The Death of Sleep Read Online Free PDF

tried to evade it, firing thrusters to turn the nippy little scout out of its path. It was chasing him! In a moment, he had the smaller mass on visual. It was a Thek capsule.
    Theks were a silicate life-form that was the closest thing in the galaxy to immortals. They ranged from about a meter to dozens of meters high, and were pyramidal in shape, just like their spacecraft. Illin's jaw dropped open. Theks were slow talking and of few words, but their terse statements usually held more information than hundreds of pages of human rhetoric. Not much else was known about them, except their inexplicable penchant for aiding the more ephemeral races to explore and colonize new planetary systems. A Thek rode every mothership that the Exploratory and Evaluatory Corps sent out. What was a Thek doing way out here? He cut thrust and waited for it to catch up with him.
    He was suddenly resentful. Oh, Krims! Illin thought. Did I come all this way just for a Thek? The other miners were going to have a laugh at his expense. He tapped his rad counter and aimed the sensor this way and that. It continued to chatter out a high-pitched whir, obviously responding to a strong signal nearby. Were Theks radioactive? He'd never heard that from anyone before. Had he discovered a new bit of interesting gossip about the mysterious Theks to share with the other miners? Yes, it would seem so. But to his delight, the signal from the asteroid he'd spotted continued. A strike! And a concentrated one, too. Should be worth a goodly handful of bonus credits.
    In a few minutes, the Thek was alongside him. The pyramidal shape behind the plas-shield was featureless, resembling nothing so much as a lump of plain gray granite. It eased one of its ship's sides against the scout with a gentle bump, and adhered to the hull like a flexible magnet. The cabin was filled then with a low rumbling sound which rose and fell very, very slowly. The Thek was talking to him.
    "Rrrrreeeeeee . . . ttrrrrrrrrriieeeeevvvve . . . ssssshhhhuuuuuutttt . . . ttttlllleee."
    "Shuttle? What shuttle?" Illin asked, not bothering to wonder how the Thek was talking to him through the hull of his scout.
    For answer, the Thek moved forward, dragging his ship with it.
    "Hey!" Illin yelled. "I'm tracking an ore strike! I've got a job to do. Would you release my ship?"
    "Iiiiimmmm . . . perrrrrrr . . . aaaa , . . ttttiiiiivvvvvveee."
    He shrugged. "Imperative, huh?" He waited a long time to see if there was any more information forthcoming. Well, you didn't argue with a Thek, Resigned but unhappy, he allowed himself to be towed along at a surprising speed through a patch of tiny asteroids that bounced off the Thek craft and embedded themselves into the nose of his ship. The outermost metal layer of a scout's nose was soft, backed by a double layer of superhard titanium sandwiching more soft metal, to absorb and stop small meteorites or slow and deflect bigger ones. Illin had only just stripped the soft layer and ground out the gouge marks in the hard core a week ago. It would have to be done all over again when he got back from rescuing this shuttle for the Thek—would anyone believe him when he told them about it? He scarcely believed it himself.
    Behind him the starfield disappeared. They were moving into the thickest part of the asteroid belt. The Thek obviously knew where it was going; it didn't slow down at all, though the hammering of tiny pebbles on the hull became more insistent. Illin switched on the video pickup and rolled the protective lid up to protect the forward port.
    A tremendous rock shot through with the red of iron oxide rolled up behind them and somersaulted gracefully to the left as the Thek veered around it, a tiny arrowhead against its mass. Illin's analyzer showed that most of the debris in this immediate vicinity was ferric, and a lot of it was magnetic. He had to recalibrate continually to keep his readings accurate. They looped around a ring of boulders approximately all