Also he saw, up there on the balcony, more than a hundred idiots.
He disregarded what was happening in the middle of the floor and walked over to a panel set into the wall of the vault. Two quick twists of the fastenings and it fell away, revealing a network of heavy insulated pipes as tangled as the tails of a king rat.
He hauled on a quadrant valve; struck a union a sharp blow with the side of his hand, too quick for the chill of it to penetrate his skin; and put one of the hoses under his arm so he could lean on it and drag it after him. There would be enough free length for his purposes.
He stared at the girl as he approached her.
Divine Daughter. Probably called Dorcas or Tabitha or Martha. Thinking of killing. Thinking of smashing. A typical Christian reaction.
You murdered your Prophet. Ours died old and full of honour. You would kill yours again, and cheerfully. If ours came back I could speak to him like a friend.
Six feet from her, the pipe scritching across the floor like the scales of a monstrous snake, he stopped. Uncertain about this man with the dark skin and the cold, dead stare, she hesitated, poising the axe to chop at him, then having second thoughts and thinking: this must be a distraction, a trap.
She glanced wildly about her, expecting to find someone preparing to take her from the rear. But the staff had recognised what Norman had brought with him, and were sidling away.
* * *
“Nothing he coulda done about it…”
* * *
Convulsively he opened the valve on the end of the pipe and held it to a count of three.
There was a hiss, and snow fell, and something laid white ice on the axe, and the hand holding it, and the arm above the hand. There was an endless instant of nothing happening.
And then the weight of the axe broke the girl’s hand off her arm.
“Liquid helium,” Norman said briefly for the benefit of the watchers, and let the pipe fall clang to the floor. “Dip your finger in it, it snaps off like a dry stick. Don’t try it is my advice. And don’t believe what you hear about Teresa, either.”
He didn’t look at the girl, who had keeled over—fainting or possibly dead from the shock—but only at the frosted form of the hand still gripping the axe’s haft. There should have been some sort of response, if no more than pride in his own quick thinking. There was nothing. His mind, his heart, seemed as frozen as that meaningless object on the floor.
He turned on his heel towards the elevator again, aware of a terrible disappointment.
* * *
Zink moved closer to Stal.
“Hey-hey!” he said. “Made it worth coming, huh? Let’s go raise a bushel of whaledreck tonight, clear from the floor of the ocean. That put me square on the proper orbit!”
“No,” Stal said, eyes fixed on the door through which the brown-nose had disappeared. “Not in this town. I don’t like the kind of enforcement they keep here.”
the happening world (2)
THE SOFT CELL
“It has been more than a decade since the contents of the New York Public Library were actually in New York. Their exact location is now classified, but this has not reduced—rather, it has enhanced—user-access.”
The most versatile copying system ever developed is Eastman Kodak’s Wholographik. Turn the print over, cut along the lines with ordinary scissors, distribute the pieces—and each of up to 24 sections will return up to 98% of the base information!
Donald Hogan sat among 1235 other people any or all of whom might be consulting the same book or magazine as he was at any given instant.
It was highly improbable, though, that anyone else would consult two consecutive items the same as his choice. His search pattern had been scrambled by Shalmaneser, and as an added precaution the transcript of it he carried with him had been copied out in Yatakangi—a difficult and unpopular language resembling Japanese in that it combined a welter of Chinese ideograms with two complete syllabaries, not, however, home-grown like the Japanese katakana but a bastard offshoot of Arabic script imported to the islands of South-East Asia in the late middle ages by Muslim proselytisers.
SUMMARY The authors describe a number of cases of debatable genealogy encountered by the New Jersey State Eugenic Processing Board. A successful method of detecting the genes responsible for recessive dichromatism is
CELL STRUCTURE ABSTRACTS
REVIEW OF BIOCHEMICAL ABSTRACT JOURNALS
PROCEEDINGS OF THE INSTITUTE FOR CEREBROCHEMICAL STUDIES
If you’re looking for a tailored bacterium capable of turning those low-grade slurries into a profitable source of sulphur, ask Minnesota Mining for a sample of their strain UQ-141. Your first million organisms: $1000 postage paid.
SUMMARY Computer testing of a tentative formula for the egg of Nannus troglodytes. The evaluation indicates
The most useful one-volume reference work available to the contemporary student of addiction is Friberg and Mahler’s DEFORMATION OF SUBJECTIVE PERCEPTS. It covers: opium and derivatives; coca and derivatives; peyote and derivatives; cannabis and derivatives; pituri, caapi, etc.; synthetics from lysergic acid to Yaginol® and Skulbustium®. Includes a specially written appendix on Triptine®. One spool micro: $75 to the medical profession only.
SOMATIC ECOLOGY JOURNAL
SPORTS AND MUTATION REPORT
REPTILIAN HEREDITY REVIEW
SUMMARY A case is presented for the interpretation of cross-economic relationships in a Bolivian mountain village as a manifestation of Mergendahler’s Syndrome with the energising factors deweighted by religious, nutritional and
Isolated genetic material is now available from GT for Rana palustris as well as Rattus norvegicus albus. Cross-sexual contamination g’teed held to less than 0.01%.
SUMMARY Occasionally when orbiting Bennie Noakes punches an encyclopedia connection on his phone and marvels at what it tells him, saying, “Christ what an imagination
COMMUNICATIONS SYSTEMS
TECTOGENETICS DIGEST
ABSTRACTS OF SUMMARIES OF BIOCHEMICAL PAPERS
SUMMARY Susceptibility to the carcinogenic effect of commercial-grade carbon tetrachloride is shown to be correlable with the known sex-linked heritable ability to detect by taste, in solutions of less than 1 ppm, the presence of
Nothing is more frustrating in the modern world than to be entitled to bear children and yet lack the capacity. We specialise in the reimplantation of externally fertilised ova.
BULLETIN OF THE SOCIETY FOR ABSOLUTE ORGASM
GRAUNCH::PROSOVERSEPIX
ANT, BEE AND TERMITE SOCIOLOGY JOURNAL
SUMMARY When ugly, frustrated dropout HANK OGMAN raped his mother and made her pregnant with what was almost certain to be a phocomelic foetus owing to her Yaginol addiction, things looked pretty black for responsible blockfather WALT ADLESHINE. However, thanks to nick-of-time intervention by gorgeous passion-panted surgeon IDA CAPELMONT, the tragedy was averted. “How can I ever repay you?” Walt demanded, and she named a price that
Donald Hogan, yawning, vacated his chair. It never took him more than three hours to get through the day’s assigned schedule. He pocketed the notebook in which he kept the search pattern and wandered towards the elevators.
context (4)
THE SUBJECT MATTER
(HUMAN BEING You’re one. At least, if you aren’t, you know you’re a Martian or a trained dolphin or Shalmaneser.