Eric Frank Russell - Heav'n, Heav'n

VIP免费

2024-12-19 0 0 105.47KB 8 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

HEAV'N HEAV'N

Eric Frank Russell

He swungwide the cast-iron doors, peered into the fire-clay tunnel, and drew a deep breath. It was like

lookinginto the business end of a spaceship. The doors shouldhave opened upon heat and thunder and

beyond the tun- nel the stars. A shuddering in the floor. Silver buttons upon his jacket, little silver comets

on his collar andshoulder straps.

"So!" rasped a voice. "Always you open the doors thenpose like one paralyzed. What is dumfounding

about anoven?"

The uniform with its buttons and comets faded away,leaving him dressed in soiled white overalls. The

floor was creaky but firm. The stars had gone as if they hadnever been.

"Nothing, Monsieur Trabaud."

"Attention then! Prepare the heat as you have beenshown."

"Yes, Monsieur Trabaud."

Taking an armful of fragrant pine branches from the nearby stack, he shoved them between the doors,

useda long iron rake to poke them to the back of the tunnel. Then another bundle and another. He

picked from the floor a dozen small, sticky pinecones, tossed them one by one in among the packed

branches. Then he contem-plated the result. A rocket primed with cones and needles.Buthow absurd.

"Jules!"

"Yes, Monsieur Trabaud."

Snatching hurriedly at pine-branches, twigs and tinylogs, he stuffed them between the doors until the

tunnelwas full. That was done. Everything was ready.

The ship required only the starting spark. Eagle eyes high in the bow must watch for the ground staff to

scurry clear of the coming blast. Then the touch of askilled, experienced finger upon a crimson button.

Afterthat a howl from below, a gigantic trembling, a slow up-ward climb becoming faster, faster, faster.

"Name of a dog! Now he is transfixed yet again. ThatI should be afflicted with such a dreamer."

Brushing past him, Trabaud thrust a flambeau of blaz-ing paper into the filled oven, slammed shut the

doors. He turned upon the other, his heavy black eyebrowsfrowning. "Jules Rioux, you are of the age

sixteen. Yes?"

"Yes, Monsieur Trabaud."

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

"Therefore you are old enough to know that to bake bread there must be hotness within this sacred

oven.And for that we must have fire; and to have fire we mustapply a flame. Is that not so?"

"Yes, Monsieur Trabaud," he agreed shamefacedly.

"Then why should I have to tell you these thingsagain and again and again?"

"I am an imbecile, Monsieur."

"If that were so, I could understand; I could forgiveyou. The good God makes fools in order to create

pity."Seating himself on a dusty and bulging sack, Trabaud putforth a hairy arm, drew the other to him,

went on in con-fidential tones. "Your brain wanders like a rejected lover in a strange country. Tell me, my

little, who is this girl?"

"Girl?"

"This woman, this divine creature who fills your mind."

"There is no woman, Monsieur."

"No woman?" Trabaud was frankly astonished. "Yousicken with desire and yet there is no woman?"

"No, Monsieur."

"Then of what do you dream?"

"Of the stars, Monsieur."

"A thousand thunders!" Trabaud spread hands in muteappeal and gazed prayerfully at the ceiling. "An

appren-tice baker. Of what does he dream? Of the stars!"

"I cannot help myself, Monsieur."

"Of course you cannot; you are but sixteen." He gavean expressive shrug. "I will ask you two things.

How can there be people if no man makes bread? And howcan anyone go among the stars if there are

no people?"

"I do not know, Monsieur."

"There are ships flying between the stars," continuedTrabaud, "for one reason only - because here we

havelife." Leaning to one side he picked up a yard-long loaf, yeasty and golden-crusted. "And this

sustains life."

"Yes, Monsieur."

"Do you think that I would not like to adventureamong the stars?" asked Trabaud.

"You,Monsieur?" Jules stared at him wide-eyed.

"Of a certainty. But I am old and gray-haired and Ihave risen to different eminence. There are many

things I cannot do, shall never do. But I have become a greatartist; I make beautiful bread."

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

HEAV'NHEAV'NEricFrankRussell Heswungwidethecast-irondoors,peeredintothefireclaytunnel,anddrewadeepbreath.Itwaslikelookingintothebusinessendofaspaceship.Thedoorsshouldhaveopeneduponheatandthunderandbeyondthetunnelthestars.Ashudderinginthefloor.Silverbuttonsuponhisjacket,littlesilvercometsonhiscoll...

展开>> 收起<<

Eric Frank Russell - Heav'n, Heav'n.pdf

共8页,预览2页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Eric Frank Russell - Heav'n, Heav'n

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: