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like some kind of an authority. He hoped it wasn't simply the way he walked
that would give people that
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Fred Saberhagen - Berserker's Star.html impression.
The girl asked: "Are the berserkers doing it?"
Her voice, her look, held a hint of fear.
Harry needed a couple of seconds to decide that the question wasn't really all
that crazy.
"Even berserkers can't fire up a nova at will.
Though they're probably working on it."
The mother was looking at him now. "But other
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Fred Saberhagen - Berserker's Star.html people say the Twinkler is actually
going to explode."
"Not 'going to,' lady, it already has." Let someone like the recent
demonstrator get to this woman, and she might refuse to leave. Her choice, but
the threat to the children bothered
Harry.
He said: "What you now see in the sky is like a recording of Twinkler's
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Fred Saberhagen - Berserker's Star.html last few hours of peaceful life. Get
your kids on that ship. Don't let any of these loonies talk you into staying."
Over the next few years, here in this relatively crowded stellar neighborhood,
the blast wave of Twinkler's nova was going to totally wipe out several solar
systems, purge them not only of existing life but also of seedbed planets
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Fred Saberhagen - Berserker's Star.html that could conceivably produce new
generations. All of their orbiting rock would go, everything that was smaller
than the stars themselves. When the coming wavefront really hit, planets as
massive as Jupiter would disappear, like seeds blown off a thistle in a gale.
That thought brought lines of poetry popping
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Fred Saberhagen - Berserker's Star.html into mind. When Harry had first heard
of the disaster, he'd talked to his ship about it, and the
Witch
, as she sometimes did, had come up with an appropriate quotation:
When shall the stars be blown about the sky, Like the sparks blown out of a
smithy, and die?
Surely thine hour has come, thy great wind
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Page 22
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
Fred Saberhagen - Berserker's Star.html blows, Far-off, most secret, and
inviolate Rose?
It was supposedly from some ancient work called "The Secret
Rose," by one William
Butler Yeats. Harry wasn't sure just what a
"smithy" was supposed to be.
His thoughts jumped back to the protester's
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Fred Saberhagen - Berserker's Star.html plan of somehow recording the
disaster.
Humanity, of course, enjoyed the advantage of having ships and robotic
couriers that could effectively move much faster than light, were capable of
jumping out of harm's way in a small fraction of a second.
Still, it would be very hard to record the advancing wavefront, or even look
at it, this close to its source, so soon
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Fred Saberhagen - Berserker's Star.html after the explosion.
There were only a few premonitory signals. The thing propagated so fast that
there was no seeing it until it had arrived.
Only later, months or years later, would it be possible to stand off and watch
from a safe distance.
Even though no human eye had yet beheld it, the wavefront of destruction was
rushing on at the
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Fred Saberhagen - Berserker's Star.html speed of light, engulfing every second
a vaster volume of space. With the advantages of superluminal travel, people
would still be able, for years to come, to see those ruined stars and planets
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