Manly Wade Wellman by The Dark Destroyers

Author:The Dark Destroyers [Destroyers, The Dark]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2011-08-27T15:06:43+00:00

CHAPTER VII

Make Darragh lay quiedy, as though he could never summon energy or inclination to move again. Take it easy, the soft voice had advised, and the advice seemed good after all the fighting, flying, running. You're among friends, the voice had added, and it had sounded friendly. Darragh opened his eyes.

He sprawled with his head out of the hood and supported on an arm. Close above him bent the face of a woman—a girl really—a pleasant blue-eyed face just now full of concern. Corn-yellow hair made bright masses around the face. Beyond and above were the faces of other people, stooping to look.

"He isn't one of us," said a man's voice. "Who are you, anyway?"

Darragh had some of his wind back. "I was going to ask that question of you," he replied.

"He can talk," said another. "He speaks English."

Darragh sat up, then, and gazed at the people around him. They were clad neatiy, in what he had seen in pictures of the days of his unconquered grandfathers—the men in jackets and trousers, the women in dresses of print or stout weave. There were a dozen of them and, beginning to press around this inner group, twice as many more. The blonde girl who had knelt beside him gazed with relief as he moved and half rose, and he smiled at her. She looked capable and intelligent and pretty. She wore dark slacks, a white blouse with short sleeves, and slippers that seemed to be made of coarse cloth, like canvas. Her bare arms and face were tanned, the darker because of that bright hair.

"You mean, who are we?" prompted the nearest man, a fellow perhaps thirty, with canny eyes set rather close together. "Why—we've been here ever since this settlement has been here."

Darragh only half-heard those words. He was getting up and looking beyond the gathering of people.

A town was there. At least it looked like the towns that Darragh had seen in old salvaged pictures of the civilization from which his own forebears had fled. There were ten houses or so—cottages, he remembered such houses were called—or white-painted planks with roofs of snug red tile. They had green lawns and beds of bright flowers, and they were ranged around a wide central court. Behind and around those cottages rose a great lead-colored wall, that extended in a sweeping curve to enclose the houses and the central common, holding them as,at the bottom of a tube. Looking up, Darragh was aware that this wall rose to a tremendous height. It was as though he and these men and women and their houses were at the bottom of an immense chimney.' Far above them, the shaft was filled with radiance, dazzling and warm, that came down and touched everything with brightness.

The blonde girl, too, had risen. She stood straight beside him, as tall almost for a girl as Darragh was for a man. All the excitement and mystery could not keep him from seeing that her body was both strong and graceful, that she was somebody he would like to know better.

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