Dean R. Koontz - Fear That Man

VIP免费
2024-12-23 0 0 521.99KB 91 页 5.9玖币
侵权投诉
Scanned by Highroller.
Proofed by an ELF proofer.
FEAR THAT MAN
by Dean Koontz
ONE: PURPOSE
And ye shall seek a new order of things…
I
When he woke from a featureless dream of silver, there was nothing but endless blackness on three
sides, a blackness so intense that it almost coughed out a breath and nearly moved. And when he woke,
he did not know who he was.
The control console—splashed with sixteen luminous dials, scopes, a dozen toggle switches and half a
hundred varicolored buttons—told him that this thing under and behind him was a spaceship. That, at
least, explained the darkness through the viewplate that wrapped around the other three sides of the
guidance nipple. And his misty reflection on the thick plastiglass told him that he was a man, for he had
the eyes of a man (blue), the face of a man (severe, but handsome, topped by a tangle of coal dusted
hair). But these things were generals. When he tried to concentrate on specifics, there were no answers.
Who was he?
The dials only wavered in answer.
What had been his past?
Only the scopes, pulsating…
And where was he bound?
He sat very still, running through all the things that he did know. This was the year 3456. He knew the
names of the cities; he understood the function and order of the empire; the past history of the galaxy was
at his tongue tip, quivering. Generals, all.
Who was he? What had been his past? And where was he bound?
He unbuckled and pushed himself from his contour-molded seat, walked behind it, away from the
viewplate and toward the rear of the chamber.
Grayness. The room was tomblike, a single-hued conformity of leaden plating, machines, and service
stands. Only the glow from the control console added a note of liveliness. Circling the room, he found
there was no written log. There was a service stand for that purpose, but it was empty. The logtapes
brought only great thunders, crashing and scraping until he was no longer so very certain that there should
be a log. After all, if he could not remember his own name, how could he be so damnably sure of these
lesser things?
Bong-bong-bong!
He whirled, his heart racing wildly in response to the alarm. Waves of yellow light crashed across the
room, splashed off the dark walls. He swallowed the lump in his throat, walked back to his chair. He
seemed to know how to operate a ship, for his fingers flew across the switches and dials, touched the
scopes and traced patterns on them as his mind automatically sifted through the readings they gave,
interpreting them. “Report!” he said to the vessel.
There was a moment of silence, then: OBJECT APPROACHING. SPEED NEGLIGIBLE.
UNNATURAL.
“Size?”
The ship grumbled as if clearing its throat. He knew, somehow, that it was only seeking an answer tape.
THREE FEET BY TWO FEET BY FIVE FEET.
“Time to contact?”
FOURTEEN MINUTES.
“Call me then.” He flipped off the computer comline and went to the rear of the cabin. Rather than sit and
wait for the speck, he would investigate the rest of the ship. It might hold a clue to his identity. He tugged
at the circular wall hatch, swung it inward. Beyond lay a corridor, narrow and low-ceilinged. At the end
of it, he knew, lay a room of shielding before the drive chamber. Along the sides were two rooms that he
could enter without being burned to death by hard radiation.
In the room to the right, there was a complete laboratory. Long rows of glittering machines lined the
walls, humming, chanting to themselves. In the very center of the chamber, there was a table with a
flexoplast top. He touched the mattress and watched while the shimmering stuff squeezed his hands,
pushed between his fingers, gripped him. It was a surgeon’s table. Above it, suspended from the ceiling
like bloated spiders, were the robosurgeons—spherical, many-armed, silver-fingered. He shivered. On
the third try, he freed his hand from the table, walked into the hall. He did not entirely trust machines like
the robosurgeons—machines that were so much like men but without the mercies, faults, or thoughts of
men.
The room across the corridor was an armory. Crates of construction explosives sat on the floor, enough
to level a city. There were racks of guns on the walls. Vaguely, he knew there were no guns in the world
any more. Men of this age did not kill anything but game animals. Guns were mainly for collecting. But
these were too new for collecting, and deep within he knew he possessed the ability to use each of
them—and to a deadly intent. Against the far wall and next to the cargo portal sat a ground car,
broadcasting nubs studding it. With its invincible shield turned on, it was, in effect, another weapon.
There was something bothering him, something more than the mere presence of weapons. Then, as he
gazed at the ground car, he knew what it was. Nothing here carried a trade name! The car was void of
brand, model, and make. So were the rifles and the throwing knives—and the explosives. All of these
