"Herbert George Wells. When the Sleeper Wakes" - читать интересную книгу автора

The attempts of his reason to dispose of these suggestions, though for the
most part logically valid, were quite unavailing. "Why should anything be
done to me? "

"If the worst comes to the worst," he found himself saying at last, "I can
give up what they want. But what do they want? And why don't they ask me
for it instead of cooping me up? "

He returned to his former preoccupation with the Council's possible
intentions. He began to reconsider the details of Howard's behaviour,
sinister glances, inexplicable hesitations. Then, for a time, his mind
circled about the idea of escaping from these rooms; but whither could he
escape into this vast, crowded world? He would be worse off than a Saxon
yeoman suddenly dropped into nineteenth century London. And besides, how
could anyone escape from these rooms?

"How can it benefit anyone if harm should happen to me? "

He thought of the tumult, the great social trouble of which he was so
unaccountably the axis. A text, irrelevant enough and yet curiously
insistent, came floating up out of the darkness of his memory. This also a
Council had said:

"It is expedient for us that one man should die for the people."

CHAPTER VIII

THE ROOF SPACES

As the fans in the circular aperture of the inner room rotated and
permitted glimpses of the night, dim sounds drifted in thereby. And Graham,
standing underneath, wrestling darkly with the unknown powers that
imprisoned him, and which he had now deliberately challenged, was startled
by the sound of a voice.

He peered up and saw in the intervals of the rotation, dark and dim, the
face and shoulders of a man regarding him. When a dark hand was extended,
the swift van struck it, swung round and beat on with a little brownish
patch on the edge of its thin blade, and something began to fall therefrom
upon the floor, dripping silently.
Graham looked down, and there were spots of blood at his feet. He looked
up again in a strange excitement. The figure had gone.

He remained motionless-his every sense intent upon the flickering patch of
darkness, for outside it was high night. He became aware of some faint,
remote, dark specks floating lightly through the outer air. They came down
towards him, fitfully, eddyingly, and passed aside out of the uprush from
the fan. A gleam of light flickered, the specks flashed white, and then the
darkness came again. Warmed and lit as he was, he perceived that it was
snowing within a few feet of him.