Across a Billion Years Read Online Free Page A

busy. Go get sposhed.”
    “Is that friendly? I’m just trying to make a little talk. You know, I miss my sister a whole lot, and it doesn’t cost you anything if I ask you if you’ve ever talked to her. I—”
    She brushed me off by rolling her eyeballs up into her head so that only the whites showed. It was her cute way of announcing that she was going into another TP linkup.
    “Cut yourself on your own slice,” I muttered, and turned away.
    Jan Mortenson had been standing beside me. Now she said, “I didn’t realize your sister was a TP communicator. How exciting that must be!”
    “Especially for someone like her,” I said. I told Jan about you being paralyzed and forced to spend your whole life in a hospital bed. Jan was very sympathetic. She wanted to know why they couldn’t work some kind of Shilamakka-style transplant to put you in a synthetic body that would let you get around. This is the obvious question that everybody asks, and I explained how we investigated that a long time ago and found it was too dangerous to try in your case.
    “How long has she been like this?” Jan asked.
    “Since she was born. At first they thought they could correct it surgically, but—”
    Then she wanted to know how old you were, and I said you were my twin, and Jan turned a very radioactive shade of scarlet and said, “If she’s a TP, and you’re her twin, then you must be a TP too, and you must be reading my mind right this minute !”
    So I had to spell it all out: that we’re fraternal twins and not identical twins, obviously, since you’re a girl and I’m not, and that telepathy isn’t necessarily shared by fraternal twin pairs, and that as a matter of fact you’re the only TP in the family. I added that it’s a common error to believe that a TP can read the mind of a non-TP. “They can make contact only with other TP-positive minds,” I said. “Lorie can’t read me. And I can’t read you, or anybody else, but Fat Marge over there can read Lorie if she wants to.”
    “How sad for your sister,” Jan said. “To have a twin brother and not to be able to reach him with TP. Especially when she’s shut in and has such a need to know what’s happening outside her room.”
    “She’s a brave girl,” I said, which is true. “She copes. Besides, she doesn’t need me. She’s got thousands of TP pals all over the universe. She spends eight hours a day hooked into the commercial telepathic communications link, relaying messages, and then I think she spends the other sixteen hours hooked in just for fun, getting TP gossip from all over. If she ever sleeps I never saw her at it. Life gave her a raw deal, sure, but she has some compensations.”
    Jan was very deeply interested in hearing all about you, and I told her a lot more. Which I don’t need to repeat here, since you know all of it anyway. I think I may have underestimated Jan slightly. In the past few days I’ve started to see that her beautiful-but-dim act is only a superficial habit; she’s actually a lot more sensitive and interesting than she seems. I don’t know where I got this idiot notion that pretty girls are always shallow. Not that she’s any blazing genius, but there’s more to her than curves and a ten-kilowatt smile.
    At this point most of our miscellaneous registration and checking-in had been accomplished. But we stood around for half an hour more waiting for Saul Shahmoon to get back with our excavation permit: Dr. Schein couldn’t understand what was taking so long. He was afraid that Saul had run into some kind of bureaucratic roadblock that might prevent us from working on this planet altogether. That got Pilazinool so upset that he unscrewed his left arm up to the second elbow.
    At last Saul came back. With the excavation permit. Seems he hadn’t had any trouble about that. He had spent forty-five minutes at the PX post office, though, getting a set of Higby V stamps for his collection.
    We loaded our gear into a