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 My fault!
The woman s voice was harsh with pain. In its tank the Klantheid whimpered,
unnoticed.
 You were the one who was going to make this hell-hole a home you said, he
answered.
 What could I do? she cried, almost wildly.  What was there to do with you
gone twenty days out of thirty? What did you expect?
The man shrugged his shoulders exasperatedly. He drank.
 I don t know, he said.  Forget it.
But the woman was wound up now.
 Forget it! she said, furiously, turning on him.  Do you think I don t know
what s wrong with you? Do you think I ve sat here day after day for the past
year and watched you come home month after month just as you are now, without
knowing what your trouble is? You were never built to have a home and stay in
it. Your life is twenty days steady on the job and then a quick run in the
flitter toPoleCity and an eight day binge. That s all you wanted before you
met me on furlough back on Arcturus 1 and that s all you want now isn t it?
He did not answer, sitting frowning at his drink.
 I m in your way here, she said.  You daren t run off toPoleCity now that
Headquarters knows you re supposed to be married. They d declare you
psychologically unfit and you d never get another job with the Botany Service.
I m in your way, aren t I?Aren t I ?
He looked up, from his drink to her.
 Yes, he said, slowly, with bitter hatred,  you re in my way. You re
breaking me. You re killing me and I m sick of the very sight of you. Now go
hide yourself someplace and leave me alone, damn you!
The wave of cruel emotion slammed out from him, washing through the room,
smothering, washing the Klantheid down through agony into unconsciousness.
When the bruised tenderness of its psyche returned to awareness, the night
was far gone, and the twin moons hung low in the sky. The woman had
disappeared and the lights were out. In the low chair the man slept with
drunken heaviness.
The Klantheid came back to life with a plan, a plan born of the pain it had
just endured, and therefore, for it, a planso monstrous and horrible as to be
almost unbelievable. In its own way, the Klantheid had been driven somewhat
insane. The man must be gotten rid of at least for a long enough while for the
woman to be healed and mended. It was impossible for the Klantheid to bring
itself to hurt or damage another living creature but there was another way.
Slowly, awkwardly, in the late moonlight, it began to drag itself over the
side of the tank. It teetered for a moment on the edge and fell to the floor.
There it rested for a second, then began slowly to pull itself toward the door
leading to the lawn outside.
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ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
It moved by coiling and uncoiling its broad petals, the weak sucker ends of
its roots trailing behind it over the polished floor. Gradually it struggled
to the door whose automatic mechanism swung it open before the plant. It
dropped one short step down from the sill and fell on the lawn.
Now progress was easier, for the grass of the lawn responded to the
controlling will of the intelligent plant, stiffening up beneath it and lying
down before it so that it half-rolled, half-slid, looking like some weird
skater as it progressed away from the house it lived.
It approached the flitter.
Above, the entrance port of the flitter stood open in the moonlight. The
Klantheid reached up with half its broad petals, hooked them over the sill of
the port and, with what for it was a tremendous effort, lifted its own weight
up and into the flitter. The effort involved was roughly analagous to that of
a man chinning himself by two fingers the little fingers of both hands. It
tumbled at last onto the floor of the flitter, and while resting for a moment
before proceeding any further, reviewed in its own mind what it must do.
From past experience it knew what the sunrise of the following day would
bring. The woman would remain shut in her room. The man, barred from taking
off forPoleCity and sick with a hangover, would load the flitter with enough
liquor to last him for a week and take off to visit one of the other,
bachelor, Flower Wardens somewhere else on the planet. To get to another
likehimself would require an air trip of over a thousand miles, above the
park-like planet where landmarks were few and every meadow looked like the
next one.
The man would take off, set the automatic pilot and go back to his drinking,
leaving to the wonderful mechanism of the airship that was the flitter, the
job of bringing him safely to earth at his destination. If the automatic pilot
failed him
The Klantheid inched itself forward. It had been in the flitter only once;
but that once had been when the man and woman had first picked it up to bring
it to their house, on the occasion of the woman s arrival and the man had
explained the workings of the flitter to the woman as they flew. At the time
the words had been meaningless, for the Klantheid had neither mechanical
aptitude nor interest. But to a nature sensitive to the slightest whisper of a
breeze or the nodding of a blossom, perfect recall was easy. Now it remembered
and studied the memory.
The man had said that the automatic pilot was connected to the controls by a
single jack plug, and had pointed it out beneath the instrument panel.
The Klantheid inched painfully forward, feeling, tasting, the cold metal all
around it, vaguely sickened by it, as a human might be sickened by the taste
of the metal of a fork from which the silver plating has been worn away.
Memory led it to the jack plug. It closed its petals about it and pulled.
The jack did not stir. It was firmly socketed.
Crying soundlessly inside itself, the Klantheid wrapped its petals more [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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