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.He dragged himself over the top and stretched out along the hard wood on his stomach, shoulder square against the wall.When he pushed his head forward it was no more than a foot from the top of the door to Hanna Kronberg's office.He could even slither forward, lean far down, and see the desktop and table at the other side of the room.In that extended position he was so uncomfortable that he could hold it for only a few seconds at a time.Job eased his way back.In five minutes the hard wood was compressing the sores on his chest and legs.He shifted and squirmed, but found no relief.Before he climbed up he had worried that he might fall asleep and roll off.Now his concerns were quite different: could he endure this, until the return of Hanna Kronberg and her colleagues?That return felt as though it was taking forever.Job, craning now and again to peer at the clock in the other room, knew that it was only half an hour until footsteps and voices sounded in the corridor outside.He pulled back close to the wall and lay perfectly still.There was a scraping of chairs and a man's hoarse cough.And then another voice, a woman's.It was speaking, loudly and clearly.And Job could not understand one word.He lay frozen on the top of the bookcases.Of all the obstacles that he might have predicted in exploring the mysteries of Techville, this was the least probable.And yet it was one that Job should have been prepared for.Here, as elsewhere in Xanadu, people stuck with their ethnic groups.Hanna Kronberg and her colleagues were no exception.They were talking freely to each other—in their native language that Job had never heard before.He forgot his discomfort and listened, harder than he had ever listened to anything.After a few minutes he began to pick up words, cognates drawn from various other languages.There was a hint now of Italian, then a phrase like Turkish and another that sounded like oddly pronounced Hungarian.The structure was familiar, yet at the same time alien.Within a few minutes Job's ear began to make the adjustment, and his brain reached for a conclusion.What he was hearing was Rumanian, a language that he had encountered only in written form, in one dusty book acquired and pondered during his long years as a street basura and vendor.As the three people in the other room—Job could identify two men's voices and one woman's—continued their discussions, other facts became clear.Although they spoke Rumanian, most technical terms were not translated to that language.They were dropped in as English words.Job could hear the same biological vocabulary that he had read in the papers: hybridomas and recombinant DNA techniques and symbiosis.Added to them were new mystery words: airborne vectors, contagion and immunity, and antigerial effects.And one other fact became clear from the tones of voice, independent of any language.These three people had not returned for a late-night technical meeting.They had come to continue an argument, and it was a fierce one.The voices grew louder.Job began to grasp tantalizing scraps of meaning.You are a slave of Gormish.That was Hanna Kronberg, addressing the gruffer of her companions, who coughed continuously whenever he was not arguing.I know what she wants, and what Pyle and Bonvissuto want, too.But we have a—Hanna Kronberg used a phrase that Job did not recognize.The book that he had studied so long ago had been written for children, with a child's limited vocabulary.The argument grew more intense.Job risked craning forward enough to steal a glance into the next room.The three had their backs to him, crowded around the computer console.Hanna Kronberg was waving her hand at the screen."I can do it—I have proved.but it works only by." Directed something, that was the words she used.From the context and her gesture, it had something to do with touching.But touching what, and for what reason?Job wallowed in words, clutching for the life raft of familiar phrases.".proof downstairs, as certain as I breathe"."Five years work, no doubt at all." "Stupid, they have no idea what they ask us to do."On and on it went, for another three hours.There was no agreement.The hoarse man was losing his voice.He began to bang his fist on the table to emphasize his points, and after a final outburst he swept out of the room.Hanna Kronberg and the other man followed, still arguing.The door slammed.Job lay flat on top of the bookcase.He felt weak and dizzy.He had spent four hours in a concentration so intense that the world around him now seemed vague and distant.The only reality was the turbulent sea of words on which he had been so long adrift.He wanted to relax, but he was too uncomfortable.He flexed taut shoulders and began to ease his way down to the floor.There had been a sound of finality in the way that the door had been banged shut, but even if he were wrong about that he could not stay hidden forever.He went through into Hanna Kronberg's office and looked at the papers strewn on the table, and at the display on the computer screen.She had been pulling materials from file cabinets to support the points she was making, and had not bothered to put any of them back.The same was true of her computer files.Data cubes sat by the console, and one was still in the machine.Job looked at the clock.Almost eleven; less than seven hours to daylight and his first chance to send a signal aloft to the orbiting monitors.He sat down at the table.Finally he had an idea what the Big Three of the Tandy were planning, and the role that Hanna Kronberg was supposed to play.But ideas were not enough; he needed proof, enough to convince Wilfred Dell and the Royal Hundred.For the next five hours he studied the papers on the table and called files onto the computer screen.Finally his brain would absorb no more information.He walked downstairs to the laboratory and went to a line of glass-fronted cabinets.They were locked, but they had not been built for strength.He forced two of them open with a metal ruler and stood for a long time staring at their contents.The two cabinets each held a dozen transparent vials with color-coded stoppers.Within those tiny bottles, unless Job had totally misunderstood the argument among Hanna Kronberg and her colleagues, sat the key to Techville and the reason for the fences around it.The invisible microorganisms floating in their cloudy yellow fluid were human designed— Kronberg's saver-of-worlds, but also the Big Three's destroyer-of-worlds [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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