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eBook Category: Science Fiction
eBook Description: Spaceship pilot Beowulf Shaeffer groggily awakens on a deserted island and considers the events leading up to the moment his head was blown off. The small ship with its six passengers had just landed on Fafnir to catch an outbound spaceliner when his crewmate had inexplicably turned and fired her weapon directly at his head. The Intensive Care Cavity that saved him shows that more than four months have passed, and his friends are nowhere to be found�

eBook Publisher: Fictionwise.com, Published: Bridging the Galaxies, 1993
Fictionwise Release Date: April 2001

This eBook is also available in the following bundle(s):

• Larry Niven Bundle

This eBook is part of the following series:

• Larry Niven's Beowulf Shaeffer Stories

438 Reader Ratings:

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Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: eReader (PDB) [75 KB] , ePub (EPUB) [81 KB] , Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [49 KB] , Portable Document Format (PDF) [213 KB] , Palm Doc (PDB) [54 KB] , Microsoft Reader (LIT) [87 KB] , Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [120 KB] , hiebook (KML) [152 KB] , Sony Reader (LRF) [111 KB] , iSilo (PDB) [46 KB] , Mobipocket (PRC) [56 KB] , Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [88 KB] , OEBFF Format (IMP) [78 KB]
Words: 16181
Reading time: 46-64 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Portable Document Format (PDF) Format:  Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud DISABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED

What if technology could bring you back to life? Raise you up like Lazarus? That is exactly the situation that Larry Niven’s famous protagonist, Beowulf Shaeffer, finds himself in “Procrustes.” And, like the victims of the mythological Greek highwayman (Procrustes made his victims lay on a long bed and then he stretched them to fit it; he also had a short bed and to get someone to fit the short bed, he cut off their legs), Beowulf finds himself altered, his height shortened by the healing powers of a procrustean autodoc. Four months after he was placed in the autodoc, Beowulf emerges with the memory of being shot by a traveling companion on the very beach he now finds himself. Where is his wife? His kids? And, more importantly, how did he get into the autodoc after his lifeless body hit the sand? Travel with Beowulf as he learns the answers to these questions in this entertaining Niven story that I heartily recommend for those who like a little mystery mixed in with their science fiction. -Paul Walker, Fictionwise Recommender

The pit was two hundred feet across. The bottom was black and smooth, and seven or eight feet below me. Feather had set the lander to melt itself down, slowly, radiating not much heat over many hours. Several inches of rainwater now covered the slag, and something sprawled in the muck.

It might be a man ... a tall man, possibly raised in low gravity. Too tall to be Carlos. Or Sharrol, or Feather, and who was left?

I jumped down. Landed clumsily on the smooth slag and splashed full length in the water. Picked myself up, unhurt. My toes could feel an oblong texture, lines and ridges, the shapes within the lander that wouldn't melt. Police could determine what this thing had been, if they ever looked; but why would they look?

The water felt good on my ruined feet. And on my skin. I was already burned. Albinos can't take yellow dwarf sunlight.

A corpse was no surprise, given what I remembered. I looked it over. It had been wearing local clothing for a man: boots, loose pants with a rope tie, a jacket encrusted with pockets. The jacket was pierced with a great ragged hole front and back. That could only have been made by Feather's horrible ARM weapon. This close, the head.... I'd thought it must be under the water, but there was no head at all. There were clean white bones, and a neck vertebra cut smoothly in half.

I was hyperventilating. Dizzy. I sat down next to the skeleton so that I wouldn't fall.

These long bones looked more than four months dead. Years, decades ... wait, now. We'd scorched the nest, but there would be lamplighter soldiers left outside. Those would have swarmed down and stripped the bones.

I found I was trying to push my back through a wall of fused coral. My empty stomach heaved. This was much worse than anything I'd imagined. I knew who this was.