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Fred Saberhagen - Berserker's Star.html hungry. Orders were taken, and the
serving machines went to work.
Those that actually brought the food were basically moving boxes, with odd
numbers of inhuman legs and arms.
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In keeping with general practice in this berserker-
haunted Galaxy, none of
Harry's servants was in the least anthropomorphic. Some berserkers were
fashioned in the general
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Fred Saberhagen - Berserker's Star.html form of their most stubborn enemy,
because that made it more convenient for them to operate equipment designed to
be operated by humans.
Eventually, Harry returned to the subject of what he had found in his data
bank.
"Interesting. It says your destination is an azlaroc-
type system."
Redpath: "That is
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Fred Saberhagen - Berserker's Star.html correct."
"What does that mean, exactly?" Lily asked. "I
mean, every time
Maracanda is mentioned, it's described as something really out of the
ordinary. But so far I
haven't been able to understand just what it is." She looked at her two fellow
passengers.
"You two say you've been there. What's it like?"
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Fred Saberhagen - Berserker's Star.html
The pair continued to resist interrogation. At last Redpath shrugged and said:
"It's a place, a lot like other places."
"Really?"
"From the business point of view, that is. I
mean, some people get rich, others go broke."
Dietrich grudgingly put in: "And yeah, one thing that makes it special is that
the shrine is there.
What they call the Portal.
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That Malakó thing, like you say. Some people are into shrines."
Harry said: "I had to look up Maracanda, to check if what I thought I hazily
remembered was correct. Basically I had it right. Means it's like one in a
hundred billion, for screwiness."
According to the data bank, maybe half a dozen bodies
technically they were not
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Fred Saberhagen - Berserker's Star.html planets of the type were known to
exist among the several hundred billion stellar systems in the great
Galaxy. Besides the
"habitable body" from which it took its name, the system's chief components
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were a neutron star and a black hole. These three principal bodies moved in a
peculiar orbital dance, tracing the form of a figure eight, each
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Fred Saberhagen - Berserker's Star.html passing at times between the other
two.
This strongly implied that Maracanda must be much more massive than any
Earth-like planet, heavier than Jupiter, in a class with objects huge enough
to count as suns.
How any object in space could weigh in with that kind of mass and still be
classed as habitable was more than Harry could figure out on the spur of
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Fred Saberhagen - Berserker's Star.html the moment, yet there it was, snugly
occupying a niche in his data bank, being passed off with a few comments about
zones of gravity inversion.
Whatever the peculiarities, Harry could discover no reason not to visit the
place; the existence of a spaceport showed that a lot of other people made the
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Fred Saberhagen - Berserker's Star.html journey and survived.
Recalling his orphaned cargo, he asked his passengers if they thought there
would be much of a market on [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]