The Ray Cummings Megapack: 25 Golden Age Science Fiction and Mystery Tales by Ray Cummings

Author:Ray Cummings [Cummings, Ray]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery, Science Fiction, novels, megapack, Fantasy, Short Stories, wildside
ISBN: 9781434443403
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2013-08-26T04:00:00+00:00

Again Miko stood staring. I saw now that he was staring at Anita!

“Why, George Prince! How strange you look!”

Anita did not move. She was stricken with horror; she shrank back against the wall, huddled in her cloak. Miko’s sardonic voice came again:

“How strange you look, Prince!” He took a step forward. He was grim and calm. Horribly calm. Deliberate. Gloating like a great gray monster in human form toying with a fascinated, imprisoned bird.

“Move just a little, Prince. Let the zed-ray light fall more fully.”

Anita’s head was bare. That pale, Hamlet-like face. Dear God, the zed-ray light lay gray and penetrating upon it!

Miko took another step. Peering. Grinning. “How amazing, George Prince! Why, I can hardly believe it!”

Moa was armed with an electronic cylinder now. For all her amazement—what turgid emotions sweeping her I can only guess—she never took her eyes from Snap and me.

“Back! Don’t move either of you!” she hissed at us.

Then Miko leaped at Anita like a giant gray leopard pouncing.

“Away with that cloak, Prince!”

I stood cold and numbed. And realization came at last. The faint zed-light had fallen by chance upon Anita’s face. Penetrating the flesh; exposed, faintly glowing, the bone line of her jaw. Unmasked the art of Glutz.

Miko seized her wrists, drew her forward, beyond the shaft of zed-light, into the brilliant light of the Moon. And ripped her cloak from her. The gentle curves of her woman’s figure were so unmistakable!

And as Miko gazed at them, all his calm triumph swept away.

“Why, Anita!”

I heard Moa mutter, “So that is it?” A venomous flashing look—a shaft from me to Anita and back again. “So that is it?”

“Why, Anita!”

Miko’s great arms gathered her up as though she were a child. “So I have you back! From the dead, delivered back to me!”

“Gregg!” Snap’s warning, and his grip on my shoulders brought me a measure of sanity. I had tensed to spring. I stood quivering, and Moa thrust her weapon against my face. The grids were swaying again with a message from Grantline. But it was ignored.

In the glare of moonlight by the forward window, Miko held Anita, his great hands pawing her with triumphant possessive caresses.

“So, little Anita, you are given back to me!”

CHAPTER 20

Moonlight upon Earth so gently shines to make romantic a lover’s smile! But the reality of the Lunar night is cold beyond human belief. Cold and darkly silent. Grim desolation. Awesome. Majestic. A frowning majesty that even to the most intrepid human beholder is inconceivably forbidding.

And there were humans here now. On this tumbled plain, between Archimedes and the mountains, one small crater amid the million of its fellows was distinguished this night by the presence of humans. The Grantline camp! It huddled in the deepest purple shadows on the side of a bowl-like pit, a crudely circular orifice with a scant two miles across its rippling rim. There was faint light here to mark the presence of the living intruders. The blue glow radiance of Morrell tube lights under a spread of glassite.

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.