Daddy [antikvár]

ONE THOMAS THE YOUNGER OPENED HIS EYES. SEPTEMBER 18, 1942, his eleventh birthday, had dawned. Ií couldn't have been more than fi ve o'clock. He peered out of the window. Fiery shafts of light were transfixing the sky and plunging into the sea. A leaden silence hung in the air, which was already stifüngly hot. An unnaturaí silence. Thomas scanned the motioníess countryside without detecting anything or anyone to explain why he'd waked up so abruptly, why the machine in his head had sounded a sudden alarm, or why he'd darted to the window in three swift strides. It was illogical-he should still have been dead to the world. He'd sat up very late rereading the whole of Valentine Williams' s Man with the Club Foot, which he liked as much as L. J. Vance's Lone Wolf, if not better, so it had been well past midnight when he went to sleep. Nothing to be seen. He swung his legs over the windowsill and sat there with his feet dangling. He was eleven now-awfully old, and he hadn't done much with his life yet. All right, so he was kidding-eleven wasn't that old. He examined the contents of his mind. Nothing wrong there: the machine was functioning smoothly, sifting every detail, l