The Dancers of Noyo Read Online Free PDF

There were no intermediate stages. I became Alvin between one breath and the next.
     
                  Alvin was a little under forty, and a little overweight. At the present moment he was sweating heavily. This was partly because it was a hot day and partly because, not wanting to be turned back at the gate of the New Life Commune, he had taken the long way around.
     
                  He had pushed through thickets of baccharis, avoided clumps of poison oak, swatted hovering flies away from his wet forehead. Now he stood on a slight rise above the commune, touching the equipment in his pocket a little nervously. Needles, aspirator, capillary tubes, packing, labeling materials—it was all there, and it made rather a big parcel. He envied his colleagues who were working on skin irritants. All they had to do was to get skin of scalp scrapings. People always made such a fuss when you asked them to give you a little blood.
     
                  The Mendocino county health department had notified the state department of public health that the New Life Commune had had several cases of highly drug-resistant malaria. According to the county, the disease had been eventually controlled; but Alvin thought he would very much like to get blood samples from the commune members who'd suffered from it. Grant and promotion time was coming up in Alvin's office. He'd like to have his own project, instead of working under other people. It would be a great help if he had a new strain of Plasmodium to offer the committee.
     
                  Alvin had elected to wear a green whipcord suit rather resembling the uniform worn by county health department people. Alvin wasn't intending to tell any direct lies. Lies usually cause trouble later. But if the commune members should happen to form the opinion that he was a public health man, come to help the commune with its sanitation and drainage problems—why, it might be a desirable thing.
     
                  In the middle distance below him there was a cluster of geodesic domes, and one big hangarlike building that must be the recreation hall. There were latrines somewhere about, to judge from the smell. The smell would have interested a genuine public health man, but Alvin, who certainly wasn't interested in the prevention of disease, took it in his stride.
     
                  Farther away, and off to his right, were a number of branchy fruit trees and a field of some sort of green crop, like alfalfa. And immediately below him, the most striking thing within eyeshot, was a dense cloud of dust, like an exceptionally solid bank of smog.
     
                  Through the cloud he could occasionally catch a glimpse of human figures moving. It was like seeing the glint of fish swimming in a turbid aquarium. And from the center of the cloud came a dull rhythmic thud and a soft shuffling.
     
                  What were they doing, moving about in the murk? And in this heat, too. Once more Alvin got out his handkerchief and blotted sweat from his forehead. He'd better go try to find someone. The people in the circle seemed too preoccupied to notice him.
     
                  He skirted the dust cloud nervously. Two or three dogs ran out from the dust and began barking furiously at him. One of them, after barking in paroxysms for a minute or two, fell over on the ground and started twitching in some sort of fit. Froth came out from its mouth and collected around its jaws. It reminded Alvin of the laboratory dogs.
     
                  He went to the recreation hall first. There was nobody there, though several uncovered dishes of food, sitting on the windowsill, were surrounded by buzzing flies. Perhaps the building was really a dining hall. But where did the commune members cook?
     
                  He visited the geodesic domes next. There was nobody there either; there were lots of