The World Wreckers Read Online Free PDF Page A

spaceport there was gambling, and where
    there was gambling he could make a stake—and then there was a whole big galaxy waiting for him
    again.
    He called the number his first visitor had left.
    Conner was ready to die.
    He found himself floating again, as he had floated so many times since the accident a year ago:
    weightless, sick, disoriented. Dying, and death wouldn't come. Not this again. Overdosed, I was ready to die. I thought it would cut this off. Now here again, is this my hell?
    Time disappeared, as it always did, a few minutes, an hour, fifty years, floating across the cosmos, and a voice said clear and loud in his brain, not in words, Maybe we can help, but you must come to us. Such pain, such terror, there is no reason …
    Where, where? His whole world, his whole being, one silent scream, where can I turn this off .
    Darkover. Be patient, they'll find you.
    Where are you who speak to me? Where is this place? Conner tried to focus in the endless spinning.
    The voice drifted away. Nowhere. Not in the body. No time, no space here.
    The invisible cord of contact thinned, leaving him alone in his weightless hell, and Conner screamed
    inside his mind, Don't go, don't go, you were with me Out There, don't ever go, don't go …
    "He's coming to," remarked an all too solid voice, and Conner felt despair and loneliness and anguish all disappear under a sudden sharply physical ache of sickness. He opened his eyes to the too brisk, all but
    accusing eyes of Doctor Rimini, who made reassuring sounds which Conner disregarded, having heard
    them all too often before. He listened without speaking, promised blandly not to do it again, and sank
    into the lifeless apathy from which he had emerged only twice, both times for a futile attempt at suicide.
    "I don't understand yon," Rimini remarked. He sounded friendly and interested but Conner knew now how empty the words were. No, Rimini didn't give a damn, although they regarded him as a stubborn
    and still interesting case. Not a person, of course, with a unique and horrible way of suffering. Just a
    case. He opened a crack in his mind to hear the doctor chattering on, "You displayed so much will to live after the accident, Mr. Conner, and after surviving that ordeal it seems all wrong that you should
    give up now . . ."
    But what Conner heard with a shout that drowned Rimini's words were the doctor's own fear of death
    which now struck Conner as a sickening, small, petty thing, and the doctor's fear of what Conner had
    become—can he read my mind, does he know that I… and the stream trailed off into a wilderness of the
    small obscenities which were at least part of the reason for his will to suicide, not the doctor's alone; too many were like him, so that Conner had found even the hospital, with its animal shudderings of minds
    and bodies in agony, more endurable than the outside with men preoccupied with their own hungers and
    lusts and greed. He had crawled into a hole in the hospital and pulled the hole in after him, emerging
    only to try dying as a change, and never succeeding.
    When Rimini had babbled himself away again, Conner lay looking at the ceiling. He felt like laughing.
    Not with amusement, though.
    They spoke of the will to live he had demonstrated after the accident. It had been a bad one, one of the
    big ships exploding in space, and the personnel hardly having time to crowd into lifeboats; four of them, instead, had made it into the experimental plastic emergency bubblesuits and had fallen into space in
    those.
    The others had never been recovered. Conner wondered sometimes what had happened to them: had the
    life-support system mercifully failed, so that they died quickly and sane? Had they gone mad and raved
    mindlessly down to death? Were they still drifting out there in the endless night? He quailed from the
    thought. His own hell was bad enough.
    The bubbles had been meant for protection for minutes, until pickup could be made by lifeboat, not for
    days