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her around all the time. He felt smothered.
The damage control assignment was a crushing bore.  A fireman in a steel city
would have more to do, Mouse complained. A few days later, he cornered
benRabi in order to update him on his own snooping.
 Our fleet commander looks like a maverick. He won t bow down to Gruber of
Gruber s Fleet as the head honcho Starfisher. He wants to do things his own
way. The other fleets treat this one like an idiot cousin.
 That why the Old Man targeted Payne s Fleet?
 No. He just jumped on a chance to get somebody onto a harvestship. You were
right about the experiment, by the way. It was something Gruber put Payne up
to. I get the impression that now he s using the failure as an excuse to go
haring off on some adventure of his own as soon as we re done harvesting.
 Speaking of which. Amy says it s the best they ve ever had. They re going to
hold their auction after we leave.
 Kindervoort still on you about crossing over?
 He mentions it sometimes. Came to the cabin last week. Did Mouse suspect
that he found the offer tempting?
Sports season became crazier than ever as playoff time approached. For Moyshe
it was all bewildering color and madness. Mouse, of course, was right in the
thick of it. Football was his latest passion. He could quote records and
statistics by the hour. BenRabi studied the game just so he could carry on a
conversation.
Their lives, increasingly, became frosting, sugar-bits having nothing to do
with their assignments. They had come here to find starfish. Despite a
thousand doubts and distractions, benRabi kept his wavering cross hair sighted
near his programed target. He even resumed wrestling withJerusalem so he could
keep his invisible notes.
Sharing quarters with an agent for the other side constantly hampered him. He
was not so naïve as to believe that Amy had been struck deaf and blind by
love.
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He had come aboard thinking starfish were a wonderful concept, a miraculous
hook on which to hang modern myths and legends. They had been one with the
lost planet Osiris and the fabulous weapons of Stars End. Now he knew that
the hydrogen streams teemed with  life. The fairy magic was gone, but still
the fantastic fish were something to play with during his long hours of
waiting for an emergency that never arose.
The starfish, the leviathans of the airless deep, were more fields of force
and the balances between them than they were creatures of matter. The
longbeards of the breed could be three hundred kilometers long and a million
years old. They might occupy thousands of cubic kilometers, yet have fewer
atoms in them than a human adult. In them atoms and molecules functioned
primarily as points upon which forces anchored. Here, there, a pinpoint
hawking hole left over from the big bang formed the core of an invisible
organ.
The fabric of space and time were the creature s bone and sinew. He could
manipulate them within himself. In essence, he built himself a secondary
universe within the primary, and, within that homemade pocket reality existed
as tangibly as did men in their own reality. The part of a starfish that could
be detected was but a fraction of the whole beast. He also existed in
hyperspace, null space, and on levels mankind had not yet reached.
Those beasts of the big night were living fusion furnaces. They fed on
hydrogen, and enjoyed an occasional spice of other elements in the fusion
chain. At first Moyshe had wondered why they did not gather where matter was
more dense, as in the neighborhood of a protostar.
Amy told him that the field stresses around stellar masses could rip the
creatures apart.
A starfish s stomach contained a fire as violent as that at the heart of a
sun. Not only did fusion take place there, but matter annihilation as well
when the beast browsed on anti-hydrogen with that part of him coexisting in a
counter-universe.
BenRabi did not speculate on the physics. He was a field man. A supernova
seemed kindergarten stuff by comparison. He simply noted his thoughts in
invisible ink and hoped the Bureau s tame physicists could make something of
them.
 Mouse, I ve run into a philosophical problem, he said one morning.  About
the fish.
 You ve lost me already, Moyshe.
 I ve gotten onto something that s turning my thinking inside out.
 Which is?
 That this isn t your usual man/cattle relationship. It s a partnership if
the Fishers aren t the cows. The fish are intelligent. Probably more
intelligent than we are. He looked around. No one was listening.  They have
what they call a mindtech section in Ops Sector. Somehow, they communicate
with the starfish. Mind to mind.
 Where d you get that?
 Around. Keeping my ears open. Adding things up.
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 So the ugly old psi theory raises its head again. Out here. You know what
the Old Man s scientists will say about that?
 They ll have to loosen up those stiff necks. But what I think is interesting
is the research possibilities.
 Research?
 Historical research. The fish have been in contact with other races. And
some of them are over a million years old. That s a lot of remembering, I m
thinking.
Like oceans, the hydrogen streams supported a complete ecology, including the
predatory  shark, the starfish s natural enemy. There were a dozen species.
Even the biggest and most dangerous was much smaller than an adult starfish.
However, like man and wolves, several of the species hunted in cooperative
packs. They could even pursue their prey through hyperspace.
Packs shadowed all the great herds. They struck when a fish straggled.
Sometimes, when driven by hunger, they tried to cut individual fish from the
herd. And occasionally, when their numbers reached a certain critical mass, a
whole pack went berserk and threw itself at the herd.
The starfish were not helpless. They could burp up balls of gut fire and
sling them around like granddaddy nuclear bombs. But sharks were fast and the
burping was slow. A starfish under attack seldom had a chance for more than
one defensive attempt. He had to count on the help of his herdmates, who might
be under attack themselves. Thus inadequate, the starfish sometimes needed
allies to survive.
When the earliest Seiners had located their first starfish herd the shark [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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