Chapter 8 2

The plane didn't burn, perhaps because the space snake had sucked too much of our heat.I believe both McCabel and Gott survived.My memory is vague like a dream, but I think they visited me in the hospital together, Gott on crutches and McCabel's arm in a cast. Trying to remember, I realized that my survival was unexpected.I believe I suffered a concussion.I was bedridden for long periods of time, both legs were broken, and worst of all I was severely infected with the gamma form virus.But maybe it was the virus that saved my life. Dr. Ram is taking care of me.When I first met him, his crisp foreign language caught my attention.Before he opened his eyes and saw his face, he stitched me up.Probably Gott had told him I was a man worth resuscitating, and that his enthusiasm was for space sickness, that the silent gamma-form virus in my blood had turned me into a laboratory specimen.

For a long time I didn't care where I lived or what happened on Earth.I must have heard people talk about Star Wars, but it wasn't nearly as catastrophic as the Moon Children and Metal Ants I knew haunted me. A shy old man named Andy Eowine cleaned my room.He once went to the moon as an engineer in a navigation ship.His wife died of space sickness, and his son went to war.He lives alone in a little white house - I can see it from my window.He has his own backyard where he grows roses. His talk was roses and towns. Pittman is a prosperous agricultural center, and now there is a military camp nearby, far away from the mountains is the original lair of the space snake, and far away from the sea is the place where the fog continues to spread.He thinks the place is safe.

Even metal ants have never been to Pittmans, Andy said, their desire is to find metal and energy.They appear to have been blasted to pieces by a nuclear bomb and are scattered across several areas.Then they unexpectedly flocked to the larger cities, using everything to build their nests, and now they are leaving the cities to clear the land. Pittmans without such things are safe. After a year and a half I started to care about the calendar. I started asking questions - about the moon children.Andy remembers that he'd read about Guy's looting of the Moon Grit, and he thought Nick and Kelly died from the skygate explosion (which happened while dealing with Metal Ants), and that's all he knew.

No one has ever heard of an intergalactic terminal.I'm beginning to think that information missiles that have "stayed" on the moon for 60 million years are of no value at all, that the birth of a moon child has no special significance, that we've already lost the race to prevent conflict between the universes.For a long time, I didn't even want to get fit anymore. Andy didn't want to talk about the war.Dr. Ram was too weak, too "narcissistic" to say anything, and he was infected with the gamma form virus, probably because of me.He's desperately trying to make himself immune to my blood.

My real news of the war came from other patients, after I had recovered enough to not require isolation.Carter came to the ward as a burnt ghost, his weakness more from exposure and hard work than any space sickness, and he was delirious and deranged when he first arrived.His incredible story rekindled my interest in the world. He's a retired Space Force pilot, and he told me how Army mechanics built America's last aviation plane—he thought so.After the plane was built, he made a test flight, changing speeds to avoid the space snake.He also brought back a report on the activities of metal ants in the Tianmen area.

As the spaceship descended, Carter saw something that had hitherto eluded his imagination.Even now, he can't quite believe what he's seeing.That day, he sat on the bed like a skeleton with a black beard, and I remember his hesitant look.He is a native of New Mexico. "The army doesn't believe what I've seen exists," he said, looking at me restlessly with fiery eyes. "Where the Gate of Heaven is, a tower on a plateau. They say I'm a liar, that I'm talking nonsense." "Is it white?" I whispered. "Does it have seven pillars together? Does it spiral? Does the central pillar have a pointed, glowing top?"

"You..." He was dumbfounded and licked his lips, "Sir, have you been there?" "That's the intergalactic terminal!" My voice was as thick as his. I said out of breath, "Moon children were born to build terminals so that tachyon ships could fly in from other planets." "Are you sure it's really there?" I wanted to sit up in bed for the first time. "It's there, really." There was fear in his voice. "Higher than I dare fly, and the shape is exactly as you said. Except..." He paused and frowned, "Except for the top, it's not shiny, it's as dark as midnight."

"It's really there!" I wanted to crawl out of the bed. "The tachyon ship will come, then." He listened, leaning back on the pillow. I had to stop for a moment as his nurse moved his badly injured feet, but he continued to tell his story. "I'm just one of the lucky ones," he said. "The plane went straight down and luckily I was ejected before it crashed. I just had a dislocated ankle and a couple of broken bones, which wasn't too bad when I thought about it. "I found my lifejacket in the wreckage. It was hot in the desert and I hurt my ankle, how lucky I was. When I climbed out of the place, I saw the tower, above the clouds!

