Page 106 -- First Seen: 2010-04-30

This is a preview of: Phoebus Krumm

The Transcript For This Page

This could be the signature panel for the whole book, one you'd
certainly find nowhere else in science fiction. It will make a
wonderful poster.

Against a colorfully nebulated and richly-starred background (most
of the stars are in fact asteroids), a crude raft, made up of all
sorts of miscellaneous junk. It is perhaps two feet thick and twenty
feet on a side.

On its underside, pointed 'downward', are four or five battered,
bell-shaped, salvaged tachyon engines, each about three feet long and
18 inches in diameter. White light blasts from their mouths.

One of them, toward the edge of the raft nearest to us, has a long
pole crudely lashed to it that extends upward, so that the engine can
be steered with both hands by someone -- in this case, Tarrant --
standing topside, near the edge. Let this engine be pointing in a
slightly different direction than the others.

Huddled together on the raft are a number of mutants -- Kombi
among them, and Moonkatz, as well. Let your imagination run freely.
You may be guided by the final paperback cover of _Bretta Martin_. You
could also give one victim the enlarged head of a fly, just as a nod
to the good old movie. Overall, the mood should be desperation,
misery, determination, heroism.

Wrap the entire contrivance, and its passengers, in a ghostly blue
#-field.

Narrative (Tarrant): 'It turned out I wasn't the only proces 'failure.' A small but consistent portion of all Oplyte transformations go wrong one way or another. It didn't take long to find others like me.

Narrative (Tarrant): 'We escaped among the billions of asteroids that
the Aggregate slavers' solar system is comprised of.

Narrative (Tarrant): 'There I stayed among perhaps a million other
refugees -- you've seen Kombi, another experiment gone wrong, and the
engineer, Moonkatz -- shrunken, wizened, green.'