Timothy Zahn - Star Song and Other Stories

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Star Song and Other StoriesStar Song and Other Stories
Timothy Zahn
For Dr. Stanley Schmidt:
Who, 24 years ago, rescued me from the slush pile.
Thanks, Stan.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Point Man
Hitmen—See Murderers
The Broccoli Factor
The Art of War
The Play's the Thing
Star Song
Introduction
I've always liked short stories. I've especially always liked short story
collections.
That's not just because you're holding a collection of mine in your hands
right
now, deciding whether or not to dive into it. It's also not just because I
started my career with short stories, though that is in fact what I did. For
me,
short fiction was a great way for a novice writer to learn the craft of
putting
narrative and character and plot together, rather like climbing a series of
foothills before tackling the awesome and slightly terrifying mountain of a
full-fledged novel. I published seven stories before even beginning my first
novel (and wrote a lot more that were never published), and had published
twenty-two of them before that novel finally saw print.
No, my love of short fiction is a lot older than that. It goes back to the
days
of my youth, back when I first began my exploration of the universe of
science
fiction. My pattern then was to pick a new author off the local library's SF
shelves and try a book by him or her. If I liked it, I would read the shelves
dry, and then (if I had any spare money that month) hunt up whatever newer
works
might be available at the bookstore.
But unless there was a novel by Author X that looked particularly intriguing,
I
always preferred to start with a short-story collection if one was available.
Why? Very simply, because a collection gave me a better idea of the author's
range than a single novel ever could. It let me see variations in style and
character, plus a wider sampling of the kind of ideas he or she liked to play
with. The full extent of the author's sense of humor was often better
represented, too. Whereas humor might be almost totally absent in a
particularly
grim novel (or overly lavished in a deliberately silly one), a collection
would
again give the kind of balance to let me know if this was someone I wanted as
my
guide into worlds of wonder over the next few weeks or months.
Which brings us back to this particular collection. In putting it together,
I've
tried to give a fair sampling of the sort of stories I've been writing over
the
years. There's everything from serious to humorous; from very short vignette
to
novella length; from my somewhat older efforts ("Point Man," 1987) to more
modern ones ("Star Song," 1997).
A quick rundown of the particular stories, in case you're interested:
"Point Man" was the third of a series of interconnected stories (modeled
after
Larry Niven's Known Universe series) that somehow never got any farther than
these three. I have that problem sometimes with series: I get distracted by
something else, and never quite get back. Maybe someday...
"Hitmen—See Murderers" was one of those ideas that let me edge a little ways
into philosophy, as well as getting to figure out ways that something that
looked so useful and good could generate such bad results. I was probably at
least partially influenced by Arabian Nights-type stories, and seeing how a
malevolent genie could mess up a perfectly good set of wishes. (Tip for
beginning writers: read everything. It all gets used eventually.)
"The Broccoli Factor." Don't even ask. Too much time spent around small
children, I guess.
"The Art of War" was commissioned (sort of) by Kris Rusch, who was editing
Fantasy & Science Fiction at the time. She had been intrigued by my Star Wars
character Grand Admiral Thrawn and his way of connecting art and war, and
thought there was something else I could do with that pairing. This may not
have
been exactly what she had in mind, but it's what came out.
"The Play's the Thing" was inspired by my first trip to New York City since
childhood, and my first-ever Broadway play. Until I can write, produce, or
star
in one myself, I guess this story will have to suffice.
And finally, "Star Song" was one of the handful of stories I've written where
I
was able to draw on my love of music. It was also one of those maddening
times
where I quickly had all of the story except for one crucial piece. In this
case,
a comment from my son was the key to that piece, after which everything fell
into place. I made the mistake of giving him 5% of the payment in thanks.
Never
do that with a teenager. He now figures any residual money that comes in from
the story is partially his, and as a paralegal student he knows how to argue
from precedent. I'm just glad I didn't offer him 10%.
So there you have it: background, history, and, hopefully, a little appetite
whetting. All that's left now is the stories themselves.
Enjoy!
Point Man
Everyone, my mother used to tell me, had a special talent. Every human being,
in
one way or another, stood head and shoulders above all those around him. It
was,
she'd firmly believed, part of what made us human; one of the few things that
stood us apart from the lower animals and even from the sophisticated alien
hive
minds that plied the galaxy.
She never told me just what she thought my talent was while I was growing up,
of
course. At the time I figured that she simply didn't want to prejudice me.
