Room With View by Robert F. Young

Author:Robert F. Young [Young, Robert F.]
Format: epub
Tags: Sci-Fi Short
Published: 2010-03-07T18:12:39.140000+00:00

The other two rooms of the apartment were small and windowless. They contained padded oval platforms and were obviously sleeping quarters. There wasn't a particle of dust in them—or a particle of life.

Donant returned to the corridor.

He experienced a sense of wrongness. After a moment he noticed that the section of the door he had burned out had disappeared, and then he noticed that the burned edges of the door itself, into which the section had fitted, had receded back to where the crystalline material was unaffected. As he watched, the material closed back in upon itself as though the orifice were a wound and the wound were healing. In a little while the door was whole again and all evidence of his vandalism had vanished.

A self-healing building? A self-healing city? Then it must be a sentient city too. The crystalline material, despite its deceptive appearance, bore no relationship to crystal. It was a complex alloy that the extinct race had developed, an alloy that possessed therapeutic qualities and an awareness of decomposition.

And its awareness was not confined to its own decomposition. It included and acted upon everything detrimental to the cleanliness of the streets and structures which the metal comprised. For the first time Donant understood why there was no dust or corrosion in a city that had probably been dead for years, if not centuries. And he guessed why there were no bodies, no bones.

A most meticulous metal. Not only did it clean up after itself, it cleaned up after its creators as well. Donant burned a section out of the next door and stepped into the next apartment. It was a duplicate of the first—three rooms, the furniture in the largest room grouped with the oval window as the central motif, and the window framing a view of walls, grass, flowers, and tree—

Donant found himself staring at the tree again. It was unquestionably the same tree, its twisted trunk and leafless branches the same bone white in the glaring sunlight. And yet it stood just outside the window, exactly in front of the window, and that was manifestly impossible because it stood exactly in front of the window of the room he had just left.

After a moment he dropped his eyes to the lawn. It was a wretched lawn by any standards. In some places it had faded to a bleached yellow, in others it had died out altogether. Even in the few places where it still contained a semblance of life, it was singularly unimpressive. The individual blades of grass were asymmetrical, thick on one side, dwindling to a sharp edge on the other, tapering upward to a lopsided point—

Suddenly Donant found himself thinking of the statue he had seen in the council chamber—the statue and the scales, and the objects the scales contained. A crystalline cube and a green knife—

Or a building brick and a blade of grass?

Abruptly another incongruity about the courtyard caught his eye. When he had entered the apartment building the sun had long since passed its meridian.

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.