The jagged orbit
Summer in 2014. Morning. The City Council of Washington, D.C. ignores yet another request to remove the paint from the facade of the Black House. Lyla Clay, pythoness, finds her apartment house comweb stuffed with advertising satches that will overload her garbage drain. Matthew Flamen, the last of the spoolpigeons, wakes up after a nightmare in which every item he wanted to air on his show comped out as unusable. Wary people began hustling into their rapitrans capsules to be individually hurtled to their daily duties. The inmates of the Ginsberg Memorial State Hospital for the Mentally Maladjusted lay passive in their "retreats."

The model citizen and a client greatly valued by the Gottschalk weaponry combine came equipped with: Mark XIX oversuit with boots and gauntlets; Helmask with respirator; 350-watt laser-gun; projectile side-arm; spare magazines for foregoing; self-fragmenting glass emetic gas-grenades; knife with 18-cm. blade; first aid kit.

While their sales and public relations staff ensured that racial hate and fear remained stable between the kneeblanks and the blanks, the Gottschalk firm now was developing the System C integrated weaponry which would enable any blank (or knee) to wipe out single-handed any 25-block area...total annihilation of civilization was no concern to the Gottschalk salesmen.

By the next night a strangely mixed group of people sat in Flamen's office deep in the bowels of war-torn New York City. Stunned, in fear, they listened as one of them—a mental patient— boldly outlined the way to halt the insane destruction. Did salvation lie in what this man had to say? Could they believe him? Could they trust him? Or was total annihilation of the human race the object of this mad man's raving?
English Science fiction, Fiction, science fiction, general
John Brunner
British author of science fiction novels and stories.