The Hills of Home

The Hills of Home, by Alfred
Coppel

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Title: The Hills of Home
Author: Alfred Coppel
Release Date: July 19, 2007 [EBook #22102]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
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THE HILLS OF HOME
by Alfred Coppel

[Illustration]
+--------------------------------------------------------------+ | "Normality" is
a myth; we're all a little neurotic, and the | | study of neurosis has been
able to classify the general | | types of disturbance which are most
common. And some types | | (providing the subject is not suffering so
extreme a case as | | to have crossed the border into psychosis) can be
not only | | useful, but perhaps necessary for certain kinds of work.... |
+--------------------------------------------------------------+
The river ran still and deep, green and gray in the eddies with the
warm smell of late summer rising out of the slow water. Madrone and
birch and willow, limp in the evening quiet, and the taste of
smouldering leaves....
It wasn't the Russian River. It was the Sacred Iss. The sun had touched
the gem-encrusted cliffs by the shores of the Lost Sea of Korus and had
vanished, leaving only the stillness of the dusk and the lonely cry of
shore birds.
From downstream came the faint sounds of music. It might have been a
phonograph playing in one of the summer cabins with names like Polly
Ann Roost and Patches and Seventh Heaven, but to Kimmy it was the
hated cry of the Father of Therns calling the dreadful Plant Men to
their feast of victims borne into this Valley Dor by the mysterious Iss.
Kimmy shifted the heavy Martian pistol into his left hand and checked
his harness. A soft smile touched his lips. He was well armed; there
was nothing he had to fear from the Plant Men. His bare feet turned
up-stream, away from the sound of the phonograph, toward the
shallows in the river that would permit him to cross and continue his
search along the base of the Golden Cliffs--
* * * * *
The sergeant's voice cut through the pre-dawn darkness. "Oh, three
hundred, Colonel.... Briefing in thirty minutes."

Kimball tried to see him in the black gloom. He hadn't been asleep. It
would have been hard to waste this last night that way. Instead he had
been remembering. "All right, Sergeant," he said. "Coming up."
He swung his feet to the bare boards and sat for a moment, wishing he
hadn't had to give up smoking. He could almost imagine the textured
taste of the cigaret on his tongue.
Oddly enough, he wasn't tired. He wasn't excited, either. And that was
much stranger. He stood up and opened the window to look out into the
desert night. Overhead the stars were brilliant and cold. Mars gleamed
russet-colored against the sable sky. He smiled, remembering again. So
long a road, he thought, from then to now.
Then he stopped smiling and turned away from the window. It hadn't
been an easy path and what was coming up now was the hardest part.
The goddam psychs were the toughest, always wanting him to bug out
on the deal because of their brainwave graphs and word association
tests and their Rorschach blots.
"You're a lonely man, Colonel Kimball----"
"Too much imagination could be bad for this job."
How could you sit there with pentothal in your veins and wires running
out of your head and tell them about the still waters of Korus, or the
pennons flying from the twin towers of Greater Helium or the way the
tiny, slanting sun gleamed at dawn through the rigging of a flyer?
Kimball snapped on a light and looked at his watch. 0310. Zero minus
one fifty. He opened the steel locker and began to dress.
* * * * *
The water swirled warm and velvety around his ankles. There, behind
that madrone, Kimmy thought. Was that a Plant Man? The thick white
trunk and the grasping, blood-sucking arms----

The radium pistol's weight made his wrist ache, but he clung to it
tightly, knowing that he could never cope with a Plant Man with a
sword alone. The certainty of coming battle made him smile a little, the
way John Carter would smile if he were here in the Valley Dor ready to
attack the white Therns and their