The Project Gutenberg EBook of 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--_