The Deadly Sky Read Free

thing it would not do was drop me; my fingers were firmly wrapped around a spiny tendon growing close to its side.
    Now and then the thing cast me a wicked look before suddenly plummeting into the pit. Along a wall we hurtled until we were deep within the gorge. Tiring of this, the bird ascended to the plateau, darted in circles for a few minutes before finally heading for the homeward side.
    My heels gouged furrows in the dirt before I finally got up enough nerve to let go, and then I pitched belly-first into a patch of tall weeds. Sitting up and cursing my wild mount, I spat out dust and grass, gained my footing and headed down the slope.
    As I reached the next plateau a large boulder came thundering down the trail behind me. It was all I could do to find cover beneath a jutting ledge before it pounded straight along the path where I had been walking. It pitched over the side and, though I listened, I didn’t hear it land.
    Complete darkness found me resting in a cave some two miles from the ground. While the wind built a small hurricane just beyond the mouth, I lay on the earth and slept.
    At dawn I climbed the rest of the way down, walked five miles to the nearest train station and rode to Section Ten.
    The door of my house was seven feet high and four feet across. There was a dial at mid-height upon which I played a code of lights. Immediately the door opened and Sargoth was there to greet me.
    Heading for my apartment, I said, “Don’t tell him anything, not when I came in or that I looked like I crawled from under a rock. Not anything. Got that?”
    “Whom do I work for, you or him?”
    “Isn’t that irrelevant? You know how old he is. I mean, how many men do you know who have their only child at age sixty?”
    “I don’t see what difference age makes.”
    “That’s because you’re a drell. If you were still human you’d see.” I closed the door in his face before he could argue.

Chapter 2
    The late morning sun came through the wall of my bedroom to awaken and annoy me. Stretching to reach the switch on the floor, I changed the angle of glass shingles outside so that the bright light became shade.
    Since the bed would have slid into the wall if I got off it, I sat on an edge and groaned. The muscles in my back were stiff and sore and as I gingerly tried them out I envisioned myself riding a bird across a crevasse. Like a honcho. Like an idiot.
    I made the mistake of raising my rear off the bed and away it went into the wall, noiselessly and efficiently, There to discard its clothes. Tonight when I switched it out again it would be wearing new sheets with a fresh blanket neatly folded at the foot.
    In the bathroom I took a capsule from a tube, switched it on and placed it in my mouth where it ran around cleaning my teeth with tiny bristles and suction cups. I inserted my head in a hole in the wall and gasped when the water came out cold. The glass shields on the water tank were becoming too corroded to reach out for heat and light. That was my fault. I had replaced the original shields with some of my own making.
    My bedroom was no more than a gleaming space fifteen by twenty-five by ten feet. According to Sargoth, and most people, a room wasn’t really neat and clean unless it was absolutely empty. Switching my bureau out of the wall by depressing a red disc on the floor, I rummaged in the top drawer for coins and fed them into a slot in a wall. Twenty-five cents for a shirt, blue since I had worn yellow yesterday, thirty cents for a pair of gray pants, twenty cents for underwear and socks, two dollars for a jacket and new boots. None of the clothes were sturdy except for the boots. At the end of the day, or whenever I pleased, I would throw them into the disposal chute.
    My father had never known what to do with me. Left a widower when my mother died in a train crash, he did his best to take care of me. I think he was relieved when I ran away at age twelve because it gave him an excuse to have Sargoth in