Get Off the Unicorn Read Free

little too far, Deneb. You can’t burn out my best prime with an unbased send like this.
    Oh, I’ll pick up midway. Like those antibiotics this morning
.
    Deneb, what’s this business with antibiotics and germdogs? What’re you cooking up out there in that heathenish hole?
    Oh, we’re merely fighting a few plagues with one hand and keeping thirty bogey ET’s upstairs.
Deneb gave them a look with his vision at an enormous hospital, a continuous stream of airborne ambulances coming in: at crowded wards, grim-faced nurses and doctors, and uncomfortable high piles of sheeted still figures.
    Well, I didn’t realize. All right, you can have anything you want—within reason. But I want a full report,
said Reidinger.
    And patrol squadrons?
    Reidinger’s tone changed to impatience.
You’ve obviously got an exaggerated idea of our capabilities. I can’t mobilize patrol squadrons like that!
There was a mental snap of fingers.
    Would you perhaps drop a little word in the C.O.C’s ear? Those ET’s may gobble Deneb tonight and go after Terra tomorrow.
    I’ll do what I can, of course, but you colonists agreed to the risks when you signed up. The ET’s were probably hoping for a soft touch. You’re showing them different. They’ll give up and get—
    You’re all heart
, said Deneb.
    Reidinger was silent for a moment. Then he said,
Germdogs sealed, Rowan; Pick ’em up and throw ’em out,
and signed off.
    Rowan—that’s a pretty name,
said Deneb.
    Thanks,
she said absently. She had followed along Reidinger’s initial push, and picked up the two personnel carriers as they materialized beside her shell. She pressed into the station dynamos and gathered strength. The generators whined and she pushed out. The carriers disappeared.
    They’re coming in, Rowan. Thanks a lot.
    A passionate and tender kiss was blown to her across eighteen light-years of space. She tried to follow after the carriers and pick up his touch again, but he was no longer receiving.
    She sank back in her couch. Deneb’s sudden appearance had disconcerted her completely. All of the Primes were isolated in their high talents, but the Rowan was more alone than any of the others.
    Siglen, the Altairian Prime who had discovered the Rowan as a child and carefully nursed her talent into its tremendous potential, was the oldest Prime of all. The Rowan, a scant twenty-three now, had never gotten anything from Siglen to comfort her except old-fashioned platitudes. Betelgeuse Prime David was madly in love with his T-2 wife and occupied with raising a brood of high-potential brats. Although Reidinger was always open to the Rowan, he also had to keep open every single minute to all the vast problems of the FT & T system. Capella was available but so mixed up herself that her touch aggravated the Rowan to the point of fury.
    Reidinger had tried to ease her devastating loneliness by sending up T-3’s and T-4’s like Afra, but she had never taken to any of them. The only male T-2 ever discovered in the Nine-Star League had been a confirmed homosexual. Ackerman was a nice, barely talented guy, devoted to his wife. And now, on Deneb, a T-1 had emerged, out of nowhere—and so very, very far away.
    Afra, take me home now,
she said, very tired.
    Afra brought the shell down with infinite care.
    After the others had left the station, the Rowan lay for a long while on her couch in the personnel carrier. In her unsleeping consciousness, she was aware that the station was closing down, that Ackerman and the others had left for their homes until Callisto once more came out from behind Jupiter’s titan bulk. Everyone had some place to go, except the Rowan who made it all possible. The bitter, screaming loneliness that overcame her during her off hours welled up—the frustration of being unable to go off-planet past Afra’s sharply limited range—alone, alone with her two-edged