Ring Around the Sun by Clifford D Simak

Author:Clifford D Simak [Simak, Clifford D]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction, Fantasy
ISBN: 9780881848526
Google: gWZongEACAAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 776420
Publisher: Orion
Published: 1952-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirty

THE land lay new and empty of any mark of Man, a land of raw earth and sky; even the wildness of the wind that swept across it seemed to say that the land was untamed.

From his hilltop, Vickers saw bands of dark, moving shapes that he felt sure were small herds of buffalo and even as he watched three wolves came loping up the slope, saw him and veered off, angling down the hill. In the blue sweep of sky that arched from horizon to horizon without a single cloud a bird wheeled gracefully, spying out the land. It screeched and the screech came down to Vickers as a high, thin sound filtered through the sky.

The top had brought him through. He was safe in this empty land with wolves and buffalo.

He climbed to the ridgetop and looked across the reaches of the grassland, with its frequent groves and many watercourses, sparkling in the sun. There was no sign of human habitation -no roads, no threads of smoke sifting up the sky.

He looked at the sun and wondered which way was west and thought he knew, and if he was right, the sun said it was midmorning. But if he was wrong, it was midafternoon and in a few hours darkness would come upon the land. And when darkness came, he would have to figure out how to spend the night.

He had meant to go into “fairyland” and this, of course, wasn’t it. If he had stopped to think about it, he told himself, he would have known that it would not be, for the place he had gone to as a child could not have been fairyland. This was a new and empty world, a lonely and perhaps a terrifying world, but it was better than the back room of a hardware store in some unknown town with his fellow men hunting him to death.

He had come out of the old, familiar world into this new, strange world and if the world were entirely empty of human life, then he was on his own.

He sat down and emptied his pockets and made an inventory of what he had. A half a package of cigarettes; three packs of matches, one almost finished, one full, one with just a match or two gone from it; a pocket knife; a handkerchief; a billfold with a few dollars in it; a few cents in change; the key to the Forever car; a keyring with the key to the house and another to the desk and a couple of other keys he couldn’t identify; a mechanical pencil; a few half sheets of paper folded together, pocket size, on which he had intended to make notes if he saw anything worth noting–and that was all. Fire and a tool with a cutting edge and a few hunks of worthless metal–that was the sum of what he had.

If this world were empty, he must face it alone. He must feed himself and defend himself and find shelter for himself and, in time to come, contrive some way in which to clothe himself.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.