Electric Forest Read Free Page A

painted upon the skin of the air.

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    II
    She walked along the edge of the park, keeping to those spots where trees and plants were most thickly massed. From inside a tunnel of shadow, she gazed out and beheld the park dotted sparsely by people,
swimming in the pool, feeding the black and white doves. Later, she walked through the narrow back
streets, behind the blocks of old stores, second-hand precincts of curios and paper books, virtually deserted. For two hours she read in a cubicle at the electro-library. They were used to her there, and offered no
comment. But as the machine whispered the pages into view on the screen, she barely saw them.

    The warm blue day began to roll downhill into a fiery sunset behind the slender glazium towers. Like a
    f i rework display on the crimson sky, a million little green shocks emitted from the high roofs and the upper links as the solar generators of the city closed their circuits against the night.
    Under the igniting street lights and checkerboard of blank yellow or black windows, Magdala, a ghastly lurching shape, moved homeward along the boulevards.
    The elevator carried her to her floor. Her door dashed wide at the touch of her thumb. Before she could
    check herself she had entered her apartment. Windowless, it should therefore be black now as a hole in the ground, till her entry triggered its lamps. But the apartment was already full of light, its lamps already
triggered. And in the center of the light, like its sun and its source, stood the man.
    Somehow, she had known. Known that, impossibly, he would be waiting for her here. Not once during her
afternoon wandering had she glanced over her shoulder. Not once had her fear risen to its extreme pitch,
     

     
     
    out Oil the street.

    is

    Yet no stranger could enter through a print-lock, a lock whose function was to respond to one print alone: that of its owner.

    The young man showed Magdala a silver rectangle lying in his hand.
    'It's not magic," he said. 'This takes a sensor-reading of your print from the lock. I press the little switch, and the reading is played back into the lock. The lock obeys. Earth Conclave government has possessed similar gadgets for years. Nothing is to be relied on, M. Cled. Believe me."
    Omnipotent, he had discovered her name. He must have asked one of the Accomat staff, then located her apartment number from the registration screen in the foyer. He had been very thorough, very determined.
    Behind her, the door had automatically shut. In the tiny, near-featureless room, he blazed and burned like a star. She could not take her eyes off him finally, staring up at him, hypnotized, her brain struggling.

    "Magdala," he said musingly, "Magdala Cled. Let me see. Cled is a composite name, is it not? Your
    mother's initials, or your father's, or a combination of both, preceded by C, the initial of the State Orphanage where you were brought up. Am I right? Magdala, however. Now that is interesting. Let me hazard a guess. Your mother was a licensed whore, and State Orphanage C had a reformatory whim. Yes, that would have to be it. Mary of Magdala, the repentant prostitute of Modernist Christianity."
    Magdala had not properly listened to what he was saying. A part of her was convinced that he had come here to kill her and would now do so. She waited, desperate, dazzled; numbed by lack of resolution.
    But he made no move toward her. The reverse. He buttoned down one of three folding seats from the wall, and sat on it. Idly, he threw the silver door opener up into the air, caught it. Threw it, caught it.
    "I suppose," he said, soft as cold snow falling on her mind, "you think I am a horrible maniac, bent on
    removing every

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    last crippled lady from Indigo. I'm not, dear hideous crippled lady, anything of the sort."
    Magdala's twisted shoulders met the wall. She pressed herself against it. "Please," she said, "please go
    away."
    "We've been through that before. Obviously, I've no intention of going away.