entailed advantages outthe social stigma of working with a black man on an equal footing (relevant quotations from the dia”I’ll never be able to hold my head up in this neighborhood again and we’ll have to move!” and “If he needs a job let him go and look for one in Africa!”).

The freshness of the disastrous citizens’ defense group exercise in people’s memory meant that instead of the normal evening-long flow of solidarity-generating comcalls there was a dull silence in the house and a crackling awareness that the treachery of Lionel Prior in carrying out his successful mock raid on his neighhomes was being discussed in scores of calls so close at hand one could almost have stolen out back and eavesdropped on the speakers.

There was additionally the terrifying notion abroad that Morton Lenigo might have arrived with the faultblueprint for a nation-wide seizure of power by the knees and during the day the Gottschalks had ansome very expensive but unprecedentedly desnew weaponry which in this high-priced disvirtually no one could afford so soon after laying out for the regular spring models.

Throughout all of which, including the dinner, Celia retained a marble statue’s calm and a polite flow of small-talk concerning her brother’s business, world afsince her hospitalization, and the various antiques he had lately purchased and put on display in the living-zone. Her imperturbability was due to the fact that she had been drugged for five months without interat the Ginsberg and even if she stopped taking the medicine prescribed for her immediately, it would be several days before the cumulative effect on her perwore off.

On the arrival of her husband Matthew Flamen she was just finishing her dessert, and after a cool greeting and the offer of her cheek to be kissed, she said it was advisable for her to go straight to bed since she had been warned against overtiring herself directly after her return to the outside world, good night.

A student of chemistry named Allilene Hooper, aged 19, failed to stabilize the home-brewed nitroglycerine she was delivering to her boy friend and it exploded from the vibration.

It being a martial law day there were armed police on duty at rapitrans terminals throughout the city, and under the inhuman gaze of goggle-like gasmasks Lyla rode the escalator up from platform level, dismayingly aware that behind her was this kneeblank stranger for whom, in a fit of violent reaction against the atmosof the Ginsberg, she had agreed to make herresponsible-not legally, for she was still under age, but morally, in that Reedeth had said quietly, “He hasn’t been in New York as a free man for years, you know, and there have been changes.”