The wrong end of time by John Brunner Read Free Book Online Page B

marginally the biggest, examined her critically from top to toe.
     
"In there," he said after a couple of heartbeats, and jerked his head towards the scrap yard.
     
She was taken aback. This wasn't what she'd expected. There should be-well, a bit of chat. Banter. Joking. Some sort of preliminaries)
     
But they had fallen in around her like military police escorting a deserter, and were forcing her towards the scrap yard gate. There was a gatekeeper's hut. There was no one in it.
     
Huge clanging noises, and a sulphur stink. Horrified, she found herself shut in by walls of ruined cars rusty bathtubs, mounds of cans crushed into polychrome lumps, while underfoot she walked on painful glass.
     
"I-" she began to say, ,and they rounded a corner among the piles of metal and were out of sight of anyone.
     
"Value her," the tallest black said, and the bald one confronted her and took her wrist. He inspected her watch.
     
"Saw, Josh?" the third said. "No purse!"
     
"Saw," the tallest said. "Zip up, Shark. Well, Potatohead?"
     
"Piss and shit! Japanese! Worth around eight-fifty!"
     
"Foreign, um? Ah-hunhl Anna clothes?"
     
"Three-fo' hunnad inna sto'. Top getcha maybe fifty. Shorts widda zip-crotch, dustin'-rag."
     
"Takun fo' pock't. I see coin. Strippun, addle." As though by magic a long knife appeared in Josh's hand and touched Lora's bosom with a cold caress.
     
"But-but what . . . ?" Words choked her. It wasn't that she didn't understand the order (addle: adolescent; they said that in Lakonia, too). She didn't understand the situation.
     
Slowly, and with immaculate diction, Josh said, "Strip, cock. We don't want to get blood on those clothes."
     
She stared at him for a terrible empty moment, thinking: cock means Caucasian, and that's only used by .
     
It dawned on her at long last what they meant to do. Rob her, and kill her, and hide her body among the scrap.
     
     
"Knahf, blabboh. Droppun knahf."
     
A voice from nowhere. Josh whirled around, eyes vastly
     
     
wide. He, they, Lora spotted the speaker almost in the same moment: high on top of the pile of scrap overlooking them, a dark face peering down, cheek cuddled close to the significant tube of a rifle.
     
"Knahfl" the voice repeated. "O' takun ow-yo' han' wiffa slug, blabboh!"
     
There was an eternity of frozen silence. All Lora could think of was that only one black man could call another blabboh-"black boy"--and survive.
     
Then Josh, mouth curled as though he had bitten a lemon, opened his fingers and let the knife fall.
     
"Addle cock!" the stranger said sharply. "Back slo'tutri pesses-so'sa fahn. Narrunda co'nah-fahn againl"
     
As in a dream, Lora reacted to the half-understood order, backing around the corner of the stack of scrap.
     
"Okay," the gunman said, and then added, more loudly and with a forced blabboh intonation: "Ali seeahl Slongzah seeah-Ah c'nitchah! Mango blabboh, mango!"
     
A gesture with his rifle. And they went.
     
     
Half a minute later, while Lora was sobbing into her hands, a tug on her arm. "Move it!"
     
Gone the blabboh accent, but the same voice. She opened her eyes to see her rescuer-lean, young, dark, not a as black as her captors but black nonetheless-tossing his j
     
rifle aside. °a
     
"But they might come after us!" she cried.
     
"Sure) I said move it, didn't I?" Catching her by the
     
arm and literally dragging her along.
     
"But the gun-1"
     
"Not worth a fart. Picked out of a stack of them over '~ there. Military surplus. Empty! Will you move?"
     
He led her stumbling through the awful man-made desert of the scrap yard, to a gap in the perimeter fence, down a narrow alley . . . . By that time she was gasping for breath, and barely registered where he was taking her. Then around a corner, and after a quick survey of the street in both directions-just such a street as she'd emerged on to from the hoverhalt-at a quieter pace for another few hundred yards, his arm around her waist now, his hand