THE BOY WHO WOULD LIVE FOREVER by Frederik Pohl

Author:Frederik Pohl
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-07-05T16:00:00+00:00

That was all it took. Kugel didn’t answer in words, just shimmered, dissipated and was gone, back inside his pressure-cooker. We never saw him again.

We did see what he did.

I had not really formed any picture of what the Kugel’s “volatilizing” would look like. So I wasn’t quite ready when the process began.

You understand that I have no physical ears. So I heard nothing directly, but I felt the shocks, even at the very limits of the planet’s atmosphere, when my acoustic sensors picked up fifty or sixty quick, stinging blasts of great magnitude. Harry felt the same shocks. He clapped his simulated hands to his simulated ears, quite uselessly, of course. “Hey, Markie!” he begged. “Make it stop!”

I couldn’t do that. It didn’t matter. The blasts had stopped already. What was left, I saw, was a blistered patch of infinitesimal liquid-metal bubbles on Kugel’s containment shell. Another, similar pattern had erupted on the wall of our spacecraft, and I recognized them as the femto-scale emissions Kugel had promised. It occurred to me to be grateful that my hardware, and Harry’s, hadn’t been in the line of sight to Wan’s palace; I doubt that Kugel would have bothered to miss them.

What was happening on the surface of Arabella was not femto-scale at all. Little white puffs began to appear here and there around the castle, then a couple of larger ones, then the mother of all blasts, not just smoke but pieces of structure, billowing flame. A big part of Wan’s castle was in ruins, though not, I was pretty sure, the part I had left him in. I think one of Kugel’s rounds had set off Wan’s main ammunition dump. Its magnitude made me feel for the Old Ones, but Harry zeroed the optical sensors in on them and reported that they were cowering under the trees, but physically unharmed.

So that was that.

Then we began our vigil as we waited for other ships to come.

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