John Brunner – Jagged Orbit

In which case she would have answered, “What’s the good of having a comweb system if you won’t use it?”

And walked briskly on, having gained a major point.

Instead of which she’d been caught in a downright lie. She sought the least damaging escape route, like a chesstrying to reconstruct a weak attack to provide emergency protection for the king.

“Well, if it was really important you could have overand if it wasn’t why come bothering me now?”

“That’s just it,” Reedeth shrugged. “I don’t know if it’s important or not-that’s what I wanted to ask you. This pythoness you’ve engaged for this afternoon: who is she, anyway, and what’s the idea?”

Chance for a counterblow. “That’s something you could have asked your desketary. The information was minuted to all staff members three days ago.”

“As a fait accompli. With his customary secretiveness, Mogshack failed to make his discussion with you availfor consultation by the staff.”

“He probably didn’t think it was necessary-any more than I would have. Just what is it that you want to be told? What a pythoness is, what she does, how she does it?”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Ariadne!” Reedeth’s affability vanished like smoke before a gale. “Don’t you have a better peg to hang your life on than making men dance up and down like yoyos? If you’re that badly obsessed with your own emotional dependence, you’d better take a vacation and get over it before you communicate the problem to your patients!”

She stared at him blankly, unable to believe that it was Jim Reedeth who had uttered such words. They were more typical of Mogshack himself, whose single-minded dedication to the principles he preached was sometimes terrifying, even though in arguments she had often enough compared it to the attitude of a Budvoluntarily renouncing the bliss of nirvana in order to share the chance of perfect enlightenment with less fortunate beings.

It didn’t take a trained psychologist’s insight to dethat something had happened to drive Reedeth a long way out of his customary orbit.

Reluctantly answering his former question before he had a chance to say anything else as cruel as his last gibe, she said.

“Festung Amerika, you monstrous Aryan bunker, it’s time for the twilight of the sods!”

“Oh-very well. The underlying thinking goes like this. Whatever it is that pythonesses actually do, it seems they get results of some kind. The evidence is overAnd the only way they could achieve the success that’s ascribed to them is, presumably, because they display exceptionally high empathy with people who are relative strangers to them. I want to find out if the degree of’strangeness’ they can cope with exto the mentally deranged. And since I’m assured that this girl Lyla Clay is one of the most talented of them, she’s a logical choice for the experiment.”

Reedeth rolled a strand of his beard absently behis fingers. “On the face of it, that’s an excelidea. It might lead to a whole new diagnostic techif it pays off. But isn’t three days rather short notice to put together such a potentially significant operation?”

“I contacted her mackero and this was the only date he could offer me until seven weeks from now. Apparshe’s very much in demand.”

She added caustically, “I’m flattered that you approve of the idea, I must say!”

“Oh, give it a rest, will you?” Reedeth snapped. “You may have quit trying to keep your private emotional entanglements from interfering with your work, but I’m at least still making the effort.” And continuing without giving time for a counterblast: “What does Mogthink of it? Obviously he gave approval in the end or you couldn’t have set it up, but I’m surprised he didn’t balk at packing a number of patients together in conditions-now how would he have put it? Ah yes!-in conditions that are not only medically insanitary but psychologically so perilous as to prejudice many of them on the road to recovery!”

“You bastard! You have been checking on the talk I had with him!”

“No, I told you: it isn’t available. I just. Well, I just tried to pick the words he’d have been most likely to use.”

For a long moment they stared at each other, face to face and much less than arm’s length apart. Suddenly, quite against her will, Ariadne felt her mouth straining upwards at the corners. She resisted for a second, then gave in. Il faut reculer pour mieux sauter, she told herquoting one of Mogshack’s own favorite aphorisms. One must go back to make a longer jump. And next time she jumped, she promised herself, it would be out of Jim Reedeth’s reach.