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图书基本信息

When the Sleeper Wakes

作者： Wells, H. G.

ISBN13： 9780979671845

类型： 平装

出版日期： 2009-02-23

出版社： Thrilling Wonder LLC

页数： 208

重量（克）： 285

尺寸： 229 x 152 x 11 mm

英文简介

From the author of THE TIME MACHINE comes a different kind of futuristic adventure. Near the end of the nineteenth century, Graham falls into an ageless trance. He awakens at the dawn of the twenty-second century. A Council rules the world. They began simply as trustees of a large financial estate, but their snowballing wealth and power, over the course of two centuries, rendered government by the people impotent, irrelevant, and ultimately extinct. But who owns this wealth Graham finds, to his shock, that he does. The men who first took responsibility for him in his trance left him their fortunes, and he is now the master of the world But real power is only his if he can claim it. The Council controls the lives of the people, literally from cradle to grave. They keep the laboring classes trapped in an perpetual cycle of drudgery and dependence. They keep the upper classes satiated with entertainment and the Pleasure Cities. Not happy to have Graham conscious and potentially able to take this power into his own hands, the Council seeks to keep him isolated and ignorant. And a rebel group aims to capture him as a figurehead for their revolution, using the people's veneration of the Sleeper as a savior to seize the Council's power for their own. But when Graham, a democrat and liberal in his own time, learns the truth about the future world, he seeks to exercise his power for the people. To truly be master of the world, Graham must first master his fate-become a leader of people, and defeat those who would sooner kill them than see them free. Timeless as its protagonist, WHEN THE SLEEPER WAKES is a tale from a century ago about a century hence that enthralls today's reader with its odyssey of prophetic vision and gripping adventure.

CHAPTER I. INSOMNIA

One afternoon, at low water, Mr. Isbister, a young artist lodging at

Boscastle, walked from that place to the picturesque cove of Pentargen,

desiring to examine the caves there. Halfway down the precipitous

path to the Pentargen beach he came suddenly upon a man sitting in an

attitude of profound distress beneath a projecting mass of rock. The

hands of this man hung limply over his knees, his eyes were red and

staring before him, and his face was wet with tears.

He glanced round at Isbister's footfall. Both men were disconcerted,

Isbister the more so, and, to override the awkwardness of his

involuntary pause, he remarked, with an air of mature conviction, that

the weather was hot for the time of year.

"Very," answered the stranger shortly, hesitated a second, and added in

a colourless tone, "I can't sleep."

Isbister stopped abruptly. "No?" was all he said, but his bearing

conveyed his helpful impulse.

"It may sound incredible," said the stranger, turning weary eyes to

Isbister's face and emphasizing his words with a languid hand, "but I

have had no sleep--no sleep at all for six nights."

"Had advice?"

"Yes. Bad advice for the most part. Drugs. My nervous system.... They

are all very well for the run of people. It's hard to explain. I dare

not take... sufficiently powerful drugs."

"That makes it difficult," said Isbister.

He stood helplessly in the narrow path, perplexed what to do. Clearly

the man wanted to talk. An idea natural enough under the circumstances,

prompted him to keep the conversation going. "I've never suffered from

sleeplessness myself," he said in a tone of commonplace gossip, "but in

those cases I have known, people have usually found something--"

"I dare make no experiments."

He spoke wearily. He gave a gesture of rejection, and for a space both

men were silent.

"Exercise?" suggested Isbister diffidently, with a glance from his

interlocutor's face of wretchedness to the touring costume he wore.

"That is what I have tried. Unwisely perhaps. I have followed the coast,

day after day--from New Quay. It has only added muscular fatigue to

the mental. The cause of this unrest was overwork--trouble. There was

something--"

He stopped as if from sheer fatigue. He rubbed his forehead with a lean

hand. He resumed speech like one who talks to himself.

"I am a lone wolf, a solitary man, wandering through a world in which

I have no part. I am wifeless--childless--who is it speaks of the

childless as the dead twigs on the tree of life? I am wifeless, I

childless--I could find no duty to do. No desire even in my heart. One

thing at last I set myself to do.

