Harry Harrison by One Step From Earth

Author:One Step From Earth
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Published: 2012-06-12T09:37:53+00:00

The metal coffin lid opened, and Jomfri sat up, dizzy. They had drugged him; he was hazy; they had tended his wounds.

“But they wouldn’t help me. They wouldn’t even look in the records to prove my innocence. A mistake. A fault in the matter transmitter, and I am condemned because of it.”

He looked at the bloodstained bandages, and some thinghurt in his head.

“Now I’ll never get home to my wife,” he sobbed.

[ -: CONTENTS :-]

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The Life Preservers

RUBBLE AND DIRT had once been piled high to cover the object, then the resulting mound had been hidden beneath a stone cairn. Either the stones had been badly fitted together or the seasons had been most unkind, because the cairn was now only a tumbled ruin, an ugly jumble of rocks no higher than a man’s waist. The rubble and dirt had been washed away by the rains of centuries so that now, rising from a foliage-covered hillock, there stood the object that great labor had worked to conceal: a giant frame of pitted, corroded metal three meters high and twice as long. Set into this frame was what appeared to be a slab of slatelike material. It was hard, it had not been scratched or dented at all during the long years, and was coated with dust and adhesive debris. Around the tumbled stones and the framed slab stretched a tufted meadow bordered by a growth of stunted trees. Drab hills were visible in the distance, barely seen through a thin mist, merging into a sky of the same indifferent color. The white pebbles of a recent hail shower lay unmelted in the hollows. A bird, brown on the back and light gray below, pecked desultorily at the grasses on the mound.

The change was abrupt. In an instant, too small a measure of time to be seen, the framed slab changed color. It was now a deep black, a strange color that was more lack of color than anything else. At the same moment its surface must have altered because all of the dust and debris fell from it. A detached cocoon from some large insect dropped next to the bird, startling it, so that it flew away in a sudden flurry of motion.

From the blackness a man emerged, stepping out, three-dimensional and sound, as though he were stepping through a door. He emerged, suddenly, and crouched low, looked about suspiciously. He wore a sealed suit to which were attached many complex devices, his head was contained in a transparent helmet, and he held a pistol ready in his hand. After a moment he straightened up, still alert, and spoke into the microphone fixed before his lips. A length of flexible wire ran from the microphone, through a fixture in his helmet, and back to the black surface into which it vanished.

“First report. Nothing moving, no one in sight. Thought I saw something like a bird then, can’t be sure. Must be winter or a cold planet, small growths and trees, low clouds, snow — no, I think it’s hail — on the ground.

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