It was as he thought. The bed had not been slept in.“Oh, dear,” he said, aloud. “Oh, dear. Where….”He crossed the room to the dressing table, looking around for some evidence of where Helen might have gone, or why. Everything was neat and orderly, and quite unhelpful. He was about to turn round a...
I put my hand on it quickly, held it down. When she looked at me I shook my head. She shrugged, and reached, instead, for one of the packs, to look for one of the flashguns. I waited for her to dig it out, then I turned down the intensity of the light inside the tent. The larger lamp, outside, wa...
It was about the size of a cow. I suppose that it fulfilled the same kind of function as a cow. It lay in an open space which had been methodically cleared of all undergrowth—the site of the Anacaon encampment. The trail that the forest people had left when they had decided to move on was like a ...
BRIMSTONE AND DR. TREACLEAs soon as he had read Utterson’s manuscript, as reproduced in Stevenson’s account of the strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the one thought in Hector Treacle’s mind was to re-create the Jekyll formula.Whereas other men seemingly regarded Utterson’s revelations as a...
Not only was the flight to Trinidad booked, but a car had been hired to take me directly to the island’s coast, where a boat would be waiting to ferry me all the way to the delta. I was able to call Rowland and give him an estimated time of arrival. We’d already had a discussion about the lab fac...
Matthew decided, for his part, that it was time to confront Tang Dinh Quan.The biochemist was in his laboratory, patiently monitoring the results on an electrophoretic analysis. The robot-seeded slides were so small that he had to use a light microscope to read the results. The shelves to either ...
The wind was light and her engines were silent but she was making good headway. Her sleek sails were patterned in red and yellow, shining brightly in the warm subtropical sunlight. The sun was so low in the western sky that the whole world, including the surface of the sea, seemed to be painted i...
he said, “but no.” He knew that it was a mistake as soon as he had said it. He realized immediately that he should have said “Yes please!” as eagerly as possible. That way, she could have asserted herself by refusing. As things stood now, he’d issued a tacit challenge, w...
Visitors to the island—even those who’ve only come over the Solent from Hampshire, let alone across the Atlantic from Boston—are always taken by surprise by the slower pace of life here. It’s not so much that the buses never run on time as the fact that you can’t judge the time of a walk by looki...
We had stopped to change horses on several prior occasions, but express coaches do not linger over such necessities, and we had not had more than five minutes to stretch our legs at any of those relay stations. I had not even bothered to get down from the impériale, knowing that I would only have...
They all wanted to know how he’d reached his conclusion, mostly in the hope of proving him wrong. Maybe Adam Zimmerman, Christine Caine, and I were better able to take it on board than the emortals, just as we’d been better able to believe in the alien invaders, simply because we’d already been s...
Chief Inspector Kenna said to Lisa, “I’ll walk you to the paramedic station.”“I can find it on my own,” Lisa assured her.“I’m going the same way,” the younger woman pointed out. “The helicopter from London should be here soon, and I need to make sure there’s enough clearance in the parking area t...
It was a place where we could walk upright through chambers with vaulted ceilings on floors that were more or less level. There was no knowing how far the system extended, but there seemed to be caves and grottoes in great profusion. As we moved from one to another I had to keep scoring the rock ...
Lord Credesdale said, when Canny went into his room. “I feel a little better today—in myself, that is. This bloody body’s still collapsing on me, but I slept well for the first time in weeks. To judge by the look of you, you didn’t.” “Jet lag,” Canny said, trying to sound ...
The notches were three meters from the ground, and some small branches had been cleared away from the main trunk below that level. They untied Remy’s wrists, and then lashed them to a pole, so that his arms were at half-stretch. Then, using poles with Y-shaped ends to lift him, they slotted the s...
The culture of the fabers was so much more geared to face-to-face interaction than that of lunar footsloggers, let alone the thoroughly privatized societies of Earth, that it was a rare faber who would not “drop in” if he happened to be passing the residence of a friend he had not seen for a mont...
Wolff was against it, I think, but higher authority called the tune. If Wolff had been the kind of man who took an exaggerated pride in his work maybe he could have had his way, but he was no absolute dictator of circumstance. He let it go. Maria Kenrian wasn’t there. She ...
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Whether it was her Internal Technology catching up with its duty, or merely her own consciousness adapting to the situation, the terror drained away. Sara became confident that she could not and would not fall, and that she was free to enjoy the view.Terror was swiftly replaced by triumph, as she...
There was no point in wasting time. We were cold, we were hungry...and we had a limited time in front of us before we were no longer capable of following any plan, however ill formed and crazy. The idea—mine—was to double back in a long arc which would take us around Leand...
Had she been quick enough to seize the initiative, Charlotte might have established that no such suspension had been granted, but she was not. While she paused to collect her thoughts, Wilde turned his attention to Michael Lowenthal. “I hope you won’t think me impolite, Michael,” said Wilde, “but...
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The darkness and the echoes conspired to prevent me from defining the direction from which the sounds came. But they were close. There was no need for me to dive for the nearest cover. I’d been skulking in deep shadow whenever the opportunity presented itself. There was a ...
When it got to the stage where I was picking petty quarrels with Zeno in order to have some way of venting my frustration, I decided that it was time to pack up and isolate myself. I set off along one of the spoke-shafts, climbing the stairways to the upper decks until there was only the ladder t...
On the other hand, I’d always been a meat-and-two-veg kind of person, having inherited the habit from Dad via Mum, so the two major shifts associated with conversion by anecdotal evidence—a keener appetite for meat and a marked distaste for highly-spiced food—didn’t really apply to me. &nbs...
I was in no hurry to seek out my fellow crew members and hasten the painful post mortem on the events of the previous day. I made myself look human, and began the somewhat lengthier task of making myself feel human again, and I waited for the knock on my door. It seemed to be a long time coming, ...
Johnny had braced himself, of course, but the rest of us lurched forward. Varly hit his head on the windshield, and complained volubly. Nobody got out. We waited for them to explain. A man came forward and peered into the Maiden. It was David Holcomb. He seemed surprised t...
I checked the treated tissue cultures I’d left overnight and made careful measurements of all the effects. There were no surprises. The most noticeable effect was on nervous tissue, although the whole integrated metabolism was slightly altered. I spent the greater part of ...
THE PANTHER by Rachilde div#book-inner p, div#book-inner div { font-size: 1.0em; } a { color: black; } a:link, a:visited, a:hover, a:active { color: blue; } div#book-inner * { margin-top: 0 !important; margin-bottom: 0 !important;} 14. THE PANTHER by Rachilde (A story designed to be read aloud to...