Hunter/Victim by Robert Sheckley

Author:Robert Sheckley [Sheckley, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media Sci-Fi & Fantasy
Published: 2014-03-31T21:00:00+00:00

26

The seaplane flew in from the southeast, its motor humming in the vast empty sky of the Bahamas like a gigantic mosquito.

“That’s Outer Cay right down there,” the pilot told her. His name was Jeffrey Blair and he was a private charterer who worked out of Saukie Field, one of Nassau’s private commercial airstrips. Mercedes had engaged him to take her to the island.

Mercedes looked down through the cracked plastic. She saw a small shrimp-shaped island set in a wrinkled blue ocean beneath a smoldering midafternoon Caribbean sun.

“It’s five point seven miles long by two miles wide,” Blair told her. “The harbor is man-made, dredged to a mean depth of ten feet at the gas dock.”

Blair circled above the tangled mangroves at the southern end of the island. As they came around the northern end, Mercedes saw the corporation’s large, rambling house set in a grove of coconut palms. Nearby were low whitewashed bungalows, and beyond them various sheds and outbuildings.

“Hope you got your invitation handy,” Blair said. “They don’t take kindly to strangers down there. Privately owned, you know.”

“I know,” Mercedes said.

“It’s a funny sort of place,” Blair continued. “Supposed to be staffed by scientists from all over the world. Sort of a think-tank place, isn’t it?”

“Sort of,” Mercedes said.

“And that’s the sort of work you do, too?”

“Something like that,” Mercedes said.

“Imagine just sitting around thinking all day,” Blair said, in tones that revealed that he for one couldn’t. “Nice life for some people. Far from worldly cares and all that sort of thing, eh?”

“Ivory tower,” Mercedes agreed.

Blair landed and taxied up to the pier. Chardar, a Nepalese micropaleologist from the company’s Himalayan center, was there to greet Mercedes. He took her luggage and brought her to the main house. From the veranda they watched Blair take off, his little float plane dwindling swiftly into the cirrus-streaked immensities of the Bahamian sky.

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