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.He was prepared to meet those demands, but could anyone combine such a life with an attempt to take over the Solar System? Surely not.Aybee felt the flood of enthusiasm giving way to rational thought.He knew it was no time to argue with Ransome.Instead he nodded slowly."What you are telling me is fascinating.I'd like to hear more."He was not surprised when Ransome accepted his apparent conversion.The other man projected so powerfully, he was probably amazed by anyone who did not become his follower on first exposure.Ransome stood up, so warm and friendly and convincing that Aybee began to have second thoughts about his motives."You have much to learn, Aybee Smith.To the few thousand people already devoted to my cause—yes, we are still spread that thin—I am their only scientific expert.They see me as their prophet, and as the source of all the new technology.But there is a limit to what one man can do, and I have no more than scratched the surface of the possible.That has been enough to allow us to begin the reorganization of the system.You will help me to take our work much farther.When you are ready, we will go to the laboratories.You can begin work there as soon as you like.The faculties are the finest that we can provide."He paused and frowned."Of course," he added mildly, "there are certain precautions taken for such sensitive work.As you will appreciate, it would be intolerable if word of our plans and discoveries were to leak prematurely to the Inner or the Outer System." He smiled."The monitor systems are automatic, and beyond my control.Attempted escape would unfortunately and inevitably lead to your capture, perhaps to your death.Now.Shall we proceed?"CHAPTER 24"Mary, Mary, quite contraryHow does your garden grow?With spinor fields, and kernel shields,And pretty men all in a row."—crèche song of the Opik HarvesterThe self-reproducing machines that alone made possible the rapid development of the Oort Cloud had never been so important in the Inner System.Fifteen billion humans were quite self-reproducing enough.Bey Wolf, accustomed all his life to human limits on work habits and energy levels, had not yet made his adjustment.He knew in the abstract what a group of machines could do, but their actual performance still amazed him.And they never seemed to stop work, even when Bey could see nothing useful to be done.The odd logic of that had been explained by Leo Manx on their original trip out to the Cloud."It's actually more economical of resources to keep them working," he said."You see, if they're not working, they're programmed to make more copies of themselves.And that takes more materials.""But why not just switch them off?" Bey asked.Manx shook his head."They're designed for continuous use.If you don't want them to decline in performance, you have to keep them busy."Typical Outer System design philosophy, but Bey was looking at a good example of what Manx had meant.Sylvia Fernald had approached the same destination and found the darkness and silence of a mausoleum.To Bey, near to rendezvous just seven days later, it seemed inevitable that the body had looked then much as it did now, gaudy, bustling with activity, ablaze with internal lights.Half a dozen ships lay in the docks, and the irregular egglike outline of the surface was blurred and softened by a tangle of free-space vines, tilting their silver and black webs to drink in the miser's dole of radiation from distant Sol.The idea that the whole body had been dark and deserted as recently as two days earlier never occurred to Bey.Its small size was a surprise.In the Inner System, a few hundred sets of orbital elements covered everything significant.The vast majority of planetoids were uninhabited and likely to remain so, except for mining operators.Travel to any of the interesting destinations took one to a body at least tens of kilometers across, with an associated population center.There would be thousands of people there at minimum, if not the billions of Earth, the hundreds of millions of Mars, or the tens of millions of Europa and Ceres.That Sylvia would come so far to arrive at a body with a handful of people was perplexing to Bey.However, it might also make his own task easier.He was seeking Sylvia, but beyond that he had another motive
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