Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand Read Online Free PDF

them.
    So he told her again: ‘Yeah.’
    The grimace again. ‘Yeah, what?’
    ‘Yeah, I can use the john.’
    She held the rod, looked at him, and finally took a long breath.
    ‘But they didn’t have one at the station. For rats. So they told us to use the cage. Then we slept in it –’
    ‘Jeeze … !’ she repeated. ‘All right, when you have to,’ she said, with another breath, ‘please do. Use it, I mean. The john in back, there. I … I know I’ve got to tell you everything. And tell you very clearly. For heaven’s sake, I’ve got a whole carton in the rear compartment full of instructions on how to handle rats – and I’ve been afraid to read more than a cube or two of any of them for fear I’ll come across some incontrovertible fact that’ll tell me this whole thing just
isn’t
going to work! And then –’ She looked away, glanced back, looked away again – ‘I’ve got this machine that’s supposed to make all those instructions unnecessary anyway, or close to it, and –’ She took another breath – ‘and I’mterrified!’ She blinked at him, dark eyes near the surface of a dark face, while he tried to remember which emotion terror was. ‘I mean, if you could only … I mean, could you – If you might just put your arm around me, hold me – firmly, and perhaps even love me just a – love? Oh, what am I
talking
about! If you just wouldn’t
hate
me –’
    She stopped, amidst her uninteresting (to him) confusion: because he’d moved over on the bench, put his arm around her, and held her firmly.
    ‘Shit …’ she whispered. After a few moments she asked: ‘You don’t hate me for making you do… this?’
    ‘No.’
    Outside the windows, near dunes moved quickly before distant ones. On the instrument board, red and yellow needles quivered on blue and black dials.
    She put her head against his shoulder, took another long breath, then raised her head again. ‘Then I guess anything’s possible in this man’s universe, right?’
    He didn’t answer because, again, he didn’t know. But she didn’t hit him or yell at him as had often happened back at the station and sometimes even at Muct when people got upset around him.
    What she said finally was: ‘Well, I guess there’s nothing to do but get on with it.’ Apparently that meant, for the next five hours, driving over the bevelled sands. Ten minutes into them, she said, gently: ‘Take your arm away now and sit back where you were, please.’ So he did.
    An hour after that she said:
    ‘You know, even with two families in Kingston and three very fine jobs that took me back and forth over almost half this world, from Ferawan to Gilster – do you know, I was miserable? Miserable! I thought about suicide. I thought about becoming a rat myself. I went to the Institute once, sat there for a whole day, watching one pathetic creature after another push in through thatblack leather curtain and not come out. I must have put my own number back and taken a new one from the end of the list over a dozen times, before it hit me: I don’t have to
become a rat
to solve my problem. I could
get
a rat. For myself. I mean, that would have to be better. For me, for what I wanted. So you see …’ and was quiet, then, for more than an hour.
    Then she said: ‘Look at the way the light glitters on the grains caught at the edge of the sandshield.’ She nodded at a corner of the window. ‘And there, at the horizon, sometimes you get that same, vaguely prismatic effect, a kind of coloured glitter in the basic tan – like you do when the grains are up close. That’s because human beings are the basic height we are – if we were less than one metre tall or more than three metres tall, it wouldn’t happen – and because this world is the diameter it is, so that the horizon is the distance away it is from people who happen to be about as tall as we are, and because the average sand crystal here is as big as it is and because the atmosphere filters