About This Book
The little man stood in front of the monstrous machine as the synaptic drone heightened to a scream. No ... no, he whispered. Don't you understand....
excerpt
Today more than other days Raoul Beardsley felt the burden, the dragging sense of inevitability. He frowned; he glanced at his watch; he leaned forward to speak to the copter pilot and then changed his mind. He settled back, and from idle habit adjusted his chair-scope to the familiar broad-spoked area of Washington just below.
"I'll not have it happening again today!" he told himself grimly ... and at once his thoughts quavered off into many tangles of self-reproach. "Blasted nonsense the way I've been acting. A machine, a damned gutless machine like that! Why do I persist in letting it get to me?"
He pondered that and found no solace. "Delusion," he snorted. "Hyper synapse-disorder ... that's how Jeff Arnold would explain me. I wish he'd confine his diagnostics to the Mechanical Division where it belongs! He's amused, they're all amused at me--but damn it they just don't know!"
Beardsley's rotund body sagged at the thought. Adjusting the chair-scope, he fixed his gaze on the broad facade of Crime-Central Building far across the city; again he felt the burgeoning embarrassment and foreboding, but he put it down with an effort before it reached the edge of fear. Not today, he thought fiercely. No, by God, I just won't permit it to happen!
There. So! He felt much better already. And he had really made good time this morning. Today of all days he mustn't keep ECAIAC waiting.
Mustn't.... Something triggered in Beardsley, and he was assailed with a perverse rebellion at the thought.
* * * * *
Must not? But why not? Why shouldn't he just once keep ECAIAC and Jeff Arnold and his clique stewing in their own tangle of tubes and electronic juice? And wouldn't this, he gloated, be the perfect day for it! Arnold especially--just once to shatter that young man's complacent routine....
