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Dr Who [Lethbridge Stewart] Andy Frankham Allen (v5.0) (epu
Content Selected Essays on Tech Cory Doctorow
Amazing Doctor Darwin Charles Sheffield
Brian Moore The Doctor's Wife (epub)
Bite My Cookies [Who Needs Chri Joyee Flynn
Doctor MC Three More Wishes Be Kind To Y
Doctor Rat William Kotzwinkle
Colorado Wild[ Colorado Heart 0
Colorado Fire [Colorado Heart 0
Doctor No Ian Fleming

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.„It‟s beautiful, isn‟t it?‟ she said in a voice that told Norman she had known precisely where the left turn she‟d suggested led.„I love it up here.I always love it when I come up here.What do you think? When you look at the City.What do you feel?‟„Well, yeah, uh.‟ Norman tried to sort out the feelings the question prompted.There was something vaguely disquieting about the way that Myra had said City, as though the word were capitalised, as though this was in some sense the only name Lychburg could ever have or need.„Yeah, well, it‟s home, isn‟t it?It‟s our home town.It‟s where we grew up.Everything we know.It‟s just that sometimes.‟„Yes?‟ said Myra.Her voice was completely neutral: a simple prompt that triggered no fight-or-flight animal danger signals whatsoever.„It‟s just that sometimes it seems so small,‟ said Norman.„It‟s like we live our little lives here, go to school and go to work and to the movies, and none of it really means anything.I mean, there‟s a big wide world out there and.‟„There is no other World,‟ said Myra, voice still perfectly neutral.No human content to it at all.„There is no World but the City.‟„What are you talking about? Just down the road from the drive-in there‟s.‟Norman‟s voice trailed off as his thoughts slipped over the edge of some mental cliff.A chaos of partially formed images struck him - images of a road similar to those which ran from Lychburg to the drive-in, only somehow wider and with any number of roads running in parallel, all of them packed with pod-like cars; images of places that were like the town of Lychburg but entirely different in some way that he could not pin down; images of huge and unimaginably complicated places with strange buildings and people who looked and moved in different.Norman had been conscious of the outside, larger world in the same way he was conscious of having a right hand.It was something that you simply did not actively think about.The thought just never occurred.Now that it had, he realised, it was like falling into some mental void.There were places outside, and those places had names - but now that he tried to think of them, now that he tried to imagine some world other than, and outside from, the Lychburg city limits, he could not think of a single one.Not one.From down below, at the bottom of the bluff, he heard a sharply detonative sound like a rifle shot or a thunderclap close up - as though the air itself had split apart as something burst through it.There was the sound of some strange mechanism whirring to a stop.„Your thought processes have become erratic,‟ Myra said in flat, inhuman tones, in the way that some science guy might discuss a bug under a glass slide.„Complexity of the host-sensorium is resurfacing.Starting to remember.The signifiers of the World are collapsing, deconstructing under an atypical and excessive sense of psychic introspection.Clearly, it has been infected by the forces of Discontinuity.‟For the first time since they had parked here on the cliff-edge, Norman looked at her - turned to really look at her.Physically she seemed unchanged, but there was a hideous sense of wrongness about her, the positioning of her limbs, the muscles that moved them, set in postures that had no humanity about them; relaxed or tensed in manners that no human being could ever achieve.Her eyes were clear and steady and direct, with nothing, absolutely nothing, living inside them.„The Continuity must be protected,‟ she said, and with an entirely relaxed and casual manner reached up her hand to plunge its splayed-open fingers deep into Norman Manley‟s eyes.* * *Victoria would never have a complete memory of the events between the Doctor pulling the lever and her resurfacing into painful consciousness on the TARDIS floor.Such mental pictures and sensations that remained were fragmented and disjointed: megrimous and synesthesic fugue-amalgams that, even in retrospect, could not be forced into comprehensive sense.Images of ragged, faceless men with stunted parasites inside them marching in single file over some precipice to fall in impossible and somehow multiple directions under a gravity that no human had ever experienced.A flash of some fabricated, animated monstrosity lashed together from paint-flaking driftwood and oiled rope.Pale-faced, god-like beings that pawed at her with long, segmented, wormlike fingers and plunged those same digits into the matter of her head.The wrenching, churning sensation of being, in some manner unrelated to the purely physical, turned inside out.She hauled herself into what was more or less a sitting position with a groan.Her body felt bruised all over and her head was one enormous ache.She looked about: if the console room of the TARDIS had been in a state of disarray before, now it was in a state of complete disaster.Small fires spluttered behind the open cover plates and the air smelt faintly of ozone - the chemical compound rather than the smell of decomposing seaweed that people travel to seaside resorts to take for their health.Jamie was off to one side, caught up in a clump of snapped-off vulcanised tubing, still insensible but beginning to stir.Of the Doctor there was no immediate sign.„Doctor?‟ Victoria called weakly.„Are you there? Where are you?‟„I‟m over here,‟ came a voice from, as she had already assumed would be the case, behind the central console.„I‟m quite all right - although I seem to have become entangled with the hat stand.‟Victoria climbed, wincing, to her feet and walked around the console.The situation was, indeed, as the Doctor had described.The little man lay on his front with the stand on top of him, its length contriving to run at some slight crosswise angle beneath his clothing so that the top end protruded from his collar and the bottom from the right cuff of his checked trousers.„If you could give me a bit of help,‟ he said, „I‟d be very grateful.‟„If you think for one minute I‟m going to take off your trousers,‟ said Victoria, „then you‟re sorely mistaken.‟„The thought, my dear girl,‟ said the Doctor, „never crossed my mind.I do have some sense of propriety.‟ He lifted his right foot so that the protruding base of the hat stand bobbed up and down.„I think the bottom, if you‟ll pardon the expression, screws right off.‟Victoria unscrewed the base and pulled the remainder of the stand through the top of his clothing.„How did something like that happen in the first place?‟ she asked.The Doctor stood up and dusted himself off - it seemed strange that he was constantly doing this, performing little fastidious gestures upon a general form that carried a vague but innate, and seemingly immutable, sense of shabbiness about it.It was as if, in some strange manner, he fully expected himself to be of some different form and was constantly surprised that he was not [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]