Gordon Dickson The Alien Way

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varnished-wood door among the green ones on his left. Behind that was the room
and the bed that had been floating in his mind for hours now, as seductively
as a dream of a fountain to a man lost in the desert.
However, he kept going, on down the hall and in through the narrow door
leading into the bottom of the library stacks. Here, on this basement level,
the windows that had been pierced in the outer walls of the stack higher up
were not able to filter down enough light to see by. The artificial lights
were off. He reached up, found the hanging cord of the first sixty-watt bulb
inside the entrance and jerked downward. Yellow light revealed the shelves of
books and magazines stretching away from him and the narrow, circular metal
staircase to the levels above.
He climbed with great effort, turning on lights as he went. On the third
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file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Gordon%20R%20Dickson%20-%20The%20Ali
en%20Way.txt level he left the stair and stumped heavily down aisles between
bookcases until he came to the polished hardwood door that opened from the
stacks into Mele's office.
Putting his ear to the panel of that door, gratefully for a moment leaning
against it, he heard the faint, polite clicking of her typewriter-recorder. He
sighed-it was almost an explosion of air in relief and exhaustion from his
lungs. He put his hand on the doorknob, opened it, and tottered in and down
the two small steps to her desk.
His hand pawed out in search of the wastebasket, to turn it up and sit on it
as he had before. But the effort was too complex and too much for his
strength. His knees gave way, and he dropped down heavily on a large tape
video-audio portable recorder beside her desk. For a moment his head swam with
the relief of being off his feet, and he had to catch the edge of her desk
with both hands to keep from falling over.
He was aware of her face staring at him from behind the now silent typewriter.
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He stared back. He had-some uncertain, semidelirious time ago-figured out what
he would say to her, how he would explain that the situation justified his
involving her by asking her for help. But now, now that he was face to face
with her, neither the strength nor the words would come. He simply sat, still
dripping with the rain, leaning on the edge of her desk, staring at her with
eyes burned dry with sleeplessness-silent.
Then the room began to tilt slowly on end. He was barely conscious of his
falling, sliding off the tape recorder, and his feeble efforts to stop
himself. Then ... nothing.
When he woke, he was back in the stacks. He was not far from the doorway that
opened on Mele's office, but he was back in a corner, and the light in the
adjoining aisle threw shadows that would hide him from anyone underneath it.
He was propped up in an angle of the comer and a heavy, gray wool blanket was
covering him, wrapped around his shoulders.
Mele was kneeling before him, pouring something from a thermos bottle into a
large coffee cup. He blinked at her uncertainly, collecting his scattered
senses. How she had managed to lift or drag his hundred-and-seventy-five pound
body up the two small stairs and back into the stacks here-to say nothing of
getting him wrapped in the blanket and propped up in this corner-was more than
his fatigue-drugged brain could imagine.
"Drink this, now," she said, holding the full cup to his lips. He started to
swallow, then checked himself so abruptly that some of the liquid spilled on
his chin. He had suddenly realized that what she was giving him might be
coffee, and he had drunk so many innumerable cups of this in hamburger joints
and from coffee machines in the last twenty-four hours that the thought of
swallowing more of it gagged him.
But then the taste of what had touched his lips and the scent rising from the
liquid reassured him. It was hot vegetable beef soup, and he.
tasted it in his mouth like some strange and wonderful dish from a foreign
land. He was thirsty as well as hungry, and shivering now with a chill that
seemed to be fast friends with the fever in his head. And he gulped eagerly at
the soup, indifferent to the fact that it was scalding his tongue and the
inside of his mouth and sore throat.
He swallowed a cup and a half of the soup-and was abruptly full. He found that
he could not drink another drop from the cup, and he closed his lips against
it, trying meanwhile to get his hand out from under the
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file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Gordon%20R%20Dickson%20-%20The%20Ali
en%20Way.txt blanket to push it away. But Mele understood and took the cup
away. She wiped his chin with a paper napkin, and the paper caught and snagged
on the bristles of his unshaven beard.
". . . Better go now ..." he said. "I'll be all right." He hugged the blanket
around him in a new access of shivering. But she did not move.
She continued to kneel there, staring at him.
"Swallow these now," she said, producing some capsules and another cup filled
with water. "They're antibiotics, achrocidin." He took the capsules in his
mouth and swallowed the cool water. "Jase," she said, putting the cup down.
"Did you do it-what they said you did?"
"What?" he asked. "What-they say?"
"Did you add a film strip to the recording Kator made, telling the Ruml all
about our knowing about them, and the Baits, and showing them a picture of our
warships in space?"
"Yes," he said, huskily through his sore throat, which was now beginning to
hurt steadily and fiercely, "I had to. You see-"
"You don't have to tell me." She was still staring at him, on her knees.
"I don't care why you did it. When Swanson first came to see if I knew you'd
been planning something like that, I first tried to think why you'd do
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something like that. Give away the only advantage we had to aliens that
outnumber us ten to one. But then, when they didn't find you, and I began to
see how everybody else felt about it-what they wanted to do if they could
capture you-I woke up to the fact that ft didn't matter."
He blinked at her. In his feverish head her words buzzed and sang without
making sense.
"Jase-," she said. She took hold of his upper arms through the blanket.
"Don't you understand me? You've got to understand. I don't care what you did!
I was so proud of myself-I thought I believed in things being either right or
wrong, no matter how I felt inside-but I don't!"
She leaned forward and flung her arms around his blanket-wrapped body, hugging
him, pressing her head and the side of her face against the rough blanket over
his chest
'It's only you I care about! You!" Her arms tightened around him as if she
would absorb and drown his shivering in her own body. "And they're not going
to get you! I won't let them!"
He could see the dark hair of her head just below his chin. He opened his
mouth to say something, but his lips trembled loosely and he could force no
sound from his throat. Behind her he saw a black shadow move and obscure the
light in the neighboring aisle. For a moment it passed away, and then it
appeared again, like an occulting shape of darkness, at the end of the aisle
they were in.
It came bobbing toward them and revealed itself into the shape of a man, then [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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