Clean Break by Roger D. Aycock (robert munsch read aloud txt) 📗
- Author: Roger D. Aycock
Book online «Clean Break by Roger D. Aycock (robert munsch read aloud txt) 📗». Author Roger D. Aycock
It was only a harmless square of linen, smudged with dust and spotted with blood from Bivins' chow-bitten leg—but with his closer look Oliver's world sprang up and exploded with a shattering bang in his startled face.
The dust was quite ordinary, but Bivins' blood was not.
It was green.
He was never quite sure, later, just what happened next. He retained a vague memory of roaring away in his Aunt Katisha's car through a reckless showering of crushed shell; sometimes he could recall the cool onrush of wind whipping his face and the frantic dodging of approaching headlamps on the highway. But in the main, his descent upon the Furnay estate was a blank.
Only one fact stood out with freezing clarity, excluding any thought of his Aunt Katisha's certain wrath or of Orella's maidenly reproaches: Perrl-high-C-trill-and-A-above was in Deadly Danger, and there was none but Oliver Watts to rescue her.
There was a brief instant of lucidity as he approached the Furnay gates through the cabbage palms and was forced to choose a course of action.
The attendant certainly would not admit him without orders from Mr. Furnay, who as certainly would not give them; the walls were much too high and sheer for climbing; and to make the need for haste even more critical, it was only too obvious that the Furnay gang was about to depart.
A tremendous saucer-shaped ship had landed by the menagerie building, where it sat with circular peripheral ports aglow and lines of bold enigmatic hieroglyphs fluorescing greenly on its smooth undersurface. Jointed metal figures scurried here and there, chivvying the last of Mr. Furnay's herbivores up a ramp into the belly of the ship; the predators, in cages drawn by other sleek robot stevedores, followed in orderly procession.
Oliver solved his problem of entry by driving headlong through the iron grillwork.
There was a raucous yelling from the gateman, a monstrous rending of metal and jangling of broken glass. Aunt Katisha's car slewed erratically down the Furnay drive, turned over twice and pitched Oliver out, stunned for the second time that day, into the greenish glow shed by the saucer-ship's lights.
e struggled back to awareness to find his head pillowed on something soft and wonderfully comfortable. A circle of startled faces, most of them dark facsimiles of the putteed Bivins', stared uncertainly down at him. In the near foreground stood Mr. Furnay, wringing his hands and muttering grittily to himself in his own dissonant tongue. Mr. Furnay, seen now for the first time without his too-large Panama, exhibited instead of hair a crest of downy blue feathers and pronged antennae that vibrated softly in the evening breeze.
"Where is she?" Oliver demanded. He scrambled dizzily to his feet, and the circle of faces melted backward hastily. "What have you done with Pearl, you monsters?"
Perrl-high-C-trill-and-A-above, on whose lap Oliver's head had been pillowed, stood up to move between Oliver and the patently apprehensive Mr. Furnay. She wore a light maroon cape over her sunsuit against the mild chill of evening, and could not possibly have looked less like a damsel in distress. She seemed, as a matter of fact, quite happy.
"I hoped you would come to see me again before blastoff," she said. Her voice skipped, tinkling with pleasure, from octave to octave. "But so suddenly—so dashing, so impetuous!"
"You're going away willingly?" Oliver said dumbly. "Then they're not forcing—you're not a prisoner after all?"
Her laugh was an arpeggiando blending of surprise and amusement. "A prisoner of these Tsammai? No. I am a performer in their company, hired by Xtll—Mr. Furnay—to train and exhibit animals native to my own world."
"But I heard Furnay threaten you in the menagerie building this afternoon! His tone—"
"The Tsammai tongue sounds dreadful because it is all consonants and not based on pitch and nuance as mine is," she said. "But the Tsammai themselves are only tradesmen, and are very gentle. Xtll—Mr. Furnay—only feared that I might say too much to you then, when it was important that the natives should not suspect our identity."
"It is true," Mr. Furnay nodded, sounding relieved. "We must avoid notice on such worlds as yours, which are too backward to appreciate the marvels of our show. We stop here only to scout for new and novel exhibits."
"Show!" Oliver echoed, "You mean all this is—is—"
"What else?" asked Mr. Furnay. He pointed with his antennae to the fluorescent hieroglyphs on the undersurface of the saucer-ship. "See, in our lingua galactica it reads: SKRRFF BROTHERS' INTERSTELLAR CIRCUS, THE GALAXY'S GREATEST. It is the best on the circuit."
He indicated the circle of identical Bivinses. "These are the Skrrff brothers, our owners. I, sir, am business manager."
"But not always a good one," one of the brothers said pointedly. "This time he has bought an entire menagerie of such fierceness that our trainers cannot exhibit it. It will have to be sold to some frontier-planet zoo, and our loss will be staggering."
It was left for Perrl-high-C-trill-and-A-above to deal with the problem, which she did with universal feminine practicality.
"Oliver made your bear well," she pointed out. "And he is afraid of nothing—nothing! Could he not train his own fierce beasts as well as I train my gentle ones?"
Oliver said, "Huh?"
The Skrrff brothers, of course, implored Oliver on the spot to join them at any salary.
Perrl-high-C-trill-and-A-above said demurely, in three octaves and for all the world to hear: "And I'm lonely, Oliver!"
Oliver never had a chance.
ife in Landsdale goes quietly on, the ripples made by Oliver's departure long since smoothed away by the years.
Miss Orella Simms has married the Methodist minister who was to have married her to Oliver. Aunt Katisha and Glenna have resigned themselves to Oliver's escape and have taken over the job of assisting Orella to superintend her husband's career, an occupation eminently satisfactory to all because the placid cleric never dreams troublesome dreams of adventure, as Oliver did, to try their matriarchal patience.
... But life is never dull for Mr. and Mrs. Oliver Watts, whose breathtaking performances currently electrify the thrill-hungry cultures of a thousand worlds. They have traveled from Sirius to Sagittarius, and at this writing have two children: a golden-haired daughter of four named Perrl-high-C-trill-and-A-sharp-above, and a tow-headed boy of two who has a cowlick like his father's and whose name is Butch.
They are very happy and there has been no talk between them, though they are wealthy enough in galactic credits by now to have bought half a planet for a home, of settling down to the quiet life. They are quite satisfied to leave such consequential decisions to those who like change for the sake of change or who, unlike Oliver, never know when they are well off.
One clean break to a lifetime, Oliver maintains, is enough.
—ROGER DEE
End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Clean Break, by Roger Dee
Comments (0)