Sturgeon, Theodore - The Cosmic Rape.pdf

(158 KB) Pobierz
The Cosmic Rape
Cover
The Cosmic Rape
The Cosmic Rape
Chapter 1
Chapter 11
Chapter 21
Chapter 2
Chapter 12
Chapter 22
Chapter 3
Chapter 13
Chapter 23
Chapter 4
Chapter 14
Chapter 24
Chapter 5
Chapter 15
Chapter 25
Chapter 6
Chapter 16
Chapter 26
Chapter 7
Chapter 17
Chapter 27
Chapter 8
Chapter 18
Chapter 28
Chapter 9
Chapter 19
Chapter 29
Chapter 10
Chapter 20
Chapter 30
Chapter 1
“I’ll bus’ your face, Al,” said Gurlick.
“I gon’ break your back. I gon’ blow up your place,
an’ you with it, an’ all your rotgut likker, who wants it?
You hear me, Al?”
Al didn’t hear him. Al was back of the bar in his
saloon, three blocks away, probably still indignantly
red, still twitching his long bald head at the empty
doorway through which Gurlick had fled, still repeating
what all his customers had just witnessed: Gurlick
cringing in from the slick raw night, fawning at Al,
stretching his stubble in a ragged brown grin, tilting
his head, half-closing his sick-green, muddy-whited
eyes. “Walkin’ in here,” Al would be reporting for
the fourth time in nine minutes, “all full of good-ol’-Al
this an’ hiya-buddy that, an’ you-know-me-Al,
and how’s about a little, you-know; an all I says is I
know you all right, Gurlick, shuck on out o’ here, I
wouldn’t give you sand if I met you on the beach; an’
him spittin’ like that, right on the bar, an’ runnin’ out,
an’ stickin’ his head back in an’ callin’ me a—”
Sanctimoniously, Al would not sully his lips with the
word. And the rye-and-ginger by the door would be
nodding wisely and saying, “Man shouldn’t mention
a feller’s mother, whatever,” while the long-term
would be clasping his glass, warm as pablum and
headless as Ann Boleyn, and intoning, “You was
right, Al, dead right.”
Gurlick, four blocks away now, glanced back over
his shoulder and saw no pursuit. He slowed his
scamper to a trot and then a soggy shuffle, hunching
his shoulders against the blowing mist. He kept on
cursing Al, and the beer, and the rye-and-ginger,
announcing that he could take ’em one at a time or
all together one-handed.
He could do nothing of the kind, of course. It
wasn’t in him. It would have been success of a sort,
and it was too late in life for Gurlick, unassisted, to
start anything as new and different as success. His
very first breath had been ill-timed and poorly done,
and from then on he had done nothing right. He
begged badly and stole when it was absolutely safe,
which was seldom, and he rolled drunks providing
they were totally blacked out, alone, and concealed.
He slept in warehouses, box-cars, parked trucks. He
worked only in the most extreme circumstances, and
had yet to last through the second week. “I’ll cut
’em,” he muttered. “Smash their face for
them, I’ll...”
He sidled into an alley and felt along the wall to a
garbage can he knew about. It was a restaurant garbage
can and sometimes... He lifted the lid, and as
he did so saw something pale slide away and fall to
the ground. It looked like a bun, and he snatched at
it and missed. He stooped for it, and part of the
misted wall beside him seemed to detach itself and
become solid and hairy; it scrabbled past his legs. He
gasped in terror and kicked out, a vicious, ratlike
motion, a hysterical spasm.
His foot connected solidly and the creature rose in
the air and fell heavily at the base of the fence, in the
dim wet light from the street. It was a small white
dog, three-quarters starved. It yipped twice, faintly,
tried to rise and could not.
When Gurlick saw it was helpless he laughed aloud
and ran to it and kicked it and stamped on it until it
was dead, and with each blow his vengeance became
more mighty. There went Al, and there the two
barflies and one for the cops, and one for all judges
and jailers, and a good one for everyone in the world
who owned anything, and to top it, one for the rain.
He was a pretty big man by the time he was finished.
Out of breath, he wheezed back to the garbage can
and felt around until he found the bun. It was
sodden and slippery, but it was half a hamburger
which some profligate had tossed into the alley, and
that was all that mattered. He wiped it on his sleeve,
which made no appreciable difference to sleeve or
bun, and crammed the doughy, greasy mass into his
mouth.
He stepped out into the light and looked up through
the mist at the square shoulders of the buildings that
stood around to watch him. He was a man who had
fought for, killed for what was rightfully his. “Don’t
mess with me,” he growled at the city.
A kind of intoxication flooded him. He felt the way
he did at the beginning of that dream he was always
having, where he would walk down a dirt path beside a lake,
feeling good, feeling strong and expectant, knowing he was
about to come to the pile of
clothes on the bank. He wasn’t having the dream just
then, he knew; he was too cold and too wet, but he
squared his shoulders anyway. He began to walk,
looking up. He told the world to look out. He said he
was going to shake it up and dump it and stamp on
its fat face. “You going to know Dan Gurlick passed

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika:

Zgłoś jeśli naruszono regulamin