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    The Thing in the Attic
    The Thing in the Attic
    The Thing in the Attic
    Ebook73 pages55 minutes

    The Thing in the Attic

    By Paul Orban and James Blish

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    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateSep 1, 2010
    The Thing in the Attic

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    • 3/5
      In a primitive subhuman culture, a group of four heretics are exiled from their treetop habitat to live in Hell (the surface of their world). After struggling to survive in an unknown and treacherous territory replete with dinosaurs (considered “demons” by their people), the group encounters the truth behind the origins of their society and the religious beliefs they questioned.

    Book preview

    The Thing in the Attic - Paul Orban

    Project Gutenberg's The Thing in the Attic, by James Benjamin Blish

    This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with

    almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or

    re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included

    with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

    Title: The Thing in the Attic

    Author: James Benjamin Blish

    Illustrator: Paul Orban

    Release Date: May 20, 2010 [EBook #32447]

    Language: English

    *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE THING IN THE ATTIC ***

    Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online

    Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

    THE THING IN THE ATTIC

    By James Blish

    Illustrated by Paul Orban

    [Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from If Worlds of Science Fiction July 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

    It is written that after the Giants came to Tellura from the far stars, they abode a while, and looked upon the surface of the land, and found it wanting, and of evil omen. Therefore did they make men to live always in the air and in the sunlight, and in the light of the stars, that he would be reminded of them. And the Giants abode yet a while, and taught men to speak, and to write, and to weave, and to do many things which are needful to do, of which the writings speak. And thereafter they departed to the far stars, saying, Take this world as your own, and though we shall return, fear not, for it is yours.

    —THE BOOK OF LAWS

    Honath and his fellow arch-doubters did not believe in the Giants, and for this they were cast into Hell. And when survival depended upon unwavering faith in their beliefs, they saw that there were Giants, after all....

    Honath the Pursemaker was hauled from the nets an hour before the rest of the prisoners, as befitted his role as the arch-doubter of them all. It was not yet dawn, but his captors led him in great bounds through the endless, musky-perfumed orchid gardens, small dark shapes with crooked legs, hunched shoulders, slim hairless tails carried, like his, in concentric spirals wound clockwise. Behind them sprang Honath on the end of a long tether, timing his leaps by theirs, since any slip would hang him summarily.

    He would of course be on his way to the surface, some 250 feet below the orchid gardens, shortly after dawn in any event. But not even the arch-doubter of them all wanted to begin the trip—not even at the merciful snap-spine end of a tether—a moment before the law said, Go.

    The looping, interwoven network of vines beneath them, each cable as thick through as a man's body, bellied out and down sharply as the leapers reached the edge of the fern-tree forest which surrounded the copse of fan-palms. The whole party stopped before beginning the descent and looked eastward, across the dim bowl. The stars were paling more and more rapidly; only the bright constellation of the Parrot could still be picked out without doubt.

    A fine day, one of the guards said, conversationally. Better to go below on a sunny day than in the rain, pursemaker.

    Honath shuddered and said nothing. Of course it was always raining down below in Hell, that much could be seen by a child. Even on sunny days, the endless pinpoint rain of transpiration, from the hundred million leaves of the eternal trees, hazed the forest air and soaked the black bog forever.

    He looked around in the brightening, misty morning. The eastern horizon was black against the limb of the great red sun, which had already risen about a third of its diameter; it was almost time for the small, blue-white, furiously hot consort to follow. All the way to that brink, as to every other horizon, the woven ocean of the treetops flowed gently in long, unbreaking waves, featureless as some smooth oil. Only nearby could the eye break that ocean into its details, into the world as it was: a great, many-tiered network, thickly overgrown with small ferns, with air-drinking orchids, with a thousand varieties of fungi sprouting wherever vine crossed vine and collected a little humus for them, with the vivid parasites sucking sap from the vines, the trees, and even each other. In the ponds of rain-water collected by the closely fitting leaves of the bromeliads tree-toads and peepers stopped down their hoarse songs dubiously as the light grew and fell silent

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