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way out. It could be a clue to what they were discussing "
The blaze of Wing's crown crashed in his helmet.
"Our teammate says she has enough of your planetic bab-ble," Ayn translated.
"She says the import of the inscription should be obvious, even to a planetic.
To escape, we must choose the tunnels sloping down."
"That's what I wanted to suggest."
Wing was already lifting away. Ayn sprang after her, as if they hadn't heard
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ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
him. Once more he followed, his servo skit-tering with him, and once more they
left him far behind. A long time later, at the end of another red-lit passage,
he found them waiting with their servos outside a tall doorway. The servo
stopped before him.
"Player Dain, you have reached your goal for the Step of Stone," its brisk
voice shone. "The judges of the game felicitate you."
Beyond the door, they found a big circular room with a dozen doorways spaced
around the wall. The servos separated here to lead them apart, but Wing glided
back to him, her yellow crown flashing. The unreadable intelligence beyond her
belt of hard black eyes was suddenly as threatening to him as he thought it
must have been to Gibbon's brother, back at Starsearch Station. "We lost this
step." Ayn's voice rang in his helmet. "So the servos report. Third place, no
score. Wing blames you. When she plays against you, she promises to send you
back to your own miserable planet."
She was soaring away behind her servo. "The game is not over." Ayn spoke as if
to cheer him. "You did all you could."
"Not well enough." He grinned into the horn-beaked, in-human face. "But I
thank you."
Now suddenly helpful, his own servo escorted him through an air lock into
another narrow room furnished with equipment copied from the Spica, complete
with Captain Bela Zar's sar-donic smile from the portrait on the wall.
Gratefully he peeled off the chafing lifeskin, showered, ate eldren
synthetics. The servo sprouted delicate silvery fingers to examine the spots
where the suit had rubbed him raw and apply something that eased the sting.
When that was done he sat down on his bunk, staring blankly at nothing.
Disappointment lay heavy on him. Wing's scorn rankled in him, yet it came from
truth that hurt. Human beings were still in fact planetics. Even if he won,
even if they were admitted to the Elderhood, would they always be third-class
citizens, mocked by everybody else?
"We're what we are." Speaking aloud, he shrugged and fin-gered a blister on
his shoulder. "With most of the game still to play "
"Sir?" the servo shone. "Have you a command?"
"I do," he told it. "Call Heart of Hydra for me. Ask for Dr. Edward Gibbon
Beta."
"Acting, sir."
The servo bounced away toward the end of the narrow room. A thin cloud veiled
it, the hemisphere of captive ions that formed the holophone screen. The cloud
flickered, and the wall trans-lator spoke.
"Dr. Gibbon is unavailable " The cloud faded and bright-ened again.
"Correction, sir. A message from Dr. Gibbon. He asks you to wait."
"I'll wait."
The ion-glow dimmed until he could see the servo's shining bubble on the floor
and the gleam of the life-support gear beyond it. It brightened, and the end
of the room was gone. He looked beyond where it had been into a milk-white
haze of pickup noise.
"Benn?" Gibbon's voice came out of the haze. "Benn?"
"Doctor, I'm here."
It cleared a little, and he found Gibbon's lumpy gray potato shape floating in
it, half covered with the birth robe. As always, that trapped him even when he
tried not to look, its shifting hieroglyphs straining his eyes and baffling
his mind with a sense of patterns gone before he could make them out.
Gibbon floated in that pale fog, motionless and featureless. No limbs were
extended, but a thin ribbon of tissue had grown from one potato eye. With an
effort to pull himself away from the tantalizing riddles of the robe, Benn
followed it through the fog to another motionless Hydran, lying almost beyond
pickup range and barely visible.
"Doctor?" he called uneasily. "Are they helping you?"
A single seeing eye came slowly open. The knobby body was still a dark and [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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