Between the Strokes of Night

CHAPTER TWELVE

The last shivering swimmer had emerged from the underground river, and now it would be possible to assemble the final results. Peron Turco pulled the warm cape closer about his shoulders and looked back and forth along the line. There they stood. Four months of preliminary selection had winnowed them down to a bare hundred, from the many thousands who had entered the original trials. And in the next twenty minutes it would be reduced again, to a jubilant twenty-five. Everyone was muddied, grimy, and bone-weary. The final trial had been murderous, pushing minds and bodies to the limit. The four-mile underwater swim in total darkness, fighting chilling currents through a labyrinth of connecting caves, had been physically demanding. But the mind pressure, knowing that the oxygen supply would last for only five hours, had been much worse. Most of the contestants were slumped now on the stone flags, warming themselves in the bright sunlight, rubbing sore muscles and sipping sugar drinks. It would be a little while before the scores could be tallied, but already their attention was turning from the noisy crowds to the huge display that formed one outer wall of the colosseum.

Peron shielded his eyes against Cassay’s morning brilliance and studied each face in turn along the long line. By now he knew where the real competition lay, and from their expressions he sought to gauge his own chances. Lum was at the far end, squatting cross-legged. He was eating fruit, and he looked bored and sweaty. Somehow Pentecost’s hot summer had left his skin untouched. He stood out with a winter’s paleness against the others.

Ten days ago Peron had met him and dismissed Lum as soft and overweight, a crudely built and oafish youth who had reached the final hundred contestants by a freakish accident. Now he knew better. The fat was mostly muscle, and when necessary Lum could move with an incredible grace and speed; and the fat face and piggy eyes hid a first-rate brain and formidable imagination. Peron had revised his assessment three times, each one upward. Now he felt sure that Lum would be somewhere high in the final twenty-five.

And so would the girl Elissa, three positions to the left. Peron had marked her early as formidable competition. She had started ten minutes ahead of him in the first trial, when they made the night journey through the middle of Villasylvia, the most difficult and dangerous forest on the surface of Pentecost. Peron had been very confident. He had been raised in wooded country. He was strong and agile, and his sense of direction was better than anyone he had ever met. After two hours, when he had failed to overtake Elissa, he was convinced that the dark-skinned girl had gone astray and was lost in the dangerous depths of Villasylvia. He had felt mildly sorry on her behalf, because before they began she had smiled and wished him luck; but most of his attention was on avoiding the darters and night-lappers that ruled the nightwoods. He had made splendid time, striking a lucky path that took him back to base without any detours or backtracking. It had come as a great shock to reach home and find her there well before him, fresh and cheerful, humming to herself as she cooked her breakfast.

Now Elissa turned to look at him while he was still staring along the line at her. She grinned, and he quickly averted his eyes. If Elissa didn’t finish among the winners, that would be bad news for Peron, too; because he was convinced that wherever they placed, she would rank somewhere above him.

He looked back at the board. The markers were going up on the great display, showing the names of the remaining contestants. Peron counted them as they were posted. Only seventy-two. The last round of trials had been fiercely difficult, enough to eliminate over a quarter of the finalists completely. No Planetfest celebration for them. They would already be headed back to their home towns, too disappointed to wait and find out who the lucky winners might be. Peron frowned and looked again along the line of finalists. Where was Sy? Surely he hadn’t failed to finish? No, there he was, lounging a few yards behind the others. As usual, he was easy to miss — he blended inconspicuously into any scene, so that it had taken Peron a while to notice him. He shouldn’t have been difficult to pick out, with his black hair, bright gray eyes, and slightly deformed left forearm. But he was somehow difficult to see. He could sink into the background, quietly observing everything with the cynical and smug expression that Peron found so irritating — perhaps because he suspected that Sy really was superior? Certainly, on anything that called for mental powers he had effortlessly outperformed Peron (and everyone else, according to Peron’s rough assessment); and where physical agility or strength was needed, Sy somehow found a way to compensate for his weakened arm. It was a mystery how he did it. He was never in the first rank for the most physical of the trials, but given his handicap he was much higher than anyone could believe.

Now Sy was ignoring the display and concentrating all his attention on his fellow contestants, clearly evaluating their condition. Peron had the sudden suspicion that Sy already knew he was in the top twenty-five and was looking ahead, laying his plans for the off-planet tests that would determine the final ten winners.

Peron wished he could feel that much confidence. He was sure (wasn’t he?) that he was in the top thirty. He hoped he was in the top twenty, and in his dreams he saw himself as high as fourth or fifth. But with contestants drawn from the whole planet, and the competition of such a high caliber…

The crowd roared. At last! The scores were finally appearing. The displays were assembled slowly and painstakingly. The judges conferred in great secrecy, knowing that the results would be propagated instantly over the entire planet, and that a mistake would ruin their reputations; and the individuals responsible for the displays had been influenced by the same obsession with care and accuracy. Everything was checked and rechecked before it went onto the board. Peron had watched recordings of recent Planetfests, over and over, but this one was different and more elaborate. Trials were held every four years. Usually the prizes were high positions in the government of Pentecost, and maybe a chance to see the Fifty Worlds. But the twenty-year games, like this one, had a whole new level of significance. There were still the usual prizes, certainly. But they were not the real reward. There was that rumored bigger prize: a possible opportunity to meet and work with the Immortals.

And what did that mean? Who were the Immortals? No one could say. No one that Peron knew had ever seen one, ever met one. They were the ultimate mystery figures, the ones who lived forever, the ones who came back every generation to bring knowledge from the stars. Stars that they were said to reach in a few days — in conflict with everything that the scientists of Pentecost believed about the laws of the Universe.

Peron was still musing on that when the roar of the crowd, separated from the contestants by a substantial barricade and rows of armed guards, brought him to full attention. The first winner, in twenty-fifth place, had just been announced. It was a girl, Rosanne. Peron remembered her from the Long Walk across Talimantor Desert, when the two of them had formed a temporary alliance to search for underground water. She was a cheerful, tireless girl, just over the minimum age limit of sixteen, and now she was holding her hand to her chest, pretending to stagger and faint with relief because she had just made the cutoff.

