But he felt somewhat better in it. He finally left the
frock behind, however. It was still too hot for that.
He walked on briskly, watching for signs of life and speculating on the
principles of applied semantics, name magic and similarity. He could
begin to understand how an Einstein might read through one of the
advanced books here and make leaps in theory beyond what the Satheri had
developed. They'd had it too easy. Magic that worked tended to overcome
the drive for the discipline needed to get the most out of it. Any good
theoretician from Hanson's world could probably make fools of these
people. Maybe that was why the Satheri had gone scrounging back through
other worlds to find men who had the necessary drive to get things done
when the going was tough.
Twice he passed abandoned villages, but there was nothing there for him.
He was coming toward forested ground now, something like the country in
which the Sons of the Egg had found refuge. The thought of that made him
go slower. But for a long time, there was no further sign of life. The
woods thinned out to grasslands, and he went on for hours more before he
spotted a cluster of lights ahead.
As he drew nearer, he saw that the lights seemed to be fluorescents.
They were coming from corrugated iron sheds that looked like aircraft
hangars strung together. There was a woven-wire fence around the
structures, and a sign that said simply: _Project Eighty-Five_.
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