Free Tom Swift and His Dyna-4 Capsule by Victor Appleton II

directions, all points of the compass. But he couldn’t give the directions their names. He didn’t know where the sun rose, where it set. He was only vaguely aware of its presence above the clouds. Perhaps compass directions didn’t matter in a timeless land where the sun appeared and disappeared but did not move.
    What Bud saw all around him was perfectly normal, perfectly sane. The church was at the periphery of the business district, what passed for downtown. He could see, beyond the blocks of larger buildings packed together, blocks of residences, houses, with neat green lawns. Cars were parked in many driveways. TV antennas—aerials, they had been called—occupied many a roof. The houses diminished with distance, and their density also fell. Far off he saw what looked like farmland with farm houses like tiny toys. Beyond that, flat green land, planted over; then brown and gray dirt all the way to rolling hills.
    Out beyond town he made out the slate ribbons of a couple highways. He tried not to acknowledge the fact that the highways were empty, utterly. "Better to do 120 on," he muttered fiercely. "I’ll start off at first light and hit that horizon fifteen minutes later, I swear !"
    Because I’ve got to get out of Friendly Village before my Barclay brain is as empty as the streets, added his thoughts. As empty and uninhabited and secretly crazy as this whole town.
    He fell into brooding.
    His brooding became, unexpectedly, violent. And vocal. With flailing gestures.
    He found himself yelling at the town, the silent town pierced only by his voice. The things he yelled made little sense. Sometimes they weren’t even words. Sometimes he didn’t even realize he was yelling them. But the gist of it was: " Where are you?—!"
    He threw in a few common terms of emphasis, hoarse and long.
    At a sudden thought he pulled out his cell.
NO SERVICE
    The emptiness took him over. He threw the phone out into space in fury and despair, an upward pass into the sky, higher than the little cross atop the steeple. Upward...
    The phone hit the middle of the sky, cracked, and went whirling down to earth in two pieces.
    And now he knew. The sky was a ceiling.
    The discovery didn’t kill Bud’s fury, but turned it cold.
    He plummeted back down the stairs. When he had left the steeple it had been broad daylight. Seconds later, stumbling out of the church into the open, it was night.
    "Of course it’s night," he declared bitterly. "Of course the sun doesn’t move. Of course the days change instantly. Because there is no sun, no moon. Just big lights screwed into the sky, the big phony sky. Hey, Friendly Village, you’re a phony, a hoax, bogus, a big nothing!—you’re a prop ! I’m getting out of this room! Hear that, Baxx? I’m getting out! "
    He sank down on the church steps and sank his face into his hands. His long black forelock fell across the back of his hands.
    Footsteps were approaching, padding softly.
    Bud looked up listlessly and registered no surprise.
    "Hello, Bud."
    "Hello, Reb. New in town?"
     

CHAPTER 9
ROSE REB
    ROSE REB stood in front of Bud on the steps. She had matured and filled-out since PS-1, since the biological experiment that was adolescence. The sullen, angry gauntness had become voluptuous, even voluminous. What remained was haunted, pale, pierced, coal-black hair hanging down on either side of her face in long crescents, as if enclosing her face in parentheses.
    Yet for all the sameness, all was not the same. Somehow, paradoxically, she looked like a walking victim of time’s relentless bludgeon. Her expression told of a resigned, matter-of-fact sadness. But there was something feverish in her dark dark eyes.
    "Always joking," she murmured.
    "That’s me, RR."
    "Uh-huh. And you’re always you."
    "I’m trying to quit."
    They stared at each other silently. Suddenly Bud surged to his feet and embraced her warmly. Another human being, even Rose Reb, was like a drink of water in the mind-messing