All the other contestants now looked at the board with a new intensity. The method of announcement was well established by custom, but there was not a trial participant who did not wish it could be done differently. From the crowd’s point of view, it was very satisfying to announce the winners in ascending order, so that the name of the final top contestant was given last of all. But during the trials, every competitor formed a rough idea of his or her chances by direct comparison with the opposition. It was easy to be wrong by five places, but errors larger than that were unlikely. Deep inside, a competitor knew if he were down in ninetieth place. Even so, hope always remained. But as the names gradually were announced, and twenty-fourth, twenty-third, and twenty-second position was taken, most contestants were filled with an increasing gloom, panic, or wild surmise. Could they possibly have placed so high? Or, more likely, were they already eliminated?

The announcements went on steadily, slowly, relentlessly. Twentieth position. Seventeen. Fourteen.

Number ten had been reached: Wilmer. He was a tall, thin youth whose head was completely hairless. Either he shaved it daily, or he was prematurely bald. He was always hungry and always awake. The rest of them had joked about it — Wilmer cheated, he refused to go to sleep until everyone else had nodded off. Then he slept faster than other people, which wasn’t fair. Wilmer took it all good-naturedly. He could afford to. Needing hours less sleep than the others, he could spend more time preparing for the next trial.

Now he lay back on the stones and closed his eyes. He had always said that when this stage of the trials was over he would sleep for ten days solid. The list advanced to number five. It was Sy. The dark-haired youth appeared to be as cool as ever, with no visible sign of pleasure or relief. He was standing with his head slightly inclined, cradling his weak left elbow in his right hand and not looking at anyone else.

Peron felt his own stomach tightening. He had passed the positions he expected to occupy, now he was in a region where only his wildest hopes had taken him. Number four: Elissa. She whooped with delight. Peron knew he should feel pleased, but he had no room in him now for pleasure. He clasped his hands tightly together to stop their shaking, and waited. The display was static, never changing. The colosseum seemed to be full of a terrible silence, though he knew the crowd must be cheering wildly.

Number three. The letters went up slowly. P-e-r-o-n o-f T-u-r-c-a-n-t-a. He felt his lungs relax in a long, tortured gasp. He had been unconsciously holding his breath for many seconds. He had done it! Third place. Third place! No one from his region had ever placed so high, not in four hundred years of Planetfest games.

Peron heard the rest of the results, but they scarcely registered. He was overwhelmed with pleasure and relief. Some part of his mind puzzled when the second place winner, Kallen, was announced, because he hardly recognized the name. He wondered how they could have passed through so many difficult trials together without ever having spoken to each other. But everything — the crowd, the colosseum, the other contestants — seemed miles away, mirages in the bright yellow sunlight.

The last name appeared, and there was a final huge roar from the crowd. Lum! Lum of Minacta had won first place! No one would begrudge him his triumph, but he would be a sad disappointment to all the parents who urged their sons and daughters to live good lives so that they could be the winner of the Games. Who would want to be a winner, if it meant growing up big, meaty, and coarse-looking like this year’s?

There was a commotion at the end of the line. Two of the girls near to Lum had given him a hug, then tried to lift him onto their shoulders to carry him forward in triumph toward the crowd. After a few moments it became obvious that he was too heavy. Lum leaned forward, grabbed one girl in each arm and lifted them up. They perched, one on each shoulder, as he strode forward to the barricade. He held up his hands and did a quick pirouette, while the crowd went berserk.

“Come on, misery.” The voice came from Peron’s side. It was Elissa, who grabbed his arm as he turned to face her. “You look as though you’re going to sleep. Let’s get in and celebrate — we’re winners! We should act like it.” Before he could object she was dragging him forward to join the others. The party was beginning. Winners and losers, everyone had magically recovered from their fatigue. Now that the contest was over, and the bets had been decided, the crowd would treat them all as winners. Which they were. They had survived the most gruelling tests that Planetfest could provide. And now they would celebrate until Cassay went down in the sky, until only the feeble red light of Cassby was left to lead them to their dormitories.

Planetfest was over for another four years. Few people ever stopped to think that the final winner had not yet been selected. The last trials took place off-planet, away from the publicity, far away where no announcements were made. The contestants knew the truth: a tougher, unknown phase still lay ahead, where the only prize would be knowledge of victory. But the cash prizes, the celebrations by whole provinces, the public applause, and the generous family pensions were not based on off-planet results. So to most of the inhabitants of Pentecost — to almost everyone but the finalists themselves — the planetary games were over for another four years.

And Lum’s name, Lum of Minacta, stood above all others.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

“I’m sure you feel you’ve been through a lot. Well, it’s my job to tell you that hard times are just beginning. Take a word from Eliya Gilby, you’ve seen nothing. Compared with the off-planet tests, the crappy Planetfest games are for kiddies.”

The speaker was a thin, gray-haired man dressed in the black leather and glittering brass of a System Guard. His face wore a sardonic smile that could be read equally as pity, contempt, or dyspepsia. He was unable to stand still as he spoke. He paced in front of the silent group, and all the time his hands were also in motion, pulling at his belt, adjusting his collar, or rubbing at bloodshot eyes.

The Planetfest winners who made up his audience were in much better shape. The offers of drinks, drugs, and stimulants from the celebrating well-wishers had been numerous, but years of preparation for the trials had taught the contestants self-control. And a quiet sleep until almost midday, without having to plan for the next trial, had been a restorative and a luxury. They looked at each other as the guard was speaking, and exchanged secret smiles. Captain Gilby was in terrible condition. He had refused no offers of free drinks, by the look of it. There was no doubt that he was hungover — and badly — from a night’s long revelry.

Captain Gilby moved his head from side to side, very slowly. He grunted, sighed, and cleared his throat. “Bloody hell. All right, here we go. It’s my job to try to explain the Fifty Worlds to you. But I can tell you now, there’s no real way you’ll know what they’re like until you’ve been there for yourself. Take my word for it, I’ve made six trips off-planet, with six lots of you winners, all over the Cass system. And everybody tells me when they see the real thing that my pictures are useless. And I agree. But my bosses won’t listen to that, so today that’s what you get. Pictures. They won’t give you more than a faint idea, but they’re all you’ll have until next week.”