Looking back from the perspective of five decades, it has gradually become
apparent that she hadn't told me what my talent was because she was never
able
to find any. But she was too kind to tell me outright that I was so uniformly
average... and so I left home and spent thirty solid years looking for
something
in which I could excel.
Eventually, I found it. I found that I had a genuine and unique knack for
being
at the wrong place at the wrong time.
I remember vividly the day that conclusion suddenly came to me; remember
almost
as well the solid month afterwards that I fought it. But eventually I had to
give in and accept it as truth. There were just too many instances scattered
throughout my life to blame on coincidence and accident. There was the time I
walked into my college room just as my roommate was frying his cortex with an
illegal and badly overset brain-stretch stimulator. I was eventually
exonerated
of all blame, but the trauma and stigma were just as bad as if I'd been
thrown
out of school, and eventually led to the same result. I joined the Services
and
had worked my way up to a very promising position in starship engineering when
I
was transferred to the Burma... three months before the ship's first officer
attempted a mutiny and damn near made it. Again, the wrong place at the wrong
time, and this time the stigma of association effectively ended my Services
career. I eventually went into the merchant fleet, kicking around various
ships
until my special damn talent landed me in another innocent mess and I was
forced
to move on.
So given my history, I shouldn't have been surprised to be on the Volga's
bridge
when it broke out of hyperspace on that particularly nasty evening.
I shouldn't even have been on the bridge, for starters. That fact alone
should
have tipped me off that my perverse talent was about to do me dirty again.
Second Officer Mara Kittredge was at the command console, Tarl Fromm and Ing
Waskin were backing her up at helm and scanners, and there was absolutely no
reason why anyone else should have been needed, least of all the ship's third
officer. But I was feeling restless. We were about to come out of hyperspace
over Messenia, and I wanted to make sure this whole silly stop was handled as
quickly as possible, so I was there. I should have known better.
"Thirty seconds," Waskin was saying as I arrived. He glanced up at me, then
quickly turned back to his scanners. Probably, I figured, so that I wouldn't
see
that faintly gloating smile he undoubtedly had on his skinny face.
Kittredge looked up, too, but her smile had nothing but her normal cool
friendliness in it. She was friendly because she felt professionals should
always be polite to their inferiors; cool, because she knew all about my
career
and clearly had no intention of being too close to me when the lightning
struck
again. "Travis," she nodded. "You're a little early for your shift, aren't
you?"
"A shave, maybe," I said, drifting to her side and steadying myself on her
chair
back. She wasn't much more than half my age, but then, that was true of
nearly
everyone aboard except Captain Garrett. Bright kids, all of them. Only a few
with Kittredge's same hard-edged ambition, but all of them on the up side of
their careers nonetheless. It made me feel old. "Was that thirty seconds to
breakout?"
"Yes," she said, voice going distant as the bulk of her attention shifted
from
me to the bank of displays before her. I followed her example and turned to
watch the screens and readouts. And continued my silent grousing.
We weren't supposed to be at Messenia. We weren't, in fact, supposed to be
anywhere closer than a day's hyperdrive of the stupid damn mudball on this
particular trip. We were on or a bit ahead of schedule for a change, we had
all
the cargo a medium-sized freighter like the Volga could reasonably carry, and
all we had to do was deliver it to make the kind of medium-sized profit that
keeps pleasant smiles on the faces of freighter contractors. It should have
been
a nice, simple trip, the kind where the crew's lives alternate between
predictable chores and pleasant boredom.
Enter Waskin. Exit simplicity.
He had, Waskin informed us, an acquaintance who was supposed to be out here
with
the Messenia survey mission. We'd all heard the rumors that there were
supposed
to be outcroppings of firebrand opaline scattered across Messenia's
surface—opaline whose current market value Waskin just happened to have on
hand.
It was pretty obvious that if someone came along who could offer off-world
transport for some of the stone—especially if middlemen and certain tax and
duty
formalities happened to get lost in the shuffle—then that someone stood to add
a
tidy sum to his trip's profits. The next part was obvious: Waskin figured
that
that someone might as well be the crew of the Volga.
It was the sort of argument that had earned Waskin the half-dozen shady
nicknames he possessed. Unfortunately, it was also the sort of argument he
was
extremely adroit at pushing, and in the end Captain Garrett decided it was
worth
the gamble of a couple of days to stop by and just assess the situation.
