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Man's building. I squinted through the binoculars, my eyes beginning to water;
and, just as I was about to give up, I caught a tiny glint of light on
something moving.
It was the bottle, being upended in the general area of the Old Man's head. I
gave an inward, silent whoop of joy. Unless he had decided to use the brandy
for a shampoo, or unless he turned out to have a body that reacted to alcohol
as if it was so much branch water, I had him.
I waited until the moon came up, then got the pickup and drove by moonlight
down through the main street of the village to the Old Man's building. I took
an unlit flashlight and went in the building entrance. Inside, I turned the
flashlight on and found the Old Man. He was curled up hi the corner of the
single room that was the building's interior on a sort of thick rug. He reeked
of brandy, and was dead drunk.
He was also no lightweight I had not thought it to look at him, for all the
experimentals looked small and skinny by human standards; but apparently they
were nothing but bone and muscle. Soil, I managed to carry him out to the
pickup and get him inside the cab. Then I drove back out of the village to the
camp.
At the camp, I took him oat of the pickup, unchained Sunday and put him in the
pickup, put the chain and collar on the Old Man and lifted him, still
snoozing, into one of the jeeps. By this time, I was surrounded by people
wanting to know what I was doing.
MI want to try him out on the equipment up at the roundhouse," I said. "He
drank almost a full bottle of brandy, and he ought to sleep until morning, but
with afl this noise he may just wake up. Now, will you let me get him put away
up there? Then I'll come down and tell you all about it"
"We already had dinner," said Wendy.
"Hush," said Marie to her, "MarcTl have his dinner when he gets back. You're
coming right back down?"
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"In twenty minutes at the outside," I said.
I turned on the lights of the jeep and growled up the hillside in low gear.
The partitions between the consoles had supports that were anchored in die
concrete floor of the roundhouse; and I chained the sleeping Old Man to one of
these. As an afterthought, I took from the jeep the canteen of drinking water
we always kept with each of the vehicles and left it beside him. If he got
drunk like a human, he was likely to have a hangover Hke a human.
Then I growled my way back down again to the camp to turn Sunday loose, answer
questions, and have my dinner.
To everybody except Porniarsk and Bill, who already knew what I had in mind, I
explained my capture of the Old Man with a half-truth, saying I wanted to see
if he could be useful as a partial monad when we tried to use the equipment in
the roundhouse, the day after tomorrow. It was not until later that evening,
in the privacy of the camper, after Wendy was asleep, that I talked to Marie
about using the little girl at one of the consoles. Surprisingly, Marie
thought it was a very good idea. She said Wendy had no one to play with but
the dogs, and she had been wanting badly to get in on what die adults were
doing.
I slept that night, but I did not rest As soon as I closed my eyes I was off
among the strands of the spider web, riding the shifting forces of the time
storm about our world. I scuttled about, studying diem. I already knew what I
would have to do. Every so often, for a transitory moment, die forces in this
area I had chosen came dose to a situation of internal balance. If, at just
die right moment, I could throw all the force controlled by the eight other
monads and myself against the tangle of conflicting forces that was the storm,
hopefully I could nudge this tiny corner of the storm into a state of dynamic
balance.
Why do I say "hopefully"? I knew I could do it-if only Wendy and the Old Man,
under die assistance of the device, would give me amplification enough to act
as an eighth monad. For it was not power I needed but understanding. As
clearly as I could see die forces now, I needed to see them many times more [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]