He sniffed, bent forward slowly and carefully, and lifted up a large, flat case. “Let’s take a look at a few pictures of Barchan, close-in to Cassay. There’s a hell-hole for you, if you want my opinion. I suppose it’s too much to hope that any of you already know something about it?”

Wilmer looked around him, then raised a tentative hand. “I do.”

Gilby stared at him. “Do you now? Mind telling me how, since that sort of knowledge shouldn’t be public down on Pentecost.”

“My uncle was a Planetfest winner, twelve years ago. Last year I asked him about the off-planet trials.”

“Before you even started on the first round for Planetfest! Cocky little bastard, aren’t you? So tell us all about Barchan.”

“Sand dunes, just like the picture shows. Primitive vegetable life, no animals, not much atmosphere. And hot as blazes except at the poles. Hot as melted lead.” Wilmer hesitated, then added: “Not my choice for a trial. If it’s held there it will mean hotsuits all the time.”

“Now then, no trying to influence the others,” said Gilby mildly. While Wilmer had been talking a tray of hot drinks had arrived, and the captain was eyeing it longingly. “But the rest of what you say is right enough. Hot enough to boil your balls off in two minutes, if your suit fails. And if you have balls. Barchan is only a hundred and twenty million kilometers from Cassay. Let’s look at another one, a bit farther out. This is Gimperstand. Know anything about it?” Gilby was holding up two pictures. One showed a space view of a greenish-brown ball, the other a lush jungle of incredibly tangled vines. Wilmer shook his head, and no one else seemed ready to speak.

“And you probably don’t want to. It’s officially Gimperstand, but the unofficial name we have for it is Stinker. And it deserves it. There’s an atmosphere. It’s a little thin, but in principle it’s breathable. I’ve tried it. Two breaths make you run off and puke. It’s something one of the vines releases, and it makes night-lapper shit smell like honeysuckle. A real stinkeroo. One whiff of it will knock you flat.”

He held the pictures out delicately at armslength, then dropped them back into the case.

“We have a lot of ground to cover, but I don’t think we’ll do it all right now. For a start, I don’t think you lot can absorb much at a time. And for a second, I want one of those drinks or I’ll fall down right here.”

He walked over to the tray and grinned unpleasantly at his audience. “I’m glad it’s you doing the trial, not me. We’ve got some monsters out there in the Cass system. You’ve seen the official planet names in school, but that’s not what people who’ve been there call them. And their names are a lot more accurate. There’s Bedlam, and Boom-Boom, and Imshi, and Glug, and Firedance, and Fuzzball. And when we get to the Outer System it’s even worse. We’ve got to take a look at Goneagain, and Jellyroll, and Whistlestop, then Whoosh, Pinto, Dimples, Camel, and Crater. They’re not called the Fifty Worlds for nothing, and every one can be a death trap.” He picked up a flask, took a tentative sip, and gave his audience another sadistic grin. “Don’t think your worries are over. By the time the off-planet tests are done you’ll be wishing that you’d gone back home today with the losers.”

The whole afternoon had been devoted to briefings, by Gilby and others. Then came news conferences and meetings with the VIP’s from each winner’s home area. It was late evening before they had any time to themselves, or even time for food. Peron had found a quiet place in a corner of the food area and was eating alone. But he was more than pleased when Elissa carried a tray over and seated herself opposite him uninvited.

“Unless you’re hiding away for a good reason, I thought I’d join you. I’ve already talked to Lum and to Kallen, now I want to pay my respects to you.” “You’re working down the whole list of winners, in order?”

She laughed. “Of course. Doesn’t everyone? No, I was just joking. I’m interested in you, so I thought it would be nice to eat dinner together — unless you really are hiding away?”

“I’m not. I’m brooding. I’ve just been sitting here and thinking how damnably rude everybody has been today. It started this morning with Captain Gilby, and I just assumed it was his hangover. But it’s been getting worse. We’re polite to everyone, and people we meet — complete strangers, most of them — treat us like dirt.”

Elissa said, “Of course they do. Better get used to it. They don’t mean any harm. But see, we’re the Planetfest winners, names in lights, and that makes us a big deal. A lot of people have to keep telling themselves that we’re not all that great, that they’re just as good as we are. And one way they convince themselves of that is by putting us down.”

“I’m sure you’re right.” Peron looked at Elissa with respect. “But I wouldn’t have thought that way. You know, this is going to sound stupid, but I still can’t believe that I came higher than you in the rankings. You did better than me in everything. And I think you think better. I mean, more perceptively. I mean, you’re — “

“If you’re getting ready to ask me to go out for a walk,” said Elissa, “there are more direct ways.”

She leaned forward and put her hand on Peron’s arm. “All you have to do is say it. You’re the exact opposite of Sy. He thinks everybody else is some sort of trained ape. But you always undervalue yourself. That’s rare for a winner in Planetfest. Most people are like me, pushy. And as for Lum — “

“And as for Lum — “ echoed a voice behind her. “What about him? Something nice, I hope.”

It was Lum, and he had with him Kallen, the second place winner.

“Good. It’s convenient to find you two together,” he said. He hoisted one huge thigh and buttock to perch on the corner of their table, threatening to overturn the whole thing. “Do you feel up to another interview tonight? The Planetfest organizers would like to meet with the top five.”

“First things first, Lum,” said Elissa. “Peron, you have to meet the mystery man. This is Mario Kallen.”

“Hello.” Peron stood up to take the hand of the second place winner, and found he was grasping empty air. Kallen was blushing a bright red, and looking away. “Pleased to meet you.” The voice was a whisper, deep in the throat. Peron looked at Kallen again, and noticed for the first time the red lines of scar tissue on his Adam’s apple.

“Let’s all sit down,” Lum said cheerfully. “We have an hour yet before the interview, and I want to tell you what Kallen has been telling me about Planetfest.”

“Don’t you have to find Sy, too?” asked Elissa.

“I already did. He told me to go to blazes, said he didn’t want any fool interviews.” Lum pulled back the bench so that he and Kallen could sit down. “He’s an interesting case, old Sy. I don’t know how he could do so well with that injured arm, but he certainly didn’t get any extra points from the judges for tact and diplomacy.”

