Free Web of Everywhere by John Brunner Page B

actually spoke the words. In fact he was overcome by a silent shudder of agreement. Stripped of virtually every other means of long-distance transport, because the industry did not exist to replace the aircraft and ocean-liners wiped out in the Blowup, let alone the tankers and freighters and cargo-planes, and there was not enough oil to run the remaining trucks and cars, and the railroads had been allowed to decay in most advanced countries, mankind had had no viable alternative to the skelter. It was cheap, not very difficult to build, and extremely reliable.
    Yet it was itself the cause of the Blowup. Within a decade of being introduced it had turned sour. It had threatened to infect the human race with world-wide ochlophobia.
    Early models had to be open to anybody who punched the proper code, whether friend or enemy, because it cost tens of thousands to activate the power-crystals. They were not designed to be switched on and off, only to resonate in a permanent state of excitement. If they were turned off, they had to be sent back to the factory to be energized again, and that would set you back three-quarters of your initial outlay.
    In the terrible years following the Blowup it was touch and go whether any transportation system would survive, or whether every skelter on Earth would be smashed by crazy mobs sick of having bandits, criminals, JD’s and even foreign soldiers pouring into their towns. It had been the West that hit on the idea of shipping saboteurs through the skelter into ‘enemy’ territory, but when the East retaliated the privileged few who owned domestic skelters at that time lived – if they did live – to regret their investment. Skelters in the Combloc were all public, and could be guarded.
    Not that guarding them had made much difference in the long run …
    In the tortured belief that an invention made in his own country of Sweden had brought about the downfall of civilization, Prince Knud had been driven to create the doctrines of the Way of Life, and scattered them by the millions of copies and in a hundred languages, at his own expense, to the far corners of the globe: a plea from the heart that humanity should cease chasing after gods and ideologies, learn to accept reality, recognize this near-Ragnarök as no more than the sort of population crash any species must endure if it over-bred.
    Pleading failed. It took Aleuker’s invention of the privateer to restore a semblance of sanity to the world.
    Just in time, the skelter ceased to be a menace and became the means of reconstruction, tying together the isolated fragments of a shattered civilization. Now, code-trading was among the most heinous of 21st century offenses, enforced as much by public opinion as by the sketchy, disorganized laws still being cobbled together from the scraps of a dozen inconsistent legal traditions.
    (At that house in Umeå: had it been spies or saboteurs who murdered the Erikssons? Mustapha had been convinced at once. On reflection, Hans found himself more ready to opt for criminals. Prisoners on the run before the advent of the bracelet would willingly have killed to make good their escape, and still more after its introduction, when the skelter was the only mode of getting away.)
    But life was no longer intolerable. The resources which remained were being well exploited, and new ones were being discovered, and one’s friends might as easily live onanother continent as another street, which must be good. It would take a long time for mankind to digest its brutal lesson. At least, though, there was a culture which showed signs of evolving in a sane direction.
    Hans gave a sage though slightly tipsy nod, telling himself solemnly that he was the guest of a universal benefactor and must not resent the fact that scores of other people kept getting between him and his host.
    Tipsy? Hmm … Might be a good idea to go check out the food on display in the hall where he had first entered. There had been quiet music