(eng) Murray Leinster - SSC by Megapack 02

Author:Megapack 02 [02, Megapack]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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WEST WIND

(Originally Published in 1948)

CHAPTER 1

Igor lay in a ditch while the search for him came to an inconclusive end. This was an age of science and atomic energy, but the soldiers blundered through crackling brush with the clumsiness of spear-armed troopers of five thousand years before. They did not find him. It was pitch-dark, with thick cloud-masses filling the sky, though here and there thinner spaces showed, through which the moon and some of the brighter stars appeared faintly. Presently they gave up the search. A whistle shrilled, over by the truck, and he heard the soldiers stumbling toward it. The truck’s headlights came on, and they were the only—absolutely the only—lights in all the world except the fugitive faint gleams in the sky. And the cloud-banks were piling up.

There was a plane circling in the darkness overhead. It had been hunting him with an infra-red scanner, and picking up only the systematically moving figures of the men who hunted him. Igor was hidden from the sky by the thick foliage of a tree which overhung his ditch. Now the plane droned away to the westward. It had given up the hunt, too. The soldiers converged upon the waiting truck. Igor heard their voices. Somebody shouted, “Stefan! Stefan!” A voice answered, far away. It called again, moving toward the truck. Someone laughed, by the waiting vehicle. Some men climbed in. Igor heard their heavy boots on the floorboards. He began to make phrases in his own mind:

“I heard the men who were hunting me laugh, because one of their number had salvaged some left-behind trifle from a deserted farmhouse! They laughed in the moment of the most monstrous disgrace in the history of their nation! They could laugh as they, the last armed men, left the land abandoned to an enemy without a blow struck or received…”

The motor of the truck started up. The last man seemed to be running, not to be left behind. He swung aboard. The motor ground into first gear, and second, and third. The truck bumbled and growled away westward toward what was to be the new frontier. Igor was left alone.

He climbed out of the ditch and saw the faint bright fingers of light which were the truck’s headlights flickering and jerking in the distance. He even saw, momentarily, the red taillight. Then the truck went over a low hill and was gone. But for minutes afterward he could still hear its faint and dwindling noise.

He suddenly felt a little sickish at his stomach. Those men, those soldiers in the truck, were his countrymen. He’d hidden from them out of patriotism, and they’d gone on. Now they’d keep traveling until they caught up with the last wave of evacuation patrols—thirty miles away by now—and merge with them, and by morning they’d have reached the new frontier. Igor was the only living human being left in a good many thousand square miles. He felt abandoned. Even the patriotism of his current errand wasn’t comfort. But there was no comfort in patriotism, anyhow.

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