Dickson, Gordon - Necromancer

VIP免费

2024-12-05 0 0 1.15MB 185 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

NECROMANCER

any means, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without

permission in writing from the publisher.

All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons,

living or dead, is purely coincidental.

An Ace Book

ISBN: 0-441-56852-1

First Ace hinting: April 1981

This Printing: August 1982

Published simultaneously in Canada

Manufactured in the United States of America

Ace Books, 200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016

CONTENTS

Book One: ISOLATE

Book Two: SET

Book Three: PATTERN

Book One: ISOLATE

And now, through double glass, I see

My brother's image, darklingly.

Now, aid us, Thor, who prisoners be.

Come—hammer, Lord! And set us free.

The Enchanted Tower

Chapter 1

The mine, generally speaking, was automatic. It consisted

of some hundred and eighty million dollars' worth of

equipment, spread out through three and a half cubic

miles of gold-ore-bearing rock—granite and quartz—all

controlled by the single console where the shift engineer

on duty sat.

Like some ponderous, many-purposed organism, the

mine walked in the layered rock. On various levels it

gnawed out the gold-bearing ore, ground it up to peb-

ble-sized chunks, and sent it by the carload up six hun-

dred feet or more to the open air and the equipment

above. As the mine machinery moved, it created and

abandoned surface shafts, elevator tubes, new exploratory

levels and stopes; and extended the vast central cavern

through which the heavier machinery and its controlling

console slid with the work in progress, laying down rails

before and taking them up behind.

The single engineer on shift at the time controlled all

this. And a touch of megalomania did him no harm on

the job. He was seated before the control panels of the

console like the identity before the brain. His job was the

job of ultimate control. Logical decision, and the facts on

which to base decision were supplied by the computer

element in the equipment. The logically optimum answer

was available at the touch of a button. But it had been

discovered that, like the process of living itself, there was

more to modern mining than logic.

The best engineers had feel. It was a sensitivity born

of experience, of talent, and even of something like love,

with which they commanded, not only the mountains,

but the machine they rode and directed.

Now this too was added to the list of man's endeavors

for which some special talent was needed. Less than ten

per cent of the young mining engineers graduating every

year turned out to have the necessary extra ability to

become one with the titan they directed. Even in the

twenty-first century's overcrowded employment marts,

mines were continually on the hunt for more shift engi-

neers. Even four hours at a time, and even for the tal-

ented ten per cent, was a long time to be the faultless god

in the machine. And the machinery never rested.

Six hundred feet overhead of the man at the console,

Paul Formain, on his first morning at Malabar Mine,

stepped from his small individual quarters of white bub-

ble plastic, and saw the mountains.

And suddenly, there it was again, as it had been time

and again since his boating accident of five years before,

and had been more recently, lately.

But it was not now the open sea that he saw. Or

even the dreamlike image of a strange, shadowy figure in

some sort of cape and a high-peaked hat, who had seemed

to bring him back to life after he had died in the boat,

and returned him to the boat to be finally found and res-

cued by the coast guard.

This time, it was the mountains.

Suddenly, turning from the white, plastic door, he

stopped and saw them. Around him was a steep slope

with the other white buildings of the Malabar Mine. Above

him the fragile blue of a spring sky spoke to the dark

blue of the deep lake below, which filled this cleft in the

mountain rock. About him in every direction were the

Canadian Rockies, stretching thirty miles in one direc-

tion to the British Columbia city of Kamloops, in the

other to the Coast Range and the stony beaches touching

the salt Pacific Ocean surf. Unexpectedly, he felt them.

Like kings they stood up around him, the mountains.

The surf sounded in his blood, and abruptly he was

growing, striding to meet them. He was mountain-size

with the mountains. With them, he felt the eternal move-

ment of the earth. For a moment he was naked but un-

shaken to the winds of understanding. And they blew to

him one word:

Fear.

Do not go down into the mine.

". . . You will get over this, this sort of thing," the

psychiatrist in San Diego had assured him, five years be-

fore, after the accident. "Now that you've worked it out

for yourself and understand it."

"Yes," said Paul.

It had made sense then, the way he had explained it to

himself under the psychiatrist's guidance. He was an or-

phan, since the time of his parents' simultaneous deaths

in a transportation accident, when he was nine. He had

been assigned to good foster parents, but they were not

the same. He had always been solitary.

He had lacked what the San Diego psychiatrist called

"protective selfishness." He had the knack of understand-

ing people without the usual small urge to turn this un-

derstanding to his own advantage. It had embarrassed

those who might have been his friends, once they un-

derstood this capability in him. They had an instinctive

urge to put a protective distance between himself and

them. Underneath, they feared his knowledge and did not

trust his restraint. As a boy he felt their withdrawal with-

out understanding the reasons behind it. And this, said

the psychiatrist, gave him a false picture of his own situ-

ation.

". . . After all," said the psychiatrist, "this lack of a

desire to take advantage of a capability, amounted to a

disability. But no worse than any other disability, such

as blindness or loss of a limb. There was no need to feel

that you could not live with it."

