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All the little libraries Out Here are full of rare books--first editions of best sellers which people pick up before they leave Someplace Else, and which they often donate after they've finished. We assume that these books have entered the public domain by the time they reach here, and we reproduce them and circulate our own editions. No author has ever sued, and no reproducer has ever been around to _be_ sued by representatives, designates, or assigns.
We are completely autonomous and are always behind the times, because there is a transit-lag which ca
Perhaps Yeats had something like this in mind when he wrote that fine line, "Things fall apart; the center ca
The day melted around me.
The words flowed across the screen in my booth as I read newspapers and magazines, untouched by human hands, and the waters flowed across Betty's acres, pouring down from the mountains now, washing the floors of the forest, churning our fields to peanut-butter, flooding basements, soaking its way through everything, and tracking our streets with mud.
I hit the library cafeteria for lunch, where I learned from a girl in a green apron and yellow skirts (which swished pleasantly) that the sandbag crews were now hard at work and that there was no eastbound traffic past Town Square.
After lunch I put on my slicker and boots and walked up that way.
Sure enough, the sandbag wall was already waist high across Main Street; but then, the water _was_ swirling around at ankle level, and more of it falling every minute.
I looked up at old Wyeth's statue. His halo had gone away now, which was sort of to be expected. It had made an honest mistake and realized it after a short time.
He was holding a pair of glasses in his left hand and sort of glancing down at me, as though a bit apprehensive, wondering perhaps, there inside all that bronze, if I would tell on him now and ruin his hard, wet, greenish splendor. Tell...? I guess I was the only one around who really remembered the man. He had wanted to be the father of this great new country, literally, and he'd tried awfully hard. Three months in office and I'd had to fill out the rest of the two-year term. The death certificate gave the cause as "heart stoppage", but it didn't mention the piece of lead which had helped slow things down a bit. Everybody involved is gone now: the irate husband, the frightened wife, the coroner. All but me. And I won't tell anybody if Wyeth's statue won't, because he's a hero now, and we need heroes' statues Out Here even more than we do heroes. He _did_ engineer a nice piece of relief work during the Butler Township floods, and he may as well be remembered for that.
I winked at my old boss, and the rain dripped from his nose and fell into the puddle at my feet.
I walked back to the library through loud sounds and bright flashes, hearing the splashing and the curses of the work crew as the men began to block off another street. Black, overhead, an eye drifted past. I waved, and the filter snapped up and back down again. I think H.C. John Keams was tending shop that afternoon, but I'm not sure.
Suddenly the heavens opened up and it was like standing under a waterfall.
I reached for a wall and there wasn't one, slipped then, and managed to catch myself with my cane before I flopped. I found a doorway and huddled.
Ten minutes of lightning and thunder followed. Then, after the blindness and the deafness passed away and the rains had eased a bit, I saw that the street (Second Avenue) had become a river. Bearing all sorts of garbage, papers, hats, sticks, mud, it sloshed past my niche, gurgling nastily. It looked to be over my boot tops, so I waited for it to subside.
It didn't.
It got right up in there with me and started to play footsie.
So, then seemed as good a time as any. Things certainly weren't getting any better.
I tried to run, but with filled boots the best you can manage is a fast wade, and my boots were filled after three steps.
That shot the afternoon. How can you concentrate on anything with wet feet? I made it back to the parking lot, then churned my way homeward, feeling like a riverboat captain who really wanted to be a camel driver.
It seemed more like evening that afternoon when I pulled up into my damp but unflooded garage. It seemed more like night than evening in the alley I cut through on the way to my apartment's back entrance. I hadn't seen the sun for several days, and it's fu
I stayed close to the lefthand wall, in order to miss some of the rain. As I had driven along the river I'd noticed that it was already reaching after the high water marks on the sides of the piers. The Noble was a big, spoiled, blood sausage, ready to burst its skin. A lightning flash showed me the whole alley, and I slowed in order to avoid puddles.
I moved ahead, thinking of dry socks and dry martinis, turned a corner to the right, and it struck at me: an org.
Half of its segmented body was reared at a forty-five degree angle above the pavement, which placed its wide head with the traffic-signal eyes saying "Stop", about three and a half feet off the ground, as it rolled toward me on all its pale little legs, with its mouthful of death aimed at my middle.
I pause now in my narrative for a long digression concerning my childhood, which, if you will but consider the circumstances, I was obviously fresh on it an instant:
Born, raised, educated on Earth, I had worked two summers in a stockyard while going to college. I still remember the smells and the noises of the cattle; I used to prod them out of the pens and on their way up the last mile. And I remember the smells and noises of the university: the formaldehyde in the Bio labs, the sounds of Freshmen slaughtering French verbs, the overpowering aroma of coffee mixed with cigarette smoke in the Student Union, the splash of the newly-pi
When I came out here on the raw frontier where people all carry weapons, I had my cane made. It combines the best features of the epee and the cattle prod. Only, it is the kind of prod which, if you were to prod cattle with it, they would never move again.
Over eight hundred volts, max, when the tip touches, if the stud in the handle is depressed properly...
My arm shot out and up and my fingers depressed the stud properly as it moved.