On the Symb-Socket Circuit by Kenneth Bulmer

Author:Kenneth Bulmer
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: (v1.0), Sci-Fi
Publisher: Ace Book
Published: 1972-04-30T23:00:00+00:00

IX

BROTHER STANLEY WAS DEAD. He’d been gunned down by a trigger-happy tipstaff from Altimus. Now even the oozing puddle of slime that was all that remained of him would have dissipated, run down the drain.

The horror of that painted a scarlet mask of forgetfulness over Matthew Wade’s actions. He came back to a semblance of normalcy spacing into Samia; and he recalled his reasons for seeking passage to the planet of the Demons. Here, for a price and at a cost of surrending a little of one’s own ego, a Samian camouflage cloak could be obtained. A deep, soul-wrenching hunger for anonymity possessed Wade. He wanted to be able to draw his cloak about him and blend with the landscape and be overlooked.

As a superlative computer man and able to demonstrate that aptitude, he had no difficulty in finding gainful occupation. Among the land of the Giants terrestrial-sized people had built up a lively culture of their own, freed from the rat runs and pest holes of their former lives behind the wainscoting and in the walls of the Demons’ houses. Wade bought his cloak; submitting to the minor operation that joined Lon Chaney’s tendrils to his own central nervous system. Here, in a rude but nonetheless extraordinary effective fashion was an early example of symbiosis between different planetary species.

He grew to love Lon Chaney. The cape’s sixteen legs clung around his body, artfully shifting as he moved, giving him cover and concealment. He spaced out from the planet of the Demons no happier but infinitely more at ease.

His experiment with poor doomed Brother Stanley of trying to live on a brawling frontier world had not succeeded. He considered then rejected the idea of traveling to Solterra. One day, he promised himself, he would visit Earth as a non coord; but he could not face the home of mankind now, in his present frame of mind. So he settled for Takkarnia, one of the planets of the Tak system, those ancient enemies of Solterra along with Shurilala in the evil TEST wars. Those days lay in the distant past, even before Strathan, the genius of comic vision, had taken up the, direct line of comic genius from Molière and Plautus. Another strange echo from the future reverberated in the coming meeting with Tom Martin on as yet unheard of Ashraindrego.

After the fracas on Takkarnia he had shifted only once more, to a job on the hostile planet called Cats-paw. Left alone by the Solterran Construction Service as unearthlike, it had been found to contain minerals and chemicals that made a bonus sideline in mining to the main chore of collecting monocerate, and that, as schoolchildren learned, was as rare as a snowflake on Sungard VI.

Matthew Wade spaced down in a company ship to Catspaw.

In the terrestrial dome he waited in the line for the unsocketed. Men and women around him talked and laughed and shuffled nervously forward. This planet was being run by the Liang-Peng Corporation and their doctor of symbiosis had trained briefly under Doctor Arliss himself.

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