Gordon R. Dickson Read Online Free PDF Page B

question of what had happened to the world. My head
kept replaying all its available evidence, from the moment of my collapse in
the cabin near Duluth to the present, trying for one solid, explainable picture
that would pull everything together.
    Sitting now under the tree, in the
shade of a new-risen quarter moon and staring up at the star-bright sky of
summer, I went clear back to reliving my college days, to the paper I had
written on the methods of charting stocks, followed by the theoretical
investments, then the actual investments, then the penthouse suite in the
Bellecourt Towers, hotel service twenty-four hours a day, and the reputation
for being some sort of young financial wizard. Then my cashing out and buying
into Snowman, Inc., my three years as president of that company, while
snowmobile and motor home sales climbed up off the wall chart—and my marriage
to Swannee.
    I had never blamed Swannee a bit for
what had happened. It must have been as irritating to her as it would have been
to me to have someone hanging on to her the way I ended up doing. The way I had
decided to get married in the first place was that I had gotten tired of living
in the penthouse apartment. I wanted a real house, and found one. An architecturally
modern, rambling building with five bedrooms, on about twenty acres of land
with its own small lake. And of course, once I had decided to have a house, I
realized what I really needed was a wife to go along with it. And I looked
around a bit and married Swannee. She was not as beautiful as my mother, but
she was close to it. Tall, with a superb body and a sort of golden-custard
colored hair, very fine, that she wore long and which floated around her
shoulders like a cloud.
    By education she had been headed for
being a lawyer; but her instincts for work were not all that strong. In spite
of the fact that she had done well academically in law school, she had never
taken her bar exams and was, in fact, working as a sort of ornamental legal
assistant to a firm of corporation attorneys down in St. Paul. I think she was
glad to give up the pretense of going to the office every day and simply take
over as my wife. She was, in fact, ideal from my standpoint. I had no illusions
about her. I had buried those with the memories of my mother years before. So I
had not asked her to be anymore than she was; ornamental, good in bed, and able
to do the relatively easy job of managing this home of mine. I think, in fact,
we had an ideal marriage—until I spoiled it.
    As I said, occasionally I would
become absent-minded and respond as if other people really mattered to me.
Apparently I made the mistake of doing this with Swannee; because little by
little she drifted off from me, began disappearing on short trips almost as my
mother had done, and then one day she told me she wanted a divorce and left.
    I was disappointed, but of course,
not much more than that; and I decided that trying to have an ordinary, live-in
wife had been a mistake in the first place. I now had all my time to devote to
work, and for the next year I did just that. Right up to the moment of my first
heart attack.
    At twenty-four. God damn it, no one
should have to have a heart attack after only twenty-four years in this world!
But again there was my rat-reflex mind chewing away at that problem, too, until
it broke through to a way out. I cashed in and set up a living trust to support
me in style forever, if necessary; and I went up to the cabin to live and make
myself healthy again.
    Two years of that—and then the
blackout, the squirrel, the trek south, the man with the axe... and Sunday.
    I had almost shot Sunday in the
first second I saw him, before I realized that he was in the same sort of
trance the squirrel had been in. We ran into each other about twenty miles or
so south of the Twin Cities, in an area where they had started to put together
a really good modern zoo—one in which the animals wandered about almost