The Jagged Orbit Read online

  “Oh, no!” Balanced on one leg to slip her toes into the first Schoo, Lyla stared at him in dismay.

  “It’s all right—the toilets are still working. But I didn’t want to risk blocking them too by dumping down a load of books, did I?”

  “Talk about hardening of the arteries,” Lyla sighed, recalling a favorite metaphor from Xavier Conroy’s The Senile City. “When it’s not the sewers it’s the streets, and when it’s not the streets it’s the comweb. … I’ll go check our slot anyway. You never know; there might be something interesting.”

  She moved to the door and began to strain against the handle of the winch to lift clear the hundred-kilo deadfall block that closed it against intruders overnight.

  “Put your yash on,” Dan said, stepping into a pair of green breeches and belting them tight around his waist.

  “Hell, I’m only going to the comweb!”

  “Put it on, I said. You’re insured for a quarter-million tealeaves and it says in the policy that you have to.”

  “It’s all right for you to talk,” Lyla countered mutinously. “You don’t have to wear the horrible thing.” But she reached obediently for the yash where it hung on its peg adjacent to the door.

  Making to slip it over her head, she checked. “Say—uh—I won’t have to wear this at the hospital, will I? It’d be awfully hampering while I’m thrashing around.”

  “No, not while you’re actually performing. Come to think of it, though …” Dan bit his lip, eying her doubtfully. “The patients are segregated at the Ginsberg, and the sight of you like that might not be a good thing. Got anything less revealing?”

  “I don’t think so. All my February clothes have expired by now, and the March ones are getting pretty shabby. And of course in April I went over to transparents.”

  “Skip it, then,” Dan shrugged. “If they insist, you can ask for something at their expense, can’t you? Like a dress, maybe. How long is it since you last had a dress—was it in November?”

  “Yes, the one I bought to go home and see my folks at Thanksgiving. But it was cold then, and right now it’s sweltering. … Oh, I guess I could put up with it in a good cause. Provided they pay for it—dresses are horribly expensive this season.” She ducked into the yash and opened the door. Having made sure with a cautious glance in each direction that the corridor was deserted, she added, “I won’t lock it—I’ll only be a moment.”

  FIVE

  MAKING READETH A FULL MAN, SAVING YOUR BACON’S PRESENCE

  “The name is Harry Madison, not Mad Harrison!”

  “I’m sorry?” the computerized desketary said, with exactly the right interrogative inflection; it was one of IBM’s ultra-advanced models with fully personalized vocal communication, and abode by articles of faith in its mechanical existence. One of them stated that hospital staff alone in a room who uttered audible words desired a reply. This did not apply to patients. To enable desketaries and other automatics to distinguish them the latter were compelled to wear oversuits with a metal thread woven criss-cross on back and chest.

  “Not important,” Dr. James Reedeth said wearily, and clamped his jaw so tightly shut he heard the singing tension of the muscles. Silently now after that careless peaking into speech: He was committed for a reason, damn it, by experts whose judgment is at least as sharp as mine! He’s not even one of my own patients. So what makes me take such an interest in his case—subconscious resentment at the presence of a knee in an otherwise all-blank hospital? I don’t believe it. But it’s completely pointless to keep coming up with the sane answer.

  For the latest of so many times he would not have dared to count them if he’d been able to, he found himself wondering what had driven him into this Minotaur-haunted labyrinth. Was it in order to become a doctor, whom men might consult re death …?

  “Ariadne! Ariadne! Where art thou now that I need thy clew of string?” On impulse, he chose to utter that aloud too, and an instant later was not sure whether he had glossed the decision with a veneer of voluntarism in order to delude himself. The desketary emitted electronic complaints as it matched and discarded partial resemblances, and finally produced the response he had expected.

  “Assuming the reference to ‘Ariadne’ connotes an inquiry regarding Dr. Spoelstra, her location is at present on Floor Nine of Wing Four and she is subject to a Class Two interdiction on being disturbed. Please declare the urgency of your requirements.”

