Prule agreed, but he was a sensitive man, and he sighed. And then he
said:
"They found him with remarkable celerity, don't you think?"
"Tracing a Galactic--an unequipped Galactic--is not difficult. The wave
length, of course."
"Yes, but they had no idea he was coming to this place."
"They certainly did. They expected him at the center of
operations--which this town must obviously be--sooner or later. When
their men did not return from the desert, or the town, they must have
grown apprehensive."
"Well, anyway, we don't need this poor fellow anymore. Why don't we let
him go, and mop up ourselves."
Kunklin grinned righteously.
"I'm a great believer in letting these people help themselves," he
said. "It seems more sporting that way. He's doing fine so far. I think
we ought to leave him in just to see how far he can go. Really, he does
deserve to be in at the end."
"I suppose. But you know, we almost didn't finish that last recording
in time."
It was a sobering thought.
"We'll have to follow him more closely," Kunklin said, beginning the
work of assembly. "But after all, we're very near the end. I expect we
will be going home--"
He broke off in mid-sentence as a tall, unusually symmetrical young
woman walked leggily around the corner of the hall. Kunklin was
invisible behind the warp shield, but although she could not see him he
could clearly see her, and his eyebrows rose happily.
"Um," he began, "it begins to come home to me now why this planet is so
well-visited. First this Earthman's father, then the Faktors--"
Prule cut him off. Kunklin was a first rate repairman, but he was
also a first rate lecher, a trait he had carried to several harrowing
extremes on other humanoid worlds, to Prule's almost Quakerian sorrow.
Prule soberly pressed him back to work, to the messy job of assembling
Web Hilton from the molecular recording.
And when Kunklin's head was down and busy, Prule's eyes quickly
followed the pneumatic young lady as she walked down the carpeted hall.
* * * * *
And now Web was walking down a street in the black night, walking
slowly, without purpose or direction or intelligence. He was aware of
walking for quite some while, numbly, vacantly, as if he was rising
from a long dark tunnel, before he reached the end and came suddenly
alive.
He stopped in the center of the sidewalk.
It had happened again.
Bewildered, he looked around him. There was nothing about the street,
about the long low rows of squat black houses, which was familiar. He
had no reason of his own to come here; he was not even sure he was
still in Chicago.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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