more decadent over the last half-century.
Extraterrestrials were telepathically...
"Naw," he snorted. Baxx was weird, but hardly a space alien.
An unused movie set. But weren’t movie sets just false fronts? Why stock an entire drug store in exquisite detail? Why print up not just the covers, but the insides , of old comic books?
"Starting to run dry," he muttered.
Could this be one of those towns the government had built to gauge the effects of nuclear explosions? "So are they testing 1953-brand bombs or something?" he asked himself rhetorically, dismissively.
What would Tom be thinking about? A brain implant? An image produced by a 3-D telejector? Bud stomped on the solid concrete of the sidewalk. "No way!"
The possibility of a drug-induced dream was beginning to look more and more plausible. More plausible than what occurred to him next.
It couldn’t happen, could it? his mind asked. A time warp or something?
Back to 1953?
Maybe Gar Baxx was working for this mad scientist with wild frizzy hair...
"But look, pal," he objected, "strange to say, there were people living back in 1953. People drove those cars and read those magazines. You don’t arrive in the past and find a whole town with everything except the people who lived there."
A worse possibility struck Bud Barclay.
Much worse.
Much scarier.
Much more insoluble.
As a matter of fact, something as hopelessly final as anything could be.
Maybe he was dead.
CHAPTER 7
THE NUMBER OF NOWHERE
"WELL, Bud," Bud said to himself in the comforting, calm voice of Tom Swift, "look at it logically. Do you feel dead?"
"I don’t know what dead feels like, genius boy."
"Corpses don’t walk around. Corpses don’t walk around worrying about whether they’re dead or not."
"But maybe they dream . How do we know? See, you die, you leave your body, go through the tunnel of light—maybe it happened while my eyes were shut—, and then, see, you’re in this, this ghost world where—"
"Ghosts of stop signals? Ghosts of comic books? Cash registers? Dress mannequins? Get serious, flyboy."
"Does kind of give a new meaning to ‘ghost town,’ doesn’t it."
He stopped the self-conversation, as it sounded more than a little crazy. "I don’t do crazy," he said aloud.
Still... what if? Alone for eternity in a small backward town. "Jetz, maybe I should be glad Timeless Town doesn’t come with people!" he said wryly.
Dread was beginning to rise in his gut. His banter wasn’t enough to brush it back. Bud was, yes, becoming very afraid. Little Luna, the moon, Aurum City beneath the sea, the Black Cobra—those formidable things were merely strange. But some things , he thought, are real horrors.
He snapped himself out of it, a bit, by muscular action. He trotted to the end of the block, to the vacant intersection, where the stoplight did its pointless, ceaseless work. He looked each way before crossing, then wondered why.
The intersection seemed to be at the center of Greater Timeless Town—its downtown area. The frozen business district extended just a few blocks in all directions. Storefronts, a bank, what looked like a library, some small restaurants and diners...
No chain fast food outlets. Now that was horror .
In the distance he saw a flagpole. The Stars and Stripes dangled limply at the top. The breeze wasn’t enough to worry it.
But down the next street—Newharvest Avenue— motion ! Red and white stripes corkscrewed down endlessly on a mechanized barber pole.
Bud sauntered toward it, steady but cautious. He had had his fill of disappointment. An uninhabited drugstore was eerie enough.
He stood in front of the little shop. Rudy’s Barbers . There was a bright sign in the window, a cardboard sign announcing in neat bold letters:
YES WE’RE OPEN
"Yes I sure hope so," gulped Bud, heading into the wide-gaping door. There was a moment of hope: he heard the sound of activity.
A small electric fan whirred. Fans on the ceiling stirred the air
Extraterrestrials were telepathically...
"Naw," he snorted. Baxx was weird, but hardly a space alien.
An unused movie set. But weren’t movie sets just false fronts? Why stock an entire drug store in exquisite detail? Why print up not just the covers, but the insides , of old comic books?
"Starting to run dry," he muttered.
Could this be one of those towns the government had built to gauge the effects of nuclear explosions? "So are they testing 1953-brand bombs or something?" he asked himself rhetorically, dismissively.
What would Tom be thinking about? A brain implant? An image produced by a 3-D telejector? Bud stomped on the solid concrete of the sidewalk. "No way!"
The possibility of a drug-induced dream was beginning to look more and more plausible. More plausible than what occurred to him next.
It couldn’t happen, could it? his mind asked. A time warp or something?
Back to 1953?
Maybe Gar Baxx was working for this mad scientist with wild frizzy hair...
"But look, pal," he objected, "strange to say, there were people living back in 1953. People drove those cars and read those magazines. You don’t arrive in the past and find a whole town with everything except the people who lived there."
A worse possibility struck Bud Barclay.
Much worse.
Much scarier.
Much more insoluble.
As a matter of fact, something as hopelessly final as anything could be.
Maybe he was dead.
CHAPTER 7
THE NUMBER OF NOWHERE
"WELL, Bud," Bud said to himself in the comforting, calm voice of Tom Swift, "look at it logically. Do you feel dead?"
"I don’t know what dead feels like, genius boy."
"Corpses don’t walk around. Corpses don’t walk around worrying about whether they’re dead or not."
"But maybe they dream . How do we know? See, you die, you leave your body, go through the tunnel of light—maybe it happened while my eyes were shut—, and then, see, you’re in this, this ghost world where—"
"Ghosts of stop signals? Ghosts of comic books? Cash registers? Dress mannequins? Get serious, flyboy."
"Does kind of give a new meaning to ‘ghost town,’ doesn’t it."
He stopped the self-conversation, as it sounded more than a little crazy. "I don’t do crazy," he said aloud.
Still... what if? Alone for eternity in a small backward town. "Jetz, maybe I should be glad Timeless Town doesn’t come with people!" he said wryly.
Dread was beginning to rise in his gut. His banter wasn’t enough to brush it back. Bud was, yes, becoming very afraid. Little Luna, the moon, Aurum City beneath the sea, the Black Cobra—those formidable things were merely strange. But some things , he thought, are real horrors.
He snapped himself out of it, a bit, by muscular action. He trotted to the end of the block, to the vacant intersection, where the stoplight did its pointless, ceaseless work. He looked each way before crossing, then wondered why.
The intersection seemed to be at the center of Greater Timeless Town—its downtown area. The frozen business district extended just a few blocks in all directions. Storefronts, a bank, what looked like a library, some small restaurants and diners...
No chain fast food outlets. Now that was horror .
In the distance he saw a flagpole. The Stars and Stripes dangled limply at the top. The breeze wasn’t enough to worry it.
But down the next street—Newharvest Avenue— motion ! Red and white stripes corkscrewed down endlessly on a mechanized barber pole.
Bud sauntered toward it, steady but cautious. He had had his fill of disappointment. An uninhabited drugstore was eerie enough.
He stood in front of the little shop. Rudy’s Barbers . There was a bright sign in the window, a cardboard sign announcing in neat bold letters:
YES WE’RE OPEN
"Yes I sure hope so," gulped Bud, heading into the wide-gaping door. There was a moment of hope: he heard the sound of activity.
A small electric fan whirred. Fans on the ceiling stirred the air
Similar Books
