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"You're a high-voltage test circuit, Angela, yes, indeed! But you've already
burned me once. I
don't intend for it to happen again!"
There was no longer any doubt of what he had to do in his mind. He was inside
a wall; well, a wall had two sides. He would reach that other side! Perhaps he
would be alive; more likely he would be a cadaver, stripped of useful parts.
But he would reach it.
Because . . . because, he thought, on the other side of that wall were many
things. There was freedom maybe
 in the Reefs of Space. There was, perhaps, the man who knew how to remove
collars.
And there was Donna Creery.
Abruptly he turned to Angela again, surprised at his own thought of the
Planner's daughter, unwilling to think farther in that most dangerous of
directions. He said, "I
 I didn't mean "
"Don't apologize, Steve. You of all people "
He became conscious that she had stopped in the middle of a thought. "What
were you going to say?" "Oh ... nothing. Nothing much. Just that..." 102
"Angela!" he said angrily. "You've always kept secrets from me! Please don't
keep on with it not here! Now, what were you going to say? Something about me
'of all people'? Am I any different from other people?"
Her wide, lovely eyes studied him serenely. Then she said: "Don't you know
that you are?"
Her cool regard made him uncomfortable. He had to gulp before he could ask
what she meant.
"Haven't you been aware of anything strange about yourself?"
He was about to shake his head, when something froze him. He recalled the
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riddle of the three days he had lost Suddenly he remembered a time when he
thought he had heard her voice, from the dark outside the circle of pitiless
light that blazed down on the therapy couch, before she had
file:///C|/2590%20Sci-Fi%20and%20Fantasy%20...2001-03%20-%20The%20Starchild%20
Trilogy.txt (48 of 206) [12/28/2004 10:49:10 PM]
file:///C|/2590%20Sci-Fi%20and%20Fantasy%20E-books/LoPL%20full%20...child%20(3
)/Starchild%2001-03%20-%20The%20Starchild%20Trilogy.txt sacrificed her limbs
to the Plan.
"You must have noticed that you are different, Steve," her soft voice taunted
him. "Have you ever wondered why?"
For a moment he wanted to strike her. The iron collar was suddenly tighter
around his neck, so tight that he could scarcely breathe, so tight that he
felt the veins throbbing at his throat. He sat numb and silent, staring at
her.
"Did you think you were human?" Her voice was contemptuous, merciless. "I
thought you might guess, when I was telling you how Donderevo got away. You
are the junk man."
"Junk what?"
The hah- stood up at the nape of his neck. He shuddered in the sun. The collar
was heavier then lead, colder than ice.
"I told you that a thing was patched together out of waste parts. A decoy for
the guards to watch while Donderevo got away. Well, Steve, that's what you
are."
He sat still, breathing carefully through the cruel constriction of the
collar.
"If you're good-looking, Steve, that's because the surgeons were trying to put
together a reasonable likeness of Ron Donderevo, who was a handsome man. If
you dislike the Plan, it is because your brain and your glands were patched
together from what was left of several of its most distinguished enemies. If
you have an unusual mastery of helical field theory, it is because one lobe of
your brain belonged to the man who invented it. If the rest of your memory is
somewhat blurred or contradictory, it is be-
103
cause the rest of your brain was stuck together from odds and ends of tissue."
"No!" he whispered hoarsely. "That can't be true "
But the collar choked off his voice. He felt weak and numb with a hideous
feeling that it could be true. "If I was ever here before," he argued
desperately, "I can't remember anything about it."
*That goes to prove it." Angela's slow smile was innocently sweet. "The men
who assembled you were research scientists, as well as enemies of the Plan.
They had been using bits of waste brain tissue in effort to improve upon
nature. When they were putting your brain together, they seized the
opportunity to create a mental mechanism dangerous to the plan."
Dazed, he could only shake his head.
"There's proof enough, if you don't believe me," she said. "Look at all your
feats of sabotage.
The subtrain tubes and fusion reactions and ion-drive accelerators that you
have demolished with your improved designs "
Agony wrenched him.
"I don't remember "
'That's the final perfection of your mental mechanism," she said calmly. "The
disloyal surgeons equipped your new brain with a self-erasing circuit, to
protect you from any temptation to reveal your secrets under torture. Aren't
you aware of the blank in your past?"
"I I am." Shuddering, he nodded.
'That's all you are." A lazy malice glinted in her smile. "All the special
attention that you have been receiving for the past three years is proof that
you functioned remarkably well as a sabotage device, but your function has
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been performed. I suppose you are setting some sort of precedent, now that all
your organs are about to be salvaged for the second time. But in spite of
that, Steve, I can't help feeling that you are trying to carry your head a
little too high. Actually, you're nothing more than a hundred and sixty pounds
of bait that those traitors filched from the sharks."
13
104
Shark meat! If that was all he was, then this was the place for him!
Ryeland lurked in a clump of the bougainvilleas near the garbage pit, watching [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]