Web of Everywhere by John Brunner Page A

– and he thinks I’m a savage!’
    There was a red ring of anger in her voice; she set her shoulders back and folded her fists and glared after Aleuker.
    Hans hesitated only a moment. Then he said, ‘I suspect you may want to tell somebody about yourself. And it cannot be easy to find people who speak your language. I do, more or less. Shall we go and sit over there out of the way? I promise I will listen to whatever you say.’
    He handed her the plate of food. She took it, her eyes on his face, and after a miniature eternity said, ‘Yes, please, sir. I would be so glad if I could talk to somebody properly instead of struggling with English that I only half understand.’
    Incredible, incredible! I’m holding a
tête-à-tête
conversation with this girl every susceptible male in the place is eyeing … How did it happen? Never mind! Enjoy, enjoy!
    He concentrated on the tale she was unfolding.
    She did indeed come from Brazil. The reason she spoke a language so close to his was that she was descended from a colony of German protestant fundamentalists who after World War I had decided they must cut themselves off from the fleshpots of wicked Europe and live a holy life in a new land.
    Hans’s mind boggled at the realization that he was talking to a Christian. This was like being transported back in time!
    Refusing to accept cars, radios, telephones – let alone the skelter – with hand-axes and horse-ploughs they had built a flourishing little town a hundred miles from anywhere, and called it Festeburg: after a religious song, she explained.
    They traded produce locally, and once or twice a yearthey loaded a boat with vegetables, cloth and handicrafts, and rowed it down-river to a market-town where they bartered for tools, nails, wire and other goods, mostly metal, which they could not manufacture themselves. Aside from that they had no contact with the larger world.
    She had been told by her grandfather how news of the 1939 war reached the colony, by word of mouth and the accident of a newspaper wrapped around a packet of seeds, and how the
Predikant
called everyone together for a day and a night and a day of non-stop prayer to avert God’s wrath from his most faithful worshippers.
    The trick must have worked; at any rate the second world war passed and nothing changed in Festeburg.
    Prayer was less successful in the case of an epidemic which struck the community and killed Anneliese’s mother when she was still a child. From her halting descriptions Hans deduced that the disease might have been influenza-M, third of the four deadly new strains hatched in the uplands of New Guinea which spread like wildfire after the introduction of the skelter, or just possibly a late outbreak of Alaskan croup. He didn’t inquire over-closely, though. He was too busy marveling at the chance which had brought him an emissary from the past he had imagined vanished forever. Until only a couple of months ago this girl had lived in the pre-skelter age! In cultural terms she had been further removed from the modern world than the Erikssons, whose bodies he had disposed of earlier today. (Yesterday? What the hell?)
    ‘What happened to bring you here?’ he urged.
    Bit by reluctant bit, she explained. Somewhere in the
sertão
a minor warlord had begun to carve out an empire in the all-too-typical manner. Among the places he coveted was the site of Festeburg.
    There had been a siege. Her father had been killed. Her elder brother, then head of the family, ordered her to take a canoe and paddle down-river in search of help. With unbelievable courage, considering she had never been further from home than she could walk in half a day, she obeyed.
    The first people she had come on were friends of Chaim Aleuker’s cocking a snook at the dangers of modern South America by taking a camping vacation … but with the aidof a portable skelter. (Hans pursed his lips at that. A traveling skelter had to incorporate its own range-finding gear, and