Bright Segment by Theodore Sturgeon Read Free Book Online Page B

knowing she was there.
    Tod crossed the chamber and looked at the last pair. Carl was a furious blur of motion, his needle-cluster swinging free, his manipulators in the final phase. He grunted instead of screaming, a series of implosive, startled gasps. His eyes were open but only the whites showed.
    Moira was quite relaxed, turned on her side, poured out on the floor of the Coffin like a long golden cat. She seemed in a contented abandonment of untroubled sleep.
    He heard a new sound and went back to April. She was sitting up, cross-legged, her head bowed apparently in deep concentration. Tod understood; he knew that sense of achievement and the dedication of an entire psyche to the proposition that these weak and trembling arms which hold one up shall
not
bend.
    He reached in and gently lifted the soft white hair away from her face. She raised the albino’s fathomless ruby eyes to him and whimpered.
    “Come on,” he said quietly. “We’re here.” When she did not move, he balanced on his stomach on the edge of the Coffin and put one hand between her shoulder blades. “Come on.”
    She pitched forward but he caught her so that she stayed kneeling. He drew her up and forward and put her hands on the bar. “Hold tight, Ape,” he said. She did, while he lifted her thin body out of the Coffin and stood her on the top step. “Let go now. Lean on me.”
    Mechanically, she obeyed, and he brought her down until she sat, as he had, on the bottom step. He punched the switch at her feet and put the capsules in her mouth while she looked up at him numbly, as if hypnotized. He got her beaker, thumped it, held it until its foaming subsided, and then put an arm around her shoulders while she drank. She closed her eyes and slumped against him, breathing deeply at first, and later, for a moment that frightened him, not at all. Then she sighed, “Tod …”
    “I’m here, Ape.”
    She straightened up, turned and looked at him. She seemed to be trying to smile, but she shivered instead. “I’m cold.”
    He rose, keeping one hand on her shoulder until he was sure she could sit up unassisted, and then brought her a cloak from the clips outside the Coffin. He helped her with it, knelt and put on her slippers for her. She sat quite still, hugging the garment tight to her. At last she looked around and back; up, around, and back again. “We’re—there!” she breathed.
    “We’re
here
,” he corrected.
    “Yes, here. Here. How long do you suppose we …”
    “We won’t know exactly until we can take some readings. Twenty-five, twenty-seven years—maybe more.”
    She said, “I could be old, old—” She touched her face, brought her fingertips down to the sides of her neck. “I could be forty, even!”
    He laughed at her, and then a movement caught the corner of his eye. “Carl!”
    Carl was sitting sidewise on the edge of his Coffin, his feet still inside. Weak or no, bemused as could be expected, Carl should have grinned at Tod, should have made some healthy, swaggering gesture. Instead he sat still, staring about him in utter puzzlement. Tod went to him. “Carl! Carl, we’re here!”
    Carl looked at him dully. Tod was unaccountably disturbed. Carl always shouted, always bounced; Carl had always seemed to be just a bit larger inside than he was outside, ready to burst through, always thinking faster, laughing more quickly than anyone else.
    He allowed Tod to help him down the steps, and sat heavily while Tod got his capsules and beaker for him. Waiting for the liquid to subside, he looked around numbly. Then drank, and almost toppled. April and Tod held him up. When he straightened again, it was abruptly. “Hey!” he roared. “We’re here!” He looked up at them. “April! Tod-o! Well what do you know—how are you, kids?”
    “Carl?” The voice was the voice of a flute, if a flute could whisper. They looked up. There was a small golden surf of hair tumbled on and over the edge of Moira’s Coffin.
    Weakly,