Brunner,John - The Shockwave Rider

The Shockwave Rider by John Brunner (1975)

He Was The Most Dangerous Fugitive

Alive, But He Didn't Exist!

The Shockwave Rider

by John Brunner (1975)

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

People like me who are concerned to portray in fictional terms aspects of that foreign country, the

future, whither we are all willy-nilly being deported, do not make our guesses in a vacuum. We are

frequently — and in this case I am specifically — indebted to those who are analyzing the limitless

possibilities of tomorrow with some more practical aim in view . . . as for instance the slim yet admirable

hope that our children may inherit a world more influenced by imagination and foresight than our own.

The "scenario" (to employ a fashionable cliche) of The Shockwave Rider derives in large part from

Alvin Toffler's stimulating study Future Shock, and in consequence I'm much obliged to him.

file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/...John%20%20-%20%20The%20shockwave%20rider.htm (1 of 158) [2/1/2004 3:05:51 PM]

The Shockwave Rider by John Brunner (1975)

J.K.H.B.

BOOK 1

THE BASIC STRAINING MANUAL

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY

Take 'em an inch and they'll give you a hell.

DATA-RETRIVIAL MODE

The man in the bare steel chair was as naked as the room's white walls. They had shaved his head and

body completely; only his eyelashes remained. Tiny adhesive pads held sensors in position at a dozen

places on his scalp, on his temples close to the corners of his eyes, at each side of his mouth, on his throat,

over his heart and over his solar plexus and at every major ganglion down to his ankles.

From each sensor a lead, fine as gossamer, ran to the sole object — apart from the steel chair and two

other chairs, both softly padded — that might be said to furnish the room. That was a data-analysis

console about two meters broad by a meter and a half high, with display screens and signal lights on its

slanted top, convenient to one of the padded chairs.

Additionally, on adjustable rods cantilevered out from the back of the steel chair, there were

microphones and a three-vee camera.

The shaven man was not alone. Also present were three other people: a young woman in a slick white

coverall engaged in checking the location of the sensors; a gaunt black man wearing a fashionable dark

red jerkin suit clipped to the breast of which was a card bearing his picture and the name Paul T.

Freeman; and a heavy-set white man of about fifty, dressed in dark blue, whose similar card named him

as Ralph C. Hartz.

After long contemplation of the scene, Hartz spoke.

"So that's the dodger who went further and faster for longer than any of the others."

"Haflinger's career," Freeman said mildly, "is somewhat impressive. You've picked up on his record?"

"Naturally. That's why I'm here. It may be an atavistic impulse, but I did feel inclined to see with my

own eyes the man who posted such an amazing score of new personae. One might almost better ask what

file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/...John%20%20-%20%20The%20shockwave%20rider.htm (2 of 158) [2/1/2004 3:05:51 PM]

The Shockwave Rider by John Brunner (1975)

he hasn't done than what he has. Utopia designer, lifestyle counselor, Delphi gambler, computer-sabotage

consultant, systems rationalizer, and God knows what else besides."

"Priest, too," Freeman said. "We're progressing into that area today. But what's remarkable is not the

number of separate occupations he's pursued. It's the contrast between successive versions of himself."

"Surely you'd expect him to muddle his trail as radically as possible?"

"You miss the point. The fact that he eluded us for so long implies that he's learned to live with and to

some extent control his overload reflexes, using the sort of regular commercial tranquilizer you or I would

take to cushion the shock of moving to a new house, and in no great quantity, either."

"Hmm . . ." Hartz pondered. "You're right; that is amazing. Are you ready to start today's run? I don't

have too much time to spend here at Tarnover, you know."

Not looking up, the girl in white plastic said, "Yes, sir, he's status go."

She headed for the door. Taking a seat at Freeman's gestured invitation, Hartz said doubtfully, "Don't

you have to give him a shot or something? He looks pretty thoroughly sedated."

Settling comfortably in his own chair adjacent to the data console, Freeman said, "No, it's not a

question of drugs. It's done with induced current in the motor centers. One of our specialties, you know.

All I have to do is move this switch and he'll recover consciousness — though not, of course, the power

of ambulation. Just enough to let him answer in adequate detail. By the way, before I turn him on, I

should fill in what's happening. Yesterday I broke off when I tapped into what seemed to be an

exceptionally heavily loaded image, so I'm going to regress him to the appropriate date and key in the

same again, and we'll see what develops."

"What kind of image?"

"A girl of about ten running like hell through the dark."

FOR PURPOSES OF IDENTIFICATION

At present I am being Arthur Edward Lazarus, profession minister, age forty-six, celibate: founder and

proprietor of the Church of Infinite Insight, a converted (and what better way for a church to start than

with a successful conversion?) drive-in movie theater near Toledo, Ohio, which stood derelict for years

not so much because people gave up going to the movies — they still make them, there's always an

audience for wide-screen porn of the type that gets pirate three-vee satellites sanded out of orbit in next to

no time — as because it's on land disputed between the Billy-kings, a Protestant tribe, and the Grailers,

Catholic. No one cares to have his property tribaled. However, normally they respect churches, and the

territory of the nearest Moslem tribe, the Jihad Babies, lies ten miles to the west.

My code, of course, begins with 4GH, and has done so for the past six years.

Memo to selves: find out whether there's been any change in the status of a 4GH, and particularly

whether something better has been introduced . . . a complication devoutly to be fished.

MAHER-SHALAL-HASH-BAZ

file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/...John%20%20-%20%20The%20shockwave%20rider.htm (3 of 158) [2/1/2004 3:05:51 PM]

The Shockwave Rider by John Brunner (1975)

She ran, blinded by sorrow, under a sky that boasted a thousand extra stars moving more swiftly than a

minute hand. The air of the June night rasped her throat with dust, every muscle ached in her legs, her

belly, even her arms, but she kept right on as hard as she could pelt. It was so hot, the tears that leaked

from her eyes dried as they were shed.

Sometimes she went on more or less level roadway, not repaired for years but still quite sound;

sometimes she crossed rough ground, the sites perhaps of factories whose owners had transferred their

operations up to orbit, or of homes which had been tribaled in some long-ago riot.

In the blackness ahead loomed lights and illuminated signs bordering a highway. Three of the signs

advertised a church and offered free Delphi counseling to registered members of its congregation.

Wildly glancing around, blinking her eyes to clear perception, she saw a monstrous multi-colored

dome, as though a lampshade made from a puffer-fish were to be blown up larger than a whale.

Pacing her at a discreet distance, tracking a tracer concealed in the paper frock which was all she wore

except sandals, a man in an electric car fought his yawns and hoped that on this particular Sunday the

pursuit would not be too long or too dull.

MINOR PROFIT IN THE BELLY OF THE GREAT FISH

As well as presiding at the church, Reverend Lazarus lived in it, his home being a trailer parked behind

the cosmoramic altar — formerly the projection screen, twenty meters high. How else could a man with a

minister's vocation afford so much privacy and so much space?

Surrounded by the nonstop hum of the compressor that kept his polychrome plastic dome inflated —

three hundred meters by two hundred by ninety high — he sat alone at his desk in the nose compartment

of the trailer, his tiny office, comping the take from the day's collection.

He was worried. His deal with the coley group who provided music at his services was on a percentage

basis, but he had to guarantee a thousand, and attendance was falling off as the church's novelty declined.

Today only about seven hundred people had come here; there had not even been a jam as they drove back

on to the highway.