  Reedeth gave a humorless laugh. When, after half a minute or so, the desketary had heard nothing further, it added with a convincing tinge of artificial doubt, “No reference can be found to her possessing a piece of string whether in the form of a clew or otherwise. Am I authorized to add this to my stock of data concerning her?”

  “By all means,” Reedeth assured it cordially. “You may record that she alone knows the way out of the maze. You may furthermore store the fact that she has skin smoother than synthosilk, exceptionally beautiful breasts, the most sensual mouth ever divinely wished on a mortal woman, thighs which probably correspond to an equation that would blow all your circuits, and—”

  He had been going to add that she had a heart of Ice-V, but at that point an unhappy grinding noise emerged from the bowels of the desketary and a flashing red light came on to signify that it was temporarily out of service. Furious, Reedeth jumped to his feet. What in the world was the good of letting the contract for the Ginsberg Hospital’s computing system to a firm which was currently hiring as many neo-puritans as was IBM? When at least eighty percent of the patients he was trying to cope with were suffering from sexual hangups, it was a constant source of irritation to have these censor-circuits expressing reflexive mechanical Grundyism all the time.

  And yet, in a way, it was a relief to be deprived of the desketary’s company. Reconciling the web of information-channels that permeated his working environment with the principles he gave lip-service to was a paradox he had never really solved.

  He walked over to the window-wall of the office and stared out at the vast bulk of the Ginsberg Memorial State Hospital for the Mentally Maladjusted. Fortresslike, with tall maxecurity towers distributed around its perimeter and linked by curtain walls as though some drawing of a fairy-tale castle from a children’s book had been unsympathetically interpreted in modern concrete, it was a structural analog of that chance to “retire and regroup” which Mogshack advocated as a perfect antidote to almost any problem of personal adjustment. There were windows only on the low-built administrative wings; the towers themselves were featureless. The sight of them—so the argument ran—offered to a fearful newly-committed patient the promise of ultimate immunity from the intolerable challenges of the outer world.

  But the view from here always made Reedeth think of the medieval castles that were rendered obsolete by the advent of gunpowder. And in an age of pocket nukes …?

  He sighed, recalling the query posed in a mild voice by Xavier Conroy, under whom he had worked while preparing his doctorate thesis. The plans for the Ginsberg had just been published, together with a persuasive summary by Mogshack of the underlying principles.

  “So what provision has Dr. Mogshack made for the patients whose recovery is likely to be delayed by their inability to discern any way of getting out again?”

  It had taken him two years’ work here to appreciate the full force of that criticism, and indeed only his unexpected recognition of Harry Madison’s plight had brought it home to him. At the time, he had chuckled along with everyone else at Mogshack’s curt and pointed reply.

  “I’m grateful to Dr. Conroy for yet another demonstration of his ability to jump his fences before he comes to them. Perhaps he would care to favor us with his company at the Ginsberg, when he will be accorded ample opportunity to figure out the solution to his problem—which, incidentally, I suspect to be one of many.”

  Reedeth shook his head. “Retire and regroup!” he quoted aloud, glad of the chance to speak without mechanical eavesdropping. “If I’d known what
limits that precept could be pushed to, I swear I’d have gone to work anywhere rather than here, where that abominable woman can bounce me up and down like a kid batting a ball because ‘love is a dependent state’ and how can a therapist at the mercy of his emotions help patients to regain their own rational detachment?”

  He scowled at the desketary, epitome of Mogshack’s impersonal ideals, and suddenly noticed that although the red light was still on it had ceased flashing and now shone with a steady glow. Silently cursing, he realized that that meant he was about to be brought face to face with the very person whose predicament was preying on his mind even more persistently than was his own.

  SIX

  THE WHERE IT’S AT AND THE WHYFORE IT SHOULD BE THERE

  “It is not so much that the nature of mental disturbance has changed, as a layman might assume from the observable fact that nowadays a higher proportion of our population can expect to be temporarily committed to a mental hospital than—let us say—would ever have been committed to a tuberculosis hospital or a fever hospital in the days when mere organic diseases were the prime concern of a public health authority.

