Tron by Brian Daley Read Free Book Online

faulting himself for being so defensive about Flynn. Jealousy over the time she’d spent with him could only mar his and Lora’s feelings for one another. “Okay, okay; c’mon, let’s get out of here.”
    They made their way to where her black van was parked in the ENCOM lot. When they were underway, Lora drew a deep breath and said, “I want to go to Flynn’s place.”
    Alan turned, saw streetlights and headlights play across the lovely face as she stared directly ahead. “You call that ‘getting over it’?” He knew an abrupt fear, that he might be in danger of losing her. He cast it out at once, unable even to consider it.
    “I mean, I want both of us to go.” She angled the van down an on-ramp and merged with the traffic deftly.
    “What for?” Try as he might, he couldn’t keep a skeptical note out of his tone.
    “To warn him.”
    She was checking the road signs overhead, and Alan saw that she’d already put the van on course for Flynn’s place. He sat back in his seat, folding his arms across his chest. “Of what?”
    “That Dillinger’s on to him.” She guided the van onto a cloverleaf.
    “I don’t know what you ever saw in him anyway,” Alan asserted, but it wasn’t true. He’d paid close attention to what she’d said and what her expression had hinted at, ever since they’d met. He knew that one side of Lora resisted the constraints of employment at ENCOM, while another, stronger, drew her to her work. And Flynn had appealed to that first side. Devil-may-care Flynn had embodied the tempting idea that rules were what you made of them, and impulses were there to be followed if you so pleased. And, though he wouldn’t have phrased it that way to himself, Alan was too much his own man to try to emulate Flynn, even for her.
    “I never saw that much in him,” she parried, finishing silently, not the things I see in you, the things I need!
    “Oh?”
    Exasperated, she burst out, “I loved him for his brains!” But she couldn’t keep a straight face, and dissolved in laughter.
    “Hah!” Alan barked at her, a parody of disbelief, half breaking up as well. The tension was suddenly gone; all her affection showed when she glanced back to him again. Lora didn’t doubt that it was Alan she loved; he had the sort of strength and constancy she needed and understood.
    It was just difficult not to envy someone like Flynn, who lived for fun—and not to want to share in that fun, sometimes. She and Flynn had been drawn to one another, for a time, by what Flynn had laughingly called their algorhythms .
    She drove to an older section of town, where brown and gray stone buildings crowded close together. Lora braked the van and parked across the street from an island of noise and light in the middle of the district. It was the largest and most popular game arcade in the city, its doors flung wide open. Over the entrance, a glorious boast in red neon, a sign proclaimed in beacon letters, FLYNN’S, lighting the entire block. This was, in fact, Flynn’s old neighborhood, and whatever other reverses he may have suffered, his place was now its landmark. HOME OF SPACE PARANOIDS, declared a second sign.
    Within, figures played before the disorderly ranks of videogames or drifted from one to the next, or waited to use some particular favorite. Lora locked up the van and she and Alan entered. Alan saw that the walls of the place were decorated with supergraphic-size murals of computer chips, micro-processors, and circuitry. There were also neon signs advertising Code Wars , Nerve Net , Gonzo , and others. Flynn’s was chockablock with games of all sorts and those who loved to play them.
    Within the microcosms of the games, all was competition, with no reconciliation possible. Tanks prowled across three-dimensional landscapes, relentlessly eager for firefights. Untiring image-athletes contended, their rivalry absolute. Spacecraft did battle and aliens invaded, with only the briefest of occasional cease-fires