Moreover, for the first time in the nine months since the church was launched, today's collections had

yielded more scrip than cash. Cash didn't circulate much any more — at least not on this continent —

except in the paid-avoidance areas, where people drew a federal grant for going without some of the

twenty-first century's more expensive gadgetry, but activating a line to the federal credit computers on a

Sunday, their regular down-time day, meant a heavy surcharge, beyond the means of most churches

including his. So churchgoers generally remembered to bring coins or bills or one of the little booklets of

scrip vouchers issued to them when they joined.

The trouble with all this scrip, though — as he knew from sad experience — was that when he

presented it to his bank tomorrow at least half of it would be returned marked VOID: the bigger the sum

pledged, the more likely. Some would have been handed in by people already so deep in pointless debt

the computers had banned expenditure on nonessentials; any new church inevitably attracted a lot of

shock victims. But some would have been canceled overnight as the result of a family row: "You credded

how much? My God, what did I do to deserve a twitch like you? Get that scrip deeveed this minute!"

file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/...John%20%20-%20%20The%20shockwave%20rider.htm (4 of 158) [2/1/2004 3:05:51 PM]

The Shockwave Rider by John Brunner (1975)

Still, some people had been ignorantly generous. There was a stack of over fifty copper dollars, worth

three hundred to any electronics firm, asteroid ores being poor in high-conduction metals. It was illegal to

sell currency for scrap, but everybody did it, saying they'd found old saucepans in the attic of a

secondhand house, or a disused cable while digging over the back yard.

Riding high on the public Delphi boards right now was a prediction that the next dollar issue would be

plastic with a one- or two-year life. Well, plus ça small change plus c'est biodegradable. . . .

He tipped the coins into his smelter without counting them because only the weight of the eventual

ingot mattered, and turned to the other task he was obliged to complete before he quit work for the day:

analysis of the Delphi forms the congregation had filled out. There were many fewer than there had been

back in April; then, he'd expected fourteen or fifteen hundred, whereas this week's input was barely half

that. Even seven hundred and some opinions, though, was a far wider spread than most individuals could

hope to invoke, particularly while in the grip of acute depression or some other life-style crisis.

By definition, his congregation all had life-style crises.

The forms bore a series of bald statements each summarizing a personal problem, followed by blank

spaces where any paid-up member of the church was invited to offer a solution. Today there were nine

items, a sad contrast with those palmy days in the spring when he'd had to continue on the second side of

the form. Now the word must be out on the mouth-to-mouth circuit: "Last time they only gave us nine

things to delph, so next Sunday we're going to . . ."

What's the opposite of a snowball? A thawball?

Despite the failure of his old high hopes, though, he determined to go through the proper motions. He

owed it to himself, to those who regularly attended his services, and above all to those whose heart-cries

of agony had been eavesdropped on today.

Item A on the list he disregarded. He had invented it as a juicy lure. There was nothing like a scandal

of the kind that might eventually make the media to grab people's attention. The bait was the vague hope

that one day soon they might notice a news report and be able to tell each other, "Say, that bit where the

poker got shot for messing with his daughter — remember we comped that one at church?"

A link with yesterday, tenuous, but to be prized.

Wryly he re-read what he had dreamed up: I am a girl, fourteen. All the time my father is drunk and

wants to plug into me but he creds so much for liquor I don't get none to pay my piece when I go out and

they repossessed my . . .

The responses were drearily predictable. The girl should apply to the courts and have herself declared

of age, she should tell her mother at once, she should denounce her father anonymously, she should get a

doc-block put on his credit, bale out of home and go live in a teener dorm — and so forth.

"Lord!" he said to the air. "If I programmed a computer to feed my confessional booth, people would

get better advice than that!"

Nothing about this project was working out in the least as he had hoped.

Moreover, the next item enshrined a genuine tragedy. But how could one help a woman still young, in

her thirties, a trained electronics engineer, who went to orbit on a six-month contract and discovered too

late that she was subject to osteochalcolysis — loss of calcium and other minerals from her skeleton in

zero-gee conditions — and had to abort the job and now was in danger of breaking bones if she so much

as tripped? Without chance of appeal her guild had awarded her contract-breaker status. She couldn't sue

for reinstatement unless she worked to pay the lawyer, she couldn't work unless the guild allowed it, she .

