The Lonely Whelk Read Online Free PDF Page A

would prove his worth if it killed him.
    “ The Globe, please,” he
said to the cab driver.
    She nodded and screeched down the street,
and then rapidly came to a halt as a kid on a wheelie-board hurtled
out into the road in front of them. Clyde closed his eyes as a deep
breath filled his lungs and oxygen rushed through his body. He
imagined oxygen looked like miniature racecars barreling from his
heart to his brain and back. As long as he kept breathing and
didn’t eat too much corn syrup or processed foods, there would be
no traffic jams in his veins.
    He rested his hands on his knees and stared
at the thin threads on the seat in front of him. They weaved in and
out of each other so cleanly, united and whole. Focusing his mind,
he began to recite possible interview questions silently: What
challenges did you face and how did you handle them? What was your
biggest accomplishment? Failure? What do you expect from a
supervisor? Why did you leave your last job? How do you alleviate
stress? What projects have you worked on? What five words would you
use to describe yourself?
    A few minutes later, as the cab pulled up in
front of the Globe, Clyde realized that he had been reciting the
questions, but not the answers. He sighed and handed the driver
some cash.
    The Globe was an amazing building. The base
of the building began wide, but narrowed until it met the massive
sphere that rested on the top of the spike, high in the sky. It
was, according to the book Sam’s Tourist Tips and Take-Outs ,
the tallest building in the city. The base was made of a dark
obsidian-coloured stone, and the Globe itself was made entirely
made of glass. Sam’s explained that the glassblower, a
Maddox Oliphant, blew the globe himself, using his own invention –
a giant raindrop-shaped fan with its own air-generation system. The
point on the top of the sphere was a warning to any invading alien
species, although no one was quite sure what the warning said.
    Clyde wasn’t sure how reliable Sam’s
Tourist Tips and Takeouts was, but the building was incredible
and always looked like it was glowing. He took a deep breath. It
was time to interview.
    He strode towards the building, chanting
silently: one step forward and one step back: even a clumsy man
can dance. He might be clumsy, but this time, he would
dance.

 
     
     
     
     
     
    Holland curled up on the floor, sobbing.
Images flashed across her eyelids: Hawkings’ dead body in the
chair, the stars twinkling in the vast void of night on the other
side of the windows, the rows and rows of coffins lying parallel to
one another and containing the bodies of her friends — and she was
alone. Completely alone.
    This was an emotional cocktail: sadness,
mixed with fear, mixed with rage, and salted with a little bit of
relief – relief that she was alive and not dead, relief that her
crew would be there soon, and relief that Hawkings had at least had
the foresight to wake her up. But the relief masked the other
emotions only for a moment, and then her mind was awash with them
all simultaneously. After listening to and feeling her feelings
wreak havoc with her body and mind, it all began to settle into
one, solid, interminable sadness. Her hands trembled, the muscles
in her back tensed, and her throat and eyes began to burn.
    She didn’t count the minutes or hours that
passed; she merely focused on taking one breath after another after
another.
    Finally, she took a deep breath and sat up.
She imagined her backbone was made of iron and coated with the
polymer that made the Radovine spaceships invincible. She imagined
that she was a robot, being piloted by a faraway mind, and that she
had been commanded to start working. She imagined that she was
anyone but herself, and anywhere but here.
    The ship was running on autopilot, so there
shouldn’t be much for her to do yet except to start waking up the
others. But she wanted to double-check – six hundred years is a
long time, and anything could have