Read Online The Atlantic Abomination by John Brunner - Free Book Online Page B

fixedly at the sea again, and seemed to be sorting out words in her mind. “It was like this. When I had this obsession about Luke, I told myself there was nothing I wouldn’t do. I almost had a breakdown over him. I was a very nervy child, unstable, emotional, the lot.
    “And then—it was the last day before he moved over to Scripps to do a preliminary course there—I had my chance. He’d been celebrating, and I was half out of my mind with juvenile self-abnegation, and I’d come to bring him some sort of parting gift. There was no one else in the house …”
    She shrugged. “Well, I got my chance, like I said, and I suppose you could say I took it. I’d told myself there was nothing I wouldn’t do for him, so I did it.”
    She sounded very calm, as though she were talking about someone else. In a way, Peter realized, she was.
    “You can imagine the results. Me, not quite fifteen, crazy-mad with delight about as much as I was shaken by the shock. The two together might have torn me to bits. What did the job, though, was discovering that to Luke it was just another interlude on the way to where he wanted to go.
    “It took me months to put myself together again, and when I did, the only way I could do it was by using Luke, my idealized image of Luke, as a center post. So here I am inoceanography, like I told you. It was pretty much of a shock when Luke joined Atlantic from Scripps, and I had to accept this flippant, shallow guy as the reality. Oh, I liked him well enough on the surface, but underneath I couldn’t forgive him for being what he was, and for not being able to realize how much he had meant to me for so many years. …”
    She turned to face him, a little defiantly. “Clear?”
    Peter nodded. “And now?”
    “Now I figure it’s about time I started looking for a real man and not a dream to build my life around.”
    Peter held out his arms, and she came to them, smiling.

X
    T HE PLACID New England fall moved quietly in on the land. But it was still warm enough to breakfast outdoors, if one did not get up ridiculously early.
    “And who,” asked. Peter of the trees around the little lodge, “gets up early on their honeymoon?”
    “Queen Victoria and Prince Albert,” said Mary mysteriously, coming out of the door on to the sun porch with a plate of pancakes.
    “What?”
    “’S a fact,” she nodded, portioning out maple syrup. “I read somewhere that they got up early on the first morning after their wedding, and the lord chamberlain or some bigwig wrote disapprovingly in his diary that this was no way to ensure an heir to the throne.”
    Their eyes met across the table. For a moment they kept straight faces, but at length they burst into helpless laughter.
    “Poor Victoria!” Mary said when at last she could speak.
    “Poor Albert, don’t you mean?” Peter contradicted. “Ormaybe not. He always seemed like a straitlaced kind of prig to me. Say, these are delicious.”
    “What did you expect?” Mary stretched her sweater-clad arms gracefully. “Did you go down for the mail yet?”
    “No. And I don’t much feel like going, either. It’s a long walk down to the highway, you know.”
    “I do know. And that’s what I thought you’d say. So I went before you woke up.” Like a conjurer with a rabbit, she produced envelopes she had been sitting on. Fanning them like a poker hand, she proffered them. “Pick a card, any card, and I’ll tell your fortune, pretty gentleman. Only first you have to cross my path with silver, or something.”
    “I have my fortune,” said Peter, grinning, and gave her outstretched hand a squeeze. He glanced at the envelopes. “One, two, three from the Foundation. Damnation, can’t they leave us in peace even on our honeymoon?”
    “Maybe they’re private, from people who wrote in the office and snitched the envelopes. Aren’t you going to open them?”
    When he had done justice to the breakfast, he lit a cigaret with a contented sigh, tipped back the