Gordon R Dickson - Sleepwalkers' World by Gordon R. Dickson Read Free Book Online Page A

weapon he could prove them all wrong and defeat their universe. He had escaped from the hollow people now. He was in a series of barely lit caverns—true caverns rather than rooms now—through which he had to grope his way, but which held neither things nor the facades of people nor anything else but rock floor and empty stone walls arching to some high point overhead.
    Then he found his enemy, the inimical creature behind the broken things and the hollow people, all alone by himself, or herself or itself, in one huge cavern. It crouched against one wall, for all its size—and it was many times bigger than he was—guarding a throne it had sat on once but had long since outgrown, like a mouse guarding a crumb.
    He did not see it clearly, for though the cavern was lighted, the lights were so dim and far overhead and the shadows were so thick and black by the wall where it crouched that seeing was barely possible. But without seeing it clearly he understood it suddenly. Once it had been as human as himself, but now it had gradually increased to a gargantuan, abnormal size, like the swollen body of an old queen wasp among the smaller figures of the normal hive denizens.
    Only in this case the growth had come about by the addition of body on top of over-body, shell upon shell, each one a rustling envelope of a dead year lived and lost to no purpose. Self-trapped at the core was what had once been a human being, but it was lost now and buried, not only in the dry and rustling years and years of its overbodies, but in its own belief that it was as monstrous as those overbodies made it. And in that belief it had constructed this universe where everything pressed inward to the center and that center was filled with broken things and hollow people.
    He saw then that he should kill it—not only in his own self-defense, but in pity to release it from that existence which it had deluded itself was not a torment but a dark joy. He looked around and found nothing but a large and jagged stone; when he picked up the stone, it crumbled to dust in his hands.
    â€œYou see?â€

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8
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    The next thing Rafe knew, he was seated in an aircraft capable of holding perhaps twelve passengers, and with that awareness began a peculiar period in which he was not completely in control of himself.
    The aircraft was flying at a great height. The three times Rafe summoned up the energy to look out the window beside his seat, he saw first an endless expanse of water, then a landscape of ice and snow, and finally barren-looking plains, rising to a range of mountains dead ahead.
    He found he could not work up any immediate concern or alarm about his situation. It was not as if he had been drugged. It was rather as if he were mentally isolated in a warm cocoon of indifference. As long as he made no effort to move or think, he sat quite comfortably in something like a pleasantly absent-minded state. But even the desire to move his head and look out the window seemed to require a massive effort.
    He made that effort again, to look across the aisle of the aircraft at the seat opposite him. Gaby sat in it, gazing straight ahead with a placid expression. Lucas was nowhere to be seen.
    Rafe turned his head to look forward again himself—the return movement was easy, effortless—and withdrew back into his cocoon. With his gaze front, he could see his hands lying open on his knees. He was not tied or secured in any way except for this compulsion which made doing and thinking nothing infinitely easier than movement and thought.
    He sat, nonthinking.
    After a little while he became vaguely conscious of a faintly nagging sensation in the back of his mind—the same sort of nagging sensation that afflicts someone who has just left home and is vaguely troubled by the thought of something forgotten or not done.
    The feeling continued. It was like a small animal gnawing away at him below the platform level of the