Blake went on. Presently the Walden Pond memory-image gave way to a
memory-image of an English park which the ex-Earth government had set
aside as a memorial to the English poets and which had impressed Blake
sufficiently when he had visited it in his youth to have found a place
for itself in the country of his mind. It consisted of reconstructions
of famous dwellings out of the lives of the poets, among them, a
dwelling out of the life of a poet who was not in the strictest sense
of the word English at all--the birthplace of Robert Burns. Oddly
enough, it was Burns's birthplace that had impressed Blake most. Now
the little cottage stood out in much more vivid detail than any of the
other famous dwellings.
Sabrina York must have been attracted to the place, for her footprints
showed that she had turned in at the gate, walked up the little path
and let herself in the door.
They also showed that she had left by the same route, so there was no
reason for Blake to linger. As a matter of fact, the fascination that
had brought the place into being had been replaced by an illogical
repugnance. But repugnance can sometimes be as compelling a force as
fascination, and Blake not only lingered but went inside as well.
He remembered the living room distinctly--the flagstone floor, the huge
grill-fronted hearth, the deeply recessed window, the rack of cups and
platters on the wall; the empty straight-backed chair standing sternly
in a corner, the bare wooden table--
He paused just within the doorway. The chair was no longer empty, the
table no longer bare.
A man sat on the former and a bottle of wine stood on the latter.
Moreover, the room showed signs of having been lived in for a long
time. The floor was covered with tracked-in dirt and the walls were
blackened from smoke. The grill-work of the hearth was begrimed with
grease.
* * * * *
Whatever else he might be the man sitting at the table was not an
image out of the past. He was too vividly real. He was around Blake's
age, and about Blake's height and build. However, he was given to
fat. His paunch contrasted jarringly with Blake's trim waist. His
vaguely familiar face was swollen--probably from the wine he had
drunk--and his too-full cheeks were well on the way to becoming jowls.
His bloodshot eyes were underscored with shadows, and his clothing
consisted of odds and ends out of Blake's past: a tattered, too-tight
pullover with the letter "L" on the front, a pair of ragged red-plaid
hunting breeches and a pair of cracked riding-boots.
Blake advanced across the room and picked up the bottle. One sniff told
him that it came from a memory-image of a Martian wine-cellar. He set
the bottle back down. "Who are you?" he demanded.
The man looked up at him sardonically. "Call me Smith," he said. "If I
told you who I really am, you wouldn't believe me."
"What are you doing in my mind?"
"You should know the answer to that one. You put me here."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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