Gordon R. Dickson by Mankind on the Run

Author:Mankind on the Run
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2011-08-25T22:33:49+00:00

CHAPTER TEN

KIL awoke suddenly and sat up on the edge of his bed. Through the unopaqued window of the room to which Melee had brought him the night before, the morning sunlight streamed and lit up his undressed condition and the rumpled state of the bed. There was sweat on his forehead and a clutching, all-obsessive feeling that something was terribly wrong. What had happened? But nothing came to him, only the empty, scooped-out feeling of something drastic that had taken place. He jumped to his feet and took three quick strides to stand in front of a mirror across the room. His own image looked back at him as lean and uncompromising as ever. Foolishly, he felt his arms and legs and the nerves in them reacted to his fingers' pressure in honest fashion. His body reported all well. Only a slight soreness behind one ear, where he might have hit his head in falling after he was drugged, and a slight headache, lopsided in that area, interrupted the general sense of physical well-being. But he felt hollow inside.

He walked over to a closet set in the wall and, opening it, found clothes—the ones he had worn the night before as well as several plastic throwaway outfits that looked to be his size. Out of automatic instincts and habits of cleanliness, he reached for one of these latter, but an odd repugnance made him draw his hand back and he dressed instead in his tunic and kilt of the previous day.

Dressed, he tried his door and found it unlocked. He stepped through it and out into the corridor. Some thirty feet along this corridor, he came on a door ajar, about where he remembered the study to have been. He went in.

It was not the study.after all, but a larger room, a lounge of some sort with a wall-wide window beside which sat a breakfast table as yet uncleared. Melee stood by the table, looking out at the trees and the grounds of the lakeward side of the resort. From this height, the blue windings of the lake could be seen beyond the tops of the trees. A small breeze blew from it, through the wall-window, which had been rolled back, and the soft, clean air of morning came to Kil's nostrils.

At the sight of her, standing with her back to him, a deep feeling of desire stirred unexpectedly in Kil and he went forward until he stood at her side.

"Morning," he said.

She turned slowly to face him. On her lips was an echo of the triumphant smile of the night before, but it faded as she regarded him, changing into something eager and half-fearful.

"Kiss me," she said.

Kil put his arms around her and drew her to him. He kissed her, feeling the hot coal of desire that was new within him burst suddenly into blazing heat. Abruptly, she wrenched away from him.

"Damn you!" she cried. "Oh, damn you!"

Her fists were clenched and her face was screwed up in pain.

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