"John Norman - Gor 02 - Outlaw of Gor" - читать интересную книгу автора (Norman John)

with one of New York's best known private universities.

He had changed very little, if at all. I rushed over to him and without
thinking seized him by the shoulder. What happened next seemed almost too
unbelievable to comprehend. He spun like a tiger with a sudden cry of rage
in some strange tongue and I found myself seized in hands like steel and
with great force hurled helplessly across his knee, my spine an inch from
being splintered like kindling wood.

In an instant he released me, apologising profusely even before recognising
me. In horror I realised that what he had done had been as much a reflex as
the blinking of an eye or the jerking of a knee under a physician's hammer.
It was the reflex of an animal whose instinct it is to destroy before it
can be destroyed, or of a human being who has been tooled into such an
animal, a human being who has been conditioned to kill swiftly, savagely,
or be killed in the same fashion. I was covered with sweat. I knew that I
had been an instant from death. Was this the gentle Cabot I had known?

'Harrison!' he cried. 'Harrison Smith!' He lifted me easily to my feet, his
words rapid and stumbling, trying to reassure me. 'I'm sorry,' he kept
saying, 'Forgive me! Forgive me, Old Man!'

We looked at one another.

He thrust out his hand impulsively, apologetically. I took it and we shook
hands. I'm afraid my grip was a bit weak, and that my hand shook a little.
'I'm really frightfully sorry,' he said.

There was a knot of people who had gathered, standing a safe distance away
on the sidewalk.

He smiled, the ingenuous boyish smile I remembered from New Hampshire.



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'Would you like a drink?' he asked.

I smiled too. 'I could use one,' I said.

In a small bar in midtown Manhattan, little more than a doorway and a
corridor, Tarl Cabot and I renewed our friendship. We talked of dozens of
things, but neither of us mentioned his abrupt response to my greeting, nor
did we speak of those mysterious months in which he had disappeared in the
mountains of New Hampshire.

In the ensuing months, my studies permitting, we saw one another fairly
often. I seemed to answer a desparate need for human fellowship in that