Web of Everywhere by John Brunner Page B

cost a million if you could find a technician able to build one for you.)
    They hauled her out of the river when her canoe sprang a leak after hitting a submerged snag, but they couldn’t talk to her until Aleuker turned up. She said she thought it was a miracle when he stepped from the coffin-sized box in the middle of the camp-site. She had literally never dreamed of a skelter before.
    But she thought it was even more miraculous when it turned out Aleuker spoke Yiddish and was able to communicate with her in a rudimentary fashion. She had been aware that other languages existed apart from the German dialect spoken at Festeburg, for the traders they dealt with spoke corrupt Portuguese, but girls were forbidden to talk to strangers.
    Having puzzled out her story, Chaim persuaded his companions to collect their guns and set off for Festeburg. When they arrived there, however, they found it burning, its inhabitants exterminated.
    Well … too bad! Everyone in the group had business to attend to, and their vacation was too near its close for them to bother about the departed warlord and his troops. So in sheer despair, shaking with terror, she had let Chaim lead her into the skelter and bring her here.
    In other words: to a place which, according to everything she had been brought up to believe, was a fair facsimile of hell.

INTERFACE J
    I am ashamed that I want to believe in judgment.
    Punishment turns my guts sour and I will not condemn.
    If I did I would be among the guiltiest of all.
    I am not however ashamed that those I would like to punish
    Are those whose crime is despoiling their fellow men
    And particularly little children of the rightful joy
    They should have from the existence of their bodies.
    – M USTAPHA S HARIF

Chapter 10

    Perhaps it was unfair to Aleuker – perhaps Hans was adding unjustified glosses to what the girl told him, and in fact she was seeing rapists around every corner, as a result of her appalling heritage … but the impression was quite clear that when Aleuker discovered that Anneliese wasn’t minded to pile straight into bed and make wild jungle love he lost interest.
    One would assume that Aleuker had a normal healthy appetite for women; indeed, one had heard that because of his fame he’d enjoyed far more of them than his proper share, which statistically must be three-fifths of one, sixty per cent, or thirty per cent of each of two, or fifteen per cent of each of four … The deadpan calculation made Hans want to giggle.
    Serious for a moment, he wondered what it would be like to be in Aleuker’s shoes, welcomed as a father for the babies of women around the world. Those lucky potential mothers who had proved to be naturally immune to CPF – which Dany was not, and in consequence had been compulsorily sterilized – picked and chose their mates regardless of marriage,regardless of stern official warnings about letting so much of the gene-pool go to waste.
    Once, three years ago, without informing Dany, he had advertised himself in one of the crudely-printed contact journals that circulated from continent to continent, serving another and more valid purpose beside the ostensible one of linking people with unusual sexual tastes. With so few people left it seemed a shame that he, Hans Dykstra, should leave behind no child at all, whether or not he could bring it up personally.
    But the only girl who had answered had failed to show at the rendezvous he’d proposed in Canberra, and he’d felt so silly he’d never repeated the experiment.
    Plainly it would be just as stupid to mention that to Anneliese as it would have been to tell Dany. He composed himself to go on listening.
    She had clung to Aleuker purely because she didn’t know where else to go. Like most Christians she had been taught to believe that even followers of heretic branches of her own faith were children of the Evil One and eternally damned, so finding herself in a world full of what she termed heathens, who drank