. . Round and round and round.

file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/...John%20%20-%20%20The%20shockwave%20rider.htm (5 of 158) [2/1/2004 3:05:51 PM]

The Shockwave Rider by John Brunner (1975)

There's a lot of brave new misery in our brave new world!

Sighing, he shook the forms together and piled them under the scanner lens of his desk computer for

consolidation and a verdict. For so few it wasn't worth renting time on the public net. To the purr of the

air compressor was added the hush-hush of the paper-sorter's plastic fingers.

The computer was secondhand and nearly obsolete, but it still worked most of the time. So, provided it

didn't have a b-d overnight, when the shy kids and the worried parents and the healthy but inexplicably

unhappy middlers and the lost despairing old 'uns came back for their ration of spiritual reassurance, each

would depart clutching a paper straw, a certificate redolent of old-fashioned absolute authority: its

heading printed in imitation gold leaf declaring that it was an authentic and legal Delphi assessment based

on contributions from not fewer than _____* hundred consultees (* Insert number; document invalid if

total fails to exceed 99) and delivered under oath/deposition in presence of adult witnesses/notary's seal

** (** Delete as applicable) on _____ (month) __ (day) 20_____ (year).

A shoddy little makeshift, memorial to the collapse of his plans about converting the congregation into

his own tame CIMA pool and giving himself the place to stand from which he could move the Earth. He

knew now he had picked the wrong pitch, but there was still a faint ache when he thought back to his

arrival in Ohio.

At least, though, what he had done might have saved a few people from drugs, or suicide, or murder. If

it achieved nothing else, a Delphi certificate did convey the subconscious impression: I matter after all,

because it says right here that hundreds of people have worried about my troubles!

And he had made a couple of coups on the public boards by taking the unintentional advice of the

collective.

The day's work was over. But, moving into the trailer's living zone, he found he did not feel at all

sleepy. He considered calling up somebody to play a game at fencing, then remembered that the last of

the regular local opponents he'd contacted on arrival had just moved out, and at 2300 it was too late to try

and trace another player by calling the Ohio State Fencing Committee.

So the fencing screen stayed rolled in its tube along with the light-pencil and the scorer. He resigned

himself to an hour of straight three-vee.

In an excess of impulsive generosity, one of the first people to join his church had given him an

abominably expensive present, a monitor that could be programed with his tastes and would automatically

select a channel with a suitable broadcast on it. He slumped into a chair and switched on. Promptly it lit

the screen, and he found himself invited to advise the opposition party in Jamaica what to do about the

widespread starvation on the island so as to depose the government at the next election. Currently the

weight of opinion was clustering behind the suggestion that they buy a freight dirigible and airlift

packages of synthetic food to the worst-hit areas. So far nobody seemed to have pointed out that the cost

of a suitable airship would run into seven figures and Jamaica was as usual bankrupt.

Not tonight! I can't face any more stupidity!

But when he rejected that, the screen went dark. Could there really be nothing else on all the

multifarious channels of the three-vee which held any interest for the Reverend Lazarus? He cut out the

monitor and tried manual switching.

First he found a coley group, all blue-skin makeup and feathers in their hair, not playing instruments

but moving among invisible columns of weak microwaves and provoking disturbances which a computer

translated into sound . . . hopefully, music. They were stiff and awkward and their coordination was

file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/...John%20%20-%20%20The%20shockwave%20rider.htm (6 of 158) [2/1/2004 3:05:51 PM]

The Shockwave Rider by John Brunner (1975)

lousy. His own amateur group, composed of kids fresh out of high school, was better at keeping the key

and homing on the tonic chord.

