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AJAX Creating Web Pages with Asynchronous
JavaScript and XML 1st Edition Edmond Woychowsky
Digital Instant Download
Author(s): Edmond Woychowsky
ISBN(s): 9780132272674, 0132272679
Edition: 1
File Details: PDF, 4.92 MB
Year: 2006
Language: english
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Language: English
She took the moving sidewalk back to Mother Weedon's. For almost
a year the trim white dome with its curved polarized picture windows
and pink Martian vines had represented home and shelter and a
prized individuality after the group-existence of school dormitories.
Now it looked like half an egg of some menacing unearthly bird, half
an egg into which she must crawl and hide, unsure of how long it
would afford her shelter. Even Mother Weedon, a shrewd and kindly
widow of sixty whose strength and good-humor made her the ideal
team-matron, looked alien and oddly menacing.
She caught the older woman's thoughts as she entered the house.
What's happened to Lynne? Always thought that girl was too bottled
up. She should have married Ray six months ago. He's not the sort
of male even a girl as pretty as Lynne can keep on a string
indefinitely—not with a harpy like Janet in the picture....
Mechanically Lynne ran her fingers down the magnezipper of her
blue plastifleece jacket, deposited it carefully against the magnetic
hook on the wall of the entry. She felt a renewed weakness, a
sickness that made her head throb more severely than ever. All the
way back from the brain-station she had been seeking reassurance
in the probability that her sudden telepathic ability was caused by
some stimulation of the machine, would vanish when she broke
contact with it.
Now she knew better—and her panic increased. She almost ran to
the escalator so she wouldn't have to exchange chatter with Mother
Weedon. She literally had to be alone.
II
Lynne stirred uneasily on her plastomat. She knew she was there,
felt sure she was not asleep. Yet the dream persisted, holding her in
a grip that was tighter than reality.
She was alone in a strange crystaline chamber, high, high up in a
strange crystaline tower. Thanks to the fact there was no metal in its
construction, nowhere was there rust. Yet her chamber, like the
tower itself, showed definite signs of age and ruin.
An irregular segment of one wall had been penetrated by a missile of
some sort and patched with plastic spray to keep out the thin, chill,
unending wind. On lower levels, she knew, were larger scars of long-
forgotten destruction. Just above the transparent arched ceiling what
had been an elaborate tracery of gleaming flying buttresses, their
functional purpose long since lost, stood precariously in a pattern of
ruin.
Here and there about her, other surviving towers of the city rose in
more serious stages of decay. And far below, on the windswept
square, huddled the gleaming egg-shaped shelters of the Earthfolk.
Beyond the city area the red desert and green oases stippled off to
the dark horizon or advanced to invade the steep scarp of the far
bank of the great canal.
Lynne was alone in a tower on Mars. Instruments, strange to her
eyes but stamped with the familiar patterns of Earthly design and
manufacture, lined three walls of the chamber. She knew she should
take the downlift and return to the tiny cluster of Earth-dwellings in
the court below, that her tour of duty was ended.
Yet she could not leave. Voices whispered within her head and
tugged at her emotions, voices whose owners she could not see,
whose embodiment lurked ever just beyond the range of her eyes,
no matter how quickly she rolled them. Voices that begged for her
assistance, offering unheard-of pleasures as a reward, unthought-of
torments as punishment for her refusal to cooperate.
They were strange voices, whose message bore the corrupt
cynicism of the very old, coupled with the naïve enjoyments of long
deferred second childhood—alien voices. Or were they alien? Wasn't
it rather that she was the alien, like those other Earthfolk who lived in
the cluster of pathetic little huts below, who strove to reclaim the too-
lean atmosphere of a planet, most of which had long-since escaped
into the star-studded black-velvet backdrop of space.
Yes, it was she who was alien. And with the thought came another, a
human picture, so horrible, so gruesome, that her mind refused to
accept it. Yet she knew it was vitally important she see it clearly. But
the others, the invisibles, kept derailing her concentration with their
whispers of joys unknown before to mortal man or woman, their soft
threats of torments beyond those conceived by Dante himself.
"Let us in," they offered softly, with the mischief of the very old. "Let
us in and we shall romp and travel and find new uses for your
bodies. We shall live side by side within you and lead you to
pleasures no souls contained by bodies can ever know. We shall...."
There was something Lynne should ask them, an answer to their
Saturnalian bribery—but like their visibility it refused to rise to the
upper level of her consciousness. She felt sudden shame at not
being able to speak, fear at her inability to marshal needed thoughts,
fear that grew quickly into terror while the all-important question
struggled vainly to make itself uttered.
