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to his wife.
Harry supposed that might have been too personal to be exhibited to strangers.
Lily was looking at the object her husband's image was swinging
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Fred Saberhagen - Berserker's Star.html gently back and forth, a specially
shaped wooden club that Harry supposed might be used to hit some kind of ball.
She said: "There was a time when he was all excited about sport rituals."
Harry grunted. He wasn't sure just what Alan's sport rituals might be, and he
thought he could contentedly live out the rest of his life without
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Fred Saberhagen - Berserker's Star.html finding out.
It was often very hard to tell the true age of anyone who was determined to
look young, in this era when health and strength could often be prolonged for
centuries, new teeth grown in as needed, and living skin preserved unwrinkled.
Listening to
Lily and looking at the holograph, Harry got the impression that Alan
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Fred Saberhagen - Berserker's Star.html must be young indeed.
And the more he looked at Lily, and listened to her, the younger she got, too.
"This was taken a few years ago," she admitted. "But he hasn't changed that
much."
Harry nodded. "How long since you've actually seen him?
"It's been months. I'm beginning to lose track."
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Fred Saberhagen - Berserker's Star.html
"But you say he left you some kind of message when he took off."
She sighed. "One thing that worries me is, I don't know if he's eagerly
expecting me to follow him or not. Maybe I've lost him. But I don't give up
easily. I couldn't tell."
After a pause she went on simply: "The message he left wasn't about us, at
all it was just about Malakó, and
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Fred Saberhagen - Berserker's Star.html how he had finally found what he'd
been seeking all his life, and how wonderful it was."
Fiercely she squeezed the little message cube between her fingers, and
Alan's ghost, still holding his game bat, obediently flew back into it.
Harry and his three paying passengers had turned off the main
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Fred Saberhagen - Berserker's Star.html thoroughfare onto a side road, where
they joined the steady flow of people to the landing field through one of the
regular gates, which this evening was standing permanently open. The guard
booth at the gate was deserted, and from a speaker on top of it a robotic
voice was endlessly repeating some inane command having to do with the proper
places to deposit
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Fred Saberhagen - Berserker's Star.html surplus personal property. As far as
Harry could tell, no one was paying the voice the least attention. In a few
hours, all the depositories and all the property on this planet were going to
be turned into a sleet of atoms.
These recorded orders were interlarded with warnings that the field was
closed, and that people wanting to use it
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Fred Saberhagen - Berserker's Star.html should make alternate arrangements.
Harry supposed that the robots were doing the best they could when abandoned
by all human supervision. He tried to derive what comfort he could from the
thought that Twinkler was at least going to wipe out all this residue of
recorded orders and advice.
Now the four people
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