I hadn't agreed. In fact, I'd fought hard to change the captain's mind. For
starters, the opaline wasn't even a confirmed fact yet; and even if it was
there, it was less than certain what the Messenia survey mission would think
of
us dropping in out of nowhere and trying to walk away with a handful of it.
Survey missions like Messenia's were always military oriented, and if they
suspected we were even thinking of bending any customs regulations, we could
look forward to some very unpleasant questions.
And I, of course, would wind up with yet another job blown out from under me.
But freighter contractors weren't the only ones to whom the word "profit"
brought pleasant smiles... and third officers, I'd long ago learned, existed
solely to take the owl bridge shift. Half the ship's thirty-member crew had
already made their private calculations as to how much of a bonus a few
chunks
of opaline would bring, and my arguments were quickly dismissed as just one
more
example of Travis's famous inability to make winning gambles, a side talent
that
had made me the most sought-after poker player on the ship.
Waskin always won at poker, too. And got far too much satisfaction out of
beating me.
Abruptly, the lights flickered. Quickly, guiltily, I brought my attention
back
to the displays, but it was all right—the breakout had come off
textbook-clean.
"We're here," Fromm reported from the helm. "Ready to set orbit."
"Put us at about two hundred for now," Kittredge told him. "Waskin, you want
to
try and contact this friend of yours and find out about this opaline?"
"Yes, ma'am," he nodded, swiveling around to the comm board.
"Was there anything else?" Kittredge asked, looking up at me.
I shook my head. "I just wanted to make sure we knew one way or another about
the rocks before anyone got too comfortable here."
She smiled lopsidedly. "I doubt you have to wor—"
"Holy Mother!"
I snapped my head around to look at Waskin, nearly losing my hold in the
process. He was staring at the main display. As I shifted my eyes that
direction, I felt a similar expletive welling up like verbal fire in my
throat.
We'd come within view of the mission's base camp... or rather, within view of
the blackened crater where the base camp was supposed to be.
"Oh, my God," Kittredge gasped as the scanners panned over the whole
nauseating
mess. "What happened?"
"No idea," I said grimly, "but we'd better find out." My long-ago years in
the
Services came flooding back, the old pages of emergency procedures flipping
up
in front of my mind's eye. "Waskin, get back on the scanners. Do a quick
full-pattern run-through for anything out of the ordinary, then go back to
infrared for a grid survivor search."
"Yes, sir." There was no cockiness now; he was good and thoroughly scared.
With
an effort, he got his face jammed into the display hood, his hand visibly
trembling as he fumbled with the selector knob. "Yes, sir. Okay. IR... those
fires have been out a minimum of... eighteen hours, the computer says. Could
be
more." His thin face—what I could see of it, anyway—was a rather pasty white,
and I hoped hard that he wouldn't pass out. Time could be crucial, and I
didn't
want to have to man the scanners myself until we could get another expert up
here. "Shortwave... nothing in particular. No broadcasts on any frequency.
Neutrino... there's a residual decay spectrum, but it's the wrong one for
their
type of power plant. Tachyon... uh-oh."
"What?" Kittredge snapped.
Waskin visibly swallowed. "It reads... it reads an awful lot like the pattern
you get from full-spectrum explosives."
Fromm caught it before the rest of us did. "Explosives, plural?" he asked.
"How
many are we talking about?"
"Lots," Waskin said. "At least thirty separate blasts. Maybe more."
Fromm swore under his breath. "Damn. They must have had a stockpile that
blew."
"No," I said, and even to me my voice sounded harsh. "You don't store
full-specs
that close to each other. Someone came in and bombed the hell out of them.
Deliberately."
There was a long moment of silence. "The opaline," Kittredge said at last.
"Someone wanted the opaline."
For lousy pieces of rock...? I forced my brain to unfreeze from that thought.
Messenia had been militarily oriented.... "Waskin, cancel the grid search for
a
second and get back on the comm board," I told him. "Broadcast our ship ID on
the emergency beacon frequency and then listen."
Kittredge looked up at me. "Travis, no one could have survived a bombing like
that—"
"No one there, no," I cut her off. "But there would have been at least a few
men
out beyond the horizon from the base—that's standard procedure."
"Yeah, but the radiation would have got 'em," Waskin muttered.
"Just do it," I snapped.
"I'd better get the captain up here," Kittredge said, reaching for the
intercom.