Laughing like rollicking imps, the whisperers closed in a hemisphere
about and above her, dancing in weird joyous malicious rhythm and
bottling up reason as effectively as a plastivial. All at once she found
herself holding her head and screaming at them to go away....
Lynne woke up. She discovered herself already sitting erect on the
plastomat, supported by hands that dug into its pneumatic surface.
She looked wildly around her, noted the familiar tri-di picture of
Victoria Falls on the wall, the blank vidarscreen on its stand beside
the magnicloset entry, the picwindow with its familiar vista of morning
sunlight and greenery outside Mother Weedon's.
Only then did she become aware that her headache was worse. It
seemed to grow with each successive morning. During the day it
lapsed at times to mere vague discomfort, and with the aid of a
couple of syntholaud pills she was able to sleep. But when she
awoke each following morning it seemed a trifle worse.
She stepped into the bathostall, which performed all functions of
cleansing and elimination simultaneously, felt briefly better and got
into sandals, clout and bolero, polarizing them to a gaudy scarlet,
which clashed with her fair coloring but expressed her mood of
defiance, not only at her own ailments but the personal treachery of
Janet and the waverability of Ray Cornell.
Mother Weedon smiled approval of this gay gesture when Lynne
took her place at the breakfast table. "I'm glad you're feeling better,
Lynne," she said. "I've been worried about you lately."
"Really putting it on, aren't you, honey?" Janet asked with a trace of
resentment. She had polarized her own costume to a soft pink,
which was washed out by Lynne's bold color-scheme. Nor could she
change it during the day without revealing her defeat.
"Delicious!" exclaimed Ray, ogling her with delight and pouring
paprisal instead of sucral on his Helthplankton.
Lynne laughed as she hadn't laughed in days. She wondered why
she felt so suddenly light-hearted and happy, especially after her
waking nightmare. Then, suddenly, she realised she was utterly
unaware of what the others were thinking. She was no longer
telepathic. She was normal once more!
However, it required no telepathic powers to sense that Ray was in a
sadly shattered state over whatever had happened between Janet
and himself on their date the night before. Lynne surmised that her
rival had enticed Ray into full courtship, that he was now suffering
from remorse, revulsion and a resurgence of desire for herself.
She wondered why she didn't care, then realised that Janet was no
longer her rival. Ray was a nice boy, a highly trained and talented
boy—but she wasn't in love with him any more. There were, she
thought, probably half a billion unattached males in the world at any
given moment, many of them far more interesting and attractive than
Ray Cornell. All she had to do was look for them....
Headache and nightmare receded further with each mouthful of
breakfast she ate. Her appetite was back and she kidded brightly
with a miserable Ray and a rather sullen and suspicious Janet all the
way to the brain-station. And then things began to happen that
shattered her new-found adjustment.
She was barred from entry to the studioff. The electroscreen
admitted Ray and Janet as usual but remained an invisible wall that
refused her admittance. She was no longer keyed to the group-
machine. Before she could try again a magnovox said, "Please
report to Integration Chief on Floor Eighty. Please report to
Integration Chief on...."
Ray looked scared. Disruption of a team during working hours was
an emotional shock. Even Janet showed traces of fright. But she
managed a grin and said, "Give him the old treatment, Lynne, and
you can't lose." She accompanied the remark with a thoroughly
carnal bump.
Lynne said nothing, being incapable of speech. She turned and
made her way to the mobilramp, had a sudden vivid recollection of
the older but far more efficient lift on the Martian tower in her dream.
She felt sick to her stomach and her headache was thumping again.
She had never been on the eightieth floor before—it was reserved
for guiding geniuses, who had no time for mere group-machine
members except in case of trouble. Lynne wondered what she had
done as she entered a room with walls of soft rolling colors.
The man on the couch, a tall lean saturnine man with dark eyes that
seemed to read right through her from out of a long lined white face,
didn't leave her long in doubt. He said, "Miss Fenlay, I'm afraid I have
bad news for you. As a result of your amazing performance
yesterday your usefulness as a group-machine worker is ended."
"But I was right," she protested. "I had the first zero-variation in
integration history."
"You needn't be so frightened," he said more gently. "I know this
must be a severe emotional shock. You were right—by the machine.
We need human factors in cybernetics to show us where the
machines are wrong, not where they are right. To come up with two
successive zero-variant answers implies some sort of rapport with
the machine itself. We can't afford to take further chances."
