Read Online The Man Who Lost the Sea by Theodore Sturgeon - Free Book Online

I bought it.”
    “What do you mean ‘cease to exist—become nothing’? You don’t mean ‘die,’ you mean something else.”
    “Good, good, Deeming. Very perceptive. What it means is that in order to pursue this Grail of his, he must expose himself to the Angels. They can’t stop him, but they can wait for him to come back. And I bought him another bucket of paint for that. He has a paid-up ticket to Grebd.”
    Deeming unhesitatingly released the low whistle. Grebd was the name of a sun, a planet and a city in the Coalsack matrix, where certain of the inhabitants had developed a method of pseudosurgery unthinkably far in advance of anything in the known cosmos. They could take virtually any living thing and change it as drastically as it wanted to be changed, even from carbon-base to boron-chain, or as subtly as it might want, like an alteration of all detectible brainwave characteristics or retinal patterns, or even a new nose. They could graft (or grow?) most of a whole man from a tattered lump, providing it lived. Most important, they could make these alterations, however drastic, and (if requested) leave the conscious mind intact.
    But the cost of a major overhaul of this nature was beyond reason—unless a man had a reason compelling enough. Deeming looked at the old man with unconcealed awe. Not only had he been able to pay such a price, he had been willing—willing in a cause in which he could have no sympathy. To care that much for a son—to care so very much that the most he could ever hope for now would be to meet a total stranger in an unexpected place who might take him aside and whisper,
“Hello—Dad!”
but for whom he could do nothing further. For if he had transgressed some ruling of the Angels so drastically as to need a trip to Grebd, the Angels would have an eyeon the old man for all time to come, and he would not dare even to smile at the new stranger. Such a transgression meant death. Could a father so much as clasp his son’s hand under such circumstances?
    “In the name of all that’s holy,” Deeming breathed, “What did he want so badly?”
    Rockhard snorted. “Some sort of a glyph. There’s a theory that the Aldebaranian stock sprang from the same ethnic roots as those in the Masson planets. It sounds like nonsense to me, and even if it’s true, it’s still nonsense. But certain vague evidence points to a planet called Revelo. There may be artifacts there to prove the point.”
    “Never heard of it,” said Deeming. “Revelo … n-no. And so he makes his discovery. And goes to Grebd. And gets his total disguise. And forever after, he can’t claim the discovery he made.”
    “Now you know about Donald,” said the old man wryly. “He just wants the discovery made. He doesn’t care who makes it.”
    They looked at each other in shared bafflement. At last Deeming nodded slightly to convey the thought that it didn’t matter if he understood. If Donald Rockhard was crazy, that was beside the point. He said, “Now where do the Angels come into this?”
    “Revelo,” said the old man, “is—Proscribed.”
    Well then, Deeming thought instantly, that seems to be that, and where’s the problem? A Proscribed planet was surrounded by a field of such a nature that if it was penetrated by a flickership, anything organic aboard would instantly and totally cease to live. If Donald had gone to Revelo, Donald was dead. If he had been snapped out of hyperspace on the way there by the outer-limit warning field, and had heeded the warning, then he hadn’t landed on Revelo, hadn’t broken an Angel dictate, and wasn’t in trouble. Deeming said so.
    Slowly Rockhard shook his head. “He’s on Revelo right now, and alive. Far as I know,” he added.
    “Not possible,” said Deeming flatly. “You just don’t penetrate the field around a Proscribed planet and live.”
    “Very well,” said the old man, “nevertheless he’s there. Look, I’ll tell you something that only four other