Midnight

inexpensive PC. Later still he had bought a modem with some of the money earned at a job. Though he could not afford much long-distance time and never spent leisurely hours using the modem far from the backwaters of Moonlight Cove into the data nets available in the outside world, he found his on-line systems engrossing and fun.
    Now, as he sat in the parked car along Holliwell Road, and used the VDT, he thought that the inner world of the computer was admirably clean, comparatively simple, predictable, and sane. So unlike human existence—whether that of New People or Old. In there, logic and reason ruled. Cause and effect and side-effects were always analyzed and made perfectly clear. In there, all was black and white—or, when gray, the gray was carefully ensured, quantified and qualified. Cold facts were easier to deal with than feelings. A universe formed purely of data, abstract from matter and event, seemed so much more desirable than real universe of cold and heat, sharp and blunt, smooth rough, blood and death, pain and fear.
    Calling up menu after menu, Neil probed ever deeper into the Moonhawk research files within Sun. He needed none of the data that he summoned forth but found solace in the process of obtaining it.
    He began to see the terminal screen not as a cathode-ray tube on which information was displayed, but as a window into another world. A world of facts. A world free of troubling contradictions … and responsibility. In there, nothing could be felt. there was only the known and the unknown, either an abundance of facts about a particular subject or a dearth of them, but not feeling ; never feeling; feeling was the curse of those whose existence was dependent upon flesh and bone.
    A window into another world.
    He touched the screen.
    He wished the window could be opened and that he could go through it to that place of reason, order, peace.
    With the fingertips of his right hand, he traced circles across the warm glass screen.
    Strangely, he thought of Dorothy, swept up from the plains of Kansas with her dog Toto, spun high into the tornado, and out of that depression-era grayness into a world far more intriguing. If only some electronic tornado could erupt from the VDT and carry him to a better place …
    His fingers passed through the screen.
    He snatched his hand back in astonishment.
    The glass had not ruptured. Chains of words and numbers glowed on the tube, as before.
    At first he tried to convince himself that what he had seen had been a hallucination. But he did not believe that.
    He flexed his fingers. They appeared unhurt.
    He looked out at the storm-swept day. The windshield wipers were not switched on. Rain rippled down the glass, distorting the world beyond; everything out there looked twisted, mutated, strange. There could never be order, sanity, and peace in such a place as that.
    Tentatively he touched the computer screen once more. It felt solid.
    Again, he thought of how desirable the clean, predictable world of the computer would be—and as before his hand slipped through the glass, up to the wrist this time. The screen had opened around him and sealed tight to him, as if it were an organic membrane. The data continued to blaze on the tube, the Words and numbers forming lines around his intruding hand.
    His heart was racing. He was afraid but also excited.
    He tried to wiggle his fingers in that mysterious, inner warmth. He could not feel them. He began to think they had dissolved or been cut off, and that when he withdrew his hand from the machine, the stump of his wrist would spout blood.
    He withdrew it anyway.
    His hand was whole.
    But it was not quite a hand any more. The flesh on the upper sides from the tips of his fingernails to his wrist, appeared to be veined with copper and threads of glass. In those glass filaments beat a steady and luminous pulse.
    He turned his hand over. The undersides of his fingers and his palm resembled the surface of a cathode-ray tube. Data burned there, green letters on a background glassy and dark. When he compared the words and numbers on his hand to those on the car's VDT, he saw they were identical. The information on the VDT changed; simultaneously, so did that on his hand.
    Abruptly, he understood that regression into bestial form was not the only avenue of escape open to him, that he could enter, into the world of electronic thought and magnetic memory, of knowledge without fleshly desire, of awareness without feeling. This was