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Show agility, thy murderous knife?" "Ye. . . y e . . .should have been there," the man squealed in outrage. "'Twas like fighting a blessed bath towel!" Indeed, twisting and flapping was the only thing Phrapp could manage when, after sitting down at the console and musing over what he was going to do when the Governor came back on line, he was seized from behind by what seemed to be two short lengths of suspension cable. He thought he'd heard something, a whisper of a sound, as he was running his fingers over the console keys, reciting to himself the codes to be fed to the Governor which would open access for him to the main memory. A brilliant accomplishment, Grant-Sheblem had told him. Phrapp had given the good Doctor Grant-Sheblem the news that he'd broken the security code just the week before on his blind and scrambled holograph, hidden in the cellars of Phrapp's NewOxbridge keep. He smiled. It had taken him twenty years of tireless work. No one knew anything of accessing the main memory of the Governor on BauerWorlde. He'd had to search and search the libraries-both on- and offplanet-for bits and pieces of information among the mountainous stacks of hardcopy in the archives of numberless computer libraries. He spent years experimenting on the consoles, memorizing and puzzling out strings and strings of figures. Indeed, he'd become something of a phenomenon on BauerWorlde, though only a few in the HighTartars knew it. Modest and self-effacing as he was, he was nevertheless well aware that he knew more about the Governor at that moment than anyone in the whole EarthColonySystem. But old Dro'Menachem Smith-Sheblem, Doctor Grant-Sheblem's father, had 163 |