The World Wreckers Read Online Free PDF

or weeks. The life-support system was fail-safe, and hadn't failed. It had worked too well. Conner,
    breathing endlessly recycled oxygen, fed by intravenous dribbles of nutrient, had lived. And lived. Lived for days, weeks, months, spinning endlessly in free-fall in an invisible bubblefield, with nothing else
    between himself and the trillions upon trillions of stars.
    He had no measure of time. He had no means of knowing up from down, no means of orientation. He
    had nothing to look at but distant flaming points of stars that spun and wheeled round him in his tiny
    days of rotation on his own center.
    Five hours in a sensory deprivation tank, back in the prehistory of psychology, had sent men insane.
    Conner spent the first ten days or so—he later figured—in a desperate hope, clinging to sanity and the
    hope of rescue.
    Then, in his own endlessly prisoning universe, he went insane. Contemplating his own center, he spun
    like a god and emerged knowing there was no protection or death, even in madness. There was not even
    hunger upon which to orient himself.
    There was only his own mind, and the universe. And so he began spinning, ranging through the
    universe, his body left behind, his mind wholly free. He visited a thousand, thousand worlds, touched a
    thousand, thousand minds, never knowing dream from reality.
    They picked him up—chance, the merest fluke—-some four months after the crash. And Conner was
    insane, but in a strange way. His brain, left alone with itself too long, had learned to reach beyond, and now he was something he could not name, or others guess. Fixed firmly in a body chained to hunger,
    thirst, gravity and stress, he could not leave himself behind again; nor could he endure the life he had
    resigned himself to lose.
    "Mr. Conner," a voice interrupted his thoughts, "you have a visitor."
    He heard the man, incurious, wishing he would go away until he heard the name of Darkover, and then
    he didn't believe it.
    He accepted only to escape any further contact with the hospital whose shelter had become a blind alley,
    a mousetrap for his soul. And because, on a world of telepaths, there might be some who could help him
    to handle this thing, to turn off the nightmare he had become without desiring it and without knowing
    why.
    And, perhaps, a little, to find the voice in his dream…
    David Hamilton wiped the sweat from his face as he came blindly through the door, leaning briefly
    against the light paneled wall.
    He'd made it this time, but God! The blind terror when the anesthetic began to blot out light—
    No, it was going to be too much. He'd have to quit. Around him the hospital, crammed with humans and
    nonhumans, breathed and sweated pain and misery at every crack in the walls; and although David, from
    years of practice, could shut most of it out, his defenses were lowered from the strain of the operation
    just past and it began to wear in on him again from every direction.
    Is the whole world groaning in pain? His sharpened nerves gave him an absurd and frightening visual commentary, a planet splitting like a fractured skull, a globe of a world with a bandage round its
    equator; he started to giggle and cut it off just that fraction before it became hysteria.
    No good. I'll have to quit.
    I'm not insane. The doctors went all over that when I was nineteen and just beginning Medic training.
    I made it through Medical school on nerve and guts; and whatever else it did or didn't do, it gave me an
    uncanny knack for diagnosis. But here in the hospital it's too much. Too many symptoms, too many
    people in fear and terror. Too much pain, and I have to feel it all. I can't help them by sharing it.
    Dr. Lakshman, dark and grave, his eyes full of compassion beneath the white surgical plastic cap, put a
    brief hand on David's shoulder as he passed through the hall. David, fresh from horror, shrank from the
    touch as he had learned to do, then relaxed; Lakshman, as always, was clean sympathy and all