"Philip E. High - These Savage Futurians" - читать интересную книгу автора (High Phillip E)

mark him.

Once marked there had been nothing to do but wait; there was no point
in running. No one saw the marker come and no one saw it go but there
had been a flash—

Ventnor shuddered slightly, he still remembered it vividly. His father
drinking from a plastic cup and suddenly— suddenly nothing. A flash, the
cup spinning in a little circle on the hard floor and a few flakes of white
ash drifting down from nowhere.

Of deliberation Ventnor junior had made himself slow of movement and
halting of speech. He rejected his apprenticeship and volunteered for
cultivation. At the time it had seemed far safer.

He had often regretted it, but he had carefully kept to himself the inner
urges of creation—the desire to improvise, improve or construct from his
own original fund of ideas.

They knew, of course, Robert Ventnor was a gadgeteer; that was why
they had marked his disc P/D—Potential Danger.
 Ventnor looked out across the sea again. Somewhere out there was the
Island—the Island of the Masters.

He was wrong; the Island was in the Atlantic, but no one had told him
that. As far as he knew it was beyond the horizon and often on a clear day
he had felt a frightened awe when the coast of France became visible.

He came to a line of whitened stones marking the boundaries of his
village and quickened his pace. It was a long walk to Gret with continuous
hills and then a long winding path down to the sea.

When he reached it the scene was familiar, men tilling the small
cultivation patches, garments fluttering in a brisk wind from the sea.
Women were filling plastic baskets with bright green newly cut protages
and swaying away with them balanced on their heads.

As he approached the men paused in their work and stared. They stared
with an open-mouthed and uncomprehending intensity as if he had three
arms or two heads and he felt a twinge of alarm. Previously they had only
glanced and turned away, now their eyes were fixed on him unblinkingly.

He felt himself coloring and knew that his step was faltering slightly.
This was a warning—a traditional warning—and, clearly they had been
expecting him.

Mentally he hesitated. Now was the time to go back, now, if he
returned, the men would stop staring and continue with their work. If he
did not turn back, however, a warning would be shouted down to the
village below and, when he arrived, men of his own age would be there to