Meeting at Infinity by John Brunner Read Free Book Online Page A

experienced it myself, because normal sensory input heterodynes the data the user gets from it. You have to be almost completely cut off from reality before you can use it. So all I can tell you is what recovered patients have told me. Why do you think I undertook your case, Athlone? Sold you my exclusive services?For the money? I’ve made four times what you can pay me, without half trying. No, simply because I wanted to explore to the ultimate the interaction between a patient and a perceptor.”
    “Did you know this was going to happen?” demanded Athlone. “Did you know she could know things without being present?”
    “Something of the sort was highly probable,” admitted Knard after a pause. “But she’s had far more experience of the perceptor now than anyone else I’ve treated, and she’s got more skilled in using it—”
    A shrill bell, impatiently sounded, interrupted him. He glanced around automatically.
    “She was expecting you,” he said. “Better go on in.”
    In another epoch, Allyn Vage would not have lived. That was a fact which Athlone often had to repeat to himself, when sanity and detachment threatened to break through his obsession.
    He had to begin repeating it now.
    He came into her presence and stood with his head bowed. Although the room was almost completely dark, he did not want to let his eyes pass across the face that was not there.
    It was worse than killing,
he said to himself.
That is why I must hound down Luis Nevada.
His mind was still spinning from the impact of the information Knard had given him.
    The voice like claws in acid, breathy and inhuman, came to him.
    “You must
not
have failed,” it said. “Tell me about it.”
    Athlone hardly heard. He was struggling to order his thoughts coherently, but they contained so many impossibilities.
Consider the facts,
he told himself. Consider that before him, supported precisely by shaped pads and air cushions, Allyn Vage rested in a sitting position on a structure half chair, half box, the base of which was a pedestal three feet on a side containing the rho function field perceptor Athlone hadto fear because he did not understand it. She did not—could not—move. If there had been light, her inflated body would have seemed to glisten: all of her, her desirable thighs and the breasts that had been so firm, the flat, muscular belly—
    Athlone chopped off the mental inventory because of its overtones of despair. No one saw her in the light any more, of course, except Knard when he was checking her slow progress towards recovery. But Athlone had seen her, twice, before she was sufficiently improved to give orders; he had also seen other cases in personalized cocoons. That was how he knew of the wet glistening. But he had never seen another case as grave. Perhaps, said Knard who ought to know, there had never been such a grave case in medical history, that survived.
    Above this ghastly naked parody-body, there was what seemed to be a face that did not move. It was a mask, and its eyes were closed. It rested on a shaped support holding its chin, through which circulated a flow of nutrients and tissue regenerants.
    But behind the mask was a brain, and the brain had not been physically injured in what the courts had ruled to be an accident, what Athlone declared because Allyn said so, was in fact an attempt at a brutal murder.
    That brain could speak through attachments to a special voder device; the vocal cords had been damaged. It could hear, similarly, through a moving coil system stimulating the auditory centers. Likewise, it could perceive in a fashion even Knard confessed he did not totally understand, thanks to the miracle in the box beneath the chair.
    Bit by bit, the ruined body would grow again; its organs would start to function, its withered muscles would eventually respond to the orders of the brain. When? Knard had said offhandedly, right at the beginning, “One or two years. With luck. If you adhere to a cult, I should