The Project Gutenberg EBook of Cully, by Jack Egan

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Title: Cully

Author: Jack Egan

Illustrator: Schelling

Release Date: October 2, 2008 [EBook #26751]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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[Illustration]

_By all the laws of nature, he should have
been dead. But if he were alive ...
then there was something he had to find._

CULLY

By JACK EGAN

Illustrated by SCHELLING

Above him eighty feet of torpid, black water hung like a shroud of
Death, and still he heard his ragged breathing. And something else.
Cully concentrated on that sound, and the rhythmic pulsing of his heart.
Somehow he had to retain a hold on his sanity ... or his soul.

After an hour of careful breathing and exploring of body sensations,
Cully realized he could move. He flexed an arm; a mote of gold sand
sifted upward in the dark water. It had a pleasant color, in contrast
with the ominous shades of the sea. In a few moments, he had struggled
to a sitting position, delighting in the curtain of glittering metal
grains whirling around him as he moved.

And the other sound. A humming in his mind; a distant burble of tiny
voices of other minds. Words swirling in giddy patterns he couldn't
understand.

Shortly thereafter, Cully discovered why he still lived, breathed: a
suit. A yellow, plastic, water-tight suit, with an orange-on-black
shield on the left breast pocket, and a clear bubble-helmet. He felt
weight on his back and examined it: two air tanks and their regulator, a
radio, and ... the box.

Suit, tanks, regulator; radio, black water, box; sand, sea, stillness.

Cully considered his world. It was small; it was conceivable; it was
incomplete.

_Where is it?_

"Where is what?" He knew he had a voice--a means of communication
between others of his kind, using low-frequency heat waves caused by
agitation of air molecules. Why couldn't he make it work?

Words. Thousands of them, at his beck and call. What were they? What did
they mean? He shifted uncomfortably in the t