C M Kornbluth - The Mindworm

VIP免费

2024-11-24 0 0 66.74KB 18 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

TheMindworm

C. M.Kornbluth

TheMindworm

THE HANDSOME j. g. and the pretty nurse held out against it as long as they reasonably could, but

blue Pacific water, languid tropical nights, the low atoll dreaming on the horizon—and the complete

absence of any other nice young people for company on the small, uncomfortable parts boat-did their

work. On June 30th they watched through dark glasses as the dazzling thing burst over the fleet and the

atoll. Her manicured hand gripped his arm in excitement and terror. Unfelt radiation sleeted through their

loins.

A storekeeper-third-class namedBielaski watched the young couple with more interest than he showed

in Test Able. After all, he had twenty-five dollars riding on the nurse. That night he lost it to a chiefbosun's

mate who had backed the j. g.

In the course of time, the careless nurse was discharged under conditions other than honorable. The j. g.,

who didn't like to put things in writing, phoned her all the way from Manila to say it was a

damnedshame. When her gratitude gave way to specific inquiry, their overseas connection went bad and

he had to hang up.

She had a child, a boy, turned it over to a foundling home, and vanished from his life into a series of

good jobs andfinally marriage.

The boy grew up stupid, puny and stubborn, greedy and miserable. To the home's hilarious young

athletics director he suddenly said: "You hate me. You think I make the rest of the boys look bad."

The athletics director blustered and laughed, and later told the doctor over coffee: "I watch myself

around the kids. They're sharp— they catch a look or a gesture and it's like a blow in the face to them, I

know that, so I watch myself. So how did he know?"

The doctor told the boy: "Three pounds more this month isn't bad, but how about you pitch in and clean

up your plate every day? Can't live on meat and water; those vegetables make you big and strong."

The boy said: "What's 'neurasthenic' mean?"

The doctor later said to the director: "It made my flesh creep. I was looking at his little spindling body

and dishing out the old pep talk about growing big and strong, and inside my head I was thinkingSve'd

call him neurasthenic in the old days' and then out he popped with it. What should we do? Should we do

anything? Maybe it'll go away. I don't know anything about these things. I don't know whether anybody

does."

"Reads minds, does he?" asked the director. Be damned if he's going to read my mind about Schultz

Meat Market's ten percent. "Doctor, I think I'm going to take my vacation a little early this year. Has

anybody shown any interest in adopting the child?"

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

C M Kornbluth - The Mindworm.pdf

共18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！

C M Kornbluth - The Mindworm

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: