Flinx in Flux Read Online Free PDF Page B

at the loss of her five offspring, she gave no sign of it.
    Scrap was less willing to find a seat. Despite Flinx’s persistent efforts to dislodge it, the young minidrag insisted on clinging to his wrist. Finally Flinx gave up and put the crawler in motion. The adolescent was not heavy, and before long he would get bored and move off by himself.
    The path he had bulldozed in from the river was easy to follow. Fast-sprouting jungle plants were already fighting, for their share of the newly esposed route to the sky. He turned a tight curve, bending the crawler in the middle, to work his way around a tree three meters thick. The vehicle articulated vertically when he followed that maneuver by driving down and through a dry streambed.
    Now that he had accomplished what he had come to Alaspin for, he was forced to contemplate what he was going to do next. Life was no longer simple. Once it had been, back on Moth, when all he had had to worry about was keeping dry and getting enough to eat and maybe swiping a few luxuries now and then to help out Mother Mastiff when business was slow. The past four years had complicated his life incredibly. He had seen and experienced more than most men saw and experienced in a lifetime, let alone adolescent boys.
    Not that he was a boy anymore, he reminded himself. He had grown physically as well as mentally. Nearly nine centimeters, in fact. Decisions were no longer easy to make, choices no longer straightforward. Being nineteen carried with it a lot of responsibility, for him more than for most. Not to mention the emotional baggage that automatically went with it without right of refusal.
    The only problem with seeing a lot, he mused as he guided the crawler through the Ingre jungle, was that he was not happy with most of what he had seen. In general, both man and thranx had been a disappointment to him. Too many individuals were ready and willing to sell out their principles and friends for the right price. Even basically good people like the merchant Maxim Malaika were essentially looking out for their own best interests. Mother Mastiff was no different, but at least she did not have a hypocritical bone in her body. She delighted in being a greedy, money-grabbing lowlife. He reveled in her honesty. She was the best human being she could be, given the sad circumstances of her life.
    And what was to become of him? A universe of possibilities lay open to him. Too many, perhaps. He had not the slightest idea which to reach for.
    Nor were weighty questions of philosophy and morality all that obsessed him right now. There was also, for example, the increasingly fascinating and complex matter of the opposite sex. As he had spent most of the past four years just surviving, women remained largely an intriguing mystery to him.
    There had been some. The beautiful and compassionate Lauren Walder, many years ago back on his home world of Moth. Atha Moon, Maxim Malaika’s personal pilot. A few others, younger and less memorable, who had flashed like brief blue flames through his life, leaving memories that burned as well as confused him. He found himself wondering if Lauren would remember him, if she was still working happily at her obscure fishing lodge or if she had moved away, perhaps offplanet. If she would still think of him as a “city boy.”
    He straightened in his seat. He had been little more than a child then, and shy at that. Maybe he was still something of a boy, but he was no longer nearly as shy. Nor did he look half so boyish. That troubled him. Any change troubled him because he could never be certain if it was the result of natural growth processes or his unnatural origin.
    Take the matter of his height. He had learned that it was normal for most young men to attain their full growth by age seventeen or eighteen. Yet he had reached his full adolescent height by the time he was fifteen and then stopped cold. Now he had suddenly and inexplicably grown another nine centimeters in twelve