John Brunner – Jagged Orbit

What else could she have said but what she did? “There’s a hotel near where I live and they don’t mind taking in knees; I’ll ride into the city with him and show him where it is.”

And it wasn’t until he said warmly, “That’s very good of you, Miss Clay, because in spite of having been shut up in this place for so long he’s really a very remarkable personality and a brilliant electronicist and ought to make out very well once he’s discharged”. only then did the terrifying thought cross her mind: The remarkpersonality was in the audience when I performed at the hospital the other day and had to be slapped out of the echo-trap and later suffered that inexplicable hangover and could it have been him?

She kept glancing back over her shoulder, and there he was imperturbably riding up along with everyone else, a heavy bag slung on his shoulder which presumacontained what belongings he had been able to reduring his stay in the hospital, dressed in a plain gray oversuit not quite properly tailored to his stocky figure, his beard neatly brushed, his hair far shorter than was fashionable owing to a hospital ordinance she rereading about, something to do with the inciof lice among patients committed after living alone for a long time in disgusting conditions.

What sort of a person? So far, apart from being introto him, riding down to the rapitrans terminal, and waiting a few moments for the compartments they’d signaled for to arrive, she had virtually no contact with him. They had exchanged a couple of dozen polite words, and that was that. She had gathered a little about him from Reedeth, notably the impression that but for being conscripted into the Army and suffering some kind of intolerable experience in combat he would never have undergone whatever sort of breakdown he had been hospitalized for.

And, on this return to the Ginsberg under utterly difcircumstances from the previous day, she had suddenly realized why she had hated the atmosphere of the place so much on first arriving there. It had nothing specifically to do with her pythoness talent. It was due simply to her awareness that, in choosing her career, she had committed herself to a lifetime on the edge of literal insanity: thinking with other minds, perhaps one might call it. or whatever did actually happen when she gulped down a sibyl-pill and collapsed into trance. One false step, and she might be in that hateful hospital for good.

“What thin partitions sense from thought divide,” she murmured as she came abreast of the watchful police at the head of the escalator.

“Talking to yourself, hm?” said one of them with a harsh laugh. “Watch it, darl, or you’ll be booked for a one-way ride to the Ginsberg!”

“Here comes a knee,” said one of his companions. “Let’s work him over, huh? We didn’t get anyone yet today, but there’s always a chance. You! You kneeblank there!”

On the firm ground, Lyla turned to look, and yes it was Harry Madison they’d chosen to drag aside and search: five tall policemen so armored and masked that one could not have told whether they themselves were light- or dark-skinned, with helmets and body-shields and pistols and lasers and gas-grenades. But there was no future in arguing. It would only make things worse if she said she and Madison were together.

Impassive, he obeyed the order to show his ID, and there was a reaction to the sight of the hospital discertificate: predictably, “So why didn’t they send you to Blackbury?”

No reply. He was very calm, this man, Lyla noticed, very self-possessed, not in the least disturbed by what he could now see of the street, regardless of the fact that it must have undergone tremendous changes since he was last in the city: the blast-proof shields over the store windows, the two-foot-high police barricades isothe fire-and-riot lane in the center of the roadthe sunken gun-posts at the nearby intersections, the heavy concrete blast-walls exactly the length of a prowl car set at two-block intervals and designed to save official vehicles from being crushed if a building was demolished and spilled across the street.

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