Recruit for Andromeda by Milton Lesser

Author:Milton Lesser
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pronoun

CHAPTER VII

IT COULD HAVE BEEN a city in New England, or maybe Wisconsin. Main Street stretched for half a mile from Town Hall to the small department store. Neon tubing brightened every store front, busy proprietors could be seen at work through the large plate glass windows. There was the bustle you might expect on any Main Street in New England or Wisconsin, but you could not draw the parallel indefinitely.

There were only men. No women.

The hills in which the town nestled were too purple—not purple with distance but the natural color of the grass.

A somber red sun hung in the pale mauve sky.

This was Earth City, Nowhere.

Arkalion had deposited Temple in the nearby hills, promised they would see one another again. “It may not be so soon,” Arkalion had said, “but what’s the difference? You’ll spend the rest of your life here. You realize you are lucky, Kit. If you hadn’t come, you would have been dead these five thousand years. Well, good luck.”

Dead—five thousand years. The Earth as he knew it, dust. Stephanie, a fifty generation corpse. Nowhere was right. End of the universe.

Temple shuffled his feet, trudged on into town. A man passed him on the street, stooped, gray-haired. The man nodded, did a mild double-take. I’m an unfamiliar face, Temple thought.

“Howdy,” he said. “I’m new here.”

“That’s what I thought, stranger. Know just about everyone in these here parts, I do, and I said to myself, now there’s a newcomer. Funny you didn’t come in the regular way.”

“I’m here,” said Temple.

“Yeah. Funny thing, you get to know everyone. Eh, what you say your name was?”

“Christopher Temple.”

“Make it my business to know everyone. The neighborly way, I always say. Temple, eh? We have one here.”

“One what?”

“Another fellow name of Temple. Jase Temple, son.”

“I’ll be damned!” Temple cried, smiling suddenly. “I will be damned. Tell me, old timer, where can I find him?”

“Might be anyplace. Town’s bigger’n it looks. I tell you, though, Jase Temple’s our co-ordinator. You’ll find him there, the co-ordinator’s office. Town Hall, down the end of the street.”

“I already passed it,” Temple told the man. “And thanks.”

Temple’s legs carried him at a brisk pace, past the row of store fronts and down to the Town Hall. He read a directory, climbed a flight of stairs, found a door marked:

JASON TEMPLE

Earth City Co-ordinator.

Heart pounding, Temple knocked, heard someone call, “Come in.”

He pushed the door in and stared at his brother, just rising to face him.

“Kit! Kit! What are you doing ... so you took the journey too!”

Jason ran to him, clasped his shoulders, pounded them. “You sure are looking fit. Kit, you could have knocked me over with half a feather, coming in like that.”

“You’re looking great too, Jase,” Temple lied. He hadn’t seen his brother in five years, had never expected to see him again. But he remembered a full-faced, smiling man somewhat taller than himself, somewhat broader across the shoulders. The Jason he saw looked forty-five or fifty but was hardly out of his twenties.

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