Free The wrong end of time by John Brunner Page B

to that unless you were on the Energetics General Board or of staff rank in the armed forces. In this particular tower, Sheklov knew, the penthouse belonged to a four-star Air Force general.
     
How did a nation get into a mess like this?
     
     
So far he hadn't managed to explore this one city, let alone the surrounding country, but he had been thoroughly stuffed with data, and against the throbbing of his head he fought to organize what he recalled into some sort of relevance to his situation. Lots of glib catch-phrases came to mind, for example: "Human beings are subject to forces so ingrained in their thinking as to render them incapable of detached evaluation of their own behavior."
     
Yery helpful. In other words: "All we learn from history"-or psychology, or anthropology, or ethnology-"is that we learn nothing from history"-or psychology, or . . .
     
Yes.
     
Still, these people had learned how to make a first-rate anti-hangover pill. He was already able to look directly at the brightly sunlit window of the room without narrowing
     
     
his eyes. No doubt of it, Lakonia offered some lovely views-those towers like a solemn crazy forest, the sparkling lake, the redwoods in the distance which, force grown or not, were splendid trees, rivaling anything he had seen in Siberia.
     
And their Chief Executive (nominal ruler) had been carried out, dead drunk, from the room adjacent . . .
     
Bewildered, he shook his head. It had to be an -illusion You couldn't possibly run a country this way
     
Liar, his conscience said. It's being done. So you can.
     
At which point his more orthodox attitudes overcame him: Yes, but look at the trouble it causes everyone else
     
     
He heaved an enormous sigh, told himself the hangover pill was perfect, superb, terrific, and finally managed to whip the crazy ringing nonsense inside his skull into some sort of pattern. It was a dismayingly random pattern-a mental counterpart of decadent non-representational art -but it had some expressionist overtones he found comforting because they indicated that he was at last beginning to feel, instead of just perceiving, the functionality of the extraordinary society he was visiting.
     
To begin with, this is NOT the Eastern Roman Empire. The hell with how many parallels you can drawl (Who am 1? Oh, that's not hard to define. I'm the discontented mercenary within the gates, who has taken sufficient pay In coin stamped with the Emperor's head-or rather, with the heads of Emperors, because they change their rulers like the weather!-to lie Indolent on the triclinium and open his mouth to the food offered by a domestic whore. Male or female.) POWI
     
A stab of pain lanced his forehead over his left eye; the hangover pill wasn't, obviously, a hundred per cent efficient. He gulped more coffee and wondered wistfully what would have become of America if it had socialized cannabis instead of alcohol.
     
Resuming: In that case, the hungry Huns at the gates of the Empire are-
     
"Oh, stop it!" he said aloud, and slapped his bare thigh. One didn't wear pajamas or night shorts here; according to his briefing, the mere possession of such garments was taken as proof of lack of confidence in one's ability to secure a partner for the night . . . of one sort or another. (He still didn't entirely believe the cover which, .Turpin
     
had assured him, excused his overnight absence from home in order to collect a spy from the sea. The story was that Turpin now and then liked to sleep with a man, and because of his professional standing preferred to travel a long way from Lakonia to look for one. And never talked about where he had spent the night, and never asked what his wife had done while he was away.)
     
Did that brown-skinned "reb" Danty slip me a psychedelic drug last night? 1 feel as though . . .
     
But a glance at his watch, not removed because he'd been briefed concerning Americans' attitudes to time and knew he would be suspect if he were caught without a