Prison of a Billion Years Read online

gazing out across the black troubledwater of the infant ocean on the infant earth. A billion years ago....

  Slade was out there. Slade, dead. Out there with the tides and thewaters and the frequent electric storms--

  "Out there with a million bacteriological parasites on his dead bodyand in his dead body, which he brought with him," Marcia said,dreamily.

  "What are you talking about, miss?"

  Out there in the electric dawn of earth, with the bacteria which livedin his body as they lived in all other bodies. Out there with them,dead.

  Food for them.

  Food and water and air heavy with ozone and the electric storms.

  Marcia laughed hysterically. It was a story she wanted to write.

  But she wouldn't write it.

  Slade was a killer, condemned to die. But Slade, dead out there withhis bacteria, Slade evil to man and human society but not necessarilyevil in the implacable ways of nature or perhaps grimly, terriblyevil--Slade out there, dead on the bosom of the primordial waters,Slade back in time a billion years before life had been born onEarth....

  She laughed hysterically as they led her away from the water. Theyslapped her face, gently at first, then harder. "I'll be all right,"she managed to say.

  She would be all right. She could live to forget it.

  But Slade out there.

  Slade.

  Slade fathering all life on earth there in the sea with his dead body.Slade who had sinned and was taken back here to die for his sins sothat life could be born.

  Slade, whose first name was Adam.

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