The Burning by James E. Gunn

Author:James E. Gunn
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2014-09-27T04:00:00+00:00

VIII

Wilson woke not to the dim confusion of the courtroom but to the pale light of morning filtering through tall windows lined with bars. His pillow was whispering to him, “You are a witch, and you have set a fire 6 a fire which destroyed a university and the people in it, people who were your friends and now are dead ashes. You are guilty. You have committed arson and murder, and you must be punished.”

More bars were all around him -- bars for walls, bars for a door. Only above him and below him was there something solid -- the ceiling and the floor were concrete, but Wilson felt that inside them, if he dug, he would find the same cold, gray bars.

He was in a cell. It was part of a block of cells stacked one atop and beside another like so many houses built of toothpicks, but the toothpicks were solid steel. Outside his cell was a corridor and beyond that was a stone wall. The tall, barred windows were in the wall. He was a prisoner held in a maximum security prison, and he had no more chance of escaping than a witch from the deepest Inquisitorial dungeon.

He ran his hand over the rough material of the prison blanket that covered him, and over the dustily astringent odor of mopped concrete floors he smelled coffee brewing far off. How long had it been since he had smelled something so good? They had taken that from him, and he lay in his bunk, listening to his pillow, and enjoyed the smell.

“You’re awake, eh?” said an interested voice close beside him. “It’s the first time you’ve been awake.” Wilson’s eyes slowly drifted shut.

“Oh,” the voice said, disappointed. “I guess you ain’t. But if you are and don’t want to let on, I want to talk to you when you get a chance to listen. They say you’re a crummy scientist, but you don’t seem so bad to me. You just lay there, moaning and talking in your sleep, and I guess you’re just a crummy con like me, and it’s us against them. We got something working, fellow, and if you want a piece of it just wiggle your eyelids.”

Wilson lay very still, breathing regularly, listening to his vindictive pillow. His eyelids did not move.

“I don’t blame you, fellow,” said the voice beside him. “Why should you trust anybody? Maybe when they bring you back -- if they bring you back.”

They came soon afterwards. Men dressed Wilson’s unresisting body in newly pressed clothes and half carried, half dragged him to an armored truck. It had two cots in the back, and they placed Wilson on one of them. The truck started up. After about ten minutes of slow, twisting city driving, the truck picked up speed. Twenty minutes later it drew up to the back of an old brick building. Wilson was hustled into a small doorway and up a flight of stairs to the courtroom.

“No one will appear in this man’s defense,” Youngman said.

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