Bless Me On My Way - English Edition, dublinertinte [classic english novels .TXT] 📗

the batteries and nodded back. He would loose some of his good knifes, which he had made in one of the full moon nights.
Mauri sat on the ledge on which he could see any of the villagers, and at last there was silence. He would begin his minor details, with the Journal, who had married whom, who had had children, who of the young man left the village to seek his fortune. He had long been in the settlements of the mining company for news and information.
"The Tusk are quite for a very long time now," he said, "perhaps they have retired. The mines are working with at full speed and it seems that they are still not exhausted. I have seen the large transport ships, and they have loaded the still larger transport ships in orbit. I have brought many things that I can exchange it for your goods. But I also have some bad news."

He had spread some of the bad news already, but Jack guessed that he embellished a bit too much on it to exchange more canned goods.
If the Ciudad panicked, they hoarded everything, in case the transport routes would be cut off. He calculated it. Jack sat back and watched the faces of the villagers. They were taken to hear the news and were ready to make the decision to leave the village or to stay for good. Even the children were quiet.
Mauri said that the settlements near the mines have been destroyed, but he had to admit that he did not know if it had been the Tusks. He spoke to some of the men escaped and they had told him that only ashes from their homes and everything else had remained.
"Fire from heaven," Mauri said, "it nearly burned their eyes so bright it was. Everything was destroyed and only those who have not just been in the village have survived. Then they started to burn off large parts of the forest to find the survivors.”
"What has become of the men," asked one of the ancients.
"They went into the mines because they had no place else to go," Mauri said darkly, "they have lost everything."
"Maybe they have drawn the wrath upon themself."
"The anger of the Tusk."
"They were careless. We are not. We are always careful and stay in the woods.”
Jack could have said some words about it, but it would have lead the discussion to a wrong way. He suspected that it had not been the Tusk, but the mining company that had burned the forest. They needed new mining areas, and they took no account of the settlements and the people who lived there.
The Tusk would not attack the village, they said after the discussion, they followed the rules and did nothing to provoke an attack. There was no reason for them to pack their bags, to strap everything on the ponies and to go deeper into the forest. There was no reason to dig a hole in the ground and to disappear.
During the discussions he grew drowsy and fell asleep, dreaming that he was again in his glider and crashed. But this time he was not strapped into the seat, until the damn thing hit the trees and then the ground, he was ejected and flew through the air. He rushed towards the ground and saw the dome lit up like a diamond hidden in the dark woods, coming closer and closer.
Bless you on your way

! heard he, woke up and found himself in the crowd of villagers leaving the place. Mauri would have a lot of work do to this night and his pony would be happy to move to the next village with less weight on his back.
The old men were still with him, but most residents had already gone home, still debating and encouraging each other.
"They were suspicious," said Mauri, when they were alone at last. His voice had lost the fair character, and now he presented himself for what he really was, a businessman.
"They wanted to know why do I need the batteries."
"What did you tell them?"
"The fact that some of the muffled forest dwellers rediscovered the advantage of an electric lighting."
"Did they buy it?"
"Sure, it is the truth, right? Why should you otherwise need a battery pack?" Mauri grinned because he knew he would hear no answer from Jack anyway.
The battery packs were heavy, had an elongated square shape. He negotiated with Mauri about the prize for the battery pack and they finally agreed that Jack would give him four knives and Mauri they could make the choice.
When he finally came home, Rachel was waiting on his bed for him. They slept separately, visiting each other only if they wanted to. Jack had founded with his nightmares, but it was easier for him to leave the house at night, when Rachel was not closely beside him.
"Mauri scared me," she said, "I wish my father were still here."
"He would tell you the same I am telling you now. Nothing is going to be happening. Soon you will not think anymore about Mauri and his stories. You'll be angry about the ponies who are devastating your garden and we will swim in the river together.”
She cried that night, but the next morning she did not speak about her fears. And he was right - nothing happened.

