The Humanoids: The Complete Tetralogy by Jack Williamson

Author:Jack Williamson [Williamson, Jack]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2015-01-05T05:00:00+00:00

The round stud clicked softly back again, and that tiny window closed itself. The polished crystal darkened, and the golden veinings knitted back. The green lettering was still erased, but that faint sweetness of Ruth’s perfume lingered heavy in the air, a somber ghost of sorrow.

That stale sweetness seemed suddenly stifling in the room. His fingers went back, automatically, to the row of buttons beside the mirror. He glimpsed himself again, a tall brown stranger, and then the mirror became a crystal window.

He punched another button, and that clear panel dropped. A fresh morning breeze cooled his face.

Ruth’s lingering thin perfume went out with the wind, and that ghost of old sadness with it. He inhaled clean air, and felt that he was free.

He turned to the window, and gaped again.

Far away, beyond the red expanse of the landing stage and below the uneven edge of the mountain’s crown, he saw the rolling vastness of the desert he had known—but now no longer a tawny desolation.

For now new lakes glinted blue in the valleys, above giant dams the humanoids must have built, and scattered villas made gay islets of bright roof-color in a new sea of tender green, and now a somber green of new-grown forest clad the higher summits, which had been bleak and bare.

Dark forests, grown since he was here!

“That grid!” he breathed. “How long?”

He was turning to call back that oddly obedient machine to answer his baffled questions, when he caught a shimmer of moving color against the sky. A little rhodomagnetic cruiser dropped silently, the oval mirror of its hull aglow with blue and green reflections and the red of the landing stage. It touched gently, and a black mechanical sprang down to help a girl alight.

He stood at the window, watching that girl, and something caught his breath. He didn’t know her, and yet something set a haunting wonder in him. Something made his pulse beat faster, and he forgot that vanished ghost of yesterday.

The girl left the humanoid waiting by the cruiser. She came obliquely across the stage, walking with a long, free, confident stride. She was tall, and splendid to him. Her flowing dress was clinging silver, scarlet-belted, and she wore a scarlet flower in her black, shining hair.

He didn’t know her name, and yet the swinging way she walked awoke a haunting recognition. He must have seen her eyes before, long and limpidly dark. And the flower in her hair, a gay badge of courage, was somehow like a tattered scrap of scarlet ribbon.

She saw him at the window. Her half-remembered face—thin-lipped and narrow, sensitive and strong, with high cheekbones—turned lovely with a smile he must have known, somewhere. She paused on the red stage, and called to him in a rich clear voice that he must have heard before.

“Hi, Webb!”

He didn’t know her name, and yet that baffled recognition took hold of him. The tall stranger he had seen in the mirror waved back to her, and leaped over the low window ledge with a young man’s effortless ease, and ran smiling eagerly to meet her.

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.