Web of Everywhere by John Brunner Read Free Book Online Page A

took along decoy film too, exposed at places he was entitled to visit.
    Dany, of course, was not party to his secret. She would have betrayed him in a fit of depression, without a doubt.
    Humming, in total darkness but moving with the ease of long practice (and thinking about blindness while he worked, as he frequently did), he decided that for once he would process his important film first, not the decoy he had shot on his way to rendezvous with Mustapha. That could serve again. In any case he was suspicious of its quality. He prepared his developing bath, opened the cassette with a tingle of excitement –
    And was suddenly dazzled by brilliant light as the door was flung wide.
    He stood rigid as a rock, looking at the ruined film in his hand.
    A shrill voice gnawed at his mind like a worm attacking the core of an apple.
    ‘Hans, you were right about Athens! There’s a public skelter terminal called Lyceum only they spell it a funny way. So I went there, but then somebody changed my card for another one and I can’t figure this out either … Oh. Is something wrong?’
    Gone: cobwebs. Gone: dust like snow unmarred by footprints. Gone: the irrecoverable ‘after’ to pair with the reconstructed ‘before’ …
    In the next five seconds he came close to murdering his wife. But he changed his mind. He thought of something sweeter and more fitting. He tossed aside the film and turned, cordial of expression and tone.
    ‘Well, what does the second card say?’
    She proffered it uncertainly. Like the first, it bore a clue in rhyme. The answer, unless he was overlooking something ridiculously subtle, must be Oaxaca.
    ‘Can you work it out?’ Dany pressed. ‘I do
so
much want to get to Aleuker’s party!’
    ‘Yes, I’m sure you do,’ he agreed, moving forward as though to obtain a better light on the card. And continued, having drawn a deep breath: ‘Only – what makes you think Aleuker will want you as a guest? He’s inviting people intelligent enough to solve these puzzles for themselves: knowledgeablepeople, well-informed, interesting to be acquainted with. You, on the other hand, are stupid, silly, greedy, selfish, boring, and totally inconsiderate of other people. When you burst in on me just now, you wrecked something I set a lot of store by. It’s gone past recall because you were too impatient to knock!’
    ‘But I asked if anything was wrong!’ In a wail. He ignored the interruption.
    ‘So I think it would be a good idea if I kept out of your way for a while, because if I see you again today I shall certainly beat you to a whimpering pulp. I’ll go to Aleuker’s party. When I get back I may have sweated out my anger.’
    ‘No! No, you wouldn’t steal my chance!’ Clawing at him with slow pudgy hands. He slapped her accurately on the left cheek, and as she shrank back, convinced by pain that he meant what he said, made for the skelter.
    An echo of her curses seemed to follow him, though he knew that was impossible.
    It was not a short trip, nor a quick one, but he relished the going.
    At Oaxaca Concourse, overlooking the abandoned airport, it was raining, and there were cracks in the concrete roof of the skelter hall which allowed warm dirty water to drip down into many handle-less plastic buckets.
    There a shabby young man exchanged the card Hans was carrying for still another, under the watchful eyes of the travel-hungry who pretended not to be: a vast group, hundreds strong, of so-called stucks, so terrified of skelter travel that they could not summon up the courage to pass the non-existent barrier dividing them from the clustered transit booths. It wasn’t inability to pay that held them back; skelter travel cost nothing. Had to. There was no way of pricing infinite speed over nil net expenditure of power. And besides, mankind’s resources of imagination and ingenuity had been slashed by far more than two-thirds when the population crash occurred, so it was imperative always to be able to bring