things had been produced to provide anonymity for their maker. But who had made them? And for what
purpose?
Bong-bong-bong!
At first, he ignored the ship’s alarm, trying to think. But the ship grew more insistent. He put back the rifle
he had been examining and left for the control room.
UNIDENTIFIED OBJECT APPROACHING. CLARIFICATION IN THIRTY SECONDS. The
computer’s squawk-box grated the words out like sandpaper drawn across sandpaper.
CLARIFICATION. IT IS A MAN.
“A man? Out here without a ship?”
THERE IS A HEARTBEAT.
II
Like a grotesquely misshapen fruit, the body in the red jumpsuit floated in the blackness, directionless,
moving with a slight spin that brought all sides of it into view.
UNCONSCIOUS.
He brought the ship in as close as possible, studied the crimson figure. What was a man doing this far
from a ship, alone, in a suit that could not support him for more than twelve hours? “I’m going to have
him brought in,” he said to the ship.
DO YOU THINK YOU SHOULD?
“He’ll die out there!”
The ship was silent.
Like small animals, his fingers moved. A moment later, the cylindrical body of the Scavenger appeared in
the viewplate. It was another almost-alive machine. He tensed with the sight of it. The single eye of the
Scavenger focused on the body. On the console screen, there was a close-up of the stranger. The lens
caught the face inside the helmet, and he was no longer sure it was a man.
There was a face with two eyes, but no eyebrows. Where the brows should have been, there were two
bony ridges, hard and dark and glistening. A mane of brown hair streaked with white lay as a cushion
about the head. The mouth was wide and generous, but definitely not the mouth of a man. The lips were
a bit too red, and the teeth that stuck over them at two places were sharp, pointed, and very white. Still,
it was more of a man than an animal. There was a look about the face that suggested soul-tortured
agony, and that was very human indeed. He directed the Scavenger to begin retrieval.
When the machine had done this and was locked in place on the mother ship, he opened the floor hatch,
drew up the body, and carefully unsuited it. The helmet bore the stenciled name HURKOS…
… He was in a great cathedral. The red tongues of candles flickered in their silver holders.
Belina was dead. No one died any longer, but Belina was dead. A rare case. The monster in her
womb had slashed her apart. Nothing the doctors could do. When you can’t turn to blame other
men, there is only one entity to blame: God. It was difficult finding a temple, for there were not
many faithful these days. But he had found one now, complete with its holy water tainted with the
sacrificial blood and its handful of ancient Christians—ancient because they refused the
man-made immortality of the Eternity Combine: they grew old.
In the great cathedral…
In the great cathedral, clambering across the altar railing and clutching the feet of the great
crucifix. On the kneecap, slipping, falling to the feet three times until the bruises blackened his
arms beneath the thickly matted hair. Then, grasping at the loincloth, fingers hooked into the
wooden folds, pulling himself up, weeping… A foot in the navel, shoving up… screaming into the
ear… But the ear, after all, was wooden. The ear merely cast back his condemnations.
Candles flickered below.
He began swaying, using his weight to topple God. The head did not respond at first. He locked
his arms more tightly about it. It began to sway. The head fell, crashing from the shoulders,
down…
Then toppled the body.
He pushed away from it as it—and he—fell.
There were sirens and hospital attendants.
The last thing he remembered seeing was an old man, a Christian, cradled between the broken
halves of God’s face, mumbling and content with his sanctuary…
He pulled himself away from Hurkos, shook his head. That had been the stranger’s dream. How had he
experienced it?
Hurkos opened his eyes. They were chunks of polished coal, dark jewels threatening many secrets. His
mouth was very dry, and when he tried to speak the corners of his lips cracked and spilled blood. The
nameless man brought water. Finally: “It didn’t work, then.” Hurkos had a deep, commanding voice.
“What didn’t work? What were you doing out there?”
Hurkos smiled. “Trying to kill myself.”
“Suicide?”
“They call it that.” He sipped more water.
“Because Belina died?”
Hurkos bristled. “How did you… ?” After a moment: “I guess I told you.”
“Yes. How could I hear your dreams like that?”
Hurkos looked puzzled for a moment. “I’m a telepath, of course. Sometimes I project, some rarer times
I read thoughts. A very unstable talent. I project mostly when I’m asleep—or under pressure.”
“But how did you get out there without a ship?”
“After I was released from the hospital—after Belina’s death and the crucifix incident—I signed on the
Space Razzle as a cargo handler. When we were relatively far out in untraveled space, I went into the
