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Ara, a crow who has somehow become aware of his own nature, spends his days watching the bright‑feathered pheasants that roam the meadow. Envious of their elegance, he fashions a disguise of their plumage and begins to distance himself from his own flock, whose simple contentment he finds increasingly intolerable. The story follows his restless yearning to be something more, and the friction it creates among the birds who cannot comprehend his aspirations.
Meanwhile, in a sleek, cluttered laboratory, Wanniston confronts Lincoln over a failed experiment that promised to reshape reality with a tiny head‑piece delivering precise energy bursts. Their terse exchange reveals a clash between cold calculation and visionary ambition, set against a backdrop of humming equipment and the quiet menace of a distant galactic authority. As the two narratives unfold, the listener is drawn into a tale of identity, pride, and the perilous edge of scientific hubris.
Language
en
Duration
~1 hours (62K characters)
Publisher of text edition
Project Gutenberg
Original publisher
United States: Street & Smith Publications, Incorporated,1945.
Credits
Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net.
Release date
2022-06-01
Rights
Public domain in the USA.

1911–1981
A Golden Age science fiction writer with an engineer’s eye for detail, he built stories around communications systems, problem-solving, and life in space. He is especially remembered for the Venus Equilateral tales, which helped give mid-century magazine SF some of its brisk, technical charm.
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