[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
I
always had a kind of fantasy to be stranded on a desert island or something,
just me and men a man you oh, all right. If we're stuck, we're stuck in a
pretty place with a lot of food and water, and maybe we got a whole world to
ourselves.
I can keep washin' them things out, and weeks or months from now they'll fall
apart anyway. Then what do we wear? Skins? There ain't no animals here, Sam,
and even if there was, I wouldn't know how to trap 'em, kill 'em, skin 'em, or
make what I needed to make into something that wouldn't feel and smell like
rotten, dead animal. And if somebody comes, it ain't no more embarrassment to
be naked than to be in a bra and panties. The hell with it."
"You're probably right," I agreed. "We're both city born and bred. I wouldn't
know what part of what to even plant, and we're still guessing on what's ripe
and what isn't. Fact is, we aren't just stuck, we're stuck here, unless they
planted these groves all over the place. The damned thing is, we can't even
get too adventurous. If we break a leg, or worse, there's no treatment here,
no doctors, no phones or ambulances or cops. It's just you and me sitting
around the garden, kid, depending on good old G.O.D., Inc., to keep us fed."
Brandy gave a little gasp. "Not if they leave us here forever, we won't be
alone. My diaphragm's back in a room in a motel that just don't seem to exist
no more. I always thought 'bout us havin' kids, Sam, but not caveman style."
I hadn't really thought about that angle, and, out here, there really wasn't
anything else to do. Me, I was still trying to figure out how we could go to
the bathroom without becoming real messy real fast. Shows the difference in
the two of us, I guess.
I always dreamed of leading a life of idle luxury, but the fact was that this
wasn't exactly my idea of things. I'm now convinced that Eve was easily
seduced by the serpent because she was incredibly bored, and that Adam ate
that apple willingly because there was nothing left to do. We didn't even have
that way out, so there was no alternative to some careful exploring.
My boots finally dried out, and while it seemed kind of nuts to go tramping
about the wilderness wearing boots and nothing else, the fact was that with
the rocks and other unknown things in the ground, they were something of a
necessity. We retrieved the clothes anyway, and fashioned some of them into
crude sacks in which we could carry small amounts of food. It didn't give us
much range, but it gave us some, meaning at least that we didn't have to plan
on getting back to that little garden spot before dark.
Just where we were still bothered me. The best idea was that we somehow got
flung back in time to before there were animals or people, but that didn't
really wash when you thought about it. The land was just too closely shaped to
the land we'd seen when it was civilized, even to that big exposed rock and
this stream. If we were in the distant past or something like that, things
would have to look very different.
We managed to cross that stream and then walk into town, or where town would
have and should have been. Just beyond it was another of the groves, proving
Brandy right again in guessing that it really hadn't mattered which way we'd
gone. It was pretty clear now that old Monocle had in fact stashed us on a
"siding," a place where you put people when you knew they shouldn't be riding
your railroad but you didn't exactly know who or what they were. The real
question was whether we'd eventually have an engine sent to move us or if we
were on one of those abandoned sidings. The other question was how the hell
you could move, or have sidings, when you didn't move, as it were.
The first night, both of us had muscle cramps and some blisters, but we'd
managed to survey some of the area and we were learning to accept the
situation a little. We had no trouble sleeping, huddled together on soft grass
under the edge of the trees, although we did have a couple more little
thunderstorms in the evening. Noisy and wet, but nothing like that tremendous
Page 68
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
storm that had hit us that first night.
There were bugs everywhere, but we got few bites of any kind. I guess if you
don't have mammals around much you don't develop mosquitoes and things that
drink blood, so the few bites we got were from ants or small spiders or
file:///F|/rah/Jack%20L.%20Chalker/Chalker,%20...D.%20Inc%201%20-%20Labyrinth%
20of%20Dreams.txt (58 of 116) [1/19/03 4:16:21 PM]
file:///F|/rah/Jack%20L.%20Chalker/Chalker,%20Jack%20L%20-%20G.O.D.%20Inc%201%
20-%20Labyrinth%20of%20Dreams.txt something that just didn't like us or where
we were sitting. I had this vision of black widows or tarantulas or something,
but none of the bites seemed more than irritating.
The real question was how much exploring we were going to be able to do.
Neither of us was in any decent shape, and the second day every muscle in our
bodies ached. That more than anything was the real trap of this place for the
overweight, out-of-condition folks from civilization. If you rested and
relaxed the second day, you were back where you started from in terms of
shaping up, but it was tough to force yourself to go anywhere or do anything
when you hurt so bad and the basics of what you needed were so close at hand.
So, out of necessity, we kind of pushed each other.
There were, in fact, at least four groves, the one up the "road" we figured
was about where the motel would have been. We shifted up to that one partly
because it was closer to the "company" site, and provided clear access to that
huge meadow as well as better storm cover.
It's funny, though, how quickly you can adapt to something totally foreign if
you don't have to worry about the basics. We had food, water, a very basic
shelter with the trees, and each other to keep from going completely nuts. If
you had to stash somebody, this was a good place to do it. You didn't even
need weapons or fire to scare off the wild animals. There were no wild
animals. As long as it stayed hot and humid, and deserted, there wasn't much
need for clothes. Brandy still had her lighter, although her cigarettes were
long gone, but we decided to conserve the lighter as much as possible in case
we ever really needed a fire. We even abandoned the boots after a while; it
seemed better to get the feet toughened. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
zanotowane.pl doc.pisz.pl pdf.pisz.pl akte20.pev.pl
I
always had a kind of fantasy to be stranded on a desert island or something,
just me and men a man you oh, all right. If we're stuck, we're stuck in a
pretty place with a lot of food and water, and maybe we got a whole world to
ourselves.
