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

recommend prayer.”
    Athlone had no space in his mind for a cult, though. He had his own dedication: the destruction of Luis Nevada.
    He thought: one or two
years!
And realized fatalistically that he would not have to endure more than a year of his personal torture, at most. If within a year and a day of laying his case against Nevada, he had not secured revenge, it was over; if Nevada got out of reach before that—secure in Lyken’s franchise, besieged but not surrendering, or worse yet, dead without the hand of vengeance having touched him—it was over likewise. And so was Kingsley Athlone.
    He was tempted to think that that was mere romantic maundering. A griping in his guts contradicted him. To him, the Allyn Vage that had been, the Allyn Vage he was striving to bring back, meant more than his life itself.
    When he came out of Allyn’s room again, he was shaking from head to foot. Knard glanced up from his great desk, and without a word dispensed a pill into a measure of water. He brought it to Athlone and held it out.
    “What is it?” Athlone asked wearily.
    “A trank. Just a trank. Better take it.”
    Athlone hesitated; then he seized and swallowed it, and handed back the cup. He said, “Knard, the power of that gadget of yours terrifies me.”
    “The perceptor?” Knard put both hands on the cup and held it before him like an offering. “I can only tell you not to fear it. I can only say that it’s just a field in a box, a rho function field, connected so as to provide sensory data to the patient, and used to counteract the sense of isolation from reality which always used to affect cocoonees. It’s just an analogue of reality—nothing more. And the longer the patient uses it, the more accurate the data yielded.”
    “How the hell can you use something you don’t understand? That’s what shakes me! And if you of all people don’t—”
    Knard shrugged. “Five years and the experience of a dozen or so cases isn’t all that much to go by.”
    Athlone gave him a strange look. He said, “Knard, something just hit me. You say we’ve had it only five years?”
    “That’s right.”
    “But I didn’t think.…” Athlone’s voice tailed off uncertainly; just in time it occured to him that he might be going to insult Knard, and he didn’t want to. Knard, though, did not seem to realize. His voice betrayed wry sarcasm as he replied.
    “You were going to say: you don’t think there’s been much progress in any field since Tacket.”
    Athlone nodded. That was roughly it.
    “Well, you’re damned right!” said Knard with unexpected emphasis. “There’s been change, but no progress. I’d like to lay claim to enough originality to have invented the rho function field myself, but I’m as secondhand as anyone in our lazybones world. All I did was figure out how to use it to advantage.”
    “You mean,” said Athlone painfully, “you mean we
imported
the idea?”
    “Of course we did.”
    Athlone felt sweat prickle on his forehead. He had the impression of being on the verge of a terrible but significant discovery. “But—who brought it in, then?” he choked out. “Whose franchise did it come from?”
    “Ahmed Lyken’s,” said Knard shortly.
    “The hell you say!” Illogical, apparently groundless, fear started to blossom in Athlone’s guts, like a fireball. He repeated, “The
hell
you say!”

6
    T HROUGH THE whole structure of the franchise system the contradictions crawled like termites—invisible to the superficialview which was all that the general public was permitted to gain.
    For example, the concessionaries bound themselves to rigid rules—ostensibly to reassure the public that irresponsibles could never again bring back a White Death from one of the sister Earths. Not one of them gave more than lip service to this ideal. All the concessionaries, and most especially the twelve who were also Directors of The Market, regarded the rules as a sort of
code duello
—if they had not