Changing, he found a scandal bulletin, voicing unprovable and slanderous — but by virtue of

computerized editing not actionable — rumors designed to reassure people by convincing them the world

really was as bad as they suspected. In El Paso, Texas, the name of the mayor had been mentioned

following the arrest of a man running an illegal Delphi pool taking bets on the number of deaths, broken

limbs and lost eyes during hockey and football games; it wasn't the pool per se that was illegal, but the

fact that it had been returning less than the statutory fifty percent of money staked to the winning bettors.

Well, doubtless the mayor's name had indeed been mentioned, several times. And over in Britain, the

secretary of the Racial Purification Board had invited Princess Shirley and Prince Jim to become joint

patrons of it, because it was known they held strong views on immigration to that unhappy island. Given

the rate at which poverty was depopulating all but the areas closest to the Continent, one could scarcely

foresee Australians or New Zealanders being impressed. And was it true that last week's long-range

rocket attack on tourist hotels in the Seychelles had been financed by a rival hotel chain, not by irredentist

members of the Seychellois Liberation Party? The hell with that.

But what he got next was circus — as everybody called it, despite the official title 'experiential reward

and punishment complex.' He must have hit on a field-leader — perhaps the most famous of all, which

operated out of Quemadura CA taking advantage of some unrepealed local statute or other — because it

was using live animals. Half a dozen scared wide-eyed kids were lining up to walk a plank no more than

five centimeters wide spanning a pool where restless alligators gaped and writhed. Their eager parents

were cheering them on. A bold red sign in the corner of the screen said that each step each of them

managed to take before slipping would be worth $1000. He switched once more, this time with a shudder.

The adjacent channel should have been spare. It wasn't. A Chinese pirate satellite had taken it over to

try and reach midwestern American émigrés. There was a Chinese tribe near Cleveland, so he'd heard, or

maybe it was Dayton. Not speaking the language, he moved on, and there were commercials. One was for

a life-styling consultancy that he knew maintained private wards for those clients whose condition was

worsened instead of improved by the expensive suggestions they'd been given; another was for a euphoric

claimed not to be addictive but which was — the company marketing it was being sued by the FDA, only

according to the mouth-to-mouth circuit they'd reached the judge, he was good and clutched, and they'd

have cleared their profit and would be willing to withdraw the product voluntarily before the case actually

came to trial, leaving another few hundred thousand addicts to be cared for by the underfunded,

overworked Federal Health Service.

Then there was another pirate broadcast, Australian by the accents, and a girl in a costume of six

strategic bubbles was saying, "Y'know, if all the people with life-style crises were laid end to end . . .

Well, I mean, who'd be left to actually lay them?"

That prompted him to a faint grin, and since it was rare to pick up an Australian show he had half-

decided to stick with this for a while when a loud buzzer shrilled at him.

Someone was in the confessional booth at the main gate. And presumably at this time of night

therefore desperate.

Well, being disturbed at all hours was one of the penalties he'd recognized as inescapable when he

created the church. He rose, sighing, and shut off his screen.

Memo to selves: going into three-vee for a while might be a good idea. Get back in touch with the

media. Or has priesthood used up the limited amount of public exposure the possessor of a 4GH can

file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/...John%20%20-%20%20The%20shockwave%20rider.htm (7 of 158) [2/1/2004 3:05:51 PM]

The Shockwave Rider by John Brunner (1975)

permit himself in a given span of time? If not, how much left?

Must find out. Must.

Composing his features into a benign expression, he activated the three-vee link to the confessional.

He was apprehensive. It was no news to the few who kept in circuit that the Billykings and the Grailers

had counted seven dead in last week's match, and the latter had come out ahead. As one might expect;

they were the more brutal. Where the Billykings were normally content to disable their captives and leave

them to struggle home as best they might, the Grailers' habit was to rope and gag them and hide them in

some convenient ruin to die of thirst.

So the caller tonight might not be in need of counsel or even medication. It might be someone sussing

out the church with a view to razing it. After all, in the eyes of both tribes it was a pagan shame.

But the screen showed him a girl probably too young to be inducted in either tribe: at a glance, no

older than ten, her hair tousled, her eyes red-rimmed with weeping, her cheeks stained with dust down

which tears had runneled. A child who had overreached her ability to imitate an adult, presumably, lost

and frightened in the dark — Oh! No! Something more, and worse. For he could see she was holding a

knife, and on both its blade and her green frock there were smears so red they could well be fresh blood.

"Yes, little sister?" he said in a neutral tone.

"Father, I got to make confession or I'll be damned!" she sobbed. "I shivved my mom — cut her all to

bits! I guess I must have killed her! I'm sure I did!"

Time seemed to stop for a long moment. Then, with what calm he could summon, he uttered what had

to be said for the benefit of the record . . . because, while the booth itself was sacrosanct, this veephone

circuit like all such was tied into the city police-net, and thence to the tireless federal monitors at

Canaveral. Or wherever. There were so many of them now, they couldn't all be in the same place.

Memo to selves: would be worth knowing where the rest are.

His voice as gritty as a gravel road, he said, "My child" — aware as ever of the irony in the phrase —

"you're welcome to unburden your conscience by confiding in me. But I must explain that the secrecy of

the confessional doesn't apply when you're talking to a microphone."

She gazed at his image with such intensity he fancied for a moment he could see himself from her

point of view: a lean dark man with a broken nose, wearing a black jerkin and a white collar ornamented

with little gilt crosses. Eventually she shook her head,

as though her mind were too full of recent horror to leave room for any new shocks.

Gently he explained again, and this time she connected.

"You mean," she forced out, "you'll call the croakers?"

"Of course not. But they must be looking for you now in any case. And since you've admitted what

you did over my mikes . . . Do you understand?"

Her face crumpled. She let fall her knife with a tinkling sound that the pickups caught, faint as fairy

bells. A few seconds, and she was crying anew.

"Wait there," he said. "I'll be with you in a moment"

RECESS

file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/...John%20%20-%20%20The%20shockwave%20rider.htm (8 of 158) [2/1/2004 3:05:51 PM]

The Shockwave Rider by John Brunner (1975)

A sharp wind tasting of winter blew over the hills surrounding Tarnover and broke red and gold leaves

off the trees, but the sky was clear and the sun was bright. Waiting his turn in line at the best of the

establishment's twenty restaurants, redolent of old-fashioned luxury up to and including portions of ready-

heated food on open display, Hartz gazed admiringly at the view.

"Beautiful," he said at length. "Just beautiful."

"Hm?" Freeman had been pressing his skin on both temples toward the back of his head, as though

attempting to squeeze out overpowering weariness. Now he glanced at the window and agreed, "Oh —

yes, I guess it is. I don't get too much time to notice it these days."

"You seem tired," Hartz said sympathetically. "And I'm not surprised. You have a tough job on your

hands."

"And a slow one. Nine hours per day, in segments of three hours each. It gets wearing."

"But it has to be done."

"Yes, it has to be done."

HOW TO GROW DELPHINIUMS

It works, approximately, like this.

First you corner a large — if possible, a very large — number of people who, while they've never

formally studied the subject you're going to ask them about and hence are unlikely to recall the correct

answer, are nonetheless plugged into the culture to which the question relates.

Then you ask them, as it might be, to estimate how many people died in the great influenza epidemic

which followed World War I, or how many loaves were condemned by EEC food inspectors as unfit for

human consumption during June 1970.

Curiously, when you consolidate their replies they tend to cluster around the actual figure as recorded

in almanacs, yearbooks and statistical returns.

It's rather as though this paradox has proved true: that while nobody knows what's going on around

here, everybody knows what's going on around here.

Well, if it works for the past, why can't it work for the future? Three hundred million people with

access to the integrated North American data-net is a nice big number of potential consultees.

