Four Unpublished Novels: High-Opp, Angel's Fall, a Game of Authors, a Thorn in the Bush by Herbert Frank

Author:Herbert, Frank [Herbert, Frank]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction, Action & Adventure, Fantasy, Philosophy
Amazon: B0B5WP2P1Z
Goodreads: 61972030
Publisher: WordFire Press
Published: 2016-02-27T08:00:00+00:00

Monti awoke, rubbed her eyes, pushed the flame-colored hair away from her forehead. She caught Jeb’s gaze upon her, and for a moment their eyes locked.

“Day number five,” said David.

“How many more?” whispered Monti.

Jeb shook his head.

“Live them one at a time,” said Gettler. “It’s easier that way.”

Jeb opened his door, slid down onto the float. His knees felt rubbery from the fever, but his muscles obeyed his will.

Fungus blotches spread across the leaves of the drowned trees on the left. In the gloom beyond, Jeb discerned the fairy-lace foliage of a tree fern. He moved his attention to the right, pointed while trying to find his voice. A papaya drooped over the current, its limbs heavy with fruit.

“Papaya!” husked Gettler. He lowered himself out the door on the right, took up a pole.

Jeb loosed the grapnel from its bed in the flooded bushes.

They guided the plane across to the papaya, hunger lending a desperate strength to their muscles.

“Is it good to eat?” asked David.

“Yes,” said Monti.

The plane buried its nose in bushes beneath the papaya. Gettler grabbed a vine, held it. Jeb climbed onto the cowling, passed the fruit down to Monti. Limbs freed of their burden snapped out of reach.

“That’s all of it,” said Jeb.

Gettler released the vines, pushed off. The current caught them.

Jeb slid down and into the cabin.

They gorged on papaya. The fruit eased their hunger pangs, but there was no real satisfaction in it.

“We still need meat,” said Gettler. He studied the rushing shoreline.

A hissing eddy swirled them toward a wall of trees where yellow water foamed around submerged trunks. Jeb and Gettler scrambled down to the pontoons, fought the cane poles until the plane was back in the central current.

Again they drifted on open water—a wide, moving lake—but the swollen river stretched wild fingers out into the forest. They could only guess at the true channel, a precarious thread to civilization.

A stupor of heat settled over the plane as the sun climbed the sky. Heat shimmered off the river in coiling vibrations. Every air current carried its torturing stream of insects.

Monti wrapped her face in the silver scarf, and huddled in the front seat. David leaned across the seat back above her, staring downstream with a glassy-eyed expression, as though his mind had ceased all motion in the heat.

Gettler sat on the right hand pontoon, cane pole across his lap, the rifle butt ready at hand on the cabin floor above him. The small eyes glittered with a fearful alertness from beneath the brim of the Aussie hat.

Jeb on the left pontoon leaned against the strut in the glittering metal shadow of the wing, stared at the passing shore.

Time’s like this river, he thought. He felt the swelling pressure of this thought … and he had the idea that somewhere he had dived into Time, and had become trapped in Time’s current without the means to escape.

A half-drowned island split the flow ahead of them. Jeb and Gettler stirred to action, fought the plane into the left hand current.

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