Project Gutenberg's Song in a Minor Key, by Catherine Lucille Moore

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Title: Song in a Minor Key

Author: Catherine Lucille Moore

Release Date: April 10, 2009 [EBook #28550]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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_Northwest Smith is one of the great adventurers of Science Fiction,
one of that group of cool, gray-eyed men who roam the spaceways and
provide much of the inspiration for the legends that are a part of
the folklore of space. Here is Northwest Smith, in a rare moment of
peace, in a remarkable vignette, published here by permission of the
author._

song
in
a
minor
key

_by ... C. L. MOORE_

He had been promising himself this moment for how
many lonely months and years on alien worlds?

Beneath him the clovered hill-slope was warm in the sun. Northwest Smith
moved his shoulders against the earth and closed his eyes, breathing so
deeply that the gun holstered upon his chest drew tight against its
strap as he drank the fragrance of Earth and clover warm in the sun.
Here in the hollow of the hills, willow-shaded, pillowed upon clover and
the lap of Earth, he let his breath run out in a long sigh and drew one
palm across the grass in a caress like a lover's.

He had been promising himself this moment for how long--how many months
and years on alien worlds? He would not think of it now. He would not
remember the dark spaceways or the red slag of Martian drylands or the
pearl-gray days on Venus when he had dreamed of the Earth that had
outlawed him. So he lay, with his eyes closed and the sunlight drenching
him through, no sound in his ears but the passage of a breeze through
the grass and a creaking of some insect nearby--the violent,
blood-smelling years behind him might never have been. Except for the
gun pressed into his ribs between his chest and the clovered earth, he
might be a boy again, years upon years ago, long before he had broken
his first law or killed his first man.

No one else