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important link. They believed in the priesthood as we believe hi machines.
I'd be the last man to contend that we don't miss a few important links in our
own thinking, of course.
How many people on Earth have a real sense of process? How many can visualize
and evaluate the process that goes into the making of a loaf of bread, for
example? Or know the use of the iconoscope with its mosaic light cells, the
real miracle of video?
I switched the screen on again and as before that businesslike fast light-up
occurred, with no rigmarole of
Alchemic A's or background music. I had no idea how to get what I wanted on
the thing or even a very clear notion of what it was I wanted.
But I twirled a dial experimentally at random and found myself apparently
sailing over a range of mountains studded here and there with shimmers of
lights that were probably villages. It was night. I
could see the stars in their familiar patterns and, far off at the edge of the
sky, a glow thet looked like a city. The one I was in? Probably maybe there
was only one city in this world. Was Malesco the city, the country, the world?
One or all? I never knew.
I turned the dial again and the picture snapped off like a light and instantly
flickered into a focus on a mountain village. I seemed to be looking down the
main street of the little town, lighted by overhead incandescents that
filtered through the trees lining the street.
It looked like a pleasant small-town street back home except that the parked
cars were missing, and the adolescents strolling two by two wore strange
garments and clustered around a corner building that was not a drugstore
but perhaps a temple. I couldn't see clearly, but I thought I
caught a glimpse through the shadows of the leaves that looked like red and
yellow lions and shining salamanders painted on the walls.
I tried the dial again and was at some club meeting of middle-aged Malescan
women who seemed to be reading poetry to each other. I visited a theatre where
a version of
Medea was being staged and it startled me very much until I realized that
Euripides belonged to a period of the past which we and the Malescans held in
common.
It wasn't until much later that Rufus Agricola edged out Claudius and the two
worlds split apart. I
wondered briefly what had really happened at that point of cleavage. In
Caligula's time there were portents in the sky, weren't there? It must have
released quite a lot of energy, mat cosmic schism in space-time.
There seemed to be practically nowhere in Malesco city, state or world which
this video screen couldn't picture with the right dialing. I sat there,
feeling like a spider at the center of an endless web reaching out over a
world by coaxial cable or relay towers or some version of miracle we don't use
ourselves and spying on every dweller here.
The priests were missing no bets. The wonder was that they hadn't caught
Coriole already unless they hadn't cared to. Could that be it? Was he not as
important as he thought, not as dangerous? Or were the
Alchemists wise enough to permit latitude for the blowing off of steam?
For ten minutes or so I swooped and soared over Malesco, my vision riding the
air-waves of an alien world, moving hi vast curves above the heads of
unsuspecting people whom I would never see or know. I
Page 43
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
tuned hi briefly on a vision of New York, and had again that disorienting
feeling of being hi two places at once, the surge of homesickness as I sat in
an alien room on an alien world and looked right down on the familiar streets
of my own neighborhood.
It was when I was trying to find hi my fumbling way what kind of screen the
New York scene was projected on that I ran into my fatal error.
New York without warning went suddenly blank in a blinding dazzle of
blue-white light. The brilliance centered in the tower right-hand quarter of
the screen and seemed to spread from a minor sun which had come into
unexpected being about two feet from my face.
The light was so strong I couldn't look at it, sa curiously compelling that I
couldn't took away. I sat there paralyzed for a moment, feeling jagged
lightning flashes of pain zigzag through my head, helpless to turn my eyes
away.
Then the sun blinked out and I slapped both hands to my eyes and squeezed my
forehead to keep it from splitting in two. Bright orange after-images swam
like amoebas inside my lids. When the pain subsided a little I began to be
able to hear again and I realized that somebody had been asking me the same
question over and over, with increasingly angry intonations.
"What are you doing here?" a man was demanding. "Give me the code word before
I "
I blinked tearfully at the screen. Through streaming eyes I saw a somewhat
unshaven face between the flaps of the priestly, headdress, small squinting
eyes boring into mine and, chest-high between us, gripped in a hairy fist, a
glass cylinder about the size of a pint milk bottle, glowing and fading rather
angrily like a large irritated firefly.
I started to say, "Don't shoot!" and something told me my voice would quaver
when I did it, for I was scared and I didn't even feel called upon to hide it,
in that first moment. However impossible it may seem that a man at the other
end of a video hookup could shoot and kill me through the relay system, I'd
just had convincing proof that he could certainly do me grave harm. Maybe that
thing would kill, at that.
I wiped my eyes on a corner of the blue towel and put on as haughty a look as
I could manage with the tears still streaming from my stinging lids. I didn't
know what I was going to say but I knew I'd better say it fast. The priest had
caught me at something I had no business to meddle with, and he'd probably
feel perfectly justified in using the fullest power of his milk bottle to
punish me unless I spoke first and fast.
It was time for Allan Quartermain or possibly John Carter to take over. I drew
a deep breath and told myself I was a hero. In a hero's loud decisive bullying
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zanotowane.pldoc.pisz.plpdf.pisz.plcs-sysunia.htw.pl
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