Alan E. Nourse - Morley's Chain

2024-11-25 10 2 24.44KB 8 页 4.9玖币

侵权投诉

Tam's problem was simple. He lived in a world that belonged to someone else.

MARLEY'S CHAIN

By Alan E. Nourse

THEY saw Tam's shabby clothing and the small, weather-beaten bag he carried, and they ordered

him aside from the flow of passengers, and checked his packet of passports and visas with extreme care.

Then they ordered him to wait. Tam waited, a chilly apprehension rising in his throat. For fifteen minutes

he watched them, helplessly.

Finally, the Spaceport was empty, and the huge liner from the outer Asteroid Rings was being lifted

and rolled by the giant hooks and cranes back into its berth for drydock and repair, her curved,

meteor-dented hull gleaming dully in the harsh arc lights. Tam watched the creaking cranes, and shivered

in the cold night air, feeling hunger and dread gnawing at his stomach. There was none of the elation left,

none of the great, expansive, soothing joy at returning to Earth after eight long years of hard work and

bitterness. Only the cold, corroding uncertainty, the growing apprehension. Times had changed since that

night back in '87—just how much he hardly dared to guess. All he knew was the rumors he had heard,

the whispered tales, the frightened eyes and the scarred backs and faces. Tam hadn't believed them then,

so remote from Earth. He had just laughed and told himself that the stories weren't true. And now they all

welled back into his mind, tightening his throat and making him tremble

"Hey, Sharkie. Come here."

Tam turned and walked slowly over to the customs official who held his papers. "Everything's in

order," he said, half defiantly, looking up at the officer's impassive face. "There isn't any mistake."

"What were you doing in the Rings, Sharkie?" The officer's voice was sharp.

"Indenture. Working off my fare back home."

The officer peered into Tam's face, incredulously. "And you come back here?" He shook his head

and turned to the other officer. "I knew these Sharkies were dumb, but I didn't think they were that

dumb." He turned back to Tam, his eyes suspicious. "What do you think you're going to do now?"

Tam shrugged, uneasily. "Get a job," he said. "A man's got to eat."

The officers exchanged glances. "How long you been on the Rings?"

"Eight years." Tam looked up at him, anxiously. "Can I have my papers now?"

A cruel grin played over the officer's lips. "Sure," he said, handing back the packet of papers.

"Happy job-hunting," he added sardonically. "But remember—the ship's going back to the Rings in a

week. You can always sign yourself over for fare—"

"I know," said Tam, turning away, sharply. "I know all about how that works." He tucked the papers

carefully into a tattered breast pocket, hefted the bag wearily, and began trudging slowly across the cold

concrete of the Port toward the street and the Underground. A wave of loneliness, almost overpowering

in intensity, swept over him, a feeling of emptiness, bleak and hopeless. A chilly night wind swept through

his unkempt blond hair as the automatics let him out into the street, and he saw the large dirty "New

Denver Underground" sign with the arrow at the far side of the road. Off to the right, several miles across

the high mountain plateau, the great capitol city loomed up, shining like a thousand twinkling stars in the

clear cold air. Tam jingled his last few coins listlessly, and started for the downward ramp. Somewhere,

down there, he could find a darkened corner, maybe even a bench, where the police wouldn't bother him

for a couple of hours: Maybe after a little sleep, he'd find some courage, hidden away somewhere. Just

enough to walk into an office and ask for a job.

That, he reflected wearily as he shuffled into the tunnel, would take a lot of courage—

THE girl at the desk glanced up I at him, indifferent, and turned her eyes back to the letter she was

typing. Tam Peters continued to stand, awkwardly, his blond hair rumpled, little crow's-feet of weariness

creeping from the corners of his eyes. Slowly he looked around the neat office, feeling a pang of shame at

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

4.9 玖币 2人已下载

立即下载

Alan E. Nourse - Morley's Chain.pdf

共8页,预览1页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Alan E. Nourse - Morley's Chain

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: