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If she'd had any idea exactly what I was going to try, she would have been even more dubious. Then again, maybe she knew. I dropped back to Ydris with the ease of routine. Finding the place had been an accident. Then, again, my whole life resembled an accident. On one of my too frequent theft-trips to Muria, I noticed another one of those thin energy lines, one that wavered and blasted and screamed for all of its tenuousness. Being inherently curious, I came back. It was clearly a track made by a timediver, yet it was opaque to me. So I followed it all the way back to Ydris. Back a good long ways, probably halfway to the end of my backtime range. Ydris home of rod-tall amphibians with dexterous claws and enormous brains. Ydris, where both brains and claws were employed in supporting a duel-based culture. Lace towers rose from artificial lakes and held the sunrise, speared the sun, and held its light well into the night. Light and energy the Ydrisians squandered them like water. Page 135 ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html I took a score of dives to scout out Ydris, from the empty and arid poles where ice winds whistled across sea ice sculpted into knife-shaped dunes to the tropical jungles where each instant held battles between beasts so savage that even the Ydrisians avoided their own equator except for the outcasts. The cities, built of pale jade nearly as hard as time-warped granite, circled and twisted along narrow peninsulas too regular to be natural. And in those cities, well, Thor would have drooled. Just in passing, I had liberated the heavy energy pistol for Odin Thor. That stopped his complaints about the wisdom of time-diving. Initially. Before the problems. Problems? One of the ConFeds, Beran, put the whole pistol in a duplicator. Fuel cell/power source/battery and all. After the blast and flash that momentarily blinded a score of ConFeds drilling nearby, turned Beran into molecules too fine to discover, and sent three others to the infirmary, we discovered, at the cost of one duplicator, that attempting to duplicate stored power produced rather messy results. Cleaning up required building another duplicator from scratch, stealing another heavy energy pistol, and conducting a few educational lectures for dumb ConFeds. Everything had more problems and angles than I ever anticipated. So... I was diving back to Ydris, red-flashing into the past, knowing what I had in mind, but not exactly how to do it. First, I tracked back to where I had found the first energy pistol. Easy enough. Then I traced that back to where it was manufactured a small black stone building on the end of a peninsula. No real help from that just a group of machines, each one stamping or forming or drawing little parts that were assembled by another machine. It would have been a good place from which to lift more pistols, but that wasn't the idea. I lifted one pistol, barely emerging from the undertime, then dropped further backtime, to the point where the factory was being built. In time, I zeroed in on a single Ydrisian who was assembling a much larger version of an energy weapon. When he, it, she left the room, I deposited the smaller version. That didn't work. The technician, researcher, whatever, nodded, squawked, and made a few changes. I could scarcely feel a chill in the time currents. So I reclaimed the weapon and looked at geography. A cooler continent in the southern hemisphere was also a technical center. I never did figure out the local politics or what passed for them, but even from the outside and undertime, it was clear that the southern continent and the northern continent did not exactly get along. So I went back foretime and retrieved some more energy guns, as well as a few other technical devices, and deposited them in various locales on the southern continent, hoping... The jolt to the undertime was like a cold wind, shivering the timepaths around Ydris like leaves in a storm, and confirming that I'd done something. I had, all right. When I returned to the time when I had picked up the pistol, all I could see from the undertime was a shimmering flow of energy and a sea of hot glass fused into strange shapes and emitting a hellish glare quite discernible from the undertime. That was the bad news. The good news was that a few hundred local years earlier, the "new" Ydrisians had de- veloped some much smaller and more highly directed energy weapons, one of which was worn on the foreleg, or whatever they used for manipulation. It took awhile, but this time, I tracked down all the components, including the miniature power cells just before they were energized. And I brought them [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] |