C M Kornbluth - The Luckiest Man In Denv

VIP免费

2024-11-24 0 0 55.46KB 11 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

The Luckiest Man in Denv

C. M. Kornbluth

The Luckiest Man in Denv

MAY'S MAN Reuben, of the eighty-third level, Atomist, knew there was something wrong when the

binoculars flashed and then went opaque. Inwardly he cursed, hoping that he had not committed himself

to anything. Outwardly he was unperturbed. He handed the binoculars back to Rudolph's man Almon, of

the eighty-ninth level, Maintainer, with a smile.

"They aren't very good," he said.

Almon put them to his own eyes, glanced over the parapet, and swore mildly. "Blacker than the heart of

a crazy Angelo, eh? Never mind; here's another pair."

This pair was unremarkable. Through it, Reuben studied the thousand setbacks and penthouses of Denv

that ranged themselves below. He was too worried to enjoy his first sight of the vista from the

eighty-ninth level, but he let out a murmur of appreciation. Now to get away from this suddenly sinister

fellow and try to puzzle it out.

"Could we-?" he asked cryptically, with a little upward jerk of his chin.

"It's better not to," Almon said hastily, taking the glasses from his hands. "What if somebody with stars

happened to see, you know? How'd you like it if you saw some impudent fellow peering up at you?"

"He wouldn't dare!" said Reuben, pretending to be stupid and indignant, and joined a moment later in

Almon's sympathetic laughter.

"Never mind," said Almon. "We are young. Some day, who knows? Perhaps we shall look from the

ninety-fifth level, or the bun-" dredth."

Though Reuben knew that the Maintainer was no friend of his, the generous words sent blood

hammering through his veins; ambition for a moment.

He pulled a long face and told Almon: "Let us hope so. Thank you for being my host. Now I must return

to my quarters."

He left the windy parapet for the serene luxury of an eighty-ninth-level corridor and descended

slow-moving stairs through gradually less luxurious levels to his own Spartan floor. Selene was waiting,

smiling, as he stepped off the stairs.

She was decked out nicely-too nicely. She wore a steely hued corselet and a touch of scent; her hair

was dressed long. The combination appealed to him, and instantly he was on his guard. Why had she

gone to the trouble of learning his tastes? What was she up to? After all, she wasGriffin's woman.

"Coming down?" she asked, awed. "Where have you been?"

"The eighty-ninth, as a guest of that fellow Almon. The vista is immense."

"I've never been . . ." she murmured, and then said decisively: "You belong up there. And higher.Griffin

laughs at me, but he's a fool. Last night in chamber we got to talking about you, I don't know how, and

he finally became quite angry and said he didn't want to hear another word." She smiled wickedly. "I was

revenged, though."

Blank-faced, he said: "You must be a good hand at revenge, Selene, and at stirring up the need for it." -

The slight hardening of her smile meant that he had scored and he hurried by with a rather formal

salutation.

Burn him for an Angelo, but she was easy enough to take! The contrast of the metallic garment with her

soft, white skin was disturbing, and her long hair suggested things. It was hard to think of her as scheming

something or other; scheming Selene was displaced in his mind by Selene in chamber.

But what was she up to? Had she perhaps heard that he was to be elevated? WasGriffingoing to be

swooped on by the Maintainers? Was he to kill offGriffinso she could leech onto some rising third party?

Was she perhaps merely giving her man a touch of the lash?

He wished gloomily that tha binoculars problem and the Selene problem had not come together. That

trickster Almon had spoken of youth as though it were something for congratulation; he hated being

young and stupid and unable to puzzle out the faulty binoculars and the warmth ofGriffin's woman.

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 Luckiest Man In Denv.pdf

共11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 Luckiest Man In Denv

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: