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Show the entire EarthColonySystem. Now they were listening to the BauerWorlders talk among themselves in the period English their forebears had adopted so many generations before while playing Archaism on the JupiterSpaceLab-and worked so hard to preserve in their rigorous BauerWorlde school system. They sounded like something out of Ivanhoe. "Hark, is't the s h u t t l e . . . ? " someone asked, all agog at the ear-splitting scream. "Mayhap a b e a r i n g . . . ? " asked another. "A loose p l a t e . . . ?" "Nay, a woman...up t h e r e . . . a maiden..." Necks craned. What was amiss with her, pray? A young maid, it was, mayhap a scholar, for she wore the black cloth of the Doctor class. She appeared rather taller than most wights on BauerWorlde, and her dark hair was disheveled and hanging about her face. She was clutching her head with both hands, leaning as far as possible away from the port side of her seat, and screaming unrelentingly. Her neighbor, a young bearded Earthski, had half risen from his seat beside her in a feral crouch and was frankly gaping at the maiden in goggle-eyed terror. The frantic stewards, two muscular young men and a tall, thin woman of middle years, hied themselves back toward the medical supply room in the front of the shuttle, colliding in a jam of shoulders and arms at the doorway which, alas, they'd all tried to pass through at once. One of the male stewards was knocked senseless to the floor-the MedTech. It was an elbow that did it. Full sharp. Right below the left ear, direct. The woman in the trio vaulted over him, snatched up a tranquilizing hypodermic and started back. Then she stopped of a sudden and cried, "But nay, I'm gainsaid!" She struck her forehead with the palm of one hand. "I have not |
