Project Gutenberg's The Night of the Long Knives, by Fritz Reuter Leiber

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Title: The Night of the Long Knives

Author: Fritz Reuter Leiber

Illustrator: Virgil Finlay

Release Date: April 9, 2008 [EBook #25024]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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COMPLETE
BOOK-LENGTH NOVEL

THE NIGHT
OF THE
LONG KNIVES

By FRITZ LEIBER

ILLUSTRATED by FINLAY

CHAPTER 1

_Any man who saw you, or even heard your footsteps must be ambushed,
stalked and killed, whether needed for food or not. Otherwise, so
long as his strength held out, he would be on your trail._

--The Twenty-Fifth Hour,
_by Herbert Best_

I was one hundred miles from Nowhere--and I mean that literally--when I
spotted this girl out of the corner of my eye. I'd been keeping an extra
lookout because I still expected the other undead bugger left over
from the murder party at Nowhere to be stalking me.

[Illustration: They were two desperate scavengers in a no-man's land of
radiation and death.]

I'd been following a line of high-voltage towers all canted over at the
same gentlemanly tipsy angle by an old blast from the Last War. I judged
the girl was going in the same general direction and was being edged
over toward my course by a drift of dust that even at my distance showed
dangerous metallic gleams and dark humps that might be dead men or
cattle.

She looked slim, dark topped, and on guard. Small like me and like me
wearing a scarf loosely around the lower half of her face in the style
of the old buckaroos.

We didn't wave or turn our heads or give the slightest indication we'd
seen each other as our paths slowly converged. But we were intensely,
minutely watchful--I knew I was and she had better be.

Overhead the sky was a low dust haze, as always. I don't remember what a
high sky looks like. Three years ago I think I saw Venus. Or it may have
been Si