"Better get a boat ready to fly, too," I told her. My eyes returned to the
main
display, where the base was starting to drift behind us. "With the doc and a
couple others with strong stomachs aboard. If there are any survivors,
they'll
need help fast."
She nodded, and that was that. If I hadn't been there, they'd have done a
quick,
futile grid search and then gone running hotfoot to report the attack to some
authority or other without trying the emergency beacon trick. We'd have
missed
entirely the fact that there was indeed a survivor of the attack.
And we sure as hell would have missed getting mixed up in mankind's first
interstellar war.
His name was Lieutenant Colonel Halveston, and he was dying.
He knew that, of course. The Services were good at making sure their people
had
any and all information that might have an influence on their performance or
survival. Halveston knew how much radiation he'd taken, knew that at this
stage
there was nothing anyone could do for him... but countering that was a strong
will to hold out long enough to let someone know what had happened. The
Services
were good at developing that, too.
We didn't get to talk to him on the trip up from Messenia, partly because the
doc needed Halveston's full attention for the bioloop stabilization
techniques
to work and partly because long chatty conversations on an open radio didn't
seem like a smart idea. It was nerve-racking as hell... and so when the
captain,
Kittredge, and I were finally able to gather around Halveston's sickbay bed,
we
weren't exactly in the greatest of emotional shapes.
Not that it mattered that much. Halveston's report would have been a
full-spec
bombshell no matter what our condition.
"It was the Drymnu," he whispered through cracked lips. "The Drymnu did this."
I looked up from Halveston to see Captain Garrett's mouth drop open slightly.
That, from the captain, was the equivalent of falling over backwards with
shock... which was about what I felt like doing. "The... Drymnu?" he asked
carefully. "The Drymnu? The hive race?"
Halveston winced in a sudden spasm of pain. "You know any other aliens by
that
name?" he said. I got the impression he would have snarled it if he'd had the
strength to do so.
"No, of course not," the captain said. "It's just that—" He paused, visibly
searching for a diplomatic way of putting this. "I've just never heard of a
hivey attacking anyone before."
A little more of Halveston's strength seemed to drain out of him. "You have
now," he whispered.
The Captain looked up at Kittredge and me, back down at Halveston. "Could it
have been a group of human pirates, say, pretending they were a Drymnu ship?"
Halveston closed his eyes and shook his head weakly. "Outposts get a direct
cable feed from the main base's scanners. If you'd ever seen a Drymnu ship,
you'd know no one could fake something like that."
"Travis?" the captain murmured.
I nodded reluctantly. "He's right, sir. If he actually saw the ship, it
couldn't
have been anyone else."
"But it doesn't make any sense," Kittredge put in. "Why would any Drymnu ship
attack a human outpost?"
It was a damn good question. All the aliens we'd ever run into out here were
hive races, and hive races didn't make war. Period. They weren't
constitutionally oriented that way, for starters; aggression in hivies nearly
always focused on studying and understanding the universe, and as far as I
knew
the Drymnu were no exception. It was why hivies nearly always discovered the
Burke stardrive and made it into space, while fragmented races like humanity
nearly always blew themselves to bits before they could do likewise.
"I don't know why," Halveston sighed. "I don't have any idea. But whatever
the
reason, he sure as hell did it on purpose. He came in real close, discussing
refueling possibilities, and when he was too close for us to have any chance
at
all, he just opened up and bombed the hell out of the base."
The speech took too much out of him. His eyes rolled up, and he seemed to go
a
little more limp beneath his safety webbing. I looked up, caught the
captain's
eye.
"We'd better get out of here," I said in a low voice. "It looks like he's
long
gone, but I don't think we want to be here if he comes back."
"And we need to report this right away, too," Kittredge added.
"No!"
I would've jumped if there'd been any gravity to do it with. "Take it easy,
colonel," the captain soothed him. "There's no one else alive down
there—trust
us, we made a complete infrared grid search while you were being brought up.
We've got to warn the Services—"
"No," Halveston repeated, much weaker this time. "You've got to go after him.
Now, before he gets too far away."
"But we don't even know what direction he's gone in," Kittredge told him.
"My pack... has the records of our... three nav satellites." Clearly,
Halveston
was fading fast. "He didn't think... take them out. Got the... para-Cerenkov
rainbow... when he left."
