The Sword and the Net полностью

She took the hand from his forehead and turned away. She spoke without looking at either man, as she was moving towards the low table which stood behind the bedside chair. Her voice was unhurried, and yet to Otto’s ear there was somewhere in it a little vibrant tightness. She said:

“Perhaps I’d better fetch two soap boxes!”

Ingolls took the cue. He laughed, and the tension eased. He saw Otto’s look of puzzlement and explained the boxes. He said, after that:

“But I owe you an apology, Jorgensen. . . .”

His daughter interrupted him again. She stood beside him with an opened magazine in her hands, and Otto recognized the red and black cover of Kosmo. He knew what was coming—and instead of relief felt an undefined but far from pleasant mixture of emotions.

“Look!” said Clare to her father. “Look—and then blush!” Under his nose she had thrust the full-page portrait of the profile of Nils Jorgensen, hero of the Vulcania.

Ingolls muttered something. He sounded startled. He darted glances from the photograph to Otto. He said:

“Well, I’ll be damned!” and wheeled upon his daughter. “Vixen!” he said. “Female jackal! Viper-cub! You couldn’t, I suppose, have shown me this before? Or told me about it? Or even hinted? No, of course you couldn’t—or you wouldn’t have had the exquisite pleasure of watching me make a fool of myself! I shall wait for the next full moon and weave a withering spell about you!”

Clare sat herself once more upon the arm of his chair. “Oh, not a withering one,” she said. “Anyway, I wasn’t sure myself until Dr. Brandt took the last dressing off his head.” She looked at Otto. She was smiling, but the eyes were guarded again. She said:

“But why did they take you in profile like that? Why in the world?”

“I had a black eye,” said Otto—and, for no reason that he could lay name to, felt momentarily less oppressed.

It was afternoon and he had just eaten and the sun was bright in the trees outside his window. He was alone and he was tired, very tired. He supposed the fatigue must be from the effort he had made this morning; the same effort which had used to amuse him sometimes and sometimes cause him a sort of savage exultation but which this time had filled him with a grey and futile and slimy aching.

He was alone—and he felt sleep wrapping about him. And she wasn’t here with him and it was dangerous to sleep like this because of the dreams. But perhaps they wouldn’t come this time. . . .

Sleep took him; heavy and merciless sleep from which he could not break. . . .

His shoulder was being shaken, very gently, by a small strong hand. It helped him—and he tore himself out of the clinging darkness.

Clare was standing over him. Her face was troubled as he first opened his eyes, but she smiled at once. In his ears an echo of his own voice was ringing.

“Hey!” she was saying. “You’d better wake up. Wake right up!”

He could still hear the echo of his own voice and wondered desperately what it had been saying—and in which language. He said:

“I am awake now,” and tried to smile.

“Bad dreams?” she said, and bent over him so that he could not see her eyes and gently readjusted the tape-fixed dressing which was all now that covered the scar upon his head.

“Yes,” he said. “Was I speaking?”

She smiled again. “Shouting’s a better word. I couldn’t catch more than one phrase, though—one you kept repeating.”

His lips felt dry and he tried to moisten them with his tongue. He forced himself to smile again and strove vainly to remember what the dream had been about and could only recapture a sort of fear which was different from the other fears.

“Perhaps the other words were in Swedish?” He fought to make this seem natural. “It is a language that sounds . . . strange.”

She shook her head. “Oh, no—it was all English. But I could only catch the words of that one phrase. I think you must have been back in childhood. You sounded as if you were trying to explain something you’d done. You kept saying: ‘It’s true! It’s true!’ Or perhaps the word was ‘truth’—I’m not sure. And then you’d say, ‘I thought I was saying lies’—I remember that because ‘saying lies’ is odd—‘I thought I was saying lies but they were truths!’” She straightened the bed-covers and sat in the chair.

“Remember now?” she said.

It was night and the light on the trees outside was silver instead of gold. It was time, nearly, for him to sleep. He did not want to sleep after the experience of the afternoon. But neither did he want to lie wakeful and thinking. He had been thinking for every lone moment he had had since she had told him the words he had been saying in his dream.

He still could not remember the dream but only the fear and doubt and black anxiety of it. But that did not matter. It was the thought behind those words which mattered and the inescapable truth of the thought. He must face it now.