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twenty-year-old newspaper. It wouldn t have told him what had happened
since he slept, but it would have restored the firmness of the world he
woke in. In all the Keep, in all the planet, this old newscast was the only
thing that could have put solidity under Sam Reed s feet. Outside the
library danger and unfamiliarity waited everywhere, because the frames of
reference had changed so much.
The little things change most fads, fashions, slang and lapses from
that superficial norm are instantly noticed. But a lapse from a basic can
often remain undetected.
Sam watched the past unroll which seemed so vividly the present that
he could almost smell dream-dust puffed freshly in his face from Rosathe s
hand. When he thought of that the dryness of his thirst suddenly choked
him, and he remembered anew how urgent his need for haste was. He
pressed his forehead to the viewpiece and sped the roll faster.
SAM REED DREAM-DUSTS! The thin voice from the past shrilled
ghostlike in his ears while the tri-di pictures moved swiftly by. Sam Reed,
promoter behind ~the Land Colony, today gave up his career and dream-dusted,
amazing everyone who knew him . . . found wandering through the city . . .
It was all there. The investigation that followed his apparent suicide,
the scandal as his swindle began to emerge. Four days after Sam Reed
disappeared, after a dozen reputable witnesses saw him under the influ-
ence of dream-dust, the Colony bubble burst.
Robin Hale, the Free Companion, had no answer to make. What
could he say? Three hundred percent of the stock had been sold, speaking
louder than any words of the fact that the Colony s promoters had known
it could not succeed. Hale did the only thing he could do tried to
weather the storm as he had weathered so many in his long lifetime, man-
made storms and the violent tornadoes of landside. It was impossible, of
course. Emotions had been strung too high. Too many men had believed
in the Colony.
When the bubble burst, little remained.
Sam Reed s name bore the brunt of the opprobrium. Not only was he
a swindler, but he had run out given up completely and lost himself in
the suicidal escape of dream-dust. No one seemed to wonder why. There
was no logic behind such a step. But publicity-wise minds behind the
telling of the story wasted no time that might give people a chance to
think the thing out. If the Colony was foredoomed to failure, Sam had
only to wait to collect his illicit three hundred percent in safe secrecy. His
suicide might have argued that he feared the Colony would succeed but
no one thought of that. It seemed only that, fearing exposure, he took the
quickest way out.
Investigation followed him, back-tracked and discovered the caches of
swindled money that he hadn t concealed quite cleverly enough. Not
against the deductive technology of the Keeps and the Immortals. They
found the four caches and emptied them all of them. The old newscasts
gave details.
Sam leaned back and blinked in the dim air of the library. Well, he was
broke, then.
He could see the hands of the Harker Family moving behind this four-
decade-old game. Zachariah s face came back to him like something seen
an hour ago, smooth and smiling in the visor screen, remote as a god s
face watching ephemeral mortals. Zachariah had known ex-actly what he
was doing, of course. But that was only the start of the game. Sam was a
pawn to be used and discarded in the opening move. He turned back to
the newscast to learn how the rest of the moves had been carried out.
And he was surprised to find that Robin Hale went ahead and started
the Land Colony, in the face of the lack of all popular support in the
face of actual enmity. He had only one weapon. He still had the granted
charter, and they couldn t take that away from him, especially since the
money Sam stole had been recovered. Doggedly Hale must have forged
ahead, laying his long-term plans as the Families laid theirs, looking
forward to the time when these petty scandals would have blown past and
he could start anew with a fresh generation and fight the Families to win
this generation over as he had won the last for a while.
Yes, the Colony was started. But remarkably little news had been [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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