Man Who Used the Universe Read Online Free PDF Page B

everything you told me to, up to and including the murder yesterday. You respond by trying to have me killed. So I'm promoting myself."
    "I don't understand." Lal's voice had sunk to a breathy whisper. "None of this was in your profile, none of it. You're not the revenge-oriented type."
    "Who said this has anything to do with revenge?"
    Lal finally broke. "What then? What the hell are you trying to prove!"
    "I am trying to prove something, I suppose," came the thoughtful reply. "Trying to prove something to myself, among the more practical considerations."
    "What? What's that?"
    "It wouldn't mean anything to you, even if I could explain it clearly. You wouldn't, couldn't understand, any more than a fly can understand why a spider spins its web circular, or spiral, or square, or just haphazardly. It doesn't really make any difference to the fly, of course, but sometimes I wonder if the spider isn't equally curious."
    "You're crazy," Lal husked. "I was right about you all along. I should've gotten rid of you years ago, you're completely insane."
    "I'm not insane," said Loo-Macklin, "just curious. You're right about one thing, though."
    "I . . . anything, anything you want!" Lal was screaming now.
    "You should have gotten rid of me."
    He pulled the trigger . . . .
    The basement of the city was very quiet. Loo-Macklin always relaxed there, away from the swarms of citizens above. His shoulders barely squeezed past the entrance of the narrow ventilation duct. He knew they would because he'd crawled this way many times before.
    His backpack scraped against the roof of the crawl tube and he tried to press his belly flatter against the floor. The components and other equipment carefully stowed in the pack were delicate. If they busted against the ceiling his trip would be wasted.
    From far ahead came the soft hum of massive machines and the steady whir of powerful fans. The river of cooled air in which he'd been crawling for the past half hour threatened to chill him.
    He turned the temperature control of his sweater up another notch and the thermosensitive threads immediately grew hotter. A light showed ahead, on his right. It took him only a few minutes to undo the seals. Then he was slipping out into the dim light of the basement.
    He was careful to reseal the plate behind him. There were guards, but they were stationed at the entrances, outside the doors people normally used. Programmers did not come out of the walls, like mice.
    He hefted the backpack higher on his shoulders and started across the polished alumin floor. The room wasn't very big—barely half the size of an average warehouse. It was populated by long, homogenous rows of individual consoles set against information banks that rose from floor to ceiling.
    There were usually two seats at each console station, sometimes more, rarely only one. Each station was enclosed in its own transparent plastic dome. The domes would turn away metal-cutting torches, most lasers, and anything else of a portable destructive nature.
    A few of the domes were occupied. Their inhabitants were busy and paid no attention to the powerful young man who strode down the aisles. These smaller domes served as communal storage and record-keeping facilities for private citizens. The larger storage facilities, those holding the records of big companies and the government, were located elsewhere.
    In addition to the domes owned by communal citizens' groups, there were a few owned entirely by single, wealthy citizens. Most served small businesses. Perhaps a dozen or so out of the several hundred were owned by fictitious companies that were fronts for the dozen syndicates, which dominated Cluria's underworld. The information they held could be read out from a number of remote stations, such as in-home consoles or marvels of miniaturization like Lal's pinkywink.
    But information could only be entered from here, from the basement storage facilities. It made record-keeping safe. You couldn't rob a