Masters of the Maze by Avram Davidson

Author:Avram Davidson [Davidson, Avram]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781440544804
Publisher: F+W Media, Inc.
Published: 2012-07-13T06:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

Some sort of private thing was clearly going on between the tall man and the short man. Some of it, probably, was endocrinal. The tall man swelled out at the middle — hip and thigh and rump and belly — and tapered at the ends: small head, hands, feet. The short man seemed momentarily about to undergo an explosion or implosion which would result in his being not short at all. For the moment (something about him seemed to say) he was holding himself in … but any moment now — There was something false and sly about the tall man, his good humors and his bad ones seemed alike assumed. The short man was all of a piece, but there was nothing reassuring in this; it was a piece of the same material that too many high school principals, boys’ camp directors, and military and naval officers are made of: a texture or quality often dignified by the description, “ability to command” — the desire to bully, override, bear down — the capacity to do so by virtue of office — the habit of having done so for a long time and the confidence of continuing to do so for a long time.

There was another difference between them, for the tall man was the county sheriff and the short one was captain of the state police troop: dog’s head and lion’s tail. The sheriff appeared to be continually torn between the recollection that Nate had no vote in the county and the possibility that it wasn’t impossible he someday might. The sheriff had only his one paid deputy beneath him and nobody above him except the sovereign citizen-voters — and, at least in theory, the governor of the state, who might (but probably wouldn’t) remove him for misfeasance, malfeasance, and nonfeasance of office. He was a tradesman in his private life and a politician in his public one. Almost every legal paper he ever served and almost every arrest he ever made meant not only a fee earned and a duty done but an enemy made, a customer and a vote lost; he gave, therefore, the impression of a man busily engaged in trying to avoid being sucked up by his own rectal orifice. This was Sheriff Nobeldorf.

The public had no hold on Captain Congers; his eyes, when they turned from malefactors potential or kinetic, were directed toward a hierarchy he no longer entertained much hope of climbing. Middle age now held him fast, he hated the scene of his exile, found refuge from his bitter wife and severe superiors in the unshined boots of a trooper or the possibility of browbeating an offender against the general code.

Congers barked and snapped, Nobeldorf prowled and looked watchful. The immediate menace of the former seemed to hint, nevertheless, of possible and future protection based on experience; the present non-involvement of the latter threatened, just the same, future and possible menace growing out of ignorance and the need for popular reputation.

“I’d like a better explanation of where you have been!” Captain Congers bared his teeth.

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