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Shaddack awoke fro dreaine of incalculable power and mysterious purpose He was, as always, refreshed as ot out of the van and stretched Using tools he found in the garage, he forced open the connecting door to the late Paula Parkins’s house He used her bathrooarage, he raised the big door He pulled the van out into the drivehere it could better trans, and depressions in the laere filled ater Already wisps of fog stirred in the windless air, which probablythat rolled in from the sea later in the day would be even denser than those last night

He took another ha the van’s VDT to check on the progress of Moonhawk The 6:00 AM to 6:00 PM schedule for four hundred and fifty conversions was still under way Already, at 12:50, slightly less than seven hours into the twelve-hour program, three hundred and nine had been injected with full-spectrum micro spheres The conversion tearess of the search for Samuel Booker and the Lockland woman Neither had been found

Shaddack should have been worried about their disappearance But he was unconcerned He had seen the moonhawk, after all, not once but three times, and he had no doubt that ultiirl was stilltoo He didn’t trouble hi deadly in the night At tiressives could be useful

Perhaps Booker and the Lockland woman had fallen victiressives--the only flaw in the project, and a potentially serious one--should prove to have preserved the secret of Moonhawk

Through the VDT, he tried to reach Tucker at New Wave, then at his home, but the man was at neither place Could Watkins be correct? Was Tucker a regressive and, like Peyser, unable to find his way back to huht now, trapped in an altered state?

Clicking off the cohed After everyone had been converted at ht, this first phase of Moonhaould not be finished Not quite They’d evidently have a few messes to mop up

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In the cellar of the Icarus Colony, three bodies had becoid shape, boneless, featureless, aa brain and heart and blood vessels, without organs of any kind It was primal, a thick protein soup, brainless but aware, eyeless but seeing, earless but hearing, without a gut but hungry

The agglomerations of silicon microspheres had dissolved within it That inner coer function in the radically altered substance of the creature, and in turn the beast had no use any ical assistance that the ned to provide Noas not linked to Sun, the computer at New Wave If the microwave transmitter there sent a death order, it would not receive the command--and would live

It had beco itself, to the uncomplicated essence of physical existence Their threein that darkness was as lacking in complex form as the amorphous, jellied body it inhabited

It had relinquished its s of events and relationships that had consequences, and consequences--good or bad--iht froression in the first place Pain was another sheddingwhat had been lost

Likewise, it had surrendered the capacity to consider the future, to plan, to dream

Now it had no past of which it are, and the concept of a future was beyond its ken It lived only for the

It had one need To survive

And to survive, it needed only one thing To feed

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The breakfast dishes had been cleared from the table while Sa monsters that apparently had been part human and part computer and part zombies--and maybe, for all they knew, part toaster oven After Saathered with hiain, to listen to them discuss what action to take next

Moose stayed at Chrissie’s side, regarding her with soulful brown eyes, as if he adored herhi-behind-the-ears that he wanted

"The greatest probleress accelerating, how to use it to i overwheln our world, to re to worship it?" He blinked at Tessa and said, "It’s not a silly question"

Tessa frowned "I didn’t say it was Sometimes we have a blind trust in machines, a tendency to believe that whatever a coet the old e out’"

"Exactly," Tessa agreed "Soet data or analyses from computers, we treat it as if the erous because a coned, and ienius but certainly as effectively"

Sam said, "Yet people have a tendency--no, even a deep desire--to want to depend on the machines"

"Yeah," Harry said, "that’s our sorry damn need to shift responsibility whenever we possibly can A spineless desire to get out froenes, I swear it is, and the only e get anywhere in this world is by constantly fighting our natural inclination to be utterly irresponsible Soot from the devil when Eve listened to the serpent and ate the apple--this aversion to responsibility Most evil has it roots there"

Chrissie noticed this subject energized Harry With his one good ar, he levered hiher in his wheelchair Color seeped into his previously pale face He made a fist of one hand and stared at it intently, as if holding sorip, as if he held the idea there and didn’t want to let go of it until he had fully explored it

He said, "Men steal and kill and lie and cheat because they, feel no responsibility for others Politicians want power, and they want acclaim when their policies succeed, but they seldom stand up and take the responsibility for failure The world’s full of people ant to tell you how to live your life, how to ht here on earth, but when their ideas turn out half-baked, when it ends in Dachau or the Gulag or the mass murders that followed our departure from Southeast Asia, they turn their heads, avert their eyes, and pretend they had no responsibility for the slaughter"

He shuddered, and Chrissie shuddered too, though she was not entirely sure that she entirely understood everything he was, saying