hold, disconnected the alarms from the pressure chamber, and left. I won’t be missed until pay day.”
“But why not step out without a suit? That would be quicker.”
Hurkos smiled an unsmile. “I guess a little of the healing did take hold. I guess we can recover from
anything.” But he did not look recovered. “Right now, my talent is fading. I can’t see a name in your
mind.”
He hesitated. “You can’t see a name… because I have none.” Briefly, he recounted the story of the
waking, the amnesia, the strangeness of the ship.
Hurkos was excited. Here was something in which he could submerge his grief, his melancholia. “We are
going to make a real search of this tub, you and me. But first, you ought to have a name.”
“What?”
“How about—Sam?” He paused. “After a friend of mine.”
“I like it. Who was the friend?”
“A dog I bought on Callileo.”
“Thanks!”
“He was noble.”
With the preliminaries out of the way, Sam could no longer contain his curiosity. “We both have names
now. We know I am a man—but what are you?”
Hurkos looked startled. “You don’t know what a Mue is?”
“No. I guess maybe I have been gone too long. Maybe I left before there were Mues around.”
“Then you left a thousand years ago—and you went damn far away!”
III
Hurkos came padding down the narrow corridor and into the main chamber. “Nothing at all!” he said,
incredulous.
They had been searching for six hours, looking through and behind everything. Still, no clues. During the
time they had pried about together, however, Sam had filled in a few gaps in his education; Hurkos had
recounted the history of the Mues. Once, well over a thousand years before, man had tried to make
other men with the aid of artificial wombs, large tanks of semi-hydroponic nature that took sperm and
egg of their own making and worked at forming babies. But after hundreds and hundreds of attempts,
nothing exceedingly worthwhile had come of it. They had been attempting to produce men with psionic
abilities valuable as weapons of war. Sometimes they came close, but never did they truly succeed. Then,
when the project was finally junked, they had five hundred mutated children on their hands. This was a
time when mankind was laying down its weapons for tools of friendship. Most looked upon the wombs
as a hideous arm of the war effort that should never have been started in the first place—and they looked
upon the Mue children with pity and shame. There was a great public outcry when the government hinted
that the Mues might be put quietly and painlessly to sleep. Though some people did not consider them
human, the vast majority of the population could not tolerate so horrid a slaughter with the Permanent
Peace only months behind them. The Mues lived. In fifteen years, they had equality by law. In another
hundred, they had it in reality. And they mated and had more of their kind, although the children were
often perfectly normal. Today, there were fourteen million Mues—only an eighth of one percent of the
galactic population, but alive and breathing and happy just the same. And Hurkos was one of them.
Fourteen million.
And he could not remember having ever heard of them before.
“Food’s about ready,” he said. Just then the light above the wall slot popped off and the tray slid out.
“Smells good.”
They pulled the tray apart where it was perforated and sat on the floor to eat. “It’s damn eerie,” Hurkos
said, spitting the words around a mouthful of synthe-beef. “There should be some trademark, some
scrap of writing, at least one brand name!” He paused, swallowed, then snapped, “The food!”
Sam waved him back to his seat before the Mue could spill his dinner in a futile effort to rise quickly. “I
already looked. The volume of food basics below the synthesizer is in unmarked containers.”
Hurkos frowned, sat down. “Well, let’s see what we do know. First, there is no log. Second, there is no
trade name, serial number, brand anywhere on the ship. Third, you have no memory of your own past
beyond this morning. Fourth, though you do not remember a thing that happened to you in your lifetime,
you do remember the basics of empire history, human history. Except, that is, for a few especially glaring
holes. Such as the artificial wombs and we Mues.”
“Agreed thus far,” Sam said, putting down his food, wiping his mouth.
“What’s the matter? You hardly ate.”
Sam grimaced, waved a hand vaguely and let it fall into his lap. “I don’t know exactly. I’m afraid to eat.”
Hurkos looked down at his own tray, paused half-finished with a mouthful. “Afraid?”
“There’s this… hazy sort of fear… because…”
“Go on!”
“Because it’s been made by machines. The food isn’t natural.”
Hurkos swallowed. “There is the fifth piece of data. You’re afraid of machines. I thought so
earlier—judging by your reaction to the sight of the robosurgeons.”
“But I’ll starve!”
“I doubt that. You ate enough to keep you going. You just won’t get fat is all.”
Sam started to say something, but in the moment it took for his words to come from his larnyx to his
tongue, he felt his head being ripped apart by thunders that shook every ounce of his flesh and soul. He
