Jack Williamson Eldren 02 Mazeway

[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

scale of time. Waiting, he studied the Hydran. Big and fat and pink, Gibbon
had nearly the shape of a potato out of the hydroponic garden. Moving himself
with nanionic forces, he needed no permanent legs or arms or wings.
Most of the time he had no visible limbs or organs at all, but he could grow
whatever he wanted out of bumps that looked a little like potato eyes. One of
those knobs opened now, into a single brown eye that looked exactly like one
Page 15
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
of the eyes Benn saw in the mirror. Two human-shape lips sprouted out of
another knob, but the actual words came through the translator, spoken with
the pink shimmer of his upper body. Gibbon could use any voice he had ever
heard. He was suddenly very serious now, the voice he chose solemn and deep.
"A grave dilemma, Honored Schoolboy."
"We aren't like you." Benn felt worried. "We aren't at home in space. We need
air. We aren't nanionic. We're adapted for Earth, but my father says we can't
go back. Do you know how we can stay?"
"The evolutionary leap is never easy." The little pink lips hardly moved, but
that great voice boomed loud out of the speakers. "More races fail than ever
complete it. Yet I think you have no choice except to try."
"Can we do it?"
"Some succeed." Gibbon opened another eye to examine him with frowning
attention. "Hundreds of our races here in the halo did complete the jump from
their own planetic origins, most of them back before your own ancestors came
out of the sea. We have made contact with several hundred more, scattered
across our own galactic arm. There must be thousands we've never known about."
The big potato body tipped in the air like a quizzical human head. Benn waited
until at last that huge voice rumbled again.
"Given time, Able Schoolboy, you yourself may live to write the answer. I am a
student of Terra and its beings. Your re-spected parents are allowing me to
work with you as an exper-imental specimen. For my own part, I shall attempt
to educate you as a potential citizen of the Elderhood. For yours, you should
devote yourself to learning whatever you can. The fate of your race must be
left to the Council and the Eldermost."
"I thank you, sir." Benn nodded, feeling as solemn as Gib-bon's voice. "I'll
do my best."
"Then let us cement our agreement in your Terran style."
Benn watched, fascinated and somewhat startled, while the curved seam on
another potato eye split to sprout a bare human arm. It reached out with a
hand that looked like a copy of his own. Gingerly he took it. Cool and strong,
it shook his own hand heartily and then slid smoothly back to let the seam
close behind it.
Gibbon never offered another handshake, but Benn never for-got that one.
Through the passing years, he tried hard to prove himself a really able
schoolboy. Gibbon was certainly a better teacher than Friday. Forever changing
voices and sprouting new organs, sometimes trying an experimental joke to test
the human sense of humor, he was always fat and jolly, always interesting.
His own jokes, though, were never very funny, and he seemed hurt and
bewildered once when Benn tried an April Fool joke on him, planting an
explosive to go off with a loud bang when Gibbon opened the lab door.
"Poor Schoolboy." He shook his body sadly after he was calm again and Benn was
trying to apologize. "The noxious fumes were painful to me, and the
demonstration had no useful point that I can understand. I suspect that this
behavior you call humor is a relic of your planetic past, ill adapted to the
halo."
Yet Gibbon seemed to forgive him. Often away on research trips to core-star or
Hydra, often gone to Starsearch to visit his clonebrother there, he kept
Friday's memory cubes pro-grammed with fresh lessons. Once, after the little
nanionic ship they named Terra Two was fitted for life support, he took Benn
with him to Heart of Hydra.
A slowly spinning cluster of mirror-shelled ice-moons, that was the central
Hydran city. The university was a separate sat-ellite system, in orbit around
it. Gibbon was there to chair a symposium on Terra, and he had brought Benn as [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

Tematy