Farmer, Philip Jose - Riverworld 05 by Gods of Riverworld

Author:Gods of Riverworld
Language: eng
Format: epub

Page 108

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Burton stopped the chair. The scene stopped with him. Burton, not knowing why he was doing so, told the Computer to project the neural-emotional field.

At once, he felt a searing pain as the doctor's knife rounded the foreskin.

He clamped down on his teeth to keep from screaming, as he had clamped down on his cigar during the actual operation.

At the same time, he felt dizzy and sluggish. The field was enveloping him with his sensations as they had been at that time, and he had been drunk. Not as drunk as he should have been.

"Enough!" he cried. "Remove the NE field.”

Immediately, the pain was gone. Or was it? Was there not the ghost or the shadow of one slowly departing?

Burton was no masochist. He had inflicted pain only so that his desire for Star Spoon, for any woman, would go away. It worked. But not for long.

21

A long time ago, Frigate had said to Burton that it had been impossible on Earth to determine the identity of Jack the Ripper. But since the Ripper must be in the Rivervalley, he could be found there. However, the chances for running across him were extremely slight. Even less were the chances that he, if found, would confess. Also, a man who might admit to the murders might be a liar. Actually, the solution to the enigma was not much more likely here than on Earth.

Frigate had stated that a long time before he and Burton had gotten to the tower. Now they were in a place where the odds for finding the man known as Jack the Ripper were high. Frigate knew who the candidates were, though it was possible that the true Ripper might not be among them, and it was likely that the Computer could locate all of these in its files.

Frigate had not gotten around to his suggested project because he was too busy with other lines of research, including tracing his genealogy. This tower, he said, was a genealogist's paradise. He did not have to resort to the difficult-to-find and often-lost records: wills, tax and land deeds, probate and orphan court records, censuses, county histories, newspapers, tombstones, military and pension records and all the other elusive traces of people who might or might not be your ancestors. Here you could set the Computer on the track, starting with yourself, and it could work backward through your parents. You could see on a screen what a parent looked like, where he or she was, see their lives through their own eyes and what they looked like through the eyes of others. Sometimes, he had to wait while the Computer used an ancestor'swathanto search through its files for the matchingwathanand then identified thewathanof that person's parents. Where there was doubt about the paternity of a child, the Computer could compare the genetic makeup of the child and the parent in doubt and establish the relationship. If it proved that a certain child could

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