opened his mouth, tried to scream, closed it abruptly. There was a chaos of noise in his head, a
fermenting, fizzing, erupting madness. He was just barely aware that Hurkos was still talking to him, but
he heard nothing. The world of the ship was distant and unreal. The noises, then, were speaking to him in
a language of cacophony. Then he lost all awareness, was wrapped into the boomings, the dissonance.
He pushed from the floor, found his seat, strapped in.
Hurkos was beside him, obviously shouting. But he heard nothing.
Nothing but the dissonance.
He saw the Mue running, crawling into the flexoplast mattress they had taken off the surgeon’s table.
They had decided, since there was no second chair, that the flexoplast—wrapped completely around the
Mue as a protective shell—would be a perfect substitute for a chair.
Sam slammed down on the toggles, blasted… then hyperspaced with a gut-wrenching jerk.
Hurkos was shouting from inside his mattress.
The ship moaned.
He reclined in his seat. The ship reached top hyperspace in incredibly short time. And collided with
something…
IV
The thunders, as soon as Sam had thrown the ship out of hyperspace and into Real Space, had faded
into silence. He again had control of his body.
Hurkos was rolling all over the floor, bounding off the walls as the ship shuddered, wallowed with the
impact.
Sam remembered, suddenly, that they had struck something, and he looked up at the viewplate and the
blank expanse of normal space. So near that he could almost touch it, another ship was drifting in front
and slightly to the left of him. Perhaps only a mile away. Close for a shield-collision. He punched for open
radio and tried to contact the other vessel, but he received no response.
“What the hell were you doing!” Hurkos shouted, freeing himself of the flexoplast and staggering to his
feet.
Sam loosened his seatbelt and also stood. He felt as if he was about to throw up, but he fought the urge.
“I don’t know! I just lost control of my mind, my body, everything! Someone told me to set a course for
the capital.”
“Hope?”
“Yes. It told me to set a course for Hope and to hyperspace. Argument was impossible.”
Hurkos rubbed a sore spot on his arm, bruised because he had not gotten it into the flexoplast in time.
“Did you recognize the voice?”
“It wasn’t exactly a voice. It was more like… well…”
There was a sudden pounding noise.
They whirled in the direction of the sound and saw a suited figure against the viewplate, rapping his fist
against the glass. He had his suit phone turned up to maximum volume and was shouting something. They
moved to the window. The man outside was huge—six feet six if an inch, two hundred and sixty pounds
if an ounce. “Open up and let me in!” he was shouting. “Let me in before I tear this tub apart plate for
plate!”
He looked as if he just might be able to carry out that threat.
“He must be from the other ship,” Hurkos said, moving to open the outer doors into the Scavenger that
served as a pressure chamber.
The figure moved away from the viewplate toward the port. They waited nervously until the chamber
closed, equalized with cabin pressure, and the door in the floor was opened.
If the stranger from the other ship had been imposing seen through the viewplate, he was overwhelming
seen at first hand, inside the cabin, his head towering dangerously close to the ceiling. He pulled back his
helmet, spewing a stream of curses, his eyes two fiery droplets within the flushed fury of his face. His
blond hair was a wild disarray, uncombed and completely uncombable. “What the hell are you, some
kinda moron? Morons have been wiped out of the culture! Haven’t you been told? You’re a
one-of-a-kind, and I have to meet up with you in all this emptiness where—by all rights—we should
never even be able to imagine each other’s existence!”
“I guess you’re angry about the collision,” Sam began, “and—”
The big man allowed his mouth to drop to his ankles and bounce back to a more respectable level just
below the chin. “You guess I’m angry about the collision! You guess I” He turned to Hurkos. “He
guesses I’m angry about the collision,” he repeated as if the stupidity of the remark was the most glaring
understatement ever pronounced and had to be shared and discussed to be believed.
“I—” Sam began once more.
“Of course I’m angry about the collision! Damn furious is what I am! You hyperspaced without checking
to see if there was another ship in hyperspace within the danger limit. Your field locked in mine and jolted
us out into Real Space. What would have happened if our ships had struck instead of just our fields?”
“That’s rather unlikely,” Hurkos said. “After all, the fields are five miles in diameter, but the ships are far,
far smaller than that. The odds against our ships striking in so vast a galaxy—”
“A moron spewing logic!” the big stranger shouted. “A real, honest moron shouting scientific
gobbleygook at me like it really meant something to him! This is amazing.” He slapped one hammy hand
