Strangers Read Online Free Page B

At any rate, he was cocksure, ambitious, and naive , which in any culture and in any age has always been an unstable combination.
    Farber spent the night before he was to report to the Outbound Center drinking in a small rural gasthaus in Zirndorf, the air heavy with the smell of spilled beer and cooking sauerkraut, listening to the bawdy jokes and naughty songs of his classmates, watching the proprietor’s half-blind old German shepherd beat its dusty tail against the floorboards and dream doggy dreams of youth. At midnight, ignoring the sounds of breaking crockery and Teutonic abandon, Farber got to his feet, carefully skirted two classmates who were wrestling on the floor next to the fussball machine while the proprietress slapped at them with a wet mop and the ancient shepherd growled reminiscently, and thrust himself out into darkness.
    The stars were out in their chill white armies, and, moving under them, Farber felt almost too big for the night, for the narrow cobblestone path under his feet—big and raw and new, he felt, filled to bursting with life like a skin full of living green water, charged with blind energies that left him hot and flowing in the cold country silence. Walking unsteadily, he made his way through the sleeping streets and shuttered squares, out through the harvested stubble of the surrounding fields (dirt under his feet now, and rutted frozen furrows), and ultimately down onto the dry flood-bed of the river. It was black and still here, the lights of the town left far behind, only the dim blinking red eyes of the hydroelectric plant downstream to remind him of civilization. Then the ground sloped down slightly toward the river channel, and he lost even the lights of the hydroelectric plant, left them behind him in darkness. He could hear the river now, a soft toothless muttering of water, and he was surrounded chest-high by cane and thickets of wild wheat that rustled and creaked and re-formed around him. Thick black mud squelched under his feet, and he could smell manure and wet earth and dampness. He had reached the center of things, and it was dark and still and wet—and he was the only one there. He was the only one there was, or ever had been, on the Earth and under the sky—
    A ghost exploded skyward from the grass at his feet, was a spread-armed gray shadow against the stars, was gone. Farber swayed in shock, scared sober. Another ghost-explosion, a half-seen form erupting upward from the ground as if it had been shot from a cannon; this time he heard the wet-canvas beating of wings against the damp river air. Pheasants , he thought, with a surge of astonishment and laughter he was still too scared to accept, pheasants , sleeping in the tall cover, frightened into flight by his blundering approach. He took a few more clumsy steps ahead, the undergrowth crackling and roaring around him. Another group of pheasants, four or five of them this time, exploded into the air a split-second apart, like shotgun blasts, like rockets going off, like spaceships hurtling outward to their destiny. He tilted his head up to follow the birds aloft, losing them almost instantly but being caught and transfixed instead by the million icy eyes of the stars. As he stood in rustling silence and stared up at the stars, he was shaken by such a surge of desire and awe and lingering terror that the stars seemed to spin and swirl into tight pinwheel squiggles, throwing down their light like spears, and he danced in rage and lust and exultation in the wet black mud.
    Then back through the dampness and the manure-smelling dark, with the liquor dying in him and his clothes wet against his body, through the translucent gray fog that was coming up to the town that was still asleep and the night that was somehow no longer his.
    And then—too quickly, too brutally sudden, before his hangover had even had time to dissipate—he found himself alone with aliens, locked into a vibrating steel box with them, watching Earth