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In front of Lehman's Drug Store he looked skyward again, to see a dazzling white cluster, like many meteors, falling. The gorgeous display lasted more than a second. "Good heavens, Franklin Nelsen what was that?" He looked down at the slight, aging woman, and stiffened slightly. Miss Rosalie Parks had been his Latin teacher in high school.
Frank Nelsen had another reason for coming to Pallastown. Afield, you avoided beam communication, nowadays, whenever you could. Someone might trace your beam to its source, and jump you for whatever you had. But Gimp Hines could tell Nelsen about the absent Bunch members and the old friends, while they both sat in the little KRNH office in Town. "... Paul Hendricks is still the same, Frank.
For it was a new kind which contained an exothermic ingredient. They ate, in the absence of gravity, by squeezing the bottles. "Guess we'll have to become asteroid-hoppers miners like the slob said," Nelsen growled. "Well I did want to try everything..." This was to become the pattern of their lives. But not right away. They still had an incomplete conception of the vast distances.
"Good for you, Les," Nelsen enthused, relieved. "Only well, skip it, for now." Two work periods later, he approached Rodan. "It will take months to sift all this dust," he said. "I may not want to stay that long." The pupils of Rodan's eyes flickered again. "Oh?" he said. "Per contract, you can quit anytime. But I provide no transportation.
There was lots of courage-lifting noise and laughter. Ramos said something, and Jig Hollins answered him back. "Think there'll be any girls in grass skirts out in the Asteroid Belt, Mex?" "Oh, they'll arrive," Ramos assured him. Nelsen didn't listen anymore.
But still, though Nelsen called repeatedly, there was no reply. He got back to quarters, and looked over not only his radio but his entire Archer. The radio had been fiddled with, delicately; it would still work, but not in a narrow enough beam to reach millions of miles, or even five hundred. An intricate focusing device had been removed from a wave guide.
David Lester looked frightened for a minute. Then he seemed to ease. "Maybe it doesn't make any difference," he said. "Though I'd like to call my mother... But I'm doing things that I like. After a while, when the job is finished, he'll let us go." "Yeah?" Frank breathed. There was the big question. Nelsen figured that an old, corny pattern stuck out all over Rodan.
Nelsen hardly cared about the archeological aspects just then. Excitement and hope that became certainty, enlivened his dulled brain. "An energy source," he grated joyfully. "The Big Answer to Everything, out here! And it's always self-contained in their buildings..." They pushed the collapsed and blackened thing with the slender bones, aside.
And we ought to have a mascot. We could make a sealed air-conditioned box and smuggle old Blaster. Afterwards, he'd be all right, inside a bubb." "You try any stunt like that and I'll shoot you," Frank Nelsen promised. "Things are going to be complicated enough." "You always tell me no, Frank," Two-and-Two mourned.
She was just polite. That was worse. She's small not much color. Of course she was scared, and mad clean through. Know her?" "I guess we've all seen her around," Nelsen answered. "Widow. Les was in one of my classes during my first high school year. He was a senior, then. They haven't been in Jarviston more than a few years. I never heard where they came from..."
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