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Behind his eyes, a multitude of voices murmured things that made no sense.
He reached out for Marla but that only made the kaleidoscopic murmuring
louder and at the same time more indistinct. He knew that he could shut out
the murmuring entirely if he chose, but the thought frightened him and he
forgot it promptly.
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The trees whispered, too. The little copse was dead, dead for the rest of the
year, but it moved and talked, and there were little utterly savage thoughts
moving inside dead logs and under the matting of dead leaves, hundreds of
them, minute, single-mindedly murderous, like the thoughts of shell-fragments
in flight. The whole world was a chiaroscuro of whispers and shadows.
He began to run. A stump tripped him at once, but he got up and made his
aching muscles resume pumping. Branches lashed him, tree-trunks sprang
squarely before him and knocked his breath out of his body, bark skinned his
face and hands. But he ran.
The sight of the distant city helped, a little, to bring back to him some of
the things he needed to know. He stood on the edge of the scrub forest,
looking down the slope of the low mountain across extensive suburbs. The river
beyond was nothing but a bank of mist on the horizon, above which the
colorless, phantom shapes of city skyscrapers floated in the morning light. He
stopped in dumb astonishment, weaving drunkenly. Behind him and to the left,
the sounds of battle diminished.
I got out. There wasn t any way out, but I got out. I m farther from the city
than I was before.
And then:
It s like my dream of floating. I got out, but I don t know how I got out all
of a sudden, all at once.
He began to stagger down the slope toward the nearby highway, which should
lead him should, only because he needed it to do so, not because it
necessarily led anyplace at all through the suburbs and back to the city. He
did not wonder what his chances were of getting through the groomed, gardened
Republicanism between himself and Marla: a scratched and soaked and ragged
figure, with a face blotched on the temples and forehead with stiffening SS
electrode compound blackened with accumulated dirt, obviously sick, probably
drunk, certainly on no legitimate business. His mind was dead, drained of
everything but the basic impulse to stay alive and to go where life was.
The psi faculties, ill-understood and undependable, had burned out. Danny
remembered only dimly Todd s warning of quick fatigue and nothing he had found
in the books or had heard from Todd would explain why or how he had been
snapped out here like a pebble from a sling, snapped from organized tension to
the swamps of trance. The wordteleportation came to him, but it was only a
word. If it meant anything to him, it meant that now not only his head but his
whole body was in pain.
And Todd was helpless now, trussed with his own wire in a stuffy closet, or
under arrest as witness to a murder, notorious in the latter case and a
liability to his University no matter how long his researches had drawn
students, money and respect toward the University, perhaps smothered to death
if still in the closet, and in any event all his study and unselfishness come
to nothing, nothing at all. The psi powers were gone; except for this
unfocusable and maddening murmur, they had evaporated into chill mist.
The nightmare, however, remained. There was no longer any refuge for Danny.
Unless
Wait. There was still the brownstone house. Sir Lewis Carter. If there was
one man in the world to whom the truth, whatever it might be, would seem
neither dangerous nor incredible, that man was Sir Lewis Carter. He had spent
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most of his life exploring areas of experience at which most scientists only,
at the very best, shrugged, and had survived their laughter and pity with
calmness and some aplomb.
He had a substantial reputation not only for ordinary astronomical discovery,
but for the invention of a form of relativistic math called non-invariation [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]