"Chad Oliver - Shadows in the Sun" - читать интересную книгу автора (Oliver Chad)

Shadows in the Sun
By Chad Oliver
Scanned by BW-SciFi

Copyright, 1954, by Chad Oliver

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 54-12509

NOTE: The town of Jefferson Springs
and all its inhabitants
are entirely fictitious.

BALLANTINE BOOKS, INC.
404 Fifth Avenue
New York 18, N. Y.

To

Dad and Mom

The two finest shadows
Under one of the better suns

I

At first it had been plain stubbornness, disguised as scientific curiosity, that had kept Paul Ellery going. It
was different now.
He had to know.
He sat at the corner table of the Jefferson Springs Cafe, alone as he had always been alone in Jefferson
Springs. There wasn't much to look at in the small dining room a grimy electric clock that had been exactly
six minutes slow for the past two months, a somewhat battered jukebox, with tired technicolored bubbles,
dying on its feet, the inevitable painting of Judge Roy Bean's Law West of the Pecos, a greenish-glass case
filled with warm candy bars. Paul Ellery looked anyway, with restrained desperation. Then he pushed back
his plate with its remnants of chicken-fried steak and French-fries, and began to draw wet circles on the
varnished table with the bottom of his beer bottle.
There was a boxlike air-conditioner stuck in one window, consisting of a fan that blew wet air into the
room. Ellery could hear the water from the fan hose dripping down to the ground on the other side of the
wall; and inside the cafe it was so humid that even the wood was sweating.
Except for the hum and drip of the air-conditioner, there wasn't a sound. It was like sitting in a cave,
miles beneath the earth.
Waiting for an earthquake.
Ellery tried to ignore the unwanted little animal that kept shivering up and down his spine on multiple
ice-sheathed feet. He tried to remind himself that the animal was imaginary. He tried to tell himself that he
had nothing to fear. He tried to look calmer than he felt.
It was incredible.
The month was August, the day was Thursday. He was in Jefferson Springs, a town of six thousand
inhabitants, in the state of Texas, a part, usually, of the United States of America. It was eight o'clock in the
evening and it was hot. Some one hundred and twenty miles to the north was the city of San Antonio,
where the Alamo had given way to the Air Force. Sixty miles to the south was Eagle Pass, and on across