Elissa winked at Peron. Nor does Lum, said her smile. She turned innocently back to the other two.

“I’ve thought of nothing but Planetfest for two years, but I’d like to hear something new.”

“You will,” said Lum grimly. “Go on, Kallen.”

Kallen sat for a moment, rubbing his hands together. He again turned red with embarrassment. “I thought of nothing but Planetfest, too,” he said at last, in that throaty, pained voice. Then he hesitated, and looked helplessly from one person to the next. What had been difficult to tell to one person was impossible to tell to three.

“How about if I say it, and you tell me when I get it wrong?” said Lum quickly. “That way I’ll have a chance to see if my understanding is correct.” Kallen nodded gratefully. He smiled in a sheepish fashion at Elissa, then looked away to the corner of the room.

“I suspect we all did the same sort of thing when we started out in the trials,” said Lum. “Once I knew I was going to be involved, I set out to discover everything I could about the Planetfest games — when they started, how they’re organized, and so on. I’d heard vague talk, nor more than random words really, about Gossameres and Pipistrelles, or Immortals and Skydown. People mentioned S-space and N-space. I wanted to know what they were all about, or at least get the best rumors I could.”

Peron and Elissa nodded assent. It was exactly what they had done themselves. “But Kallen’s case was a little different. He was legally old enough — just — for the previous games. He was born on the exact cutoff date, right at midnight. And he went through all the preliminary rounds then. He aced them.”

Kallen blushed a brighter red. “Never said that at all,” he whispered. “I know. But it’s true. Anyway, that’s when he had his accident. A carriage wheel broke apart as it went past him, and a piece of a spoke speared his throat. It cost him his vocal cords, and it took him out of circulation for almost a year. And of course it killed off all his hopes for the trials. That looked like the end of it, except that Kallen was born in border country, between two planetary time zones. He found out his birth was recorded twice, in two different zones. According to one zone he was an hour younger. Still young enough to try again, in this trial. So he applied again, and here he is. “But before the trials began this time, he was very curious to catch up on the results of the last one. He remembered the people who had competed, and he was pretty sure, from his own experiences, who the winners would be. He checked, and sure enough he was right. The top twenty-five had seven people that he remembered. And in the off-planet tests, three of those had finished in the final ten. They had gone through the preliminary rounds with Kallen, and they’d all become pretty good friends.”

Peron and Elissa were listening, but they were both beginning to look a little puzzled. It hardly seemed that Kallen’s tale held any surprises.

Lum had caught the look that passed between them. “Wait a bit longer before you yawn off,” he said. “You’ll find something to keep you awake in a minute. I did. “He tried to get in touch with them, but not one of them had gone back to their home region. According to their families, they were all working in big jobs for the government, and they all sent messages and pictures home. Kallen saw the videos, and it was the same three people he remembered. And the messages replied to questions from their families, so they couldn’t be old videos, stored and sent later. But they never came home themselves, not in four years. They had stayed off-planet. They were out there, somewhere in the Fifty Worlds.” Kallen lifted his hand. “Don’t assume that,” he whispered. “I don’t assume that.”

“Quite right. Let’s just say they might be somewhere in the Cass system. Or they could be even farther away. Anyway, at that point, Kallen got nosy. He checked back to the previous Planetfest, the one before he was involved. With over a billion people on Pentecost, the odds that you’ll know a finalist personally are pretty small. But you know the old idea, we’re only three people away from anybody. You’ll know somebody who’ll know somebody who’ll know the person you want to get to. Kallen starting looking — he’s persistent, I found that out the hard way in the Seventh Trial, when we were both lost in The Maze. And he finally found somebody who had been knocked out in the preliminary trials from the earlier ‘Fest, but who was a friend of a winner. And that winner had never been home since the off-planet trials.”

Lum paused and stared at Peron, who was nodding his head vigorously. “You don’t seem very surprised. Are you telling me you know all this?”

“No. But I had a similar experience. I tried to reach a former winner from our region, and I got the runaround. She was supposed to be off-planet, and unavailable, but she’d be happy to answer written questions. And she did, eventually, and sent a video with it. Kallen, are you suggesting that none of the off-planet winners come back to Pentecost? That doesn’t seem to make much sense. Why would they want to stay away?”

Kallen shrugged.

“No reason that we can think of,” said Lum. “Let me give you the rest of it. When Kallen went through the preliminaries on the previous Planetfest, there was a contestant called Sorrel. He never came first in any trial, but he was always high enough to make the cutoff for the next round. He was easy-going, and popular, and he seemed to hit it off well with the guards, but he never got any publicity from the government media. Three other things: he never seemed to need much sleep; he tended to know bits and pieces of information that others didn’t — because a cousin of his had been a finalist in a previous ‘Fest. And he was completely bald. That make you think of anybody we know?”

“Wilmer,” said Elissa and Peron in unison.

“But he can’t be,” went on Elissa. “He couldn’t compete twice. He wouldn’t be allowed to, unless he was a freak like Kallen — oh, don’t look like that. You know what I mean, he’d have to be born at just the right time at exactly where two zones meet.”

“Didn’t compete — twice,” said Kallen softly.

“Sorrel and Wilmer don’t look anything like each other,” added Lum. “Kallen is absolutely sure they are two different people. Wilmer didn’t compete twice.” “Or even once?” said Peron thoughtfully. “We travelled back together after the Polar Trial. And I couldn’t get a word out of him about the way he’d handled the glacier crossing and crevasses. He just grinned at me. I thought at the time, he’s so cool and fresh, it’s hard to believe he’s just spent fourteen hours stretched to the limit.”

“I agree,” said Lum. “After I heard what Kallen had to say I had the same feeling. Wilmer’s not a real contestant at all. He’s a plant. I don’t think he took part in any of the trials — no one saw him during them, only before and after. The question is, why put an outside observer in with the contestants? — and a completely bald one, at that, which makes him easy to remember.” “My father told me before I entered,” said Peron. “There’s more to Planetfest than the government wants to tell. He hates the government of Pentecost, and he didn’t want me to take part in these trials. He says we’ve lived for the past four hundred and fifty years at a standstill, without real progress, ever since Planetfest began. But I didn’t take much notice. He lives for underground politics, and since I was ten years old I’ve expected that one day he’ll be arrested. Now you seem to be agreeing with him, the ‘Fest had things in it that we’ve never been told about.”

