[p ] Nick awoke gasping, his fingers knotted in the sheets of the bed and a cold sweat beading out upon his face. His heart hammered in his chest like a drum, threatening to leap to his throat at any moment. He looked around anxiously for Beth, but the silence of the room reminded him that she had gone back to the city and her job. Dawn was breaking and the dim light filtered through the unwashed windows. There was little point in trying to sleep now. Might as well get his clothes on and try to start unraveling a long thread of odd events. He pulled on his clothes slowly and slid his feet into his shoes, wondering where to begin the climb back to himself. It would be bad enough for an amnesia victim to regain all his memory if given an unlimited length of time - this way, with people closing in on all sides, the whole damned thing seemed impossible. He hooked the last button on his shirt, stuffed it into his pants, and headed for the kitchen. He warmed up last night’s coffee and it tasted like warm sulfuric acid, but it brought him around to full consciousness, even if his stomach did object to it. When he had finished the coffee, he found the library in the den and began reading a few of the [p77] titles; often, he remembered, a lot could be told from a man by his reading habits. There were books by Bridgeman, Zaindenburg and Loomis, almost everything on the shelves pertained to art in some form or another - except for the last row. There were about fifteen science fiction volumes, mostly collections of short stories, from Asimov to A.E. van Vogt. He had a fleeting idea to start reading the stuff in an effort to determine whether or not his strange dreams came from somewhere within the pages, then he rejected it. It would take a hell of a long while to even skim through that mass of literature and he didn’t have the time. [p77] [p ] He shoved a copy of H. Beam Piper back onto the shelf and straightened. To hell with it. He had the whole house to search, before he started fumbling through something as far out as science fiction. He started rummaging through the various rooms of the place with systematic carefulness. Hoping...
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