Web of Everywhere Read online

  He returned to his desk. There was as always very much work to be done.

  INTERFACE U

  You

  stood before the skelter

  thinking it was new and strange

  to confront so many options

  You

  overlooked the fact

  that every dawn since time began

  has lighted uncountable choices

  – MUSTAPHA SHARIF

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  Also by John Brunner

  A Maze of Stars

  A Planet of Your Own

  Age of Miracles

  Bedlam Planet

  Born Under Mars

  Castaways’ World

  Catch a Falling Star

  Children of the Thunder

  Double, Double

  Enigma from Tantalus

  Galactic Storm

  Give Warning to the World

  I Speak for Earth

  Into the Slave Nebula

  Manshape

  Meeting at Infinity

  More Things in Heaven

  Muddle Earth

  Players at the Game of People

  Polymath

  Quicksand

  Sanctuary in the Sky

  Stand on Zanzibar

  Telepathist

  The Atlantic Abomination

  The (Compleat) Traveler in Black

  The Altar on Asconel

  The Avengers of Carrig

  The Brink

  The Crucible of Time

  The Dramaturges of Yan

  The Dreaming Earth

  The Gaudy Shadows

  The Infinitive of Go

  The Jagged Orbit

  The Ladder in the Sky

  The Long Result

  The Martian Sphinx

  The Productions of Time

  The Psionic Menace

  The Repairmen of Cyclops

  The Rites of Ohe

  The Sheep Look Up

  The Shift key

  The Shockwave Riders

  The Skynappers

  The Space-Time Juggler

  The Squares of the City

  The Stardroppers

  The Stone That Never Came Down

  The Super Barbarians

  The Tides of Time

  The World Swappers

  The Wrong End of Time

  Threshold of Eternity

  Times Without Number

  Timescoop

  To Conquer Chaos

  Total Eclipse

  Web of Everywhere

  DEDICATION

  To Robert Silverberg

  who asked for this story

  and had to take something else

  when it grew up to be a novel instead of a novella

  —JKHB

  John Brunner (1934-1995) was a prolific British SF writer. In 1951, he published his first novel, Galactic Storm, at the age of just 17, and went on to write dozens of novels under his own and various house names until his death in 1995 at the Glasgow Worldcon. He won the Hugo Award and the British Science Fiction Award for Stand on Zanzibar (a regular contender for the ‘best SF novel of all time’) and the British Science Fiction Award for The Jagged Orbit.

  Copyright

  A Gollancz eBook

  Copyright © John Brunner 1974

  All rights reserved.

  The right of John Brunner to be identified as the author

  of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the

  Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published in Great Britain in 1974

  This eBook first published in 2011 by

  Gollancz

  The Orion Publishing Group Ltd

  Orion House

  5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane

  London, WC2H 9EA

  An Hachette UK Company.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book

  is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978 0 575 10165 4

  All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  www.orionbooks.co.uk