“But it doesn’t answer Lum’s question,” said Elissa. She was tracing patterns in water droplets on the table top, but now and again her eyes did a quick survey of the room to see if anyone was watching them.

“Not yet,” agreed Peron. “But give me a minute, and let me tell you the way my father would see it. First, Wilmer. Suppose he is a government plant. Then he is observing us for a definite reason. My father would say, there’s no point in his presence if it has no effect on the Planetfest trial results. So that suggests the results are being tampered with — so that the right people win. But I just don’t believe that. Too many people are involved in the evaluation and judging. It has to be a little more subtle. Somebody wants to know how the winners will behave when faced with certain facts. And that’s consistent with Kallen’s other observation: something that we haven’t been told about yet happens to Planetfest winners. Maybe not to all of them, but at least to some of them.” The other three were silent for a long time. They were looking at Peron expectantly. He finally realized that they were simply waiting. He remained silent himself, until at last Lum glanced at his watch.

“Five minutes more, then we have to go.” His voice was respectful. “Carry on, Maestro, keep going and tell us the rest. I’m sure you’re right so far. I’m beginning to feel less and less entitled to that number one rating.” Peron looked intently at each of the others. Elissa’s eyes were downcast, staring thoughtfully at the table. Kallen and Lum were both visibly excited. “First of all,” Peron said. “If we know of one government plant in the group, there could be others. So we don’t say anything to anyone, unless we’re absolutely sure of the other contestant. That means people we knew before, or people we’ve worked with on trials who couldn’t be fake competitors. What about Sy?”

Kallen shook his head. “He is a genuine competitor,” he whispered. “And an amazing one. I spent time with him during some of the trials. He is much more intelligent and resourceful than any of us, but because of that withered arm he sees the world through a distorting mirror. We should tell him — though it will confirm all his worst suspicions about people.”

It was Kallen’s longest speech to the group. He seemed to realize that, and smiled at Elissa in an embarrassed way.

“All right, Sy is in,” said Lum. “What else, Peron?”

It was disconcerting to be treated as an authority. Peron chewed at a fingernail, and thought hard.

“We don’t have to do anything at all,” he said at last. “Except keep our eyes open and our mouths shut. You see, it’s obvious from what Kallen told you that at some point we will learn the mystery of the off-planet trials. The earlier winners must have been told. So we’ll be told, too, and we’ll find out what happens to the winners after the off-planet contest is over. There’s no suggestion that anything bad happens to us — just that something is going on that the government doesn’t want the public to know. I tend to agree with my father, that in itself is a bad thing. But until we know what it is, we can’t disagree with it. So it’s simple: for the moment we try to define how many of our group of twenty-five we can really trust. And from now on we question everything that we’re told.”

“You think we should even discuss this with others?” Lum stood up. “My preference is to tell no one else at all.”

“We need all the eyes and ears we can find,” said Peron. “We’ll be careful.” They moved as a group to the exit, not speaking again until they were outside the food hall and heading for the Planetfest communication headquarters. Lum and Kallen walked on ahead, leaving Peron and Elissa to stroll side by side through the chilly autumn air. Little Moon had already risen, and off near the horizon the red fire of Cassby threw long, ocher shadows across the deepening twilight.

Elissa stopped and looked up at the sky. It was clear, and the stars were slowly appearing through the dusk.

“We’ll be up there in a few days,” said Peron. He took her arm in his. “We’ll see the Fifty Worlds, and maybe we’ll see The Ship. I’ve dreamed of that since I was four years old.”

“I know. So have I. My aunt doesn’t even believe there is a Ship. She says we’ve been here on Pentecost forever.”

“What did you tell her?”

“Nothing. For someone with that view, logic is irrelevant — she’ll believe what she chooses, regardless of evidence. Her religion says God placed us here on Pentecost, and for her that’s the end of the argument.”

“And you?” Peron was aware that she had moved in very close to him. “What do you think?”

“You know what I think. I’m cursed with a logical mind and a lot of curiosity. That’s why I’m taking a good look. Once we go up there, away from the planet, the sky will all be changed.” She sighed. “When I used to think about going off-planet, back when I was little, it almost seemed the same as going to heaven. I thought that everything would be different there. No controls, no security officers, no guards, everything clear and simple. Now it’s going to be another horrible contest.”

Peron nodded. “That’s why they won’t let us be contestants after we’re twenty years old. To do your best in the ‘Fest, it’s fatal if you question what you’re doing too much. The trials need an uncluttered mind.”

“Which we’ll never have again. We’ve left the cradle, and there’s no going back. Let’s hope we’ll find compensations.” She took his hand and ran her fingertips gently over the palm. “Come on, let’s get the interview over. Then you can take me for that walk — the one you were all ready to ask me about when Lum arrived.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

For most of the journey up, Captain Gilby had harangued them incessantly. He had pointed out the features of the ship, dwelling in detail on the things that could go wrong during the ascent phase; he had told them, again and again, that freefall sickness was all psychological, to the point where they would go to any lengths to vomit in private; and he had asked each of the twenty-five to point out their own region of Pentecost as the orbit carried them over it, sniffing contemptuously at their failures. Recognizing a familiar land area from space turned out to be harder than any of them had anticipated. Cloud cover, haze, and oblique angle changed all the usual elements of identification.

But finally, when the spacecraft was nine thousand kilometers above Pentecost and approaching The Ship, Gilby fell silent. This was a case where he had learned to let the event itself overwhelm the contestants, without his assistance.

The craft that had carried them up from the surface of Pentecost was bigger than anyone had expected. A vessel capable of carrying thirty people did not sound particularly large, even knowing in principle how much capacity was needed for fuel. The reality had rendered them speechless. They would ride to space at the top of a mammoth obelisk, towering twenty stories high above the flat plain of the Talimantor Desert.

