Read Across a Billion Years for Free Online

don’t want to disturb Saul and Mirrik, who are playing chess. It’s astonishing to watch somebody as huge as Mirrik moving chess pieces around with the tip of a tusk.
    Jan is running toward our shack from the dig site. She looks excited. She’s calling something to us, but I can’t hear her through the bubble wall.
    One hour later. Night, now. What Jan was trying to say was that they hit paydirt. The telescopes show the location of the High Ones cache. We weren’t more than a dozen meters off course. For some reason we had misinterpreted the survey figures and were coming in on a tilt, but we can correct for that now.
    It’s too late to do any digging tonight. First thing in the morning we’ll plot a whole new survey graph so that we have the position down perfectly. Then we’ll finally be ready to start real work, with all of the preliminaries out of the way.
    The whole team is over in our dorm right now. Outside it’s pouring again. Everyone’s tense and jumpy. Dr. Horkkk keeps pacing around in that weird precise way of his—a dozen steps, turn, a dozen steps back, turn, mathematically calculated so that he covers the same distance down to the millimeter. Steen Steen and Leroy Chang are following along behind him, having some kind of argument about High Ones linguistics. Pilazinool and Kelly Watchman are playing chess, which as you’ve guessed is our big recreation here. Kelly got very wet coming back from the site and has stripped down to her pretty pink synthetic skin, which has Leroy Chang disturbed; he keeps peering over his shoulder at her. So much for all that elaborate stuff about modesty. Kelly is a handsome wench, of course, but it quonks me how Leroy can get so excited about something that came out of a vat of chemicals. Maybe she’s naked, but she isn’t real, and that takes some of the thrill out of the nakedness. Pilazinool has done his kind of strip routine too: he’s down to head and torso, and one arm to make the moves, while the rest of his body is lying in a mixed-up heap next to his bench. Now and then he screws one of his legs back on, or takes off an antenna, or otherwise fissions around with himself in his nervous way. He’s losing the chess game, incidentally.
    Dr. Schein is running scanner tapes of previous High Ones excavations, and is discussing tomorrow’s digging techniques with Mirrik, who has plenty to say. Saul Shahmoon has one of his stamp albums out and is showing his prize specimens to 408b and Jan, who don’t look very interested. And I’m sitting off in one corner talking into a message cube.
    The evening seems endless.
    Is it ever like this for you, Lorie? Even after all these years I don’t really know how you work inside. I mean, lying there, hardly able to move, getting your food through tubes, no way even to go to the window and see what the weather’s like. Yet I’ve never seen you bored or impatient or even depressed. If you were some kind of mental vegetable, I could understand it. But your mind is active and alert and probably in most ways a better mind than mine. Here I am—here we all are—counting minutes until morning and sick of waiting. And there you are, with nothing to look forward to except another day of the same, keeping cheerful.
    Is it the TP that does it? I guess it is. Being able to rove all through the universe in your mind. Talking with friends on a thousand different planets, seeing strange scenes through their eyes, finding out everything about everything without leaving your bed at all. You can’t ever be bored or lonely for long. You just have to tune in on some other TP and you’ve got company and entertainment.
    I’ve always felt sorry for you, Lorie. Me being so healthy and active, going everywhere, doing so much, and you tied down to your hospital room, and yet we’re twins, who are supposed to share so much. That’s the ironic part. But tonight I wonder whether I ought to pity you or envy you. I can walk; you can soar from