against his forehead in a snow of amazement.
“If you’ll just listen a moment…” Sam sighed, seeing the big man’s lips open for comment even before he
had said three words.
“Listen? I’m all ears. I’m just all ears for your excuse! Some excuse that could possibly explain your
imbecilic reactions, and—”
“Wait a minute!” Hurkos shouted gleefully. “I know you!”
The stranger stopped talking abruptly.
“Mikos. You’re Mikos, the poet. Gnossos Mikos!”
The rage was swept away in the wash of a wide grin, and the grin became a flush of embarrassment. The
huge fist dropped away from the forehead and became a hand again—a hand that was abruptly stuck out
to Hurkos as a sign of friendliness. “And I haven’t had the pleasure,” the giant said politely.
Hurkos took the hand, shook it vigorously.
For one short moment, Sam felt as if he were going to collapse. Fear of the colossus had been the only
thing holding him up, a fear whose vibrant force coursed through his quivering legs and straightened him
with its current. Now, the fear gone, he wanted nothing so much as to fold up his legs, tuck them under
his belly, and fall onto his face. Somehow, he held himself erect.
“My name is Hurkos. First and last. I’m a nobody, but I read your poetry. I love it. Especially “The
Savagery of Old.”
“That was a damn grizzly one though,” Gnossos said, beaming.
“Spill the blood across the savage face;
Raise the ax, the bow, the gun, the mace—”
Gnossos finished the quatrain:
“Scream the scream that breaks apart the chest.
Killing is the thing you know best.”
The grin on the poet’s face was even wider.
“All the world’s a stage for plundering…” Hurkos began the next stanza.
“Hmmph!” Sam manged to cough without being too conspicuous.
“Oh! Mr. Mikos, this is—”
“Gnossos,” the poet interrupted. “Call me Gnossos.”
Hurkos was more than pleased with the offer of a first name basis. “Gnossos, this is a recently-made
friend of mine. Sam, meet Gnossos Mikos, the empire’s most famous and most literate poet.”
The giant hand came forth, engulfed Sam’s own in a warm, dry embrace that almost crushed every bone
up to his wrist. “Glad to meet you, Sam!” He seemed to mean it. “Now what malfunction of your vessel
caused this recent unpleasantry?”
“I—”
“Perhaps I can help you repair it.”
Later, after the poet had heard the story of the missing trade names, the amnesia, the memory blank, the
strange voices in Sam’s head, he rubbed his hands together and said, “You’ll not get rid of me until we
discover the roots of this thing. What a helluva mystery! It’s almost worth an epic poem already!”
“Then you aren’t angry?” Sam asked.
“Angry? But whatever for? If you’re referring to the unfortunate collision of our hyperspace fields, please
let us forget it. It was very obviously not your fault, and there are far more important things to discuss.”
Sam sighed again, heavily.
“Well,” Hurkos said, “what do you make of it?” He was hunched forward, as they all were, sitting on the
floor like a small boy at his father’s knee.
Gnossos rolled his tongue over his wide, perfect teeth, thought a moment. His eyes were crystal blue and,
when he stared, it seemed as if he were looking directly through—not at—whatever his gaze fell upon. “It
sounds,” he said at length, “as if someone is trying to overturn the galaxy—or the order of the galazy, at
least.”
Hurkos looked at him blankly. Sam shifted, waited for more, shifted again. “What do you mean?”
“Consider the weapons. Weapons have been illegal—except for sport, Beast hunting and collecting—for
a thousand years. You say these weapons are obviously not for sporting because of their terrific power,
and yet no one collects explosives or new and gleaming guns. Someone, it seems painfully clear to me,
means to use them on humans.”
Sam shuddered. Hurkos blanched. The thought had been hanging in the rear of their minds, but neither
had allowed it to gain perspective out in the light of the conscious. Now it was looming there—to be
feared.
“The trade names,” Gnossos continued, “are missing because this ship and its contents were designed to
provide secrecy for their owner and manufacturer. Sam here is being used by someone. He seems to be
a tool to overthrow the current order of things.”
“Then he could get orders at any time to kill both of us!”
Sam was perspiring.
摘要：

ScannedbyHighroller.ProofedbyanELFproofer.FEARTHATMANbyDeanKoontzONE:PURPOSEAndyeshallseekaneworderofthings…IWhenhewokefromafeaturelessdreamofsilver,therewasnothingbutendlessblacknessonthreesides,ablacknesssointensethatitalmostcoughedoutabreathandnearlymoved.Andwhenhewoke,hedidnotknowwhohewas.Thecon...

展开>> 收起<<
Dean R. Koontz - Fear That Man.pdf

共91页,预览19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！

相关推荐

更多
立即下载
分类：外语学习 价格：5.9玖币 属性：91 页 大小：521.99KB 格式：PDF 时间：2024-12-23

开通VIP享超值会员特权

  • 多端同步记录
  • 高速下载文档
  • 免费文档工具
  • 分享文档赚钱
  • 每日登录抽奖
  • 优质衍生服务

作者详情

相关内容

更多

热门标签

人际关系 动力学连接体 力的合成 配电装置 高考理综 全宋诗作者索引 公务员考试
/ 91
评分 收藏
分享
立即下载 VIP免费下载
客服
关注