“Well, who’s to say what happened? Anything was possible. We don’t know the conditions of those days. Anyhow, here I come thousands of years later and dig a man, with a knife in his hand, out of a glacier. I heat his body in order to decompose the flesh. Instead of decomposing; he comes to life and I have to kill him. He’s been hibernating in a glacier for centuries. I don’t know what to think about it.”
Bonner refilled and lighted his pipe, then looked at me questioningly.
“Chris,” I said, “I tell you frankly that I don’t believe a word you have said. You tell me you were out of your head for a few days. That accounts for it. You had the jim-jams and imagined all that, then try to spring it on me as actual fact.”
He looked hurt. He looked at the knife in his hand steadily for several long moments, then thrust it toward me, his eyes boring into mine.
“Then where in hell,” he demanded, “did I get this knife?”
FEAR
By David R. Solomon
THERE were only five words.
They neither affirmed nor denied what had gone before. But they changed the whole trend of the argument.
The men of the engineering gang were lying around the camp-fire, preparatory to going out on the job. It was cool in the shade of the thick trees, with the damp feel of early morning hanging over everything. Further out, over the river, the sun gave promise of better weather later in the day.