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eyes looked at infinity.
He offered no speech, though he would answer questions:
Haendl: "How can we get back to Earth?"
Tropile: "The ship used for Sun kindling will be found at Latitude North
32.08, Longitude
West 16.53. It will accommodate 114 persons and make the passage in six hours
and forty-five minutes."
Innison: "How can we disconnect all our people from these damned machines? How
do we wake them up?"
Tropile: "Neurosurgery machines used for disconnection of Components will be
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found against the North wall of the Reception and Reprocessing Complex and may
be programmed manually to administer electro-shock through the forebrain which
will have the ef-
feet of scrambling the pleasure-reflex you refer to by implication as 'sleep':
after some hours of disorientation and mania the primary personality will
assert itself. Notice should be taken that there will be a mortality rate of
about seven per cent for this operation."
Germyn: "Can I get you anything, Citizen Tropile, for your comfort? Are you
all right?
Do you wish to see your wife?"
Tropile: "No. No. No."
The reclamation of the Components proceeded exponentially. At the start there
was only the ragged tribe, reduced to two hundred by its war, tentatively
recognizing a friend or a husband here and there wired into the network of the
planet. With trepidation the neu-
rosurgery machines, the first ones programmed by the hands of Tropile, were
brought to the Components and they were awakened. Then there were a hundred
and ten, and the ten had useful shadow-memories. They "guessed" that you
worked this machine so and that's the way it was. Then there were four hundred
and ten, and the tribe was outnumbered and a little resentful of these
well-fed come-latelies who had not been in the battle at all and who knew so
much about this damned planet. Then there was a regular
assembly line set up to process Components out, and the Sun ship, on a ferry
run to return them to an astounded Earth.
Tropile was among those returned, sitting relaxed but unmoving, his eyes dead.
He sat thus for three months before it occurred to somebody that
"electro-shock through the fore-brain" might be what he needed. It was.
Tropile was Tropile again, living, aching, looking up at masked faces.
Surgeons and nurses.
He blinked at them and said groggily: "Where am we?" And then he remembered.
He was back on Earth; he was merely human again.
Someone came bustling into the room and he knew without looking that it was
Haendl.
"We beat them, TropileP' he cried. "No, cancel that.
You beat them. Beautiful work, Tropile. Beautiful! You're a credit to the name
of Wolf!"
The surgeons stirred uneasily, but apparently, Tropile thought, there had been
changes, for they did no more than that.
Tropile touched his temples fretfully, and his fingers rested on gauze
bandages. It was true. He was out of circuit. The long reach of his awareness
was cut short at his skull;
there was no more of the infinite sweep and grasp he had known as part of the
Snowflake in the nutrient fluid.
"Too bad," he whispered hopelessly.
"What?" Haendl frowned. The nurse next to him whispered something and he
nodded.
"Oh, I see. You're still a little groggy, right? Well, that's not hard to
understand."
"Yes," said Tropile, and closed his ears, though Haendl went on talking. After
a while
Tropile pushed himself up and swung his legs over the side of the operating
table. He was stark naked, and once that would have bothered him enormously;
but now it didn't seem to matter.
"Find me some clothes, will you?" he asked. "I'm back. I might as well start
getting used to it."
Glenn Tropile found that he was a returning hero, attracting a curious sort of
worship wherever he went. It was not, he thought after careful analysis,
exactly what he might have expected. For instance, a man who went out and
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killed a dragon in the old days, why, he was received with great gratitude and
rejoicing, and if there was a prince's daughter around, he married her. Fair
enough, after all. And Tropile had slain what was undoubtedly a foe more
potent than any number of dragons.
But he tested the attention he received, and there was no gratitude in it. It
was odd.
What it was like most of all, he thought, was the sort of attention a reigning
baseball champion might get in a country where cricket was the national game.
He had done something which, everybody agreed, was an astonishing feat; but
about which nobody seemed to care. Indeed, there was an area of accusation in
some of the attention he got.
Item, nearly ninety thousand erstwhile Components had now been brought back to
ambient life, most of them with their families long dead, all of them a
certain drain on the limited resources of the planet. And what was Glenn
Tropile going to do about it? Item, the old distinctions between Citizen and
Wolf no longer made too much sense now that so many Citizens
fought shoulder to shoulder with Sons of the Wolf. But didn't Glenn Tropile
think he had gone a little too far there?
And item well, looking pretty far ahead, of course, but still
Well, just what was
Glenn Tropile going to do about providing a new sun for Earth, when the old [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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