Fear that man by Dean Koontz Read Free Book Online Page B

toward freedom, wishing to move again, to travel, to be lightning, to do what was denied them. “I see it,” he said to Gnossos.
        “They’re Unnaturals.”
        “The ones-”
        “Who would like to kill,” Gnossos completed. “They are defects born with many of the old faults: with the desire to kill, an overwhelming greed, and bent toward self-gratification. There is nothing the government can do but take them and make them Sensitives. If they hurt anyone, they also feel the pain. Only ten times worse. Any pain they inflict is returned tenfold to their own nervous system. If they aid someone, they feel the other person’s pleasure. If they kill someone, they feel the death throes and terminal spasms ten times more intensely than the victim. None of them could tolerate that. They do not, therefore, kill or hurt.”
        “And they look so normal,” Sam said.
        “Outside. Outside, Sam. But on the inside-”
        “He knows about the Unnaturals,” Hurkos said, “but he did not know about the Mues. That’s rather curious.”
        “We’ll consider it over another drink,” Gnossos said. He placed the order, deposited the coins, waited for the liquor. None came. He pounded the robotender once, then bellowed for the human tapkeeper who was polishing glasses behind the bar. He was growing red-faced as he had been when his ship had collided with Sam’s. A false anger put on merely for the pleasure of appearing furious. The tapkeeper opened the gate in the bar and crossed the room with strides as sure and quick, almost, as Gnossos’. In his eyes glittered the tenseness, the trapped expression of the scooterbeast with his nose to glass.
        “This thing is broken!” Gnossos roared. “I want my money back!”
        “Here,” the human bartender said, flipping three coins to the poet. “Now all of you had better leave-please.”
        “Why?” Sam asked. This was the second time he had encountered genuine rudeness-once with the Christian, now with the Unnatural. It puzzled him.
        “This is not a Natural bar.”
        “You’re a natural if I ever saw one,” Hurkos mumbled.
        The bartender ignored the wit.
        “We are allowed service anywhere,” Gnossos boomed. “Naturals and Unnaturals are not segregated!”
        Shuffling his feet, a bit cowed, or taking a new line of tact, perhaps, the tapkeeper said, “It’s just for your own safety that I ask.” There was a mixure of fear and general uneasiness in his eyes now.
        “Was that a threat?” Gnossos said, astonished. “Am I with the uncivilized?”
        “Not a threat. It’s for your own safety, as I said. It’s because of him-that one.”
        They followed the tapkeeper’s thumb as it jerked toward the man standing at the far corner of the bar. The stranger was clutching a glass of yellow liquid, taking large gulps of it without effort, swishing it about in his mouth as if it were mouthwash, chugging it down without a tear. He was huge, nearly as big as Gnossos, red-haired and red-eyed. His hammy hands clenched into fists, unclenched to grab his drink. Though physically a bit smaller than the poet, he had muscle where Gnossos had run somewhat to fat. The corded masses of tissue that were his arms seemed able to snap anything or anyone to pieces.
        “Who’s he?” Gnossos asked.
        “Black Jack Buronto.”
        “You’ve got to be kidding,” Hurkos said, slumping even further into his chair. “You must be.”
        “Henry Buronto’s his name, but he wins all the time at the gaming tables, so they call him Black Jack. And he carries one too-a blackjack, that is.”
        A great many Unnaturals carried crude weapons, wishing they could use them, but never daring to because of the pain echoes that would engulf their sensitized brains. Clearly, Gnossos was fascinated by Buronto. Here was someone a bit different. A poet is, of course, a man of insight if he is a poet of any worth. But he is not