John Brunner – Jagged Orbit

As though, thought Flamen fretfully waiting, after letting in Morton Lenigo yesterday the officials were deto make up for their lapse by screening everyelse five times as thoroughly as usual

Tempera mutantur et nos mutamur in illis. Four short years ago, he could not have sat here without being mobbed. Now, at most a curious look from the passersby, this airport being the busiest of New York’s five and the terminal building thronged day and night. In the distwo girls giggling together with frequent glances in his direction.

Definition of spoolpigeons: an about to be extinct spe

Angry with himself and the world, he forced his mind to switch to what ought to have been a fascinating subthe question of Morton Lenigo’s whereabouts. He had checked his office computers this morning as usual, because even though it was Saturday and he had no noon slot to prepare for he was too tense to alter his routine. But the Lenigo problem was currently as flexible as an anaconda. Having missed the story the day it broke, he was now faced with the probability of missing the next stage because it would happen over a weekend. It was small consolation to have stirred up the subject of the Detroit blackmail deal. Nobody seemed to have reacted to that; the monitors had logged virtually nil response.

He looked around at the anonymous strangers riding the pediflows and thought: Don’t they care?

Answer-they’d rather not. For them Morton Lenigo had the reality of Father Christmas or the Devil, a legend in his own lifetime not to be taken seriously until they were forced to it. by which time it would be far too late.

So he found himself faced with more personal probthan he’d had in months and no weighting in favor in any area. Thinking of knees: Pedro Diablo. Vanished in strict accordance with the customs of his forcibly adopted blank hosts, doubtless not to appear again until office time on Monday morning but then entering poand calm and unhelpful. Flamen had hoped for a sense of dynamism, a jolt to his own exhausted imaginaNone had resulted from their meeting. Only the tension of anticipation had drained away and left him flabby, like a perished balloon.

And Celia. He shivered. A cool withdrawn stranger. That was my wife, that lovely body pressed mine and convulsed in orgasm? That mouth on mine, that voice whispering in darkness? Memory says yes. Rationality says no. Rationality says this is a different person with the same name and features.

He asked himself: Is it in me, the reason for the change? Is it in those doom-laden words the doctor proat the Ginsberg about previous emotional attachbeing symptoms of immaturity? According to

Mogshack Celia was cured, but he was here today with precisely the intention of proving Mogshack a liar. Beof what had been done to Celia?

No, because it was necessary for spoolpigeons to shoot an occasional sacred cow in order to survive.

And concerning survival: that impossible reading of zero! Given unlimited Federal computer time, the source of the interference on his program must be identifiable! Yesterday’s, the first with Diablo participating if you could call it participation, had suffered three breaks, not the record, but any at all was too much, and yet when he called to register the latest of scores of furious complaints the despair of the engineer i/c transmission had been somehow convincing. The Directorate had even invited him to their next general meeting to disthe problem.

The hypocrites, he thought. Got to hit them! And with something harder than the flabby threat of the PCC. Ace in the hole, maybe-Harry Madison? Oh, ridiculous!

Looking back, he was aware of grasping at straws and knew why he’d been impelled to fall in with Reedeth’s request. Not by Prior’s eagerness to exorcise the specter of that zero reading, not by the dark eyes of Diablo trained on his face. By his own terrifying sense of disDiablo trained in the real school of hard knocks coming to join the company; his wife treating him like an unknown; a conspiracy among his employers to sahis transmissions. It was like living in a hut on an ice-floe and feeling the warm breeze of summer come from the south.

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