Parallax View Read Online Free PDF

at a point way beyond Corrie. Slowly, the black woman lay on her back and closed her eyes.
    “A week,” she heard the voice, issuing from the next cell. “Maybe a little more.”
    She turned. It was Rube. He lay propped on a pile of vegetation in his cell, staring at her. She focused on him, wondering if her eyes were playing tricks on her. The entirety of Rube’s torso now seemed to be scabbed over with the iridescent plaque, almost like a covering of chitin. His head sat atop the multi-coloured armour, bloated but unaffected by the plaque. A ginger growth of beard testified to the possibility that they had been in the cave for a week.
    “The Darwinian ,” Corrie said. She stopped. That seemed the extent of her ability to articulate the thought swimming nebulously in her head. She forced herself to concentrate. “I mean... how long before it gets here?”
    Rube laughed. “Jesus Christ, does it matter?” he said. Like Rachel, his voice was slowed, slurred. “What’s the rush? We’re doing okay, aren’t we? You were always one cocky, uptight bitch, Asanovic.”
    She waved in futile disgust and pushed herself away from the cell. She made her way around the cave, stopping before each of the dozen cells in turn. Imran... he too was out of it, lying back on his litter of leaves with a beatific expression on his face. Jake – he was sitting upright, legs crossed, staring right through Corrie. When she waved a hand before her eyes, he didn’t so much as blink. She moved on, around the curve of the cavern, and came to the cell in which Tanya and Sue huddled together. The women were naked, sweat-slicked limbs entwined. For a while they had conscientiously peeled the plaques from each others’ bodies, but they had neglected the duty for the past few days. Corrie made out invading colonies of the plaque, like lichen, splotched across the women’s fattening bodies: a patchwork alien carapace.
    She reached out and touched a leg, waggled it back and forth in a bid to elicit some response, but Tanya just moaned and turned over.
    Corrie looked around the cave. Her thoughts were slow. She wanted nothing more than to lie down in her cell, sup on the juice of another fruit.
    Something made her walk past her cell and approach the cave entrance. She closed her eyes, squinting. After the half-light of the cave, the glare of the setting sun was a painful dazzle. Her sight adjusted at last and she made out the bloated hemisphere of Deneb going down behind the jungle on the far side of the river.
    On the shelving sands before the cave-mouths, a triptych of Gargoyles stood very still, as if frozen. Corrie had often seen them like this, in postures that made no sense in the human schema of arrested motion.
    They looked more than ever like insects in their immobility.
    Corrie approached the aliens and walked around them. Their eyes were open, each pair focused on a different point. They seemed not to notice her.
    She struggled to fathom what made the attention of the Gargoyles so frightening. For days the aliens had fed and watered the stranded humans, supplying them with half a dozen varieties of fruit, all of which had a sedative, soporific effect on the team.
    And yet, while the Gargoyles danced attendance to the human’s need for sustenance, in all other respects they seemed to ignore the team.
    It was this disparity that was so eerie.
    Corrie smiled to herself, pleased that she had managed to work out something so complex. She knew why, though. It was sunset, hours since they had last been fed, and the mind-crippling effects of the fruit were wearing off.
    She reached out, touched the cold, hard skin of the closest alien. It turned, suddenly, and stared at her with its ember-like eyes.
    She controlled her breathing. Her heart gave a panicky little flutter. “Thank you,” she said. Until this moment, she hadn’t understood that the complex array of emotions she felt towards the Gargoyles included gratitude, but she realised that