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    corners of earth, ready to place the projectors wherever their emanations (part sound, part something else)
    would reach masses of humans. They could not reach all humans, but they would reach most, and the
    established hive would then draw in the rest. No human would escape, none could; none would want to.
    Then, somewhere in this flawless, undivided, multi-skilled entity, Gurlick would plant a tiny fleck of
    himself, and at the instant of fusion between it and a living ovum, the Medusa would spread through it
    like crystallization through a supersaturated solution.
    Chapter 18
    Sharon Brevix squatted on the dry part of a stony stream bed, dying. It was the second night, and she
    hadn t come to the ocean or a city or any people at all. Billy had told her that lost people just have to find
    a river and go downstream and they ll be all right, because all the rivers flow into the sea and there s
    always a town or people there. She had started downstream as soon as it was light on the first morning. It
    never occurred to her to stay where she was until she heard a car, because she must certainly still be near
    the road, and a car had to come by eventually. She did not reason that when she traveled the stream bed
    for the first hour and it did not bring her to the road, it must therefore be leading her away from it.
    She was, after all, only four years old.
    By ten in the morning she was aching hungry, and by noon it was just awful. She whimpered and
    stopped for a while to cry hard, but after a time she got up again and kept on. The ocean couldn t be
    terribly far away after a person walks so far. (It was another twelve hundred miles, but she could not
    know that.) In the afternoon she had slept for a while, and when she awoke she found some wild
    raspberries on a bush. She ate all she could find until she was stung by a yellowjacket and ran away
    screaming. She found her little stream again and kept on going until it was dark. Now it was very late and
    she was dying. She felt better than she had, because she felt nothing at all very much, except hungry. The
    hunger had not diminished with her other sensations, but it had the virtue of blanketing them. Fear and
    cold and even loneliness were as unnoticeable, in the presence of that dazzle of hunger, as stars at noon. In
    the excitement of packing, and on the two days of traveling, she had eaten little, and she had rather less to
    fall back on than most four-year-olds, which is little enough.
    It was after midnight, and her troubled sleep had long since turned into a darker and more dangerous
    condition. Cramped limbs no longer tingled, and the chilly air brought no more shivers. She slept
    squatting, with her back and side against a nook of rock. Later she might topple over, very possibly too
    weak to move at all but for some feeble squirmings. Yet
    She heard a sound, she raised her head. She saw what at first she thought was a Christmas tree
    ornament, a silver ball with a dangle of gewgaws under it, in midair a few inches from her face. She
    blinked and resolved it into something much larger, much farther away, coming down out of the night
    sky. She heard a snarling howl. She looked a little higher, and was able to identify the running lights of a
    small airplane streaking down out of the high overcast.
    Sharon rose to her feet, holding the rock wall to steady herself while her congealed blood began to
    move. She saw the globe about to land on clear, ground at the top of a knoll three miles away. She saw the
    airplane strike it dead center while it was still thirty feet off the ground, and then plane, globe, and cargo
    were a tangled, flaming ruin on the hill. She watched it until it died, and then lay down to finish her own
    dying.
    Chapter 19
    Just another rash of saucer-sightings, thought the few observers, and recipients of their observations, in the
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    brief minutes left to them to think as they had always thought. Some of the military had, in these minutes,
    a harrowing perplexity. Anything tracked at such speeds as the radars reported, must, with small
    variations, appear somewhere along an extrapolated path; the higher the speed, the finer the extrapolation.
    The few recordings made of the flick and flash of these objects yielded flight-paths on which the objects
    simply did not appear. It was manifestly impossible for them to check and drop straight to their [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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