Unfortunately most of them are running scared from the awful specter of tomorrow. How best to

corner people who just do not want to know?

Greed works for some, and for others hope. And most of the remainder will never have any impact on

the world to speak of.

Good enough, as they say, for folk music . . .

A MOMENT FOR MILLSTONES

On the point of undogging his trailer's sealed door and disconnecting the alarms, he hesitated.

file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/...John%20%20-%20%20The%20shockwave%20rider.htm (9 of 158) [2/1/2004 3:05:51 PM]

The Shockwave Rider by John Brunner (1975)

Sunday. A moderately good collection, if not a record-breaker. (He sniffed. Hot air. From the smelter.)

And she might be a precociously good actress . . .

He pictured a tribe raiding, looting, vanishing before the croakers swooped, leaving behind no one but

a minor immune from police interrogation, hysterical with laughter at the success of her "practical joke."

Therefore, prior to shutting down the alarms, he activated all the church's electronics except the coley

music system and the automated collection trolleys. When he rounded the base of the altar — ex-screen

— it was as though fire raged in the whale's-belly of the dome. Lights flashed all colors of the rainbow

and a few to spare, while a three-vee remote over his head not only repeated his image monstrous on the

face of the altar but also stored it, minutely detailed, in a recorder buried beneath a yard of concrete. If he

were attacked, the recording would be evidence.

Moreover, he carried a gun . . . but he was never without it.

These precautions, slender though they were, constituted the maximum a priest was expected to take.

More could easily worry the federal computers into assessing him as a potential paranoid. They'd been

sensitive on such matters ever since, last summer, a rabbi in Seattle who had mined the approaches to his

shul forgot to turn off the firing-circuit before a bar mitzvah.

Generally the Fedcomps approved of people with strong religious convictions. They were less likely

than some to kick up a fuss. But there were limits, not to mention mavericks.

A few years ago his defenses would have been adequate. Now their flimsiness made him tremble as he

walked down the wall-less aisle defined by the black rubber streaks car tires had left over decades. Sure,

the fence at the base of the dome was electrified except where access had to be left for the confessional,

and the booth itself was explosive-resistant and had its own air supply against a gas attack, but even so . .

. !

Memo to selves: next time, a role where I can take more care of life and limb. Privacy is fine, and I

needed it when I arrived here. But this place was never meant to be operated by a single individual. I can't

scan every shifting shadow, make sure no nimble shivver is using it for cover!

Thinking of which as I stare around: my vision is unaided. At forty-six??? Out of three hundred

million there are bound to be some people that age who have never bought corrective lenses, most

because they can't afford them. But suppose the Bureau of Health or some pharmo-medical combine

decided there were few enough middlers without glasses to organize an exhaustive study of them?

Suppose the people at Tarnover decided there must be a genetic effect involved? Ow.

Memo to selves, in red italics: stay closer to chronological age!

At that point in his musing he entered the confessional — and found that through its shatterproof three-

centimeter window he was not looking at a little girl in a dress spattered with blood.

Instead, the exterior section of the booth was occupied by a burly blond man with a streak of blue in

his tightly curled hair, wearing a fashionable rose-and-carmine shirt and an apologetic smile.

"So sorry you've been disturbed, Father," he said. "Though it's a stroke of luck that little Gaila found

her way here. . . My name's Shad Fluckner, by the way."

This poker looked too young to be the girl's father: no more than twenty-five, twenty-six. On the other

hand, his congregation included women married for the third or fourth time and now to men as much as

twenty years younger. Stepfather?

In that case, why the smile? Because he'd used this kid he didn't give a plastic penny for to rid himself

of a rich but dragsome older wife? Fouler things had been admitted in this booth.

file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/...John%20%20-%20%20The%20shockwave%20rider.htm (10 of 158) [2/1/2004 3:05:51 PM]

Brunner, John - The Shockwave Rider

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: