Sensitive
Page 16
How long after, had the machines come on when the people knew not their danger, and were without their caps? Some might have been close enough perhaps, but they would not have been strong enough to retake the cities from the robots. What agony then to see their loved ones marching to the tunnels?
Then, when it had been all over for an age, or more than an age, he had come, another sensitive, from another race, in another struggle for power, and he had turned the machine to the same deadly purpose.
Sensitive and nonsensitive. Was each race fated to tread the same bitter path, or had the bird people, like those of Earth, sold their souls for a SACQ engine? What had Courteau said? Earth was almost unhabitable, and sensitives were being killed on sight. He was the only sensitive on High America. There might, one day, be none left on earth. Margaret would bear him no heirs for this power of his. No other woman would. Better that no sensitives lived on High America, and the human race might have the second chance that the bird people on this planet had not.
Yet, in between the two worlds, there was Pa'Lar. Somewhere up there, a vulture waiting to alight.
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Chapter 19
Wolf looked up at the stars just beginning to show in the darkening sky, and, at that moment, one, brighter than the rest, rose above the eastern horizon, and began to track across the heavens far faster than the others.
Pa'Lar! High above, waiting for others to die for him, as he had waited on Earth. Pa'Lar who had destroyed one world and threatened another. Pa'Lar! Pa'Lar! Monster! Hate stirred once more in the mind of Wolf Carthar, stirred and swelled, fed on itself and grew, sucked energy from living tissue, and exploded outwards. But now it was not random spreading, now it had a target, visual, known.
Far faster than light it snapped across the space, and Pa'Lar in his stateroom felt it. He felt the coming of the power, he felt the accusation in his name, he lived a brief moment of knowledge, the start of fear, and he felt the power swelling, greater, greater, until knowledge was blotted in agony. He half rose, clutching his head, clawing the skin and flesh from his skull, screaming, until his lungs had expended their air, and then he stood for an instant, his nerves locked, his eyes bulging, his mouth open in a scream that had not sound. Then the thousands of straining blood vessels within him burst, and blood poured into the cells of his brain, his lungs swam, and his heart collapsed. All at once his body became unlocked, and he crashed.
About him the other sensitives fell also, some dead, others unconscious. Still the mind of Wolf Carthar was there, locked to the ship, sliding down the corridors like a physical thing, until it came to the SACQ engine, there, where a billion, billion ergs of energy flutter in delicate balance, and the mind entered there, a mind in fury, and the balance was cast asunder, and a new sun blossomed in the heavens.
For a moment, a great glare of light bathed the land, picked out the hills in sharp, photographic detail, swept the gentle darkness from the contorted dead, created shadows where no shadows had ever lain, expelled the stars from their realm of night, and stirred a primeval wonder in every living thing.
Then it was gone. The night returned more dark in vengeance, the stars shone through a fading purple stain, and an exhausted man lay on a rock that was not a rock, and wept like a child.
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About the Author
Dan Donoghue grew up in country Queensland, receiving his primary education in small one-teacher schools and completing his secondary education at boarding school in Cairns. He went on to gain a Bachelor of Education degree at the University of Queensland, and spent many years teaching English in Queensland schools. He began writing novels as a progression from his love of reading, and as a form of stress management. He has always been fascinated by the possibility of mind powers beyond the norm and much of his writing reflects this. Most of his working life was with young adults and as he believes that the later teens can be the most exciting and formative time in a person's life it is of those he loves to write.
You can keep track of the rest of his novels at his author page:
www.writers-exchange.com/author.php/56
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