John Brunner Jagged Orbit

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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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Still, no doubt it had all been shown on the beams. Even being in the Ginsberg
wasn't like being on another planet.
Disappointed perhaps for they had gone so far as to make him empty his bag and
proffer the contents for inspection the policemen at length nodded
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Madipermission to go ahead, and one of them who had stood by idly chewing, a
very tall lean young man, indeed gangling, put out his foot casually with the
intenof tripping him as he hurried away. And somehow Lyla couldn't see how the
outstretched foot was in precisely the spot where Madison next needed to step,
and his weight went down on the arch without breaking stride, and by the time
the pain was signaled to the astonished and furious busy there were a dozen
people separating them.
"I'm sorry for the delay," Madison said as he rejoined Lyla. "There was no
need to wait I can easily find my way to this hotel you suggested."
Granted. So why had she waited? For the sake of having company, she decided
suddenly. Last night she had lain beside the bed where Dan had died, where his
body still rested, where ugh. In cleanly modern America, one spoke of the
organs, heart, liver, kidneys, for they were terms the doctors used when one
was ill, and never made the connection with the tidily frosterile,
plastic-wrapped objects purchased for food. Dan had been opened, and the gash
showed truly that men too possessed these things, these bloody wet palpitating
things&
She looked around her giddily at the crowd. There was a crowd on this street,
there was always a crowd on every street in every modern city. She thought:
hunand hundreds of hearts and livers and kidneys, kilometers of gut, liters of
blood enough to make the sidewalk run awash with red!
"Are you all right, Miss Clay? You look very pale!" On her shoulder a touch
steadying her, for which she was grateful because the world had tilted askew.
"You get your filthy hand off that blank girl!" screamed someone and instantly
heads turned for twenty paces on every side, but luckily it was an elderly
woman with a pinched mouth and stern eyes under a furrowed old forehead who
had uttered the shriek.
"Want him to handle you instead, you old bag?" Lyla shouted back, and there
was laughter and people had forgotten it, except the old woman herself who
looked murder. In this century of ours, curses upon our ancestors, even the
sweet old ladies know what it is to hate enough to kill. Turn out that big
purse clutched so protectively: find a Blazer like the one that stinking
Gottschalk tried to sell me over Dan's warm corpse&
But the instant of tension had taken with it her unexfit of dizziness. She
said in a normal voice, "I guess I should have warned you, Mr. Madison, that
even though this is a district where knees can still find hotels and
restaurant service it isn't what you'd call a very integrated neighborhood."
"That's all right, Miss Clay. One expects that. And the Army taught me to look
after myself, which is someI haven't forgotten." [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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