James Blish - ESPer (1952) (PDF) (Gorgon776) by Unknown Author

Author:Unknown Author
Language: eng
Format: epub

Chapter Ten

PASTORALE

For a long time, Danny lay where he was, the brambles piercing his clothes and scratching at his face and scalp as he gasped for breath. Not only his head, but his whole body hurt him horribly, and he was soaking wet all along one side. Closing one hand rewarded him with the feel of cold mud oozing between his fingers. The odor of decaying leaves was in his nostrils, and grayness and brightness flickered and flowed beneath his eyelids.

Distantly, guns chattered on the raw air.

Finally, he was conscious enough to wonder where he was. He opened his eyes and saw an overcast morning sky, fretted with branches. He sat up, his head hammering with every motion. He lay sprawled on one elbow until the cold wetness became intolerable, then got up, swaying. All around him, trees, leafless, swayed with him.

Without knowing why, he began to stumble away from the sounds of gunfighting. 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.

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

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