Thorn by Fred Saberhagen (books to read romance .txt) 📗

legs that bore him round the white curve of tunnel were moving trunks of bone and muscle, well designed for his great weight. The torso above the legs had once been heroic, but now sagged grossly with advancing age. Still the clean-shaven face, its chin held high, was alert, controlled, imperious. Only a fringe of hair, all white, remained around the massive head; and gray hair grew matted thickly on the chest and belly and on the heavy, still-powerful arms.

      This man advanced a little way into the room and halted, looking with displeasure at the scene. “There are some very valuable things in here,” he announced in a bass voice, “and both of you are evidently crazy, or completely freaked out, or whatever the word for it is this year. Therefore I am not going to let you make this your playground. Got that?”

      The last words trailed off just a little. The aging man had at last taken some notice of the extreme rigidity of the girl’s gaze and the strangeness of her frozen posture. The arm she had used to shove the youth away was still extended. Her head was still turned, eyes looking back over her left shoulder.

      The only sound in the room, besides the violent music, was the labored breathing of the young man. He still sat on the floor, and now he was glowering angrily at the girl.

      The old man said, in his bass voice: “If that on the wall really strikes your fancy, little girl, then you have good taste. Better than some people who have entered this room fully clothed and supposedly in their right minds. Well, I have good taste too, and you doubtless don’t know what you’re staring at anyway, and I appreciate your round little ass. In fact, out of all the orifices available tonight, I may just choose to end my evening there. But I want to do it back in the other room. So get up.”

      Now through the tunnel behind the old man three more naked figures were approaching, pushing before them an extensive interplay of shadows. Slightly in the lead there walked a leanly muscular man of about thirty-five. His suntanned body was marked with the pale outline of absent swimming briefs. Just after the man came a boy who appeared to be in his mid-teens, small and slightly built, pale-haired, blinking lost eyes at the world. The boy supported himself every few steps by leaning a frail arm against the white curve of the tunnel wall. When he emerged from the tunnel into the room and the wall flattened, he stopped, leaning his back against it for support. A step behind the boy, another dark-haired girl strolled in casually. In size, and build, and coloring, she fairly closely resembled the girl who had been dancing. The brown eyes of this newly-arrived girl were keen with interest—but they were focused on the empty air an arm’s length before her face. She paid no attention to anyone else. Her full lips mumbled soundlessly, then smiled.

      The red-haired man who sat on the floor ignored them all, all except the girl who had danced. Now in his throat a low murmuring of rage and humiliation had begun, and grew in loudness. On the second try he struggled back to his feet. His right hand went out to a small white cube, and from its flat surface he grabbed up a small but heavy artifact of silvery metal. Raising this, he lunged straight for the crouching dancer as his right arm swung the lethally compact weight straight for her skull.

      The old man’s was the only voice to cry a warning, and his yell did no one any good. It sounded simultaneously with a sharp, dying scream.

      The thin young boy still leaned back tiredly against the flat white wall. His blinking eyes, completely lost, were looking somewhere on the far side of the dim room. The dark-haired girl who had come with him through the tunnel stood quietly beside him now. She was thoughtfully probing with one finger inside her own mouth, as if intent on making sure her teeth were all still there. She took no account of what had happened to the white carpet just a few feet away.

      The athletic man, who was alert and could move very fast, was already a step in front of the huge old one. But there he halted his swift advance, warily astonished; his move had obviously come too late, and he had no wish to step into the fresh blood.

      The huge, gray old man was astonished too. Then, because he was no stranger to sudden violence and it did not particularly upset him, and because he possessed a quickly penetrating mind, he was immediately struck by circumstances even more amazing than the mere fact of abrupt murder. Inspiration of a magnitude extremely rare grew swiftly behind his clear blue eyes. Slowly he put out a massive hand, to take his wiry companion by the shoulder.

      “Gliddon,” the old man said. He used the careful tone of one who wishes to wake a sleeper gently, not to startle.

      “What?” The attention of the wiry man was still warily absorbed in the scene before him. Hell of a mess to be cleaned up, at best, he was thinking. The killer was now standing, swaying, as if dazed. The silver artifact lay on the floor, near something else.

      “Gliddon. These two kids behind me. I want you to get them out of here. They’re both stoned blind, and I don’t think this has made any impression on them at all. I doubt that they’ll remember seeing a thing—but anyway we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. Right now get ‘em out of here and put ’em down to sleep somewhere. I want to deal with this.” He nodded at the red spectacle before them.

      “But.”

      “Oh, you can take charge of the cleanup later. But right now just get those two put away.” The old man, an expression in his