He dug up the hidden batteries and brought them up into the dome.
The entrance to the dome was on the back of the mountain, a steel door, the frame cut out of the stone, which had disappeared under scrub and thorn bushes, and Jack had found it only by chance. The electronic lock could be opened easily and in the corridor leading to the ever-increasing belly of the dome, it was dark, cool and calm. Everything was still intact, no water leaks and no damages. Jack had an idea what awaited him in the dome, but he did not expect the range of existing equipment. When he had been there for the first time at night, he could not use the lamp light because the dome would have lit up like a light bulb in the wood, but during daylight he could see through the intact dome of the bright light outside the forest, squinting up and then inspect the facilities, weapons, and the shut down computer. All had been left behind with the intention of returning after a short time, but no one had returned. It had been a research station, a well-armed research station, which had concentrated on the orbit. The fast-moving lights that have misinterpreted by the Ciudad as satellites, if they had ever seen them through the leafy canopy, were the ships of the Tusk and the troops that were deployed to protect the mining company. Jack spent hours in the dome, staring up to the sky and wonder whether they were still up there.

According to his own calendar, it was three months in which life went on peacefully with the Ciudad, and where no one spoke about fleeing from the Tusk. Jack had joined the batteries, but did not test the devices and just hoped they would work in the case of emergency.
During the iron work, a metal splinter flew into Hudd’s face and although he was bleeding like a pig, he only said that he was damned lucky. It could have cost him an eye. Jack drew the splinter from the flesh and stitched the cut.
"How do you do that?" Hudd had asked and he had only answered: "I've already stitched myself together a lot of times.”
To celebrate the fact that it had not caused one of his eyes, they drank a sip from his holy booth and Jack stayed with him and listened to old stories until it was day light.
Back home and in his bed, he dreamed again he would crash on the dome and when he struggled to wake up, the old fracture in his leg hurt. No other bones, which he had ever broken, none of his old injuries came ever alive to speak to him, only that damn thigh bone.
Jack followed his intuition and visited the crash site. The vegetation was very thick, the score was almost closed in the forest and even the disintegrated remains of the glider were difficult to be found. Jack found a part of the cockpit, overgrown with ferns and poison ivy.
The glider had crashed with his three-man crew in the woods, Jack was the pilot and had tried everything to rescue them after being hit which had caused a devastating fire in the electronics. He had yelled to the hyenas, they should hold on to something, but not necessarily to themselves and they had laughed uproariously. It was not the first time they crashed, but for the two hyenas, it was the last time.
He knew that it would go wrong when they touched the first tree tops, then branches and tree trunks, the first hit them and scattered on the glider and then he saw the rocks coming up. Through the trees they would have managed their way down, but not through these rocks. Jack tried to pull the glider up and made him tilt to the right and the last thing he could remember from the crash was an incredible shock, the sound of tearing metal and the wind that took his breath away. The glider had been torn apart, Jack in the small narrow cockpit had only survived because he had missed the rock. Fortunately for him, unlucky for the others. The hyenas ended quickly and nearly painless on the rock and there was not much left of them, nor of their equipment. After the crash, Jack woke up with a broken leg, bloody skull and hanging upside down in his seat belts. He almost broke his neck when he unbuckled the belt and hit the ground. He wore his battle gear, in which most of his important utensils were hidden and it took him only a moment to switch off the tracker on his wrist.
In his mind he could see his signal disappearing in the bloody orbit station. They would not waste their time searching for him and although they constantly circling up there and shot more and more surveillance satellites in the orbits of the planets, he would simply disappear before their eyes. He had planned to work in the mines, then use the money to leave this planet and start over, but his broken leg had almost killed him. His body armor had a vacuum function, which he could control partially to stable the broken bones, but the pain remained. He was on his way to get away from the glider, using the compass, but he did not move far. On the uneven forest ground, he stopped at a root, stumbled and fell on the broken leg. It knocked him out. When he awoke, it was pitch dark and raining. The first rain for years, after so many years on ships and space stations, and yet he cursed the rain. The sounds of the forest and the nocturnal animals were around him, he crawled forward, but he eventually gave up. He waited for the sun to come back and that the pain would subside. He had crawled through the woods for days, developed fever and was not yet willing to turn the tracker on again. He did it twelve hours later, when he realized that he would die if they did not find him.

Jack stood in front of the well-hidden remains of the glider. There were no