"I said, I will do this, and to do it, to overcome the inertia of this

dull body, I resorted to drugs. Great God, I've had enough of drugs!

I don't know if _you_ feel the heavy inconvenience of the body, its

exasperating demand of time from the mind--time--life! Live! We only

live in patches. We have to eat, and then comes the dull digestive

complacencies--or irritations. We have to take the air or else our

thoughts grow sluggish, stupid, run into gulfs and blind alleys. A

thousand distractions arise from within and without, and then comes

drowsiness and sleep. Men seem to live for sleep. How little of a man's

day is his own--even at the best! And then come those false friends,

those Thug helpers, the alkaloids that stifle natural fatigue and kill

rest--black coffee, cocaine--"

"I see," said Isbister.

"I did my work," said the sleepless man with a querulous intonation.

"And this is the price?"

"Yes."

For a little while the two remained without speaking.

"You cannot imagine the craving for rest that I feel--a hunger and

thirst. For six long days, since my work was done, my mind has been a

whirlpool, swift, unprogressive and incessant, a torrent of thoughts

leading nowhere, spinning round swift and steady--"

He paused. "Towards the gulf."

"You must sleep," said Isbister decisively, and with an air of a remedy

discovered. "Certainly you must sleep."

"My mind is perfectly lucid. It was never clearer. But I know I am

drawing towards the vortex. Presently--"

"Yes?"

"You have seen things go down an eddy? Out of the light of the day, out

of this sweet world of sanity--down--"

"But," expostulated Isbister.

The man threw out a hand towards him, and his eyes were wild, and his

voice suddenly high. "I shall kill myself. If in no other way--at the

foot of yonder dark precipice there, where the waves are green, and the

white surge lifts and falls, and that little thread of water trembles

down. There at any rate is ... sleep."

"That's unreasonable," said Isbister, startled at the man's hysterical

gust of emotion. "Drugs are better than that."

"There at any rate is sleep," repeated the stranger, not heeding him.

Isbister looked at him and wondered transitorily if some complex

Providence had indeed brought them together that afternoon. "It's not

a cert, you know," he remarked. "There's a cliff like that at Lulworth

Cove--as high, anyhow--and a little girl fell from top to bottom. And

lives to-day--sound and well."

"But those rocks there?"

"One might lie on them rather dismally through a cold night, broken

bones grating as one shivered, chill water splashing over you. Eh?"

Their eyes met. "Sorry to upset your ideals," said Isbister with a sense

of devil-may-careish brilliance.

"But a suicide over that cliff (or any cliff for the matter of that),

really, as an artist--" He laughed. "It's so damned amateurish."

"But the other thing," said the sleepless man irritably, "the other

thing. No man can keep sane if night after night--"

"Have you been walking along this coast alone?"

"Yes."

"Silly sort of thing to do. If you'll excuse my saying so. Alone! As

you say; body fag is no cure for brain fag. Who told you to? No wonder;

walking! And the sun on your head, heat, fag, solitude, all the day

long, and then, I suppose, you go to bed and try very hard--eh?"

Isbister stopped short and looked at the sufferer doubtfully.

"Look at these rocks!" cried the seated man with a sudden force of

gesture. "Look at that sea that has shone and quivered there for ever!

See the white spume rush into darkness under that great cliff. And this

blue vault, with the blinding sun pouring from the dome of it. It is

your world. You accept it, you rejoice in it. It warms and supports and

delights you. And for me--"

He turned his head and showed a ghastly face, bloodshot pallid eyes and

bloodless lips. He spoke almost in a whisper. "It is the garment of my

misery. The whole world... is the garment of my misery."

Isbister looked at all the wild beauty of the sunlit cliffs about them

and back to that face of despair For a moment he was silent.

He started, and made a gesture of impatient rejection. "You get a

night's sleep," he said, "and you won't see much misery out here. Take

my word for it."