"I waited until sunset, and guessed it might be a mirage. But it stayed where it was. It was dark in the desert, and the sun was still shining on it. It was a marvelous thing, sir, high up in the sky, and the sun gave it It is plated with a layer of gold. In the night, red and purple also slowly form color blocks on it. I have never imagined such a beautiful tower of no halls. "I made a walking stick. When dawn came, I began to walk towards the tower. The tower was already radiant before sunrise, a rose-gold color under a dead black top. "It was a mile from where I started. I limped until sunset and it still seemed a mile away. By then my mouth was parched and my feet ached like hell. The tower didn't look like it anymore. So beautiful."

As soon as Carter recovered from his wounds, he put on his military uniform again. He wanted to lead a troop of cavalry westward. He thought that neither space snakes nor metal ants would hinder the horses.He hopes to get a few pictures of the terminal and maybe communicate with the metal ants. But I never heard from him again. Another person slept with his head covered for three days after treatment. "His name is Barro," Eowine told me, "and he has many friends. They took him to the hospital in a buggy and threatened to kill him if Dr. It will burn down the hospital."

"How did he get hurt?" "He was severely injured by some women, his internal organs were also smashed, and his peritoneum had already begun to inflame. If the surgery was not done well, he would have died already." When Barrow woke up I saw him. He was a bony, irascible man with bushy hair, a nasal and whining voice.He was furious when the doctor removed the bandage from his face and accidentally touched his face.After dismantling, he asked for a mirror. "Look what you did to me!" Pointing to the forked blue scar on his face, he said, "I used to be a very handsome man. People said I was like a star. Now look how scary you made me." He threw the mirror heavily at the doctor: "You damned clumsy quack!" Naras Macha stooped to hide, and the mirror shattered to the ground with a snap.His bad attitude angered the doctor. The doctor's black face showed suffocating anger, his clenched hands kept shaking, and he strode out without saying a word. "Call him back," Barrow snarled at the nurse, "I'll take no offense. I'm going to let you know I'm a great guy, we're the Fairfax Barrow family, I guess you've heard .” "Heard it many times." The nurse hurried out.He turned around and glared at me. "I'm Spock Barrow," the unscarred side of his face twitched into a slight smile, "I'm a man in Fairfax where no one dares to offend me, no second Second-rate!" I was about to introduce myself when he suddenly became pitiful and said sadly, "This is too much for me to take. My father was the chairman of the Fairfax National Bank and the chairman of the Fairfax factory." , he has the best property in town. When I got married, he gave me a presidential wedding, but look at me now." He sniffled and pointed at the scar on his face. "My wife is Billy Levelland, the most beautiful and sexiest woman in town. I have four acres of land and an eight-bedroom house. I drive a hydrogen-fueled Cadillac and only do business twice a year.I thought I had it all until the King of the Moon came..." "The King of the Moon?" I was already very tired of Barrow, but when I heard him say that, I cheered up, "Who is the King of the Moon?" "You remember the Moonkids? Two cunning little things and a furry bear-like thing?" I said I still remember Moon Children. "As they grew up, it seemed like people hated them more and more, I guess because going into another biological universe wasn't fun for people anymore. Anyway, that beast thing eight years ago brought came to us with what he called moon grains..." "Have you seen it," I interrupted, "a glowing pyramid-like thing..." "Billeveland," he said with hatred in his voice, "most of the women in Fairfax. But he never showed it to me. He didn't show it to men..." "Then cover..." I hastened to stop talking, "Is the sand still in Fairfax?" "Of course it is," Barrow nodded painfully. "I heard he hid it in my father's bank storage room. Billy Levelland said it can make space creatures—killing fog, flying space snakes, eating Iron Metal Ant—stay away from Fairfax, she also thinks it cures cosmic diseases." "So this child of the moon really exists?" "He wasn't a kid, he was the size of a big grizzly bear. He came to Fairfax years ago with grains of grit, and that's when the world started to fall apart. I was the only one who didn't know him, and Billy Levelland Yes, she is my wife..." Barrow gritted his teeth. "That's when she started being cold to me. If you can imagine..." He coughed a little with rage, as if he couldn't imagine, "They're treacherous. My wife, and the hairy beasts! They should all be burned alive." He sat up in bed, gasping for air, staring at a listening nurse at the door.The nurse ran away in fear, and he lay down again to adjust his breathing. "He was like a talking Siberian bear in a circus. Heard a professor asked some nasty