Read Ebook: Nightmare tower by Merwin Sam

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Ebook has 410 lines and 24905 words, and 9 pages

Release date: December 27, 2023

Original publication: New York, NY: King-Size Publications, Inc, 1953

nightmare tower

Lynne disliked the man from Mars on sight. Yet drawn by forces beyond her control she let him carry her off to the Red Planet.

Lynne Fenlay had had a few headaches in the course of her twenty-four years. But she had never had a headache like this.

There had been one as a result of her first field-hockey practice at the seminar, when she was twelve and the hard rubber ball caught her squarely above the left eye. There had been another, five years later, when she had used a guided trip to Manhattan during the Christmas holidays to experiment with a bottle of cr?me de menthe in the unaccustomed solitude of a hotel room. There had been a third as the result of overwork, while she was adjusting to her job with the group-machine.

Lynne looked across the neoplast tabletop at Ray Cornell and wondered with mild malevolence if her fianc? could be responsible for her discomfort. His spoonful of Helthplankton halfway to his mouth, Ray was smiling at something Janet Downes had said. In her self-absorption Lynne had not heard Janet's remark. Knowing Janet as she did, however, she was certain it had undertones of sex.

With his fair height and breadth of shoulder, his tanned good-looking features beneath short-cropped light hair, Ray wore all the outward trademarks of a twelfth-century Viking chief or a twentieth-century football hero. But inside, Lynne thought, he was a Mickey Mouse. His very gentleness, his willingness to adjust, made him easily led.

Lynne forced herself to down another spoonful of Helthplankton and thought it tasted exactly like what it was--an artificial compound composed of sea-creatures, doctored up to taste like cereal.

Mother Weedon looked down at her from the head of the table and said, "What's the matter, Lynne--don't you feel well?"

"I'm all right, Mother Weedon," she said. She felt a pang of fear that stirred the discomfort between her temples. If she were really sick, mentally or physically, Mother Weedon might recommend that she be dropped from the team. After therapy she would be reassigned to some other group--and the thought was insupportable.

"Don't worry about our Lynne." Janet's tone bore a basis of mockery. "She has the stamina of a Messalina."

Damn Janet! Lynne regarded the other third of the team with resentment. Trust her to bring a name like Messalina into it. Even Ray caught the implied meaning and blushed beneath his tan. Mother Weedon looked at Lynne suspiciously.

"Better take things a bit easier," Mother Weedon suggested tolerantly. "After all, the team comes first."

"I know," Lynne said listlessly. She pushed her food away from her and waited sullenly while the others finished theirs. Unable to face the possibility of mental illness, she concentrated on Janet, wondered what the girl was trying to do.

There was always danger of conflict, she supposed, when two young women and a young man were set up as a team. Usually the members were balanced the other way or were all of one sex. But mentally at any rate Lynne and Janet meshed perfectly with Ray. So they had been assigned to live and work together on the group-machine under Mother Weedon's watchful eye. They had been together now for eleven months.

The trouble with Janet, Lynne thought, was that she wasn't the sort of girl who registered on men at first sight. She was tall, her lack of curves concealed by astute willowiness of movement, her half-homely face given second-glance allure by a deliberately and suggestively functional use of lips and eyes. Janet was competitively sexy.

Lynne, who was as casually aware of her own blond loveliness as any well-conditioned and comely young woman, had not considered Janet seriously as a rival when she had fallen in love with Ray Cornell. Now, rubbed almost raw by the discomfort of her headache, Lynne decided she had underrated Janet. She was either going to have to get Ray back in line or turn him over to the other third of their team. Either way promised complications for the future....

The three of them walked the thousand meters to the brain-station, avoiding the moving sidewalk strips that would have sped them there in three minutes instead of fifteen. Lynne, who usually enjoyed the stroll through the carefully landscaped urban scenery, found herself resenting its familiarity. Besides, her head still ached.

As they moved past the bazaar-block, halfway to their destination, Lynne found herself wincing at the brightness of the window-displays. Usually she found the fluorescent tri-di shows stimulating--but not today. Nor was her mood helped when Janet, nodding toward the plasti-fur coats in one of them said, "I wish I'd lived a century ago, when a girl really had to work to win herself a mink coat."

And Ray replied with a smile she could only interpret as a leer, "You'd have been a right busy little mink yourself, Jan."

Lynne wondered what was wrong with her. Surely by this time she ought to be used to Janet's continuous and generally good-humored use of the sex challenge on any male in the vicinity. It hadn't bothered her much until the headache began two days ago. Nor had Ray's good-nature seemed such a weakness. Hitherto she had found it sweet.

On impulse she said, "You two go ahead. I'm going to have a colafizz. Maybe it will knock some of the beast out of me."

"You could stand having a little more of it knocked into you, darling," said Janet. This time Ray said nothing.

