Shakespeare's Planet Read Online Free Page B

back aboard,” urged Nicodemus. “What do you want to eat? Vichyssoise, perhaps—how does that sound to you? Prime ribs, a baked potato?”
    â€œYou set a good table,” Horton told him.
    â€œI am an accomplished chef,” the robot said.
    â€œIs there anything you aren’t? Engineer and cook. What else?”
    â€œOh, many things,” said Nicodemus. “I can do many things.”
    The sun was gone and a purple haze seemed to be sifting down out of the sky. The haze hung over the yellow of the grass, which now had changed to the color of old, polished brass. The horizon was jet-black except for a glow of greenish light, the color of young leaves, where the sun had set.
    â€œIt is,” said Nicodemus, watching, “most pleasing to the eye.”
    The color was fading rapidly, and as it faded, a chill crept across the land. Horton turned to go up the ramp. As he turned, something swooped down upon him, seizing him and holding him. Not really seizing him, for there was nothing there to seize him, but a force that fastened on him and engulfed him so he could not move. He tried to fight against it, but he could not move a muscle. He attempted to cry out, but his throat and tongue were frozen. Suddenly he was naked—or felt that he was naked, not so much deprived of clothes as of all defenses, laid open so that the deepest corner of his being was exposed for all to see. There was a sense of being watched, of being examined, probed, and analyzed. Stripped and flayed and laid open so that the watcher could dig down to his last desire and his final hope. It was, said a fleeting thought inside his mind, as if God had come and was assessing him, perhaps passing judgment on him.
    He wanted to run and hide, to jerk the flayed skin back around his body and to hold it there, covering the gaping, spread-eagled thing that he had become, hiding himself again behind the tattered shreds of his humanity. But he couldn’t run and there was no place to hide, so he continued, standing rigid, being watched.
    There was nothing there. Nothing had appeared. But something had seized and held and stripped him, and he tried to drive out his mind to see it, to learn what kind of thing it was. And as he tried to do this, it seemed his skull cracked open and his mind was freed, protruding and opening out so that it could encompass what no man had ever understood before. In a moment of blind panic, his mind seemed to expand to fill the universe, clutching with nimble mental fingers at everything within the confines of frozen space and flowing time and for an instant, but only an instant, he imagined that he saw deep into the core of the ultimate meaning hidden in the farthest reaches of the universe.
    Then his mind collapsed and his skull snapped back together, the thing let loose of him and, staggering, he reached out to grasp the railing of the ramp to hold himself erect.
    Nicodemus was beside him, supporting him, and his anxious voice asked, “What is the matter, Carter? What came over you?”
    Horton grasped the railing in a death grip, as if it were the one reality left to him. His body ached with tension, but his mind still retained some of its unnatural sharpness, although he could feel the sharpness fading. Helped by Nicodemus, he straightened. He shook his head and blinked his eyes, clearing his vision. The colors out on the sea of grass had changed. The purple haze had faded into a deep twilight. The brassiness of the grass had smoothed into a leaden hue, and the sky was black. As he watched, the first bright star came out.
    â€œWhat is the matter, Carter?” the robot asked again.
    â€œYou mean you didn’t feel it?”
    â€œSomething,” said Nicodemus. “Something frightening. It struck me and slid off. Not my body, but my mind. As if someone had used a mental fist and had missed the blow, merely brushing against my mind.”

6
    The brain-that-once-had-been-a-monk