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The room of bleached light was getting fuzzy. He made Ipan try the code again,
but the stubby fingers mashed several keys at once.
The blue-white flies flapped at the edges of his vision. Ipan's hands whacked
in frustration at the punch-pad.
Think. Hari looked around. Ipan wasn't going to last much longer. A desk
nearby had a writing slate and pen.
Leave a note? Hope the right people find it...
He made Ipan stagger to the desk, grasp the pen. An idea flickered as he tried
to write: I NEED...
He turned and tottered back to the capsule. Concentrate.
Gripping the pen, he punched down with the butt. It struck a key cleanly. The
blue flies flickered in his vision.
The access code was hard to remember now. He worked on it one number at a
time. Stab, poke, jab
and it was done. A light winked from red to green.
He fumbled with the latches. Popped it open.
There lay Hari Seldon, peaceful, eyes closed.
Emergency controls, yes. He knew them from the briefing.
He searched the polished steel surface and found the panel on the side. Ipan
stared woozily at the meaningless lettering.
Hari himself had trouble reading. The letters jumped and fused together.
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He found several buttons and servo controls. Ipan's hands were worse now. It
took three stabs with the pen to get the reviving program activated. Lights
cycled from green to amber.
Ipan abruptly sat down on the cool floor. The blue-white flies were buzzing
all around his head and now they wanted to bite him. He sucked in the cool dry
air, but there was no substance in it, no help...
Then, without any transition, he was looking at the ceiling. On his back. The
lamps up there were getting dark, fading. Then they went out.
22.
Hari's eyes snapped open.
The recovery program was still sending electro-stims through his muscles. He
let them jump and tingle and ache while he thought. He felt fine. Not even
hungry, as he usually did after an immersion. How long had he been in the
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wilderness? At least five days.
He sat up. There was no one in the vessel room. Evidently Vaddo had gotten
some silent alarm but had not alerted anyone else. That pointed, again, to a
tight little conspiracy.
He got out shakily. To get free he had to detach some feeders and probes, but
they seemed simple enough
Ipan. The big body filled the walkway. He knelt and felt for a pulse. Rickety.
But first, Dors. Her vessel was next to his and he started the revival. She
looked well.
Vaddo must have put some transmission block on the system, so that none of the
staff could tell by looking at the panel that anything was wrong. A simple
cover story: a couple who wanted a really long immersion. Vaddo had warned
them, but no, they wanted it, so... A perfectly plausible story.
Dors' eyes fluttered. He kissed her. She gasped.
He made a pan sign, quiet, and went back to Ipan.
Blood was flowing steadily. Hari was surprised to find that he could not pick
up the rich, pungent elements in the pan's blood from smell alone. A human
missed so much!
He took off his shirt and made a crude tourniquet. At least Ipan's breathing
was regular. Dors was ready to get out by then, and he helped her disconnect.
"I was hiding in a tree and then poof!" she said. "What a relief. How did
you "
"Let's get moving, " he said.
As they left the room, she said, "Who can we trust? Whoever did this " She
stopped when she saw Vaddo. "Oh. "
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Somehow her expression made him laugh. She was very rarely surprised.
"You did this?"
"Ipan. "
"I never would have believed a pan could, could... "
"I doubt anyone's been immersed this long. Not under such stress, anyway. It
all just well, it came out.
"
He picked up Vaddo's weapon and studied the mechanism. A standard pistol,
silenced. Vaddo had not wanted to awaken the rest of the station. That was
promising. There should be people here who would spring to their aid. He
started toward the building where the station personnel lived.
"Wait, what about Vaddo?"
"I'm going to wake up a doctor. "
They did but Hari took him into the vessel room first, to work on Ipan. Some
patchwork and injections and the doctor said Ipan would be all right. Only
then did he show the man Vaddo's body.
The doctor got angry about that, but Hari had a gun. All he had to do was
point it. He didn't say anything, just gestured with the gun.
He did not feel like talking and wondered if he ever would again. When you
couldn't talk you concentrated more, entered into things. Immersed.
And in any case, Vaddo had been dead for some time.
Ipan had done a good job. The doctor shook his head at the severe damage.
Alarms were ringing. He got an instant headache. The security officer showed
up. He could see from her reaction that she had not been in on the plot. Can't
connect it to the Academic Potentate, then, he thought abstractly.
But how much did that prove? Imperial politics were subtle.... Dors looked at
him oddly the whole time.
He did not understand why, until he realized that he had not even thought
about helping Vaddo first. Ipan was himself, in a sense he knew deeply but
could not explain.
But he understood immediately when Dors wanted to go to the station wall and
call to Sheelah. They brought her, too, in from the far wild darkness.
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PART 6
ANCIENT FOGS
GALACTIC PREHISTORY ... the destruction of all earlier records during the
expansion of humanity through the Galaxy, with the attendant eras of warfare,
leaves in shadow the entire problem of human origins. The enormous changes
wrought on so many worlds also erased any evidence for much older, alien
civilizations. These societies may have existed, though there is no firm
evidence for them. Some
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early historians believed that at least one type of remnant might have
survived in the Galaxy: the electromagnetic records. These would have to be
lodged in plasma streams or the coronal loops of stars, and thus lie beyond
the detection of Expansionist technology. Even modern studies have found no
such sentient structures. However, the virulent radiation levels at the
Galactic core where energy densities might promise an hospitable abode for
magnetically based forms make such investigations difficult and ambiguous.
Another theory holds that cultures might have "written" themselves into
pre-Empire computer codes, and thus now reside undetected in some banks of
ancient data. Such speculations met with no proof and were discounted. Thus
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