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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. Page 130 ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html 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. Page 131 ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html 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 caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ] |