Free A Company of Heroes Book Four: The Scientist by Ron Miller

his eyes to clear his vision. “We’re a generation apart, if for no other reason. My time of change, of mutability, of uncertainty and doubt is long past. You are still in the midst of your plasticity, like a blob of molten glass just removed from the furnace. Who knows what that blob will become? A work of art? A pane of window glass? A paperweight? The lens of a telescope? It depends not entirely upon the quality of the glass itself, but also upon the artisan into whose hands it falls. You are still very much potentiality. You still need the influences of other people, different people, as many different people as possible, as your needs evolve and you yourself as a result become different. You have the advantage over the inanimate and mindless blob of molten glass in being able to pick and choose your artisans. But you must not fear that you are being selfish or exploitative. As all of these people touch your life and help to mold it, so you too alter theirs. You are just obeying something like the First Law of Thermodynamics, or perhaps the Law of Conservation of Momentum. Something like that. Gyven is no more the same man you first met, or even the man he was six months ago, than you are the same woman he first knew. Remember, he had become an almost mindless, colorless, inhuman creature under the dubious care of the Kobolds. Look at him now! You have not so much grown away from him as the both of you may have simply grown apart, rebounding like a pair of colliding masses, with altered energy and direction, each taking something from the other. You’ve done nothing more than become two distinct personalities. Perhaps you were never destined to grow into one being. But if that’s so, then it’s as good for him as it is for you.
    “It’s possible, too,” he added by way of consolation, “that Gyven is going through metamorphoses of his own and he is receding from you faster than you are receding from him. And it’s even possible, if human development can be subjected to the laws of celestial mechanics, that your orbits will again intersect, like the shards of a shattered asteroid or disintegrated comet.”
    “I suppose you may be right,” said Bronwyn, perversely unwilling to mitigate her misery or guilt. “But what if Gyven doesn’t return before we leave? What if he comes back and discovers that I’m gone . . . that I’m not even on the planet any longer?”
    “You could leave him a note.”
    When the scientist and the princess returned to the Academy, the former discovered a heavy parcel awaiting him at the concierge’s desk. He signed the form offered by the impatiently waiting delivery boy while Bronwyn struggled to carry the package into Wittenoom’s office. It was a small cube, wrapped in brown paper and coarse twine, scarcely eight inches on each side, but, as the princess set it onto the desk with a thump, she remarked on its disproportionate mass.
    “It must weigh fifty pounds!” she said, as the professor entered, closing the door behind him. “Where’s it from?” he asked and she examined the stamps, cancellations and seals that plastered almost every one of the cube’s three hundred and eighty-four square inches of surface. “Great Musrum!” she exclaimed, “it’s from the Londeacan consulate in Spondula!”
    “Spondula? The Spondula in Ibraila? What could possibly be in it? Who could it be from?”
    While the professor speculated, Bronwyn bent her energies more practically. She snipped the heavy twine with a scissors and tore away the paper, of which there were two or three individual layers.
    “I hate people who wrap packages like this. If they didn’t want us to get it open, why did they send it in the first place?”
    “Why, it’s from Professor Melnikov!” exclaimed Wittenoom, who had been examining the discarded wrapping. “Whatever is he sending me anything for? He’s an archeologist, which is not my field at all, to say nothing of the fact that the man has been out