[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

captured it and stored it.
And in such a case, then they had given free this new maturity and this new equality. And they had taken something
which would have been lost in any event - something for which the human race had no use at all, but which was the
stuff of life for the Sitter people.
They had taken youth and beauty and they had stored it in the house; they had preserved something that a human
could not preserve except in memory. They had caught a fleeting thing and held it and it was there - the harvest of
many years; the house was bulging with it.
Lamont Stiles, he wondered, talking in his mind to that man so long ago, so far away, how much did you know? What
purpose was in your mind?
Perhaps a rebuke to the smugness of the town that had driven him to greatness. Perhaps a hope, maybe a certainty,
that no one in Millville could ever say again, as they had said of Lamont Stiles, that this or that boy or girl would
amount to nothing.
That much, perhaps, but surely not any more than that.
Donna had put her hand upon his arm, was tugging at his sleeve.
"Come on, Mr. Dean," she urged. "You can't stay standing here."
They walked with him to the door and said good night and he went up the street at a little faster gait, it seemed to
him, than he ordinarily traveled.
But that, he told himself quite seriously, was because now he was just slightly younger than he had been a couple of
hours before.
Dean went on even faster and he didn't hobble and he wasn't tired at all, but he wouldn't admit it to himself - for it
was a dream, a hope, a seeking after that one never must admit. Until one said it aloud, there was no commitment to the
hope, but once the word was spoken, then bitter disappointment lurked behind a tree.
He was walking in the wrong direction. He should be heading back for home. It was getting late and he should be in
bed.
And he mustn't speak the word. He must not breathe the thought.
He went up the walk, past the shrub-choked lawn, and he saw that the light still filtered through the drawn drapes.
He stopped on the stoop and the thought flashed through his mind: There are Stuffy and myself and old Abe
Hawkins. There are a lot of us...
The door came open and the Sitter stood there, poised and beautiful and not the least surprised. It was, he thought,
almost as if it had been expecting him.
And the other two of them, he saw, were sitting by the fireplace.
"Won't you please come in?" the Sitter said. "We are so glad you decided to come back. The children all are gone.
We can have a cozy chat."
He came in and sat down in the chair again and perched the hat carefully on one knee.
Once again the children were running in the room and there was the sense of timelessness and the sound of laughter.
He sat and nodded, thinking, while the Sitters waited.
It was hard, he thought. Hard to make the words come right.
 He felt again as he had felt many years ago, when the teacher had called upon him to recite in the second grade.
They were waiting, but they were patient; they would give him time.
He had to say it right. He must make them understand.
He couldn't blurt it out. It must be made to sound natural, and logical as well.
And how, he asked himself, could he make it logical?
There was nothing logical at all in men as old as he and Stuffy needing baby-sitters.
Title : Galactic Chest
Author : Clifford D. Simak
Original copyright year: 1956
Genre : science fiction
Comments : to my knowledge, this is the only available e-text of this book
Source : scanned and OCR-read from a paperback edition with Xerox TextBridge Pro 9.0, proofread in MS Word
2000.
Date of e-text : February 13, 2000
Prepared by : Anada Sucka
Anticopyright 2000. All rights reversed.
======================================================================
Galactic Chest
Clifford D. Simak
I had just finished writing the daily Community Chest story, and each day I wrote that story I was sore about it; there
were plenty of punks in the office who could have ground out that kind of copy. Even the copy boys could have
written it and no one would have known the difference; no one ever read it - except maybe some of the drive chairmen,
and I'm not even sure about them reading it.
I had protested to Barnacle Bill about my handling the Community Chest for another year. I had protested loud. I had [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]