《Not Fade Away》作者： - Spider Robinson 【EPUB】

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NOT FADE AWAY I became aware of him five parsecs away. He rode a nickel-iron asteroid of a hundred metric tons as if it were an unruly steed, and he broke off chunks of it and hurled them at the stars, and he howled. I manifested at the outer periphery of his system and waited to be noticed. I'm sure he had been aware of me long before I detected him, but he affected not to see me for several days, until my light reached him. I studied him while I waited. There was something distinctly odd about his morphology. After a while I recognized it: he was wearing the prototype—the body our ancestors wore! I looked closer, and realized that it was the only body he had ever worn. Oh, it had been Balanced and spaceproofed and the skull shielded, of course. But he looked as if when Balancing was discovered, he had been just barely young enough for the process to take. He must have been one of the oldest of the Eldest. But why keep that ridiculous body configu-ration? It was hopelessly inefficient, suited only to existence on the surface of planets, and rather poorly to that. For a normal environment, every-thing about it was wrong. I saw that he had had the original