Free Manly Wade Wellman - Novel 1959 by The Dark Destroyers (v1.1) Page A

           But
what, he found half of an instant to ask himself, would be the end of all this
headlong dash? For all his length and hardness of limb, for all his splendid
young strength and health, he was already puffing. His head whirled, and blood
beat in his ears. The cold nipped and dragged at him, like a living foe trying to throw him down. His breath clouding out
through the scarf, fell around him in shimmery
crystals as he ran. He wanted to stop, but he knew that stopping would be fatal.
The cold would fell him and finish him.
                 He
ran more slowly despite himself, and reached another open space, a mere lofty
chamber at which tunnels crossed. In the instant that he slowed up to choose a
new route, a patrol of Cold People moved into view across the way, ready for
him.
                 Three
held ray-throwers and stabbed the beams toward him, making steamy furrows in
the clotted frost of the floor. He stopped still, once again recognizing the
futility of escaping death longer. But the rays did not touch him. One played
past him to the right, like a stream
from a hose; another flicked the tunnel-way from which he had emerged, cutting
off his retreat in that direction. Perforce he turned to his left, and into
that passage.
                 One
inside, he ran again, his breath beginning to sob in his laboring lungs.
                 But
no ray blasted him, and even in his weariness he swifdy outdistanced the things
that had thus menaced him. On shaking legs he ran until he reached another open
space, this time as large as a public square.
                 Along
its walls were ranged shantylike little structures, of dull metal or smooth
concrete, and direcdy across his path ran a single rail of supports. As he came
into the open, a flat one-wheeled
car came into view along this rail, smoothly whispering. It stopped, and down
from it hopped three Cold Creatures. They, too, had rays, and these rays began
to glow, weaving and crossing around him.
                 He
stood still and glared.
                "Why don't you finish me, damn
you?" he yelled hoarsely at them.
                 But
the rays, two of them crossed, only crept toward him.
                This was some complicated
cat-and-mouse game. Darragh had heard all his life that the Cold People were
merciless in their warfare, but never that they were wantonly cruel. He wished
for a gun, for arrows, for his lost saber, that he might charge and perhaps
kill yet again before he was exploded into atoms. Closer crept the crossed rays
... closer.
                 He
could stand still and perish, or he could keep running. One of the alleys was
still open to him, and he swung around and staggered into it. He was fagged and
fainting, but he ran.
                 The
single rail went along this passage, and after a moment he heard that
one-wheeled car behind him. He snatched a backward glance. The three tormentors
followed, but not swifdy, not so closely as to overtake him. Once or twice a
ray came flicking, as a herdsman might crack a whip over a refractory animal.
He must keep moving somehow, stay ahead of their car, their rays. Up ahead,
this tunnel, too, widened.
                 Another
crossing of ways, but here both side exits were guarded by inexorable squads of
helmet-shaped devils with poised ray-weapons.
                 He
had come more than a mile, at a speed that made him sweat inside his leather
despite that ineffable cold. Again and again he had been sure that his last
moment had come, but teasingly it had delayed. Now ...
                 Now
it could delay no longer. Darragh was running toward a blank wall at the end
of the last tunnel. Frost ridged the partition, hung in shaggy beards before
him. Behind him came the Cold People, three of them on the car that rode the
rail, the others hitching nimbly along on their