Repairmen of Cyclops (Ace Edition) by John Brunner

Author:John Brunner [Brunner, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Sci Fi & Fantasy
Publisher: Ace Books
Published: 1956-01-19T00:00:00+00:00

“We got him,” Nole said unnecessarily as the limp body was placed on a trolley for removal to the wards. “But he’ll be one sick boy for at least a week.”

“You’re an idiot, Nole,” Langenschmidt said in a toneless voice. “That’s only the start of the trouble. How about the family he’s said to have left in Gratignol? Now we’ll have to send them some sort of relief, and if we don’t gauge it exactly right we’ll have half the poor fisherfolk of the planet begging for handouts to match those given to this one family… Hell, that’s my worry, and it can wait for tomorrow. I’m getting tired, you know? I’ve had a pretty wearing time lately, and dealing with emergencies when I ought to be catching up on lost sleep isn’t helping me any!”

Nole hesitated. “Uh—don’t you want to know about the data I got on Kolb’s leg?”

It seemed like last year, instead of an hour earlier, when they had set out to the computing room to inspect these curious findings. Langenschmidt ran a weary hand through his hair.

“Okay, I guess so. But there’s not much point, really. I can hardly take any action before the morning, and even then—oh, I’m rambling! Hurry up, then, before I keel over and take my nap on the floor!”

Following him down the corridor with Nole, Maddalena found herself regretting that she had ever uttered her contrary opinion when Langenschmidt told her about the ZRP controversy. The pleasure he had felt on seeing her had masked the toll the problem had taken from him. Now, she was coming to realize that if it affected him so deeply she had no right to judge it on the basis of her own miserable experience on a single ZRP—which, after all, she had chosen herself, with her eyes open.

“Here’s the print-out,” Nole said, with a kind of eager nervousness perhaps intended to disguise his embarrassment at letting the Dyge boy get out of his room and cause so much bother. “You’ll see it comes in three sections. First off, I asked for a local identification—in other words, for a likely point of origin on Cyclops.”

“And got a zero reading, hm?” Langenschmidt’s brow was furrowing; he seemed to have recovered a little from his fit of exhaustion.

“That’s right. The gene-type is non-Cyclopean, you may take that as definite. His other leg, from which I took a comparison sample, is local and quite common.

“Now the memory does contain a list of those worlds—some eight or ten of them, I believe—where donor-grafting is an accepted medical practice. Some cultures regard it as an honorable thing to permit part of one’s body to continue in service after one’s death. But there’s nowhere within about thirty parsecs where this applies.

“Anyway, I got another zero out of that line of inquiry. So I set for all-galaxy parameters, and I got nonsense!”

He made an impatient gesture at the print-out, and Langenschmidt read it through very slowly and carefully.

“How many’s that? Ninety-some worlds?” he grunted.

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