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.Razor in hand he listened while the voice of the woman announcer went through a few details of what she called the grisly discovery.The thing somehow got to him, enough to keep him from concentrating properly either on shaving or on what he ought to say when he appeared on the panel in a couple of hours.Not only that, it stayed with him after he finished getting ready and left the room.The radio really hadn't given many facts.The body of a woman of indeterminate age had been washed up on a beach somewhere down in the Keys, which put it, he supposed, almost a hundred miles to the southwest of Miami Beach.An unnamed authority was quoted to the effect that the body might have been in the water as long as several years.He thought at first that the news-caster had probably got that garbled somehow, but then mention was made of pockets of cold, un-circulating water to be found in certain depths, in which unusual preservation action could be expected.One reason for the grisly discovery remaining with him all morning, he supposed, was that his panel topic was "Science in Science Fiction," and he hoped to be able to work that "unusual pre-servation action"into what he had to say.He felt a little uncomfortable about this panel, as he really was no scientist, though he read the professional journals fairly often and popularizations a lot, and his stories tended to be thick with scientific jargon.He thought some of the readers liked the jargon better than the stories, and he loved it himself, really, which was why long ago he had begun to use so much of it.For him it had always made a kind of poetry.Some of the other people on the panel were not only real scientists, but were writers as well.They talked quantum mechanics.They talked epistemo-logy.He wasn't sure at first that he remembered what that meant.He wondered for a little while if he was going to have to sit there like a dummy for long minutes at a time.So as soon as the chance came, he got in a few words that shifted the subject to alternate universes.Anybody could talk about that.Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.htmlSuppose, he thought to himself, looking out over the heads of the audience in the far last row while some argument between two other panelists droned on, just suppose that body could have been five years in the sea.How far could a body drift in five years? Well, certainly not through the Panama Canal.When, in the early afternoon, he got back to his room, he looked out at what little he could see of the one great ocean that went all the way around the world, and thought about that body again.They hadn't said what, if anything, the woman had been wearing.He couldn't quite shake the subject, it seemed to have set up a resonance of some kind inside his head.Time passed, what seemed like a lot of time as he sat waiting in his room, but the phone call from another hotel room that he was expecting failed to come.So he left the convention earlier than he had planned, left it that very afternoon, driving north through summer Florida.Going to the convention, he told himself, had been more trouble than it was worth.In the old days, the cons ran three days, no more, and were relaxed and friendly.Now each one he went to seemed like some damned big business in itself.Just getting away on his own was something of a relief.A day and a half later, waking up early in his motel room in Atlanta, he put in a call to his agent in New York.The agent would be back in the office in half an hour, the girl thought, and would call him back then.Waiting for the agent to call back, he took a shower, and when he came out of the shower, dripping, turned on the radio.Listening, he experienced an inward chill.".thought to have been in her early twenties, recovered from the Cattahoochie some twenty miles north of Atlanta.The condition of the body made it impossible to determine immediately if there were any marks of violence.Sheriff's officers said that the body might have been in the water for as long as several months.Attempts at identification [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]