  “No, rather it is that the nature of normality is not now what our ancestors were accustomed to. Is that surprising? Surely one would not expect social problems to remain unchanged, static from generation to generation! A few get solved; many—indeed the majority—develop along with the society as a whole. I hardly need to cite examples here, for several are available in the news each day.

  “What is far too seldom stressed, however, is the positive aspect of this phenomenon. For the latest of uncountably many times, humanity as a species has presented its individual members with a challenge which—like a mathematical limit—can never be fulfilled but which can always be approached more closely. In former ages the challenges were philosophical, or religious: abjure desire; defy the world,, the flesh and the devil; be ye perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect … and so on.

  “But this time the command is psychological: be an individual!”

  –Elias Mogshack, passim*

  “What people want, mainly, is to be told by some plausible authority that what they are already doing is right. I don’t know of a quicker way to become unpopular than to disagree.”

  –Xavier Conroy

  *Or, as some would put it, ad nauseam.

  SEVEN

  (THIS SPACE RESERVED FOR ADVERTISING)

  Kicking the door shut with her heel, tossing aside her yash, Lyla grimaced at the wad of envelopes she had collected.

  “Practically all satches, same as usual. I do hate saturation mail! It clogs the comweb same as garbage does the drains, and I swear ninety percent of it goes straight into the drains without being read. … Oh, this one isn’t satch. It’s from Lairs and Pen-eights Inc. Must be the reminder about old whoozis.” She jerked her head at the impassive Lar.

  “Laireez and Penaiteez,” Dan corrected her. “You must get things like that right.” He hesitated. “It’s French, I guess,” he concluded lamely, holding out his hand for the letter.

  Flicking through the rest, Lyla muttered, “Same old names—won’t they ever learn to take a hint?” She pantomimed tearing them across, but they were reinforced against that; they could only be torn along the line which would liberate the chemicals powering their inbuilt speakers. Satch mailing campaigns were too expensive to let illiterates escape.

  “Stick ’em in the used books pile,” Dan suggested. “The reagents sometimes last long enough to attack extra paper.”

  “Good idea.” Lyla complied, wedging the unopened envelopes into the sticky mound on the brass tray like so many pieces of toast in a rack. Obligingly two or three of them started to decay at once.

  Meantime, Dan had ripped along the sealing strip of the one from Lares & Penates Inc., and at once the room was full of a familiar high thin voice.

  “You can’t afford to be without a cult tailored to your private needs in this age of the individual. Consult Lares & Penates for the finest specialized—”

  It took him that long to locate the power-capsule driving the speaker and break it between finger and thumb. Promptly, he dropped the envelope with a yelp, shaking his hand.

  “It burned me! That’s a new one! They must have got wise to people cracking the capsules.”

  “Is it serious? Has it left a mark?” Lyla was instantly solicitous.

  Dan inspected his forefinger, licked it, and finally shrugged. “No real harm done—just a few volts shorted through the paper, I guess. But from now on I open their envelopes with Schoos on so I can crack ’em under my heel!” He scanned the letter he had withdrawn from the envelope. “And it’s only what you expected, a reminder to pay up or send back the Lar.”

  “Which are we going to do?”

  “I guess we’d better make our minds up later, don’t you? After all, it did get us this booking at the Ginsberg, and that’s a breakthrough, you know. I asked around, and apparently this is the first time they ever engaged a pythoness. It could be very big. In fact I—”

  There was a loud bang on the door. Lyla spun around. Realizing she had forgotten to wind down the hundred-kilo barrier again, she dived for her yash. It was a good one; it had been dreadfully expensive, but as Dan had truthfully pointed out it was insisted on by her insurers. Heavy and clumsy though it was, the guarantee did promise protection against solid shot up to 120 grams, laser-beams up to 250 watts and virtually all kinds of acid.

  “Who the hell?” Dan muttered, and strode over to set the deadfall catch on the over-door barrier. That attended to, he shouted, “Yes, who is it?”