questions one night, so he smashed his head off and ran away. It was in another town. happened. "He sneaked into Fairfax through the woods, wearing a battered hat and an old awning, like a bum begging for food. I must have gone to the Multi-Village Club for a gin that day. , than Cleveland — alone at home.” Anger boiled inside him. "I guess she let him into the kitchen first. She stuffed him with the meat she was supposed to cook for me and ended up hiding him in a little room behind the garage where her dead mother used to live. She even Hiding him there, can you imagine?" "How could she?" He winked at me, angry and bewildered, "A sweet girl like Billy Levelland, who sings in the choir and teaches at the children's weekend school, whenever she sees me How could a girl who would cry like a child when the lipstick marks on her shirt became like this? How could any girl like that big stupid bear?" I did not respond to his words. "She kept him there for the better part of a year, and I didn't know anything about it. But she wasn't the only woman he had," he said slowly, as if surprised, "I guess it was a virgin at first, and then married woman." He grinned grimly with a bit of pain, and at the same time a bit of smugness. "I'm not the only victim." I couldn't help but ask him how he found him. "Billy's so damn happy," he said, frowning, "so fucking healthy, so damn pretty, like at the fountain of life." She kept humming, Just ignore me. She cooks what I like to eat, uses the money she saves to buy me a shock chronograph I wanted for my birthday, and stops nagging me when I'm late. Things like that Confused me. Until one day a stranger let me know the truth. "It was a fat little man with a hawk nose and a strange smell. When I first saw him coming out of the tree, I thought he was a federal policeman. But he didn't seem to care. Our violence against our employee, who is a private detective hired to find moon grit. "Oh?" I began to wonder how my missing brother got involved. "Is his name Tom Hood?" "He said his name was Todd Hunter Hawk," said Barrow, giving me a hard look, "and he knew all about the educated Siberian bear and the professor whose head was crushed. He snooped around and finally found the moon monster and his bitches. "When he told me about Billy Levelland I was so pissed off. I wanted to punch him but he ran away and just threw me a picture of Billy Levelland with that brute. He's still there The house was bugged. He played me a tape of the brute making love to her, and it made me sick.” Barrow sat still for a while, his scarred face twitching. "Hawk got a bunch of guys together, my golf buddies and poker buddies—that hairy brute got us all wives." His voice was hoarse with hatred. "I really want to catch Catch him and burn him alive, but Hawke says we'll have a hard time catching him. "So in the end we decided to go to court. My uncle was the head of the police department and the sheriff of the town had a loan in the bank, so we teamed up. We surrounded the house with six cars and ten men .I took a big shotgun and just wanted to smash the brute in one shot. "But he wasn't in the house," Barrow writhed in disappointment. "Someone yelled that he was running into the woods, and we rushed like fools. He was shot down by the creek. , when we got a closer look, the man who fell was the deputy sheriff. "That bastard fooled us, those damned women must have called him. We got back to the cabin to find the car overturned and burning, and that's just the beginning..." Maybe I smiled because he stopped and looked at me. "It's not a joke," he grumbled angrily, "not to us. And the women, I'll make the sluts ashamed forever to see that brute." "It's not a joke," I agreed with him, "did you catch him?" "Not yet, including his sluts. The sheriff wanted to catch all the women and drive them out of town, and he sent us into the streets in an armed squad, but we only caught a few little girls and Old women with all their teeth gone. The rest of us hid or shot us in the dark. "Our manhunt continued, a dozen of our men were killed or injured in a shootout in a city park, and the sheriff was wounded in an ambush near the bottle factory. "We surrounded them once, in the Red Crow Hotel on the side of the airport road. The police threw smoke bombs in there, then rushed in and fired. But the brute was so strong that he was not afraid of the smoke and grabbed the bullets. He grabbed the shopkeeper like a stick, and made a way for himself. A hairy demon! As strong as a Brahmin bull. "Those women, you can't imagine what he did to them! Most of them were already pregnant, all with big bellies carrying his little bastard. But it didn't bother them much, I saw the elders The pastor was thrown out of the window by his daughter. "At night, they hunted us. The sluts took over the courthouse, the auditorium and the militia barracks. They sniped us from water towers, elevators and rooftops. They wanted to drive us out of town." Barrow lay back and closed his eyes, gasping for breath. "Keep us out, don't let us in. They burn bridges, they build barricades of wretched