Lynne entered a pharmabar and pressed the proper buttons, sipped the stinging-sweet retort-shaped plastitumbler slowly. The mild stimulant relaxed her a little, caused the ache in her head to subside to a dull discomfort. She felt almost human as she took one of the moving strips the rest of the way so as not to be late to work.

Their studioff was situated halfway up the massive four-hundred meter tower of the brain-station. It was shaped like a cylinder cut in half vertically and contained a semicircular table with banks of buttons in front of each seat-niche. The walls were luminous in whatever color or series of colors was keyed to the problem faced by the team. At the moment it was blank, a sort of alabaster-ivory in tone.

Ray and Janet were already in their places. Their conversation ceased abruptly as Lynne entered and slid into her lounger and slipped on the collar that keyed her to the machine. She wondered what Janet had been saying about her, what Ray had been replying.

"Feel better, honey?" Ray asked her. Lynne nodded.

Janet, obviously uninterested, said, "Disposal of waste-foods so as to be useful to highway construction in Assam--without disruption of traffic-loads in Patagonia."

Early in the century--some fifty years back--when the cybernetic machine had been regulated to their proper functions of recording and assemblage only, of non-mathematical factors, the use of human teams, working as supplements to the machines themselves, had been conceived and formulated by the Earth Government.

Janet was the analyst of the team--it was a detail job, a memory job, one which usually went to a woman. And she was good. She culled from the messages given her by the machine those which bore most directly upon the problem.

Then it was Lynne's turn. In a way, save that all three of them were vital to team-success, she was top-dog. It was up to her to listen to Janet's stream of information, to follow Ray's assembly job, to say, "This will work," or, "This will not work," or perhaps, "This will work if we do such-and-such, rather than thus-and-so."

There weren't many who could fill this job of synthesizer without too-wide variance from the judgments of the machine itself. Consequently there weren't very many teams actually at work--perhaps a score, give or take a few, at any one time. Such synthesization demanded a quality almost akin to intuition--but intuition disciplined and controlled to give results as often as needed.

She concentrated now, though her head was troubling her again, keying her whole being to Janet, then to Ray. And to her horror she began to get a picture--not of the problem of using waste matter to abet highway construction in Assam without disrupting the climate-limited transportation of Patagonia, but of the thoughts and feelings of Janet Downes.

It was frightening to realize that she was reading everything Janet kept carefully concealed behind the sardonic mask of her personality. It was disturbing to discover how much she herself was resented and hated and feared by Janet. It was horrifying to learn how hungry was Janet, how she thirsted to smash Lynne's attachment to Ray, how she planned to use the problem of the headache to discredit Lynne, not only with Mother Weedon and the Mind-Authority but with Ray himself.

Where had that one come from? Lynne wondered. The ocean lanes had not been used for two-thirds of a century, save for fishing and excursions. But hundreds of the old double-hulled cataliners of the pre-atomic air-age were still in their huge cocoon-capsules in various nautical undertakers' parlors.

She watched the large indicator breathlessly, wondering what the machine would answer. Almost certainly a 1.3 variation--which would mean the problem would be shunted to another team. An 0.2 variation was considered normal. Lynne's decisions, over the eleven months of her assignment, had averaged 0.13. Her best mark had been an 0.08.

It was, Lynne thought, impossible. No team had ever, in the entire history of human-cybernetic integration, produced an answer without a single variance with the machine. The best on record was an 0.056 by Yunakazi in East-Asia Center. And he had never come close to it again.

Lynne nodded to the rest of them and unfastened her collar. She felt a little sick to her stomach. An 0-variant answer was supposed to be impossible. But she had attained one, and at a time when her mind had been wandering, thanks not only to her malaise but because of her shocking telepathic experience. She wondered dully if the two factors were integrated in her incredible result.

"... like the monkeys with fifty million typewriters composing a Shakespearean sonnet, probability ultimately favors it," Ray was saying. "Lynne, let's try another. What's the next problem, Jan?"

"Poor reaction of 11th age-group children in Honduras to gnomics during the months of July and August," Janet said promptly. "Wanted--its causes and cure."

Again the flashes from the indicator--again the zero.

Janet regarded Lynne with odd speculation in her hazel eyes, Ray looked a little frightened. Lynne said, "I don't know what's going on but my head is killing me. I'm going home and rest."

"What about our date tonight?" Ray asked quickly--too quickly.

She walked out the door with a vivid picture of what Janet was thinking. Janet was going to do her damnedest to take Ray away from her that night by the oldest and still the most effective weapon a woman could use. And if Lynne tried to make trouble about it she intended to make trouble for Lynne.

As for Ray--he didn't seem to have any thoughts at all. He was a sort of Thurber male, cowering in his corner while the dominant females fought over him. The only hitch, Lynne decided, was that there wasn't going to be any fight. Janet could have him ... in spades!

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.

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.

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