Wolfbane (Sci-Fi Classic). Cyril M. Kornbluth

      Cyril M. Kornbluth, Frederik Pohl

      Wolfbane (Sci-Fi Classic)

      Books

      OK Publishing, 2020

       [email protected] Tous droits réservés.

      EAN 4064066397708

      Table of Contents

       CHAPTER I.

       CHAPTER II.

       CHAPTER III.

       CHAPTER IV.

       CHAPTER V.

       CHAPTER VI.

       CHAPTER VII.

       CHAPTER VIII.

       CHAPTER IX.

       CHAPTER X.

       CHAPTER XI.

       CHAPTER XII.

       CHAPTER XIII.

       CHAPTER XIV.

       CHAPTER XV.

       Appallingly, the Earth and the Moon had been kidnapped from the Solar System—but who were the kidnappers and what ransom did they want?

      CHAPTER I.

       Table of Contents

      Roget Germyn, banker, of Wheeling, West Virginia, a Citizen, woke gently from a Citizen's dreamless sleep. It was the third-hour-rising time, the time proper to a day of exceptional opportunity to appreciate.

      Citizen Germyn dressed himself in the clothes proper for the appreciation of great works—such as viewing the Empire State ruins against storm clouds from a small boat, or walking in silent single file across the remaining course of the Golden Gate Bridge. Or as today—one hoped—witnessing the Re-creation of the Sun.

      Germyn with difficulty retained a Citizen's necessary calm. One was tempted to meditate on improper things: Would the Sun be re-created? What if it were not?

      He put his mind to his dress. First of all, he put on an old and storied bracelet, a veritable identity bracelet of heavy silver links and a plate which was inscribed:

      PFC Joe Hartmann

       Korea 1953

      His fellow jewelry-appreciators would have envied him that bracelet—if they had been capable of such an emotion as envy. No other ID bracelet as much as two hundred and fifty years old was known to exist in Wheeling.

      His finest shirt and pair of light pants went next to his skin, and over them he wore a loose parka whose seams had been carefully weakened. When the Sun was re-created, every five years or so, it was the custom to remove the parka gravely and rend it with the prescribed graceful gestures ... but not so drastically that it could not be stitched together again. Hence the weakened seams.

      This was, he counted, the forty-first day on which he and all of Wheeling had do-nned the appropriate Sun Re-creation clothing. It was the forty-first day on which the Sun—no longer white, no longer blazing yellow, no longer even bright red—had risen and displayed a color that was darker maroon and always darker.

      * * * * *

      It had, thought Citizen Germyn, never grown so dark and so cold in all of his life. Perhaps it was an occasion for special viewing. For surely it would never come again, this opportunity to see the old Sun so near to death....

      One hoped.

      Gravely, Citizen Germyn completed his dressing, thinking only of the act of dressing itself. It was by no means his specialty, but he considered, when it was done, that he had done it well, in the traditional flowing gestures, with no flailing, at all times balanced lightly on the ball of the foot. It was all the more perfectly consummated because no one saw it but himself.

      He woke his wife gently, by placing the palm of his hand on her forehead as she lay neatly, in the prescribed fashion, on the Woman's Third of the bed.

      The warmth of his hand gradually penetrated the layers of sleep. Her eyes demurely opened.

      "Citizeness Germyn," he greeted her, making the assurance-of-identity sign with his left hand.

      "Citizen Germyn," she said, with the assurance-of-identity inclination of the head which was prescribed when the hands are covered.

      He retired to his tiny study.

      It was the time appropriate to meditation on the properties of Connectivity. Citizen Germyn was skilled in meditation, even for a banker; it was a grace in which he had schooled himself since earliest childhood.

      Citizen Germyn, his young face composed, his slim body erect as he sat but in no way tense or straining, successfully blanked out, one after another, all of the external sounds and sights and feelings that interfered with proper meditation. His mind was very nearly vacant except of one central problem: Connectivity.

      Over his head and behind, out of sight, the cold air of the room seemed to thicken and form a—call it a blob; a blob of air.

      There was a name for those blobs of air. They had been seen before. They were a known fact of existence in Wheeling and in all the world. They came. They hovered. And they went away—sometimes not alone. If someone had been in the room with Citizen Germyn to look at it, he would have seen a distortion, a twisting of what was behind the blob, like flawed glass, a lens, like an eye. And they were called Eye.

      Germyn meditated.

      The blob of air grew and slowly moved. A vagrant current that spun out from it caught a fragment of paper and whirled it to the floor. Germyn stirred. The blob retreated.

      Germyn, all unaware, disciplined his thoughts to disregard the interruption, to return to the central problem of Connectivity. The blob hovered....

      From the other room, his wife's small, thrice-repeated throat-clearing signaled to him that she was dressed. Germyn got up to go to her, his mind returning to the world; and the overhead Eye spun relentlessly, and disappeared.

      * * * * *

      Some miles east of Wheeling, Glenn Tropile—of a class which found it wisest to give itself no special name, and which had devoted much time and thought to shaking the unwelcome name it had been given—awoke on the couch of his apartment.

      He sat up, shivering. It was cold. The damned Sun