The Blue World Read Online Free PDF Page B

capable.”
    “End!”
called Sklar Hast. Ixon Myrex checked the clock. “One hundred
forty-six seconds.”
    Sklar Hast moved
back from the machine. A good time, though not dazzling, and by no
means his best speed. “Mistakes?” he inquired.
    “No mistakes,”
stated Rubal Gallager.
    Norm time was one
hundred fifty-two seconds, which gave him a percentum part score of
6/162, or 3.95 minus.
    Zander Rohan poised
himself before the machine and at the signal winked forth the message
in his usual somewhat brittle style. Sklar Hast listened carefully,
and it seemed as if the Master Hoodwink were winking somewhat more
deliberately than usual.
    Zander Rohan’s time
was one hundred forty-five seconds; he made no mistakes, and his
score was 4.21 minus. He stepped to the side with the trace of a
smile.
    Sklar Hast glanced
from the corner of his eye to Meril Rohan, for no other reason than
idle curiosity—or so he told himself. Her face revealed
nothing.
    He set Exercise 62
before him. Ixon Myrex gave the signal; Sklar Hast’s hands struck out
the first wink. Now he was easy and loose, and his lingers worked
like pistons.
    Exercise 62, like
61, was an excerpt from the Memorium of Eleanor Morse:
    “A hundred
times we have discussed what to my mind is perhaps the most
astonishing aspect of our new community on the float: the sense of
trust, of interaction, of mutual responsibility. Who could have
imagined from a group of such diverse backgrounds, with such initial
handicaps (whether innate or acquired I will not presume to
speculate), there might arise so placid, so ordered, and so cheerful
a society. Our elected leader, like myself, is an embezzler. Some of
our most tireless and self-sacrificing workers were previously
peculators, hooligans, goons: One could never match the individuals
with their past lives. The situation, of course, is not unanimous,
but to an amazing extent old habits and attitudes have been
superseded by a positive sense of participation in the life of
something larger than self. To most of us it is as if we had regained
a lost youth or, indeed a youth we never had known.”
    “End!”
called Sklar Hast.
    Ixon Myrex stopped
the clock. “Time: one hundred eighty-two seconds. Norm: two
hundred seconds. Mistakes? None.”
    Sklar Hast’s score
was a solid 9 minus. Zander Rohan winked a blazing-fast but nervous
and staccato one hundred seventy-nine seconds, but made at least two
mistakes. Rubal Gallager and Herlinger Showalter claimed to have
detected enough of a waver in one of the corner hoods to qualify as a
third error, but Freeheart Noe had not noticed, and both Semm
Voiderveg and Ixon Myrex insisted that the configuration had been
clearly winked. Nevertheless, with a penalty of six seconds, his time
became a hundred eighty-five with a score of 15/200 or 7.5 per cent
minus.
    Sklar
Hast-approached the third exercise thoughtfully. If he could make a
high score on this third exercise, Zander Rohan, already tense, might
well press and blow the exercise completely.
    He poised himself.
“Wink!” cried Ixon Myrex. And again Sklar Hast’s fingers
struck the tabs. The exercise was from the Memorium of Wilson Snyder,
a man of unstated caste:
    “Almost two
years have elapsed, and there is no question but what we are an
ingenious group. Alertness, ingenuity, skill at improvisation: these
are our characteristics. Or, as our detractors would put it, a low
simian cunning. Well, so be it. Another trait luckily common to all
of us (more or less) is a well-developed sense of resignation, or
perhaps fatalism is the word, toward circumstances beyond our
control. Hence we are a far happier group than might be a
corresponding number of, say, musicians or scientists or even
law-enforcement officers. Not that these professions go unrepresented
among our little, band. Jora Alvan—an accomplished flautist.
James Brunet—professor of physical science at Southwestern
University. Howard Gallagher—a high-ranking police