cars, they set up snipers in basements among the trees, those crazy bitches and their hairy stallions, that's what we call the moon The king's reason." "Then he's still there?" "The government is not going to help us catch him. They're losing ground in the interstellar war, and the militiamen are busy fighting the murderous fog of Lake Barrow, so Hawke helps us raise our own cavalry. "Of course I was the captain. We forded the creek early one morning, sneaked past snipers and made our way through the woods. We startled three women who screamed to run, but we caught one anyway. "She was Billy Levelland, and she looked like she was going to have a second little bastard, but she never wanted to have one for me. We took her back to camp, and at first she didn't say anything, but Hawke Let her talk. She told us all about the brute and the moon grit, how they hid the grit in the bank vault, and how he slept once a week. Two to three days at a time. "I feel sorry for her, what a fool I am!" Barrow touched the scar on his face with trembling fingers, "I was in charge of her that night, in a barn. She broke the binding rope, and from From under the hay a rusty dagger came at me, she stabbed me, jumped on our best horse and ran away. "That's why I came here. I almost died on the way. But we're not done yet, Hawk is preparing to attack again, but he'll wait for me to lead.He fixed a tank that the militiamen had dropped, and we'll ride in it, while the brute sleeps.I don't believe those bitches know how to deal with tanks..." "It's time for bed, Mr. Barrow!" He glared at the busy nurse like she was Guy's woman.She smiled sweetly, laid out the bed sheets for him, looked at the monitor, turned on the sleep therapy device, and prepared for his next treatment. When he was released from the hospital, three militiamen came, all brown morose men with guns and knives hanging from their bodies.The tank has been repaired, one of them said.And Hawke was counting the days when the Moon King would sleep, and the hairy bastard would lose his mind if he woke up. Another partner of mine is Dr. Naras Macha.Lesser creatures were devouring his nerve cells, and he spent most of the time twitching and moaning in pain, with nothing the nurses could do. But sometimes he is sober enough to talk. "You know, Hodian, I hate dying now," he said to me one midnight. "I'd rather be the last to go when the end of the world comes. Anyway, I'd like to live long so that Let's see where we went wrong." I thought about it in a daze. "In the cities of India where I grew up, I was a researcher," he said, "I was never very concerned with the individual—you learn that too, but I did have a big ambition, and that was that I tried to study the universe. The cause of disease. I've often thought that before we can make friends with our neighboring biological universe, we have to beat them. Now I guess we'll never win." He sighed and fell into thought.I lay thinking about Barrow and his story about Gai's kingdom, where people were safe from cosmic disease.I thought it was too inappropriate for a dying man to tell such a complicated story, so I said nothing. "I've always been an optimist," Naras Macha said suddenly. "I believed in science, and I hoped it could explain our world and nature. I tried to make it a bridge between animals and God. " I heard him move and felt his haggard eyes watching me in the dark. "Hodian, do you think I'm wrong?" I have to say I don't know. In the morning he started foaming at the mouth and wailing again, and he died two days later.Eowine came in and put a veil over his face, and put a partition round the bed, and no one carried him away. The partition blocks my view through the windows, but sometimes I can hear sounds from the street: cars roaring, horns blaring, tires screeching under brakes, and crashing cars.These voices gradually diminished and finally disappeared. At noon, the silence was suffocating.I longed to hear the clink of plates, the sound of footsteps as I walked, the sounds of voices in the street, anything, but all I could hear was the pounding of my heart as I lay on my pillow. As night fell, Naras Macha's body began to smell, but not the rotting stench of a normal human corpse, but the sour smell of the lesser creatures that devoured him, like shredded beef. . That night, stimulated by the smell, coupled with fear, I struggled to get out of bed.Due to my weakness, I couldn't stand still. Holding on to the chair and the wall, I walked around the shutter and staggered to the window. Outside, moonlight shines on the silver mist. Fog spread across the valley, covering most of the town.On the hill where the hospital is located, trees and several fog-soaked houses stood there like black iron rods.Fog has flooded the first floor of the hospital and is now up to my window sill. On the mountain in the distance, there are a few shimmering lights, which I guess are the campfires of the refugees. Although there is no wind, the large fog slowly rises and falls as if it is breathing, emitting a lovely color like a cold moon. The light gave me an urge to jump down.