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Read Ebook: The Junior Classics Volume 9: Stories of To-day by Patten William Editor
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Ebook has 170 lines and 5061 words, and 4 pages
second sight
Then his hand caught an arm and he exerted his full strength. The entire arm tore away from its shoulder....
His fingers moved over the modest packet of bills the invisible rockhound had handed to him. He smiled through the eternal night that was his own personal hell. Duggan's Hades.
"Thanks, Pete," he said gratefully. "Here, have a box of Conmos."
His sensitized fingers found the cigars, handed over a box, and he heard the nervous scuff of the other's shoes.
"This eight thousand means I can see again--for a while at least. Take 'em! It's little enough."
"Look, Duggan. I get eight hundred for selling you the ticket on the breakthrough time. Keep the cigars. You need the dough."
Feet pounded, thumping into swift inaudibility along the 10th Level's yielding walkway. His fingers caressed the crisp notes that his lucky guess on the 80th Level's tunnel juncture had won for him, plus the ten dollars, that this meager business could ill afford, it had cost to join the rockhounds' pool....
But now he was free. His own man. He was released from the calculated economies of his wife. Janith knew to within a few dollars what his newsstand on the 10th Level should make. He had never been able to save the necessary thousand dollar deposit, and ten dollars an hour, that a rented super mech cost. And she would never listen to his pleas that he must see again--if only for an hour....
"Waste ten or twenty dollars for nothing," she would storm. "We have all your hospital bills to pay. I need new clothes. Your stock in the stands is too small."
What she left unspoken was the fact that she must secretly have hated his engineering career in the deep levels under Appalachia, and that she was dedicated to preventing his possible return....
After three years of blindness, under his wife's firm dominance, Duggan felt only hate for her. With this sudden fortune he could be independent. He could divorce her. He could rent a super mech--even return to work in the ever-deepening levels of Appalachia City!
First of all he must see again.
He closed up the news-and-cigar stand. With his cane's sensitive radar button pulsating beneath his fingers he hurried along the walkway toward the nearest super mech showroom. It was less than three blocks....
"Be sure that all the contacts are against the skull and neck," the salesman was saying, his voice muffled by the mentrol hood covering Duggan's head and shoulders.
"Of course." Duggan's impatience made his voice shrill. "I've used mentrols before when inspecting cave-ins and such."
"Very well, sir." The man's voice was relieved. Probably he hated his job as much as Duggan hated his cigars and news.
Duggan tripped the switches and heard the building hum of power. An odd sort of vibration that his mind told him was purely emotional, seemed to be permeating his whole body.
Abruptly the transition was complete. He was no longer lying on the padded bench beneath the mentrol hood. He was standing erect, conscious of the retaining clamps that held him upright.
He gulped a deep draught of air into the artificial lungs that did not need oxygen and his mechanical pulse quickened.
His eyes slitted open, drinking in by degrees the mirrored mentrol booth and the pallid, fat, little man sitting beside his hooded body. He stepped out of the clamps, his sharpened senses aware of softness, and hardness, and scent, and color that human weakness so often blurs.
This super mech that was linked directly with his brain by twin mentrols was tall, chunky and gray of eye and hair. In a general way it was a duplicate of his own body, but there was no facial resemblance.
"How do you like it, sir?" The fat smile was empty, almost apologetic. "We have younger, more handsome models...."
"Well enough." Duggan started donning the clothing that he had removed. "I'll want the mech for five, possibly ten, hours."
"I'll make out the slip for ten hours, sir. We'll refund any balance due you. But after ten hours ..."
"I know. You must report the mech missing. But with my body here you can't lose."
Duggan shrugged. He was impatient to be outside, feasting his starved vision on the stores and parks of the various upper levels. He might even take a lift to the Outside. It had been fifteen years ago, while their youngest son was a baby, that they had taken a weekend motor trip to the great scar that had been Manhattan. He remembered the vastness and the rawness of the uncontrolled atmosphere. It had been beautiful but also a bit terrifying. It was a ten years delayed honeymoon....
And now Merle was in the rocket corps and Janith and he were like strangers.
Duggan zippered shut his gray-checked jacket and left the booth. He walked slowly, savoring every picture of the crowded passenger strips beyond the walkway, and of the fairy spans of moving walkways crossing the travel strips. The soft glow of the level's ceiling, fifty feet above, illuminated the double rows of apartment and store fronts.
It was good to see again.
Every twelfth section of the level was a park. The greenery was fresher and brighter than he remembered; the tree boles and the branches were marvels of grace and strength. He strolled along the paths, impatient to be moving on, but aching with the emerald beauty around him....
He took the lifts to the upper levels. He rode the swiftest walkways and travel strips, his eyes drinking in the long-hidden sights. From an observation dome he looked out over the wooded mountain slopes of Outside, and saw the telltale ridging of rock and earth that marked the scores of hidden vehicular tubes linking Appalachia with its sister cities of Ondack and Smoky.
His five hours stretched into seven, and then, eight. Slowly a determination to keep these eyes, at whatever cost, was building within him. Always before he had agreed when Janith decided. He had been so dependent on her those first terrible weeks. But now, with this money from the breakthrough pool, he could rent a super mech--live as a man should live!
Duggan left the employment booth on the 20th Level, a badge on his jacket and a half-grin on his full super mech's lips.
On the records he was now Al Duggan, a second cousin from Montana. He knew that nothing in the world could bring Al further east than Ozarka. Just to be safe, however, he decided to drop Al a line to explain.
As far as his wife was concerned Merle Duggan was gone. Dead and buried. She could get a divorce if she wanted and marry that podgy, pink-skulled boss of hers at the advertising agency....
"Five hundred a month," Duggan told himself. "Two-fifty for the rental, fifty for insurance--maybe fifty or so for spare parts--that leaves about a hundred and fifty for me."
He was starting at the bottom as a rock hog, a mucker, a clean-up man in the newly opened 80th Level. And his wages were the minimum union scale.
He took the lift down to the 79th Level, flashed his new badge at the guards, and took the gritty freight lift to the lowest level of the sprawling metropolis....
"You Gaines Short?" he asked the lanky man bent over the littered desk in the rough plastic bubble that served as an office.
Sharp black eyes studied him--noted the bright new olive badge, and the creased, obviously new, coveralls.
"You're the new rock hog?"
"Yes, sir. Al Duggan."
"Any experience?"
"Montana--mining. Had some engineering. Worked in Ozarka on tunnels."
The lank man nodded, expressionless.
"You'll hog for a while. Later we'll see.... Any relation to the Duggan we lost a couple of years back?"
"We're cousins."
"Tough he couldn't see his way clear to try again." Short's lips thinned. "He may snap out of it yet.... We could use a few more like him."
"I--I'll talk with him," promised Duggan.
He fought back the words that wanted to pour out. Whether it was a strange sense of loyalty to his wife, or a stubborn sort of pride, he could not bring himself to speak ill of her.
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