But that was the way, it seemed, that unconsciously he

had felt. And that feeling had culminated in an uncon-

scious attempt at suicide.

". . . There's no doubt," said the psychiatrist, "that

you got the bad-weather, small-craft warning put out by

the coast guard. Or that you knew you were dangerously

far offshore for any weather, in such a light sailboat."

So the storm had driven him out to sea and lost him.

He had been adrift, and in the still days following, death

had come like some heavy gray bird to sit perched on the

idle mast, waiting.

". . . You were in a condition for hallucination," said

the psychiatrist. "It was natural to imagine you had al-

ready died. Then, when afterward you were rescued, you

automatically searched for some justification of the fact

that you were still alive. Your unconscious provided this

fantasy of having been brought back to life by a father-

like figure, tall and mysterious, and wrapped in the

garments that denote magical ability. But when you had

fully recovered, your conscious mind could not help

finding this story somewhat thin."

No, thought Paul, it couldn't help thinking so. He

remembered, in the San Diego hospital, lying there and

doubting the whole memory.

"So to bolster it, you produced these moments of ex-

treme, almost painful sensitivity. Which filled two needs.

They provided support for your delirium fantasy of hav-

ing been raised from the dead, and they acted as an ex-

cuse for what had caused the death-wish in the first place.

Unconsciously you were telling yourself that you were not

crippled, but 'different.'"

"Yes," Paul had said at that point. "I see."

"Now that you've dug out the true situation for your-

self, the need for justification should diminish. The fan-

tasy should fade and the sensitivity moments grow less

frequent, until they disappear."

"That's good to hear," said Paul.

Only, in the past five years the moments had not dwin-

dled and disappeared. They had stayed with him, as

the original dream had stuck stubbornly in the back of

his mind. He thought of seeing another psychiatrist, but

then the thought would come that the first had done him

no good at all. So what was there to expect from a sec-

ond?

Instead, in order to live with his problem, he had

anchored himself to something that he had discovered in

himself since the accident. Deep within him now, some-

thing invincible stood four-square to the frequent gusts

from the winds of feeling. Somehow he thought of it as

being connected to, but independent of, the dream ma-

gician in the tall hat. So when, as now, the winds blew

warnings, he felt them without being driven by them.

Fear: said the mountains. Do not go dawn into the

mine.

That's foolish, said Paul's conscious mind. It reminded

him that he was at last hired for the work to which all his

education had pointed him. To a job that in the present

overcrowded world was the dream of many and the

achievement of few. He reached for that which stood un-

conquerable in the back of his mind.

Fear, it replied, is merely one more in the multitude of

factors to be taken into account in moving from point A

to point B.

Paul shook himself free from the winds of feeling,

back to the ordinary existence of the world. The build-

ings of the Malabar Mine were all around him. A little

distance down the slope from where he stood the wife of

the company auditor came out on her back step and

called something across a small white fence to the wife of

the surface engineer in the yard adjoining. It was Paul's

first day on the job and already he was close to being

overdue on the job underground. He turned his gaze

from the mountains and the buildings, to the near con-

crete walk leading to the main shaft head of the mine.

And headed toward it, and the waiting skip.

Chapter 2

The skip slid Paul down some six hundred steeply slant-

ing feet through mountain stone. For all the romanticism

of its old-fashioned name, it was nothing more in fact

than a magnetic tube elevator. Through the transparent

walls of the tube, granite and rose quartz flickered at

him as he descended. They spoke to him as the moun-

tains had, but in smaller voices, fine, thin, crystalline

voices with no yield, no kindness to them, and no mercy.

Between them and himself, Paul's own faint image in the

tube wall kept pace with his descent—it was the image of

a square-shouldered young man of twenty-three, already

past any look of boyishness or youth.

He was large-boned and tall, strong-featured, round-

headed, and athletic-looking. A football-player type,

but not one of the game's commoner varieties. He was

not bulky enough for a lineman, not tense enough for

the backfield. End—that was the sort of position he fit-

ted. And, strongly calm, with long-fingered capable hands

to catch the ball, he remembered playing it well. That

had been on the first team at Colorado Institute of Mines,

where he had taken his undergraduate work.

His eyes were curiously deep, and a warm, gray color.

His mouth was thin-lipped, but a little wide and alto-

gether friendly. His light, straight brown hair was al-

ready receding at the temples. He wore it clipped short,

and he would be nearly bald before his thirties were out,

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：

NECROMANCERCopyright©1962byGordonR.DicksonAllrightsreserved.Nopartofthisbookmaybereproducedinanyformorbyanymeans,exceptfortheinclusionofbriefquotationsinareview,withoutpermissioninwritingfromthepublisher.Allcharactersinthisbookarefictitious.Anyresemblancetoactualpersons,livingordead,ispurelycoincide...

展开>> 收起<<

Dickson, Gordon - Necromancer.pdf

共185页,预览10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！

Dickson, Gordon - Necromancer

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: