The Mindwarpers by Russell Eric Frank;

Author:Russell, Eric Frank;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dover Publications
Published: 2017-03-13T04:00:00+00:00

SEVEN:

HE HIT a heavily grassed bank sloping steeply downward. Although he managed to land on his feet his forward momentum and the sharp angle of the bank sent him tumbling diagonally down the slope in a series of violent rolls during which he did his best to keep himself curled into a ball. The world rotated around him and thumped him all over. The bank seemed to be a mile high and he thought he was never going to reach the bottom of it. Eventually he landed with a crash in a dry ditch, breathless and dirty, his nostrils choked with dust.

For a short time he lay there gasping for air, sneezing repeatedly and listening to the dying vibrations along the overhead track. The train showed no sign of stopping; steadily it pounded onward bearing a thwarted Reardon who was losing distance with every second that it took him to swing into action. Reardon might well be carried twenty miles or more before he could make sure of Bransome’s getaway and do something about it.

Or had the sharp-eyed agent anticipated the leap for liberty and taken a dive himself? Bransome came erect in the ditch, straightening himself slowly and apprehensively lest he suddenly feel the agony of a broken bone. He felt himself all over, finding no damage other then to his clothes. The escape could not have been better performed had he been doing it for the movies.

That last thought came back a second time as if to lend itself emphasis: it couldn’t have been better performed had he been doing it for the movies. His mind gave another jolt, one hard enough to make him pause as he was about to scramble from the ditch. The movies? The movies?

Strange that a random idea about motion pictures should hit him like that. Once upon a time he’d considered the movies in an absent kind of way much as one thinks of dogs or doughnuts, hats or hamburgers or any other commonplace appurtenances of civilization. But now it was different without any obvious reason for the difference. Now he though of movies with a peculiar sense of strain that wasn’t exactly fear or terror; it was something else, something he couldn’t quite identify. The nearest he could get to defining his mental attitude was to say that the concept of motion pictures was accompanied by a sense of basic incongruity or of something that violated a fundamental law in a way that hurt him personally.

Perhaps Reardon had been right in suggesting that he was off his head or rapidly going that way. Perhaps as his mental condition became worse he would experience weird thoughts and have cockeyed reactions every hour instead of a few times a week. Then in the end he would live in a hell of illusions beyond the bars of which a tearful Dorothy would be seen only in rational moments.

Climbing from the ditch, he scrambled up the bank and looked along the railroad track. The train

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