The Second Time Travel Megapack: 23 Modern and Classic Stories by Kristine Kathryn Rusch & Robert J. Sawyer

Author:Kristine Kathryn Rusch & Robert J. Sawyer [Rusch, Kristine Kathryn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: science fiction, short stories, adventure, time travel, sci-fi
ISBN: 9781479403400
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2014-08-13T00:00:00+00:00

There was something terrifying about all this, some aura of the same dispassionate cruelty he had felt, once, in the experiment room of a naturalist friend whose skinned frogs and guinea-pigs had twitched to the galvanic false-face of searching electrodes’. They had been bundles of gory flesh, like the scarlet horror on a table near a second door in the farther wall. But that was—that had been a man!

“No,” Elaise groaned, behind him. “No. I will not—” Her voice choked off.

Stratton whirled. The girl was writhing in the grip of Flaton’s macabre weapon, her dear face twisted out of all semblance to humanity by the torture Stratton himself had found unendurable.

The cylinder’s green nimbus blinked out and he caught Flaton’s grim order. “Disrobe, or you shall feel the agony again. Strip off your garb, female.”

Flaton’s great eyes flicked to Stratton, and the youth read his appalling intention. Wrath lightninged through him, obliterating fear. He left his feet in a long low dive, his arms flailing ahead of him in a desperate stab at the future-mans spindly legs.

Because instinct, and not thought, inspired that mad attack, Flaton was not warned of it in time to bring his weapon to bear on the berserk youth. Stratton’s shoulder crashed against the fellow’s frail limbs. They snapped at the impact, and Flaton went down under the mad charge. Paper-thin bones crunched under his blow. Abruptly he realized he was pummeling a squashed thing that did not move, a thing out of which all life had expired.

“Ronny,” Elaise was crying. “Here, Ronny. His wand of magic!”

Stratton pushed himself erect, shuddering now with revulsion from the touch of that which had been the fruit of all mankind’s long travail, shaking still with the fury that had fired him to his unexpected triumph. Elaise was thrusting at him the black cylinder of the disintegrator ray. He snatched it from her, found the thumb-button that would release its fearful energy.

Somewhere outside someone called: “Flaton! Come quickly. I need your help. The barbarians attack us!”

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