  “Morning!” the invisible caller replied. “Or afternoon, rather! My name’s Bill and I’m your new neighbor in Apt Ten-W. Sorry to disturb you, but I understand you lack a citidef group on this block! Well, of course nowadays”—here the voice dropped solemnly by half an octave—“in a district like this one never knows when the knees may choose to strike. So I thought I’d be public-spirited and all that sort of garbage and see what I could do to whip up interest in organizing a group.”

  “Another Gottschalk?” Lyla whispered to Dan. He nodded.

  “Lay you fifty in favor. And pretty raw, too. I’d even make bets on what he’ll say next”

  The voice from outside resumed. “You see, I happen to have some contacts which can get me the necessary at very favorable prices, such as guns for a mere sixty-three with maker’s warranty, gas of assorted types at prices as low as three-fifty the liter—”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Lyla said wearily, letting fall her yash.

  “Want me to ask you in?” Dan shouted with a wink at her.

  “Well, naturally, if you’d care to discuss my proposals …!” The voice was suddenly tinged with optimism.

  “Sure! Come right ahead! There’s only a hundred-kilo deadfall to stop you.”

  There was an interlude of silence. With cheerfulness that was now distinctly forced, the Gottschalk said, “Ah—I guess maybe if you’re busy right now the best thing I can do is leave some literature in your comweb slot. Be seeing you, friends.”

  “Tell him some knees took over the apt,” Lyla suggested softly. Dan shook his head.

  “No point. This one may sound like an idiot, but the Gottschalk pollies are much too smart to turn a new recruit loose without going over the ground for him first.” Glancing at his watch, he added, “Hey, we’d better move. I don’t recall you eating last night, so I’ll have to get some breakfast down you on the way to the Ginsberg. I sure as hell don’t want you fainting during the show.”

  EIGHT

  WHAT’S IT LIKE OUT THERE?

  Humidity index in New York in excess of previous high for the current date, a factor ascribed by officials to the effect of the city’s five and a half million air-conditioners. The insurrection probability index slipping ahead of schedule into what is nicknamed “the sweaty season downturn” (for which heartfelt thanks among those who were half afraid they might not get
one this year). Over most of the eastern seaboard of North America a warm close summer day with slight precipitation in inland areas. Snow on high ground in South Island, New Zealand. Owing to information transmitted from the Bureau of State and Federal Relations computers at the Immigration Dept. this morning had to ease the reading on the Morton Lenigo application south of the fifty-fifty line but simultaneously and for the same reason computers at ISM canceled their sweaty season downturn weightings. The new government of Trinidad & Tobago broke off diplomatic relations with (in order of importance) South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Russia and the USA. The kneeblank city council of Washington DC ignored the thirty-third request from the DAR to remove the paint from the façade of the Black House.

  All in all a pretty ordinary day.

  NINE

  PATIENT MAKING A HIGHLY SUCCESSFUL ADJUSTMENT

  Reedeth’s office door buzzed and he told it to open and there indeed was Harry Madison in his patient’s oversuit of the bright green shade which signified minimal disturbance and, ordinarily, impending discharge. Seeing him around the hospital for such a long time after he had—as the phrase went—“gone to green” was not, of course, the first thing that had attracted Reedeth’s attention to him, but it was the factor which led to the alarming discovery that he was trapped here in a tangle of legalisms.

  He had been committed by the Army, following conscript service in a brushfire war in New Guinea, at a time when the subject of kneeblank draftees was rather a sensitive one and it was politic to send him to a civil instead of a military institution. Naturally that made the Army his legal guardian, for he appeared to have no surviving relatives. However, by the time he was handed his new green suit, the Army no longer wanted to know about him. They’d given up accepting knees even as volunteers, and they certainly Would not admit responsibility for a former conscript whose medical discharge had removed him from the reserve. That meant that he automatically became a ward of New York State, and directly his personality profiles matched the computerized ideal laid down for him he should have been turned loose to fend for himself subject only to restrictions on things like his credit rating, getting married and moving out of the state to reside elsewhere.