And with the rainbow recorded from three directions we did indeed have the
direction the ship had taken—at least until he came out of hyperspace and
changed vectors. But it would normally be several days at the least before he
did that. "All the more reason for us to go sound the alarm," I told
Halveston.
"No time," Halveston gasped. "He'll get away, regroup with other Drymnu
ships...
never identify him then. And the whole mind will know... how easily he got
us."
And suddenly, for a handful of seconds, the pain cleared almost entirely from
his face and a spark of life flared in his eyes. "Captain Garrett... as a
command-rank officer of the Combined Services... I hereby commandeer the
Volga... and order you to give chase... to the Drymnu ship... that destroyed
Messenia. And to destroy it. Carry out your... orders... captain."
And as his eyes again rolled up, the warbling of the life-failure alert broke
into our stunned silence. Automatically, we floated back to give the med
people
room to work. We were still there, still silent, when the doc finally shut
off
the med sensors and covered Halveston's face.
"Well?" the captain asked, glaring at the intercom and then at Kittredge and
me
in turn. "Now what do we do?"
The intercom rasped as First Officer Wong, who had replaced Kittredge on the
bridge, cleared his throat delicately. "I presume there's no way to expunge
that... suggestion... from the log?"
"That your idea or one of Waskin's?" the captain snorted. Perhaps he was
remembering it was Waskin's fault we were here in the first place. "Of course
there's no way. And it wasn't a suggestion, it was an order—a legal one, our
resident military expert tells me." He turned his glare full force onto me.
I refused to shrivel. He'd asked me a question, and it wasn't my fault if he
hadn't liked the answer.
"But this is crazy," Wong persisted. "We're a freighter, for God's sake. How
in
hell did he expect us to take on a warship with eighteen thousand Drymnu
aboard?"
"It wasn't a warship," I put in. "Couldn't have been. The Drymnu don't have
any
warships."
"You could have fooled me," Kittredge growled. "I hope you're not suggesting
he
just happened to have a cargo of full-spectrum bombs aboard and somehow lost
his
grip on them."
"I said he didn't have any warships," I shot back. "I didn't say the attack
wasn't deliberate."
"The difference escapes me—"
"Let's keep the discussion civil, shall we?" the captain interrupted. "I
think
it's a given that we're all on edge here. All right, Travis, you want to
offer
an explanation as to why a race ostensibly as peaceful as the Drymnu would
launch an unprovoked attack on a human installation?"
"I don't know why he did it," I told him. "But keep in mind that the Drymnu
isn't really 'peaceful'—I wouldn't call him that, anyway. He isn't warlike,
but
he's competitive enough, to the point of having deliberately wiped out at
least
one class of predators on his home world. All the hivies are that way. It's
just
that in space there's so much room and territory that there's no reason for
one
of them to fight any of the others."
"But we're different?" the captain asked.
I spread out my hands. "We're a fragmented race, which means we're warlike,
and
we've gotten into space, which means we're flagrant violations of accepted
hivey
theory. Maybe the Drymnu has decided that the combination makes us too
dangerous
to exist and is beginning a campaign to wipe us out."
"Starting with Messenia?" Wong interjected from the bridge. "Why? To show
that
his war machine can blow up a couple hundred Services men, developers, and
scientists? Big deal."
"Maybe it wasn't the entire Drymnu mind behind it," I pointed out. "Each ship
is
essentially autonomous until it gets within thirty thousand klicks or so of
another Drymnu ship or planet."
"Could this one part of the mind have gone insane?" Kittredge suggested
hesitantly. "Become homicidal, somehow?"
"God, what a thought," Wong muttered. "A raving maniac with eighteen thousand
bodies running around the galaxy in his own starship."
I shrugged. "I don't know if it's possible or not. It's probably more likely
that Messenia was an experiment on his part."
"A what?" Kittredge growled.
"An experiment. To see if we could handle a sneak attack, with Messenia
chosen
because it was small and out of the way. You know—club a sleeping tiger or
two
first to get the technique down before you tackle one that's awake."
Wong and Kittredge started to speak at once; the captain cut them off with a
wave of his hand. "Enough, everyone. As I see it, we have three possibilities
here: that the entire Drymnu mind has declared war on humanity; that this one
ship-sized segment of the Drymnu mind has declared war on humanity; or that
some
portion of the Drymnu mind is playing war with humanity to see how we react.
Does that about cover it, Travis?"
My mouth felt dry. There was a glint I didn't at all care for in the
captain's
eyes. "Well... I can't see any other alternatives at the moment, no."
He nodded, the glint brighter than ever. "Thank you. Any of the rest of you?
No?
Then it seems to me that we've got no choice—ethically as well as legally.
Halveston said it himself: if that ship gets back to one of the Drymnu worlds
and reports how easy it was to club this sleeping tiger to death, we may very
well find ourselves embroiled in an all-out war. Wong, pull the raider's
direction from those tapes and get us in pursuit."
There was a moment of stunned silence. None of the others, I gathered, had
noticed that glint. "Captain—" Wong began, and then hesitated.
Kittredge showed less restraint. "Captain," she said, "the last time I
checked,
the Volga was not a warship. Doesn't it strike you as just the slightest bit
dangerous for us to take on that ship? Our chief duty at this point is to
report
the attack."
"And if Messenia was merely a single thrust of a more comprehensive and
synchronized attack?" the captain said quietly. "What then?"
She opened her mouth, closed it again. "Then there may not be any human bases
left anywhere near here to report to," she said at last, very softly. "Oh,
God."
The captain nodded and started unstrapping himself from his chair. "Bear in
mind, too, that even if we're able to guess where he'll come out of
hyperspace,
we'll have a minimum of several days to prepare for the encounter. Travis, as
the nearest thing to a military expert we've got, you're in charge of getting
us
ready for combat."
I swallowed. "Yes, sir."
The wrong place, the wrong time.
Twenty minutes later we were in hyperspace, in hot pursuit of the Drymnu
ship,
and I was in my cabin, wondering just what in hell I was going to do.
A Drymnu hive ship. Eighteen thousand—call them individuals, bodies,
whatever—there were still eighteen thousand of them, each part of a common
mind.
The concept was bad enough; the immediate military consequences were even
worse.
No problems with command or garbled orders. Instant communication between
laser
operators and those at the scanners. Possibly no need for scanners at all at
close range—observers watching from opposite ends of the ship would give the
mind a binocular vision that would both make scanners unnecessary and,
incidentally, render useless many of the Services' ECM jammers. The ship
itself
would be a hundred times larger than the Volga, with almost certainly the
extra
structural strength a craft that big would have to have. More antimeteor
lasers.
More speed.
In other words, warship or not, if we went head-to-head against the Drymnu,
we
were going to get our tubes peeled.
What in the hell were we going to do?
The smartest decision would be to quit right now, try to talk the captain out
of
it, and if that didn't work, simply to refuse to obey his order. Mutiny. The
memory of the Burma incident made me wince. But this wasn't the Services, and
it
was nothing like the same situation. Mutiny. In this case, it was far and
away
the best chance of getting all of us out of this alive. And that, it seemed
to
me, was where my loyalty ought to lie. I respected the captain a great deal,
but
he had no idea what he was getting all of us into. These people weren't
trained—weren't volunteers for dangerous duty like Services people were—and
sending the Volga out to be point man in this war was mass suicide. Maybe
Captain Garrett felt legally bound to carry out Colonel Halveston's dying
order,
but I didn't feel myself nearly so tied.
In fact, it occurred to me that by refusing the captain's orders, I might
actually be doing him a favor. Halveston's order had been directed at him;
but
if he was prevented from carrying it out, he would be off the legal hook. Any
official wrath would then turn onto me, of course, but I was prepared to
accept
that. Unlike Captain Garrett, I was used to having my career dumped out with
the
sawdust. Surely enough of the others would back me in this, especially once I
explained how it would be for the captain's good, and we could just head to
the
nearest Services base...
Assuming there were still Services bases to head for. Assuming the Messenia
attack had been a one-shot deal. Assuming the Drymnu had not, in fact,
launched
an all-out war.
And if those assumptions were wrong, running from the Drymnu now wouldn't
gain
us anything but a little time. Maybe not even that.
Which was where the crux of my dilemma lay. Saving the Volga now for worse
treatment later on wouldn't be doing anyone a favor.
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StarSongandOtherStoriesStarSongandOtherStoriesTimothyZahnForDr.StanleySchmidt:Who,24yearsago,rescuedmefromtheslushpile.Thanks,Stan.TableofContentsIntroductionPointManHitmen—SeeMurderersTheBroccoliFactorTheArtofWarThePlay'stheThingStarSongIntroductionI'vealwayslikedshortstories.I'veespeciallyalwaysli...

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