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suppose I am. I'm wor-ried about you. This restoration of yours can't be as
simple as you made it out to be."
"I told you what happened," he said. "That's all I can do. Everything else is
hypothesis."
"A laying on of hands," DeFore drawled with a deliberate, mocking slowness.
"Very scientific."
"Actually, it was only one hand. His right, as I recall."
Despite his light tone, Lakesh repressed a shiver. He still retained
exceptionally vivid memories of the incident when Sam told him he would be
"moving energy in precise harmony and perfect balance."
He remembered how Sam laid his little hand against Lakesh's midriff and how a
tingling warmth seemed to seep from it. The warmth swiftly became searing
heat, like liquid fire, rippling through his veins and arteries. His heartbeat
picked up in tempo, seem-ing to spread the heat through the rest of his body,
a pulsing web of energy suffusing every separate cell and organ. He was aflame
with a searing pain, the same kind of agony as when circulation was suddenly
restored to a numb limb. His entire metabolism seemed to awaken to furious
life from a long slumber, as if it had been jump-started by a powerful
battery.
He still remembered with awe that after the sen-sation of heat faded he
realized two things more or less simultaneously he wasn't wearing his glasses
but he could see his hand perfectly. And by that per-fect vision, he saw the
flesh of his hand was smooth, the prominent veins having sunk back into firm
flesh.
The liver spots faded even as he watched.
Later, Sam claimed he had increased Lakesh's pro-duction of two antioxidant
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ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
enzymes, catalase and su-
peroxide dismutase, and boosted his alkyglycerol level to the point where the
aging process was for all intents and purposes reversed. For the first few
weeks following Sam's treatment, his hair continued to darken and more and
more of his wrinkles disap-peared. But then the entire process came to a halt.
DeFore's voice broke into his reverie. "Since you refuse to let me examine you
on a regular basis, I can only take your word for the state of your health.
But I know one thing if aging is controlled by a kind of biological alarm
clock, a sort of genetic switching system, and the hands of yours were turned
back, it
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James Axler - Outlanders - Devil in the Moon stands to reason they'll start
moving in the normal fashion again."
"And?" Lakesh asked sourly. "And," she retorted, "just as different kinds of
clocks and watches are designed to run for different lengths of time after
being wound, so different kinds of bodies are genetically designed to run for
different periods. The mainspring of your body's clock could break at any time
or it could go haywire. You could age ten years in ten seconds." He nodded.
"I've considered that possibility."
"But you're not going to do anything about it." He shook his head impatiently.
"What can I do? Move into the infirmary while old Doc DeFore pokes and prods
me and goes 'tsk-tsk' every few minutes?" For the first time, DeFore smiled
and some of the confrontational tension ebbed from her posture. "I'm not
really offering a prognosis, Lakesh. I'm only ex-pressing a physician's
concern for a patient."
Lakesh returned the smile. "Acknowledged and appreciated, doctor. I assure you
when I start feeling my age, you'll be one of the first to know." She lifted
an eyebrow. "
One of the first?" He hastily amended his statement. "
The first. Are you satisfied?"
"No, but that's not unusual." She continued down the corridor. Lakesh watched
her anxiously until she passed his quarters, and he expelled a relieved sigh.
He still didn't know why he felt compelled to keep his relationship with Domi
a secret. With Grant's heart more or less pledged to Shizuka, even though she
was more than a thousand miles away on the is-
land of New Edo, the big man was probably too pre-occupied with thoughts of
her to give the more co-
vert and personal activities of the redoubt more than his cursory attention.
Lakesh guessed his reluctance to let anyone know about his affair with Domi
derived mainly from the habit of keeping so many secrets. As it was, he lived
daily with the fear that he would anger Grant or
Kane and they would expose his biggest secret how there came to be exiles at
Cerberus.
In the twentieth century Lakesh had been a major player in the conspiracy that
led to the nuclear holo- [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]