Gordon R Dickson - Sleepwalkers' World (2 page)

 

“I don’t know what ability you think you have in resisting the soporific effect,â€

 

Instinctively, Rafe tried to back up. But the branch dipped under him at the movement, and without visibly setting himself for the effort, the wolf shot into the air toward him. Rafe jerked his dangling feet up level with the branch, and white teeth clicked shut only inches below them as the branch lifted again. Rafe clung to it, not moving.

Slowed by the broadcast power as he was, he had no intention of taking his chances on the ground with a beast like the one below. There had to be other ways of handling this situation than fencing a timber wolf with his bare hands.

Lucas was still singing below him in a wavering combination of growl and whine. Feet hooked on the branch now, Rafe leaned forward a little—the branch trembled beneath him—and spoke to the wolf.

“Lucas,â€

 

He woke again to find Gaby out of her vehicle, seated on the carpet beside him, and supporting his head while she held a small glass at his lips. He drank—and choked. It was undiluted Scotch whisky. He shook his head and turned his lips away from the glass.

“No need, now—â€

 

For a long minute nothing was said. The car hummed its way northward along the unlimited-speed strip through dark farmland where all ordinary creatures, human and animal, slept in their drugged-like slumber.

“Let’s get this straight,â€

 

As if at some great distance, he heard the door to his room closing behind the policemen and the white-suited man. With a massive effort he turned the great weight of his head with reluctant neck muscles so that he gazed toward the window. The light still filled the sky. He could not see the sun from where he was, but it could not be quite down. He had a few minutes, anyway—maybe more than a few minutes—to do whatever could be done before the broadcast came on to add its soporific influence to the effect of whatever sedative or narcotic they had given him.

But even as he thought this, the drug was taking hold and blurring his mind so that he could not think, pulling him under. In the end, he went down with it, into unconsciousness, or something like it . . . .

At first it was only like drowning. But a dry and stifled drowning in which his whole body was held paralyzed, so that he could not struggle or call out. After a while, however, this passed and he became conscious again, but conscious only to the point of being aware that he was dreaming or hallucinating.