Lynne sat down abruptly on an empty couch. She felt empty inside,
said, "What am I to do?"
The tall dark man's smile was a trifle frosty. He said, "We've been
watching you, of course. About all I can tell you, Miss Fenlay, is that
your—er—aberration is not exactly a surprise."
"You mean you've been spying on me?" Even though Lynne was
thoroughly conditioned to accept her life as part of a complex
mechano-social integration, she found the idea of being spied upon
unpleasant.
"Not really," he told her. "And don't worry. We have no intention of
letting your remarkable gifts go to waste." He paused, added, "I hope
your headache is better soon."
"Thank you," she said. She was outside before the full implications of
his parting shot sank home. How had he or anyone known she was
suffering from headache? She had reported it to no one—and the
helth-check booth machine was not geared to give confidential
evidence or to retain personality keys for checking.
It was a puzzle. She worked on it until she was almost back at
Mother Weedon's, then realised the Integration Chief had given her
no hint of a new assignment—had only suggested she was to be
used. She began to wonder if laboratory test-animals suffered from
headaches like the one which seemed to have led to her undoing.
There was no escaping Mother Weedon, who was enjoying a tri-di
vidarcast in full view of the front door as Lynne came in. Well, the girl
thought, she was going to have to be told anyway—if she hadn't
already got the news from the brain-station.
Evidently Mother Weedon had heard. She motioned the girl to sit
beside her on her couch and said, "Don't worry, Lynne. You're going
to be fine. The trouble with you is you've outgrown your job—yes,
and Janet and Ray and me too. You can't help it. You're too good for
us and that's that. They'll be moving you on."
"But I like it here," cried Lynne. "I like you and Jan and Ray and our
work with the group-machine. I don't want it to change."
"But it will—everything changes," said Mother Weedon gently. "I'm
glad you've been happy here. But your happiness has meant Janet's
unhappiness and, more lately, Ray's."
"I—see," Lynne said slowly. She hadn't thought of things in that light
before. But of course it was true. The first real home she had ever
known was about to be taken from her and the experience was too
personal to allow much detached thinking.
Like most genetically-controlled children whose double-birth had
been successful, she had been brought up with functional rather
than sentimental care. Not having known her parents, not having
known her twin brother on Mars, she had never missed them. The
teachers and matrons at the seminary had been carefully selected
for their warmth and competence. There had always been plenty of
playmates, plenty of interesting things to learn.
Living at Mother Weedon's had been a new and emotionally opening
experience, as had the blossoming of her romance with Ray Cornell,
her now-fractured friendship with Janet Downes. It was not going to
be easy to leave, to tear up only recently established roots, to set
down new ones which might in time be as ruthlessly sundered.
She felt frightened and very much alone, as if she were again in the
Martian tower of her nightmare with only alien and disembodied
voices speaking to her. Mars—she wondered a little about it.
Somewhere on Mars was her twin, Revere Fenlay, the brother she
could not remember. She wondered if he too were having troubles.
There were stories floating about of twins whose rapport spanned
lifetimes separated by the distance between the planets. But she
knew nothing of Mars.
She watched a vidarcast with Mother Weedon, an unreal historical
romance of love and adventure in one of the vast sprawling industrial
empires of the mid-twentieth century. There was, for twenty-second-
century folk, a vast emotional appeal in the job-competition, the hard
compulsory physical toil, the dangers of that exciting era. But Lynne
was too wrapped up in her own problem to react as usual.
While she and Mother Weedon were lunching on pineapple soup
and Bermudasteak with shadbacon and lacticola, Ray and Janet
came in. They pretended concern at what had happened to Lynne
and the team but were obviously excited with one another and the
prospect of integrating a new member of the team in Lynne's place.
After the meal Janet and Lynne were briefly alone in the vidaroom.
Janet eyed Lynne covertly and Lynne said, "It's all right, Jan. I'm not
going to put up a fight for Ray. Under the circumstances it's only fair.
I don't know what's going to happen to me and you and him—"
"Damn you, Lynne Fenlay!" Janet's sudden flare of hot emotion was
almost frightening. "You would be like this. Don't you realise that by
being noble you'll leave both of us with a guilt complex we'll never be
able to shake?"
"Sorry," said Lynne sincerely. "I can't help it."
Janet regarded her narrowly, shook her head. "Hasn't anything ever
touched you, Lynne?" she asked. "Haven't you ever wanted Ray or
anyone as I want him? Haven't you ever hated anyone as I'm
beginning to hate you? Haven't you ever been human?"