Flight to the Lonesome Place Read Online Free PDF Page B

door carefully, then quickly undressed with the aid of his flashlight and crawled into one of the bunks.
    He closed his eyes, and tried to make his mind a blank so sleep would come easily. But tonight sleep would not come. The darkness tormented him with sounds and visions he found impossible to block from his memory. Gus on the phone again, hoarse, gasping … the men in the hotel corridor, and the faint scrape of a key in the lock … the terrible pounding of his heart as he fled down an endless stairway …
    And in San Juan, would he be fleeing there? But of course he would! Only, where could he possibly go?
    He cried out suddenly in torment and sat up, trembling. He knew he ought to be planning what to say to the captain in the morning, but at the moment such thoughts were beyond him. He wanted only to forget himself.
    Remembering a light he had seen over the bunk, he fumbled in the dark and turned it on, then opened his zipper bag and took out a book, a pencil, and several sheets of paper. The book, which he had discovered on a shelf devoted to advanced studies in mathematics, was by a little-known master, and it bore an impressive title: Time and Duality, or the Mathematics of Coexistent Planes .
    Peter Pushkin, seeing the book a few days ago, had thumbed through it, and whistled. “Good grief!” he had said. “If you can read this, you don’t need me. I’ve heard of this fellow Prynne. It’s said that less than a dozen men in the world can really understand him. Do you like this sort of thing?”
    â€œOf course!” he had told Peter. He had found it the most exciting and fascinating volume he had ever seen. Dr. Prynne had set out to prove, by the most complicated equations, that the utterly impossible was not only possible, but true.
    â€œBut I think Dr. Prynne is wrong,” he had hastened to tell Peter. “I’m sure he’s made a mistake somewhere. I haven’t found it yet, though it ought to be in one of his basic equations. When I’ve worked through more of them—”
    â€œYou mean you’re actually doing his mathematics all over?” Peter had looked shaken.
    â€œWell, how else can I prove he’s wrong?”
    Secretly, way down inside himself, he realized he didn’t want to find a mistake. Prynne’s fantastic idea was much too appealing. But in spite of the fact that he couldn’t believe in it, every equation was absorbing. They were all so utterly absorbing that tonight everything else slipped from his mind. As he studied the figures in the book, the ugliness that had driven him to the Cristobal Colón gradually faded and ceased to exist, and presently his pencil was flying over the notepaper.
    He was not aware, long later, of weariness overtaking him. Sleep suddenly pinched him out like a candle. It was nearly dawn when it happened, and the vessel was far down in the marshy delta of the Mississippi, not far from the Gulf.
    He slept through most of the morning, undisturbed by the breakfast gong and the various sounds of activity outside on deck. It was the new and entirely different motion of the ship that awakened him. He sat up abruptly, started to rub his hot face, and discovered he had fallen asleep with his wig on. He tore it off, glanced at his watch, and scrambled around to peer through the porthole above the bunk. He gasped.
    He had flown the oceans a number of times, but only once before—it was on a large liner to Europe—had he actually been to sea. It had been nothing like this. Save for a few glimpses of the cold north Atlantic, he might have been spending his days in another luxury hotel. And when he had jetted across, the water seven miles below had ceased to have existence. But this …
    He gave a little cry of delight as he glimpsed the creaming waves beyond the width of the deck. They were the richest blue he had ever seen. And skittering away over the tops of some of them, like silver birds,