[Jan Darzek 01] - All the Colors of Darkness
Page 22
“As a matter of fact, I did. I met some Moon people. Men and women.”
“Maybe he’s normal after all,” Jean said. “What did the women look like?”
“They were enormous. Eight feet high, maybe ten, and broad as a barn door. They were wrapped up like an Egyptian mummy, and what I could see of their flesh was kind of blue-looking.”
“There’s nothing unreasonable about that. The nights up there get pretty cold.”
“These women weren’t cold. They were very warm, and more human than any human female I’ve ever met. They had four fingers on each hand, and their faces looked as if they’d been run over by a steam roller, and I thought they were beautiful. Don’t ask me why.”
“My God!” Jean exclaimed. “No wonder he’s a bachelor. Who could compete with a vision like that?”
“Have you told your analyst about that dream?” Ron Walker asked.
“I haven’t got an analyst.”
“You’d better get one fast. Ted—what’s the matter with Ted?”
Arnold was staring at Darzek, his face frozen in a look of utter stupefaction. His mouth worked futilely; finally he managed to speak. “Four fingers?”
“Right,” Darzek said.
“Four webbed fingers?”
“Right.”
“Dressed with some kind of cloth wrapped around and around her, and the whole face caved in, like, and fat from the front and skinny from the side, and eyes without any color, and—”
“So you know her, too,” Darzek said.
“Same person?”
“Same person.”
“You two are making this up,” Jean said.
“We aren’t, Hon—honest we aren’t. We just must have had the same dream, except that I only saw one of them. Did she say anything to you?”
“I don’t think she did,” Darzek said.
“She didn’t speak to me, but she showed me two formulas and a transmitter diagram, and I woke up right afterwards and wrote them down, and this morning—”
“Naturally she’d know better than to show me anything like that,” Darzek said.
“This morning I looked at them, and they made sense.” He turned to Watkins. “I’ve been thinking about all that red tape we had to go through to get a transmitter on the Moon, and all the trouble USSA has given us since we got it there. I think we should operate our own Moon projects.”
“I agree. But how do we get our transmitters to the Moon without USSA’s help?”
“All we have to do is design a transmitter that will operate without a receiver. This one I dreamed about will do it. I’m sure of that. We can go anywhere on the Moon we want to go. We can go to Mars, or Saturn, or Pluto—anywhere in the Solar System, or outside of it, if there’s anywhere outside of it to go. We can double our capacity here on Earth by using all of our transmitters to transmit, rather than half of them to receive. Whoever your Moon woman is, Jan, I feel doggone grateful to her. This idea—”
“He’s still dreaming,” Darzek told Jean. “Kick him.”
She did—sharply—and Arnold winced and bent over to rub his shin. “Just the same, I’m going to build one. I know it will work.”
“You have trouble ahead of you, Jean,” Darzek said. “This Moon woman is evidently a fellow scientist. That, with her natural beauty, makes her a formidable rival. I see only one hope for you.”
“What’s that?”
“Put him back on desserts. Then he won’t have such dreams.”
“No one took you off desserts. How did you happen to have the same dream?”
“In every man’s inner life there is an area so intensely personal—”
“I’ll haul both of you to an analyst,” Jean said, “and find out where those dreams came from.”
Darzek blissfully took another spoonful of sundae. “What makes you so sure that you’d like to know?” he asked.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lloyd Biggle, Jr., science fiction and mystery author and musicologist, was born in Waterloo, Iowa in 1923. Relocating to Michigan, he received degrees from Wayne State University and the University of Michigan. With the publication of his first novel, All the Colors of Darkness, he became a full-time author, a profession he continued until his death in 2002.
Biggle introduced aesthetics into science fiction, utilizing his musical background and his interest in artistic themes. His mystery stories include the Grandfather Rastin and Lady Sarah Varnley short stories, two Sherlock Holmes novels and the J. Pletcher/ Raina Lambert series.
He was the founding Secretary Treasurer of Science Fiction Writers of America and served as Chairman of its trustees for many years. Biggle also founded the Science Fiction Oral History Association to preserve a record of science fiction notables’ speeches and interviews.
He died after a courageous twenty year battle with leukemia and cancer.
BOOKS BY LLOYD BIGGLE, JR.
The Angry Espers
The Fury Out Of Time
The Light That Never Was
Monument
Alien Main (with T. L. Sherred)
Jan Darzek Novels:
All the Colors of Darkness
Watchers of the Dark
This Darkening Universe
Silence Is Deadly
The Whirligig of Time
Cultural Survey Novels:
The Still, Small Voice of Trumpets
The World Menders
Short Story Collections
The Rule of the Door
The Metallic Muse
A Galaxy of Strangers
Nebula Award Stories Seven (Editor)
MYSTERY AND SUSPENSE NOVELS:
Pletcher and Lambert Novels:
Interface for Murder
A Hazard of Losers
Where Dead Soldiers Walk
Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
The Quallsford Inheritance
The Glendower Conspiracy
Table of Contents
ALL THE COLORS OF DARKNESS
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
DEDICATION
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
BOOKS BY LLOYD BIGGLE, JR.