Players at the Game of People by John Brunner Page A

biting her thumb, hung back, her eyes immensely

wide. There seemed to be no limit to the depth the staircase reached.

Losing patience, Godwin took her by the left arm and urged her ahead of

him, and a few seconds later they were in what Ambrose referred to as

his sanctum.

It gave the appearance, once they were within it, of having neither roof

nor walls: only a floor of cold irregular stone. At one place glowed

a brazier on which reposed an alembic distilling a luminous fluid; at

another, two human skeletons, male and female, were mounted to suggest

that they were about to grapple, wrestler-fashion; elsewhere, floating in

midair, hung a stuffed crocodile and a dried bat; beyond that, at first,

there appeared to be no more than banks of fog.

Then Ambrose turned on a light, and the illusion vanished. Instead of

misty obstacles to vision, it was plain that the boundaries of the place

were formed by ranks and layers of charts drawn on two-meter-square sheets

of some transparent substance, which rustled at the slightest draft like

dead leaves. Each consisted in a series of circles, sometimes concentric,

sometimes overlapping, sometimes of alarming complexity and number,

crossed with straight lines and marked with symbols in contrasting colors,

mostly letters of the Greek and Hebrew alphabets but in some cases

quite unfamiliar.

But these were not the most astonishing feature of the place once it

was possible to see it clearly.

Ambrose had sat down in a slingback canvas chair beside a foursquare

teak desk which might have come directly out of the headquarters of a

multinational corporation anxious to maintain its executives' illusions

concerning their current status, on which was mounted an elaborate

computer complex including a full-scale word-processing setup. One of

the screens was visible from where Gorse and Godwin stood, and it was

cycling a dozen rings of different colors around a central dot.

Catching sight of it, Ambrose muttered an oath and hit a switch, then

beamed falsely at his visitors.

" So sorry! But they're talking about a certain Royal Personage getting

married, so I thought I'd just run through a few alternative sequences,

but naturally, once one gets to that level, the interplay of conflicting

possibilities attains alarming proportions, so I simply let it run,

and . . ." A shrug. Then a winning smile. "You will forget you ever saw it,

won't you? Yes? Bless you. And, speaking of attaining alarming proportions,

just let me tell Anders what I'm up to . . . Do sit down!"

There were comfortable chairs for them, which they did not remember from

a moment ago. It was all part of the scenario, but Gorse was trembling

worse than ever as she lowered herself into hers. Meantime, Ambrose

whispered to an invisible microphone. Then he was paying attention to

them again, this time addressing Gorse directly.

"I sense you have a question, young lady. May I answer it?"

She swallowed hard, indicating the panels all about them. "What are

these?"

"What do you think they might be?" he countered with an affably avuncular

air.

"Uh . . . Well, they make me think of horoscope charts, but -- "

"God, you briefed her in advance!" Ambrose interrupted accusingly.

Godwin sighed, leaned back, shook his head, feigned a smile.

"In that case I'm impressed," Ambrose said, leaning forward and interlinking

his fingers. He had contrived to make his wand disappear without trace.

"These are, let's face it, a trifle more explicit than most such charts.

For instance, I had been prepared for some few weeks to see God again,

thanks to his." He signaled, and a chart presented itself as though they

were all on an automatic retrieval system -- and instantly he snapped his

fingers and it vanished again into the continually circulating background,

while he bent a white-toothed smile on Godwin.

" You know I would never show anybody your chart without your permission,

save for such a fleeting instant . .