Selected Stories Read Online Free PDF Page A

Twisted, sick, nonsurvival roses, killing themselves with their own thorns.
    “And the world was a place of light!” Blue light, flickering in the contaminated air.
    The enemy. The red-topped lever. Bonze. “They pray and starve and kill themselves and die in the fires.”
    What creatures were these, these corrupted, violent, murdering humans? What right had they to another chance? What was in them that was good?
    Starr was good. Starr was crying. Only a human being could cry like that. Starr was a human being.
    Had humanity anything of Starr Anthim in it?
    Starr was a human being.
    He looked down through the darkness for his hands. No planet, no universe, is greater to a man than his own ego, his own observing self. These hands were the hands of all history, and like the hands of all men, they could by their small acts make human history or end it. Whether this power of hands was that of a billion hands, or whether it came to a focus in these two—this was suddenly unimportant to the eternities which now infolded him.
    He put humanity’s hands deep in his pockets and walked slowly back to the bleachers.
    “Starr.”
    She responded with a sleepy-child, interrogative whimper.
    “They’ll get their chance, Starr. I won’t touch the key.”
    She sat straight. She rose, and came to him, smiling. He could see her smile because, very faintly in this air, her teeth fluoresced. She put her hands on his shoulders. “Pete.”
    He held her very close for a moment. Her knees buckled then, and he had to carry her.
    There was no one in the Officers’ Club, which was the nearest building. He stumbled in, moved clawing along the wall until he found a switch. The light hurt him. He carried her to a settee and put her down gently. She did not move. One side of her face was as pale as milk.
    There was blood on his hands.
    He stood looking stupidly at it, wiped it on the sides of his trousers, looking dully at Starr. There was blood on her shirt.
    The echo of no’s came back to him from the far walls of the big room before he knew he had spoken. Starr wouldn’t do this. She couldn’t!
    A doctor. But there was no doctor. Not since Anders had hung himself. Get somebody. Do something.
    He dropped to his knees and gently unbuttoned her shirt. Between the sturdy, unfeminine GI bra and the top of her slacks, there was blood on her side. He whipped out a clean handkerchief and began to wipe it away. There was no wound, no puncture. But abruptly there was blood again. He blotted it carefully. And again there was blood.
    It was like trying to dry a piece of ice with a towel.
    He ran to the water cooler, wrung out the bloody handkerchief and ran back to her. He bathed her face carefully, the pale right side, the flushed left side. The handkerchief reddened again, this time with cosmetics, and then her face was pale all over, with great blue shadows under the eyes. While he watched, blood appeared on her left cheek.
    There must be somebody —He fled to the door.
    “Pete!”
    Running, turning at the sound of her voice, he hit the doorpost stunningly, caromed off, flailed for his balance, and then was back at her side. “Starr! Hang on, now! I’ll get a doctor as quick as—”
    Her hand strayed over her left cheek. “You found out. Nobody else knew, but Feldman. It got hard to cover properly.” Her hand went up to her hair.
    “Starr, I’ll get a—”
    “Pete, darling, promise me something?”
    “Why, sure; certainly, Starr.”
    “Don’t disturb my hair. It isn’t—all mine, you see.” She sounded like a seven-year-old, playing a game. “It all came out on this side, you see? I don’t want you to see me that way.”
    He was on his knees beside her again. “What is it? What happened to you?” he asked hoarsely.
    “Philadelphia,” she murmured. “Right at the beginning. The mushroom went up a half mile away. The studio caved in. I came to the next day. I didn’t know I was burned, then. It didn’t show. My left side. It