He was quite sure now that this was a providential encounter. Only half

an hour ago he had been feeling horribly bored. Here was employment the

bare thought of which was righteous self-applause. He took possession

forthwith. It seemed to him that the first need of this exhausted being

was companionship He flung himself down on the steeply sloping turf

beside the motionless seated figure, and deployed forthwith into a

skirmishing line of gossip.

His hearer seemed to have lapsed into apathy; he stared dismally

seaward, and spoke only in answer to Isbister's direct questions--and

not to all of those But he made no sign of objection to this benevolent

intrusion upon his despair.

In a helpless way he seemed even grateful, and when presently Isbister,

feeling that his unsupported talk was losing vigour, suggested that they

should reascend the steep and return towards Boscastle, alleging the

view into Blackapit, he submitted quietly. Halfway up he began talking

to himself, and abruptly turned a ghastly face on his helper. "What can

be happening?" he asked with a gaunt illustrative hand. "What can be

happening? Spin, spin, spin, spin. It goes round and round, round and

round for evermore."

He stood with his hand circling

"It's all right, old chap," said Isbister with the air of an old friend.

"Don't worry yourself. Trust to me."

The man dropped his hand and turned again. They went over the brow in

single file and to the headland beyond Penally, with the sleepless man

gesticulating ever and again, and speaking fragmentary things concerning

his whirling brain. At the headland they stood for a space by the seat

that looks into the dark mysteries of Blackapit, and then he sat down.

Isbister had resumed his talk whenever the path had widened sufficiently

for them to walk abreast. He was enlarging upon the complex difficulty

of making Boscastle Harbour in bad weather, when suddenly and quite

irrelevantly his companion interrupted him again.

"My head is not like what it was," he said, gesticulating for want

of expressive phrases. "It's not like what it was. There is a sort of

oppression, a weight. No--not drowsiness, would God it were! It is like

a shadow, a deep shadow falling suddenly and swiftly across something

busy. Spin, spin into the darkness The tumult of thought, the confusion,

the eddy and eddy. I can't express it. I can hardly keep my mind on

it--steadily enough to tell you."

He stopped feebly.

"Don't trouble, old chap," said Isbister. "I think I can understand. At

any rate, it don't matter very much just at present about telling me,

you know."

The sleepless man thrust his knuckles into his eyes and rubbed them.

Isbister talked for awhile while this rubbing continued, and then he had

a fresh idea. "Come down to my room," he said, "and try a pipe. I can

show you some sketches of this Blackapit. If you'd care?"

The other rose obediently and followed him down the steep.

Several times Isbister heard him stumble as they came down, and his

movements were slow and hesitating. "Come in with me," said Isbister,

"and try some cigarettes and the blessed gift of alcohol. If you take

alcohol?"

The stranger hesitated at the garden gate. He seemed no longer clearly

aware of his actions. "I don't drink," he said slowly, coming up the

garden path, and after a moment's interval repeated absently, "No--I

don't drink. It goes round. Spin, it goes--spin--"

He stumbled at the doorstep and entered the room with the bearing of one

who sees nothing.

Then he sat down abruptly and heavily in the easy chair, seemed almost

to fall into it. He leant forward with his brows on his hands and became

motionless.

Presently he made a faint sound in his throat. Isbister moved about

the room with the nervousness of an inexperienced host, making little

remarks that scarcely required answering. He crossed the room to his

portfolio, placed it on the table and noticed the mantel clock.

"I don't know if you'd care to have supper with me," he said with an

unlighted cigarette in his hand--his mind troubled with a design of

the furtive administration of chloral. "Only cold mutton, you know, but

passing sweet. Welsh. And a tart, I believe." He repeated this after

momentary silence.

The seated man made no answer. Isbister stopped, match in hand,

regarding him.

The stillness lengthened. The match went out, the cigarette was put down

unlit. The man was certainly very still. Isbister took up the portfolio,

opened it, put it down, hesitated, seemed about to speak. "Perhaps," he