I can keep washin' them things out, and weeks or months from now they'll fall
apart anyway. Then what do we wear? Skins? There ain't no animals here, Sam,
and even if there was, I wouldn't know how to trap 'em, kill 'em, skin 'em, or
make what I needed to make into something that wouldn't feel and smell like
rotten, dead animal. And if somebody comes, it ain't no more embarrassment to
be naked than to be in a bra and panties. The hell with it."
"You're probably right," I agreed. "We're both city born and bred. I wouldn't
know what part of what to even plant, and we're still guessing on what's ripe
and what isn't. Fact is, we aren't just stuck, we're stuck here, unless they
planted these groves all over the place. The damned thing is, we can't even
get too adventurous. If we break a leg, or worse, there's no treatment here,
no doctors, no phones or ambulances or cops. It's just you and me sitting
around the garden, kid, depending on good old G.O.D., Inc., to keep us fed."
Brandy gave a little gasp. "Not if they leave us here forever, we won't be
alone. My diaphragm's back in a room in a motel that just don't seem to exist
no more. I always thought 'bout us havin' kids, Sam, but not caveman style."
I hadn't really thought about that angle, and, out here, there really wasn't
anything else to do. Me, I was still trying to figure out how we could go to
the bathroom without becoming real messy real fast. Shows the difference in
the two of us, I guess.
I always dreamed of leading a life of idle luxury, but the fact was that this
wasn't exactly my idea of things. I'm now convinced that Eve was easily
seduced by the serpent because she was incredibly bored, and that Adam ate
that apple willingly because there was nothing left to do. We didn't even have
that way out, so there was no alternative to some careful exploring.
My boots finally dried out, and while it seemed kind of nuts to go tramping
about the wilderness wearing boots and nothing else, the fact was that with
the rocks and other unknown things in the ground, they were something of a
necessity. We retrieved the clothes anyway, and fashioned some of them into
crude sacks in which we could carry small amounts of food. It didn't give us
much range, but it gave us some, meaning at least that we didn't have to plan
on getting back to that little garden spot before dark.
Just where we were still bothered me. The best idea was that we somehow got
flung back in time to before there were animals or people, but that didn't
really wash when you thought about it. The land was just too closely shaped to
the land we'd seen when it was civilized, even to that big exposed rock and
this stream. If we were in the distant past or something like that, things
would have to look very different.
We managed to cross that stream and then walk into town, or where town would
have and should have been. Just beyond it was another of the groves, proving
Brandy right again in guessing that it really hadn't mattered which way we'd
gone. It was pretty clear now that old Monocle had in fact stashed us on a
"siding," a place where you put people when you knew they shouldn't be riding
your railroad but you didn't exactly know who or what they were. The real
question was whether we'd eventually have an engine sent to move us or if we
were on one of those abandoned sidings. The other question was how the hell
you could move, or have sidings, when you didn't move, as it were.
The first night, both of us had muscle cramps and some blisters, but we'd
managed to survey some of the area and we were learning to accept the
situation a little. We had no trouble sleeping, huddled together on soft grass
under the edge of the trees, although we did have a couple more little
thunderstorms in the evening. Noisy and wet, but nothing like that tremendous
Page 68
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
storm that had hit us that first night.
There were bugs everywhere, but we got few bites of any kind. I guess if you
don't have mammals around much you don't develop mosquitoes and things that
drink blood, so the few bites we got were from ants or small spiders or
file:///F|/rah/Jack%20L.%20Chalker/Chalker,%20...D.%20Inc%201%20-%20Labyrinth%
20of%20Dreams.txt (58 of 116) [1/19/03 4:16:21 PM]
file:///F|/rah/Jack%20L.%20Chalker/Chalker,%20Jack%20L%20-%20G.O.D.%20Inc%201%
20-%20Labyrinth%20of%20Dreams.txt something that just didn't like us or where
we were sitting. I had this vision of black widows or tarantulas or something,
but none of the bites seemed more than irritating.
The real question was how much exploring we were going to be able to do.
Neither of us was in any decent shape, and the second day every muscle in our
bodies ached. That more than anything was the real trap of this place for the
overweight, out-of-condition folks from civilization. If you rested and
relaxed the second day, you were back where you started from in terms of
shaping up, but it was tough to force yourself to go anywhere or do anything
when you hurt so bad and the basics of what you needed were so close at hand.
So, out of necessity, we kind of pushed each other.
There were, in fact, at least four groves, the one up the "road" we figured
was about where the motel would have been. We shifted up to that one partly
because it was closer to the "company" site, and provided clear access to that
huge meadow as well as better storm cover.
It's funny, though, how quickly you can adapt to something totally foreign if
you don't have to worry about the basics. We had food, water, a very basic
shelter with the trees, and each other to keep from going completely nuts. If
you had to stash somebody, this was a good place to do it. You didn't even
need weapons or fire to scare off the wild animals. There were no wild
animals. As long as it stayed hot and humid, and deserted, there wasn't much
need for clothes. Brandy still had her lighter, although her cigarettes were
long gone, but we decided to conserve the lighter as much as possible in case
we ever really needed a fire. We even abandoned the boots after a while; it
seemed better to get the feet toughened. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]