Now they were facing another change of scale. The Ship had first appeared on the screens as a point of light, far above and ahead of them. As they slowly closed with it, and features became visible, the dimensions could be seen if not comprehended. They were looking at an irregular ovoid, a swollen ball covered with pimples, hair and scratches, like a diseased and mottled fruit. Closer approach brought more details. Each of the small nipples on the underside was a complete docking facility, capable of receiving a vessel the size of the one they rode in; the thin, hair-fine protrusions on the side were landing towers; the regular scratches were composed of a multitude of fine dots, each of them an entry port to the hull.

All conversation had ceased. They all realized the significance of the moment. They were looking at The Ship, the mystical, almost mythical structure that had carried their ancestors across the void from Earth, from a place so far away in time and space that it was beyond imagining.

“Take a good look at it,” said Gilby at last. His lecture was continuing, but his voice had a different tone. “That was the only home of your ancestors for fifteen thousand years — three times as long as we’ve lived on Pentecost. The Ship roamed from system to system, never finding anywhere that could be a new home. It visited forty-nine suns and a hundred planets, and everywhere it was frozen, dead worlds, or burning deserts. Cass was the fiftieth system, and they found Pentecost. It was right to support human life. Paradise, eh? Do you know what happened then?”

They all remained silent, overwhelmed by the swelling presence of The Ship as it filled the screen in front of them.

“They argued,” said Gilby. He paused in his fidgeting with his shoulder strap to touch his gunbelt. “They squabbled in The Ship, over whether or not they should leave it and land on Pentecost. The Ship was home, and half the people didn’t want to leave. It took two hundred years before the last transfer down took place and The Ship was left deserted. The final act was to move it to a high orbit, where it could circle Pentecost forever.”

They had approached within a couple of kilometers, and were spiralling slowly around the shining hull. There was a burred, matte finish to the surface, the evidence of eons of meteor impact and the scouring of interstellar dust. “Any chance we can all go on board?” asked Wilmer. Like a small child, he had pressed his nose to the transparent port.

Gilby smiled. “It’s a shrine. No visitors allowed. The original travellers stated only one situation in which The Ship could be opened up to use again. It’s not one we care to think about. The Ship will be reopened and refurbished if nuclear weapons are ever used on Pentecost.”

He pointed to the port. “Look out there now, and fix it in your memories. You won’t see this again.”

As he spoke they felt a steadily increasing acceleration pressing them back into the seats. The Ship moved past their spacecraft, fell behind, and dwindled rapidly in size. They were heading farther out, out to the sprawling menagerie of planets that moved around and beyond Cassay and together made up the Fifty Worlds.

Seen through the best Earth telescopes, the system of Eta Cassiopeiae had been no more than twin points of light. It appeared as a striking red-and-gold binary, a glittering topaz-and-garnet jewel less than twenty light-years away from Sol. No amount of magnification by Earth observers could give any structural detail of the stellar components. But to the multiple sensors of Eleanora, curving on a slowing trajectory toward the brighter component of Cassiopeia-A, a system of bewildering complexity had revealed itself. Cassiopeia-A is a yellow-gold star, stellar type GO V. It is a little brighter and more massive than Sol. Its companion is a red dwarf, lighter and only one twenty-fifth as luminous.

Dense, rust-red, and metal-poor, Cassiopeia-B keeps its distance from the bright partner. It never approaches closer than ten billion kilometers. Seen from the planets near Cass-A, the weak, rusted cinder of the companion appears far too feeble to have any influence. But the gravitational field is a long-range force. Gravitational effects of Cass-B had profound influence on the whole system. The planetary family that evolved around Eta Cassiopeiae is a whole zoo, with a bewildering variety of specimens.

Over fifty worlds reel and gyrate around the star pair. Their orbits are at all inclinations and eccentricities. The planets within a few hundred million kilometers of Cass-A exhibit orbital regularity and stable cycles, with well-defined orbital periods and near-circular orbits. But the outer worlds show no such uniformity. Some follow paths with both Cass-A and Cass-B as foci, and their years can last for many Earth centuries. Others, locked into resonances with both primaries, weave complicated curves through space, never repeating the pattern. Sometimes they will journey in lonely isolation, billions of kilometers from either star; sometimes they dip in close to the searing surface of Cass-A. The travellers on Eleanora had concluded that a close encounter of a major planet was also the cause of the system’s complexity. Millions of years earlier, a gas giant had come too close. It had skirted the very photosphere of Cass-A. First the volatile gases were evaporated away; then irresistible tidal forces caused disruption of the remaining core. The ejecta from that disintegration had been hurled in all directions, to become parts of the Fifty Worlds. To the visitors approaching the system, the wild variations of the outer worlds at first seemed to dominate everything. The Cassiopeia binary complex was an unlikely candidate for human attention. Where orbits are wildly varying, life has no chance to develop. Changes are too extreme. Temperatures melt tin, then solidify nitrogen. If it is once established, life is persistent; it can adapt to many extremes. But there is a fragility in the original creation that calls for a long period of tightly-controlled variations.

The automated probes were sent out from Eleanora, but only because that was the procedure followed for many centuries. First returns confirmed an impression of scarred and barren worlds, bleak and empty of life. When the electronic reports were beamed back from the probe to Pentecost, they seemed just too good to be true. Here was a stable planetary orbit, close to circular, one hundred and ninety million kilometers from Cass-A. And Pentecost was a real Earth-analog, with native vegetation and animal life, acceptable temperatures, an eighteen degree axial tilt, twenty-two hour day, breathable atmosphere, forty percent ocean cover, a mass that was only ten percent less than Earth, and an orbital period only four percent longer than an Earth year.

It was hard to believe that Pentecost could exist amid the dizzying variations that comprised the Fifty Worlds. But the probes never lied. At last, after eons of travel between the stars, and endless disappointment, humanity had found a new home.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The Fifty Worlds held enormous diversity. Peron knew that. They were of all sizes, shapes, orbits, and environments. No two seemed even remotely alike, not even the twins of the doublet planet of Sambella. And most of them fit poorly anyone’s idea of a desirable place to visit, still less as the site for another trial.

And as for Whirlygig…

Peron was approaching it now. He had to land there. Of all of the worlds, he thought gloomily, this one has to be the most alien and baffling. In the past two months the Planetfest winners had orbited over a dozen worlds. The planets ranged from depressing to unspeakable. Barchan was a baking, swirling dust-ball, its surface forever invisible behind a scouring screen of wind-borne particles. They were held aloft by a thin, poisonous atmosphere. Gilby had warned them that Barchan would be a terrible choice for a trial (but he had said that about most places!). The dust and sand found its way into everything — including a ship’s controls. There was a good chance that a landing on Barchan might be final.

Gimperstand was no better. The contestants had voted not even to look at it, after one of the ship’s crew had produced a sample bottle of sap from Stinker’s juicy vines. The bottle had been opened for less than two minutes. A full day later the air through the whole ship still tasted like rotting corpses. Air purifier units didn’t even touch it.

From a distance, Glug had looked pretty good. The ship’s telescopes and scanners showed a green, fertile world, ninety percent cloud covered. They had actually made a field trip down there, and spent a couple of hours squelching and sticking on the viscous surface. A steady gray rain drifted endlessly down from an ash-dark sky, and the sodden fronds of vegetation all drooped mournfully to touch the gluey soil. Once a boot had been placed firmly, the planet acted as though reluctant ever to release it. It clung lovingly. Walking was a pained sequence of sucking, glutinous steps, dragging the foot upward inch by inch until it came free with a disgusting gurgle. As Wilmer had put it, once you had pulled your boot out you never wanted to put it back again — except that your other boot was steadily sinking in deeper.

Glug was revolting, but Peron thought it would still make the final list. Sy had even voted to make it his first choice. Maybe his complex thought processes had discovered something about Glug that could be turned to his advantage. Lum had pointed it out long ago to Peron and Kallen: Sy did not need an edge over others to win; all he needed was a situation that cancelled the handicap of his withered arm. Given that, he would wipe the floor with all of them. Some of the others had also cast a tentative vote in favor of Glug; for by the time the contestants went there they had already visited some choice specimens: Boom-Boom — constant volcanic activity and earthquakes; an ambient noise level that seemed to shatter eardrums; foul, sulphurous air and treacherous terrain, where fragile crusts of solidified lava stood above molten slag.

Firedance — only microscopic animal life, and at any time one sixth of the vegetation that covered the whole world was a smoldering, charred mass: the rest was bone dry and ready to spring to blazing life after any random lightning stroke; ribbons of flame danced and crackled their twisting paths along the surface, changing direction unpredictably and moving far faster than a running human.

Fuzzball — every living thing, every plant or animal that lived under or on the surface, or in the salty seas of Fuzzball, served as a host to a single species of fungal growth; evolutionary adaptation appeared complete, so that the fungus did no harm; but its white, hair-fine tendrils sprouted from every inch of skin, and every animal’s ears and nostrils carried their own harvest of delicate, trailing fronds; the prospect had been too much for the contestants, even though Gilby assured them that the fungus could be removed from them completely after leaving the planet. Fuzzball had received zero votes.

Goneagain sounded tolerable; but that little world had been ruled out by simple geometry. Its orbit was wildly eccentric, carrying it tens of billions of kilometers away from Cassay and Cassby. It would not return to the Inner System for another three thousand years.

And then there was Whirlygig. Peron peered ahead through the faceplate of his suit. Three hours to go, then he would be landing there — without a ship. Later (if all went according to plan) he would leave in the same way. Meanwhile, there was not a thing to be done until the moment of grazing impact was reached. Peron — not for the first time — wondered about his velocity calculation. He had checked it ten times, but if he were off by a few meters a second… He resolutely turned his mind to their earlier travels, and struggled to put Whirlygig out of his thoughts for the next three hours.

There were plenty of other things to think about. For the first two weeks of the journey away from Pentecost, privacy had been impossible for all of them. The shuttle vessel was impressively big, but with thirty people squeezed into a space intended for three crew and cargo, the contestants had been shoulder to shoulder. Not until transfer to the big Inter-System ship, after a short visit to Little Moon, did they have room to spare. And at last Peron had been able to compare notes with the others.

By careful cross-checking that had taken them several days, Lum and Kallen had accounted for all the winners. Wilmer was the only bogus contestant. They had also confirmed Peron’s first impression: no one had been with Wilmer in any trial, and he had been suspiciously fresh after all of them. But the reason for his presence among them? No ideas from anyone. And to add to the mystery, Wilmer certainly had been with them on all the activities since they lifted off from Pentecost — which had sometimes been dangerous, as well as unpleasant. Wilmer’s innocent request to Gilby that they be allowed to visit The Ship, along with Gilby’s answer, had registered on both Peron and Elissa. Someone wanted the winners to know that The Ship was off-limits. But again, what did it mean? How was it connected with the fact that some previous winners of the Planetfest games had not returned to Pentecost?

Peron had bounced the questions off Sy, when they had a few minutes of privacy in the Inter-System ship. Sy had stood motionless, his eyes aloof. “I don’t know why The Ship is off-limits,” he said at last. “But I agree with you that Gilby was prompted to tell us that. Let me tell you of a bigger mystery. After the off-planet trials the Immortals will supposedly appear. We are told that they will come from the stars, after a journey that will take just a few days. Do you believe that?”

“I don’t know.” It was one of Peron’s own worries. “If it is possible to travel faster than light, our theories of the nature of the universe must be wrong.” “That is possible,” said Sy slowly — with a tone of voice that said clearly, that is quite impossible. “But don’t you see the problem? If the Immortals can exceed light-speed, they must have improved on our theories. And if they are so friendly to us, why do they keep that better theory from us?”

Peron had shaken his head. Anything about the Immortals remained a mystery. “It is my personal belief that nothing can exceed light-speed,” said Sy at last. “I will mistrust anyone, Government or Immortal, man or woman, human or alien, who attempts to tell me otherwise without providing convincing evidence.” And he had moved quietly away, leaving Peron more puzzled than ever. Conversation with Sy often left that unsettling feeling. Lum had explained it in his offhand way — Sy was just a whole lot smarter than the rest of them. And Elissa had thrown in her own evaluation: Sy was not smarter, not if that meant either memory or speed of thought; but he could somehow see problems from a different angle from everyone else, almost as though he were located at a different point in space. His perspective was different, and so his answers were always surprising.

And if he weren’t so strange, she had then added irrelevantly to Peron, he would be really attractive; which had of course irritated Peron greatly. His thoughts moved inevitably back to Elissa and their last night on Pentecost. While Lum and Kallen had been working conscientiously to screen contestants, Peron had been subjected to a pleasant but intense cross-examination. He and Elissa had found a quiet place in the Planetfest gardens. They stretched out on the soft ground cover and stared up at the stars, and Elissa must have asked him a thousand questions. Did he have brothers and sisters? What was his family like? Were they rich? (Peron had laughed at the idea that his father could ever be rich.) What were his hobbies? His favorite foods? Did he have any pets back home? Had he ever been on a ship, across one of Pentecost’s saltwater seas. What was his birthdate? Do you have a girl friend, back in Turcanta?

No, Peron had said promptly. But then his conscience had troubled him, and he told Elissa the truth. He and Sabrina had been very close for two years, until he had to devote all his time to preparation for the trials. Then she had found someone else.

Elissa didn’t bother to disguise her satisfaction. She had quietly taken hold of Peron and begun to make love to him.

“I told you I was pushy,” she said. “And you were acting as though you’d never get round to it. Come on — unless you don’t want me? I’ve wanted to do this — and especially this — ever since I met you on the forest trial, back in Villasylvia.” They had done things together that Peron had never imagined — and he used to think that he and Sabrina had tried everything. Lovemaking with Elissa added a whole new dimension. They had stayed together through the night, while the fireworks of Planetfest celebrations fountained and burst above them. And by morning they seemed infinitely close, like two people who had been lovers for many months. But that, thought Peron unhappily, made Elissa’s comment about Sy much harder to take. If she thought Sy was attractive — hadn’t she said very attractive? — did that mean she thought Sy was more interesting than he was? He remembered the last evening on Pentecost as fabulous, but maybe she didn’t feel the same way. Except that everything since then suggested that she did feel that way, and why would she lie to him?

Peron’s suit gave a gentle whistle, bringing him back from his dreaming. He felt irritated with his own train of thought. No denying it, he was feeling jealous. It was exactly the kind of mindless romantic mushiness that he despised, the sort of thing for which he had so teased Miria, his younger sister. He looked straight ahead. No time for dreaming now. Here came Whirlygig, to teach him a lesson in straight thinking. He was within a couple of kilometers of the surface, travelling almost parallel to it but closing too fast for comfort. Seen through a telescope, Whirlygig was not an interesting object. It was a polished silver ball about two thousand kilometers across, slightly oblate and roughened at the equator. Its high density gave a surface gravity at the poles of a fifth of a gee, a bit more than Earth’s Moon. A person in a spacesuit, freefalling straight down to the surface of Whirlygig, would hit at a speed of two kilometers a second — fast enough that the object in the suit afterwards would hardly be recognizable as human.

But that was true for a fall toward any planet in the system, and people did not attempt landings on objects of planetary size without a ship; and the composition of Whirlygig was of no particular interest. The planet had been ignored for a long time, until finally some astronomer took the trouble to examine its rotation rate.

Then interest grew rapidly. Whirlygig was unique. What made it so had happened recently, as geological time is measured. A mere hundred thousand years ago a close planetary encounter had transferred to the body an anomalously high angular momentum. After that event Whirlygig was left spinning madly on its axis, completing a full rotation in only seventy-three minutes. And at that speed, centripetal acceleration on the equator just matched gravitational force. A ship flying in a trajectory that grazed Whirlygig’s surface, moving at 1,400 meters per second at closest approach, could soft-land on the planetoid with no impact at all; and a human in a suit, with only the slightest assistance of suit steering jets, could do the same.

But theory and practice, thought Peron, were a long way apart. It was one thing to sit and discuss the problem on the Inter-System ship with the other contestants, and quite another to be racing in toward Whirlygig on a tangential trajectory.

They had drawn lots to see who would be first contestant down. Peron had “won” — Gilby’s term, delivered with a sadistic smile. The others, following in pairs, would face a far easier task because of Peron’s actions of the next few minutes. If he arrived in one piece.

He wondered what they would do if he didn’t land safely — would they nominate someone else to try again? Or would they abandon the whole idea, and move on to another planet? A contestant in theory had just one shot at the trials (Kallen was a rare exception). But death was an earnest contender in every Planetfest games. The deaths of contestants were never mentioned by the Government, and never given one word of publicity in the controlled news media; but everyone who entered the trials knew the truth. Not everyone went home a winner, or even a loser. Some contestants went forever into the shimmering heat of Talimantor Desert, or to a blood-lapped nightdeath in the woods of Villasylvia, or to a frozen tomb in the eternal snows of Capandor Mountains; or (Peron’s own secret fear) to a slow asphyxiation in the underwater caverns of Charant River. He shivered, and peered ahead. Those dangers were past, but death had not been left behind on Pentecost. He would visit Peron just as readily on Whirlygig. The equipment that Peron was hauling along behind him had seemed small when he left the ship, but now four hundred kilos of lines, springs, and pitons felt like a mountain, trailing half a kilometer directly behind him. Uncontrolled, they would envelop him on landing.

The surface felt so close that it seemed he could reach out a suited arm and touch it. He made small attitude adjustments with the suit jets. His velocity was just right for a stable orbit about Whirlygig at surface level. He turned his suit to land feetfirst, and touched, gently as a kiss.

He had landed softly, but at once there was a complication. He found he was at the center of a blinding cloud of dust, pebbles, and rock fragments. Effective gravity here on Whirlygig’s equator was near to zero, and the shower of rock and sand was in no hurry to settle or disperse. Working purely by touch, Peron took one of the two pitons he was carrying, placed it vertically on the surface, and primed the charge. His hands were shaking in the gloves. Must be quick. Only thirty seconds left to secure a firm hold. Then he would have to be ready for the equipment.

The explosive charge in the top end of the piton exploded, driving the sharp point deep into the planet’s surface. Peron tugged it briefly, made sure it was secure, then for double safety primed and set off the second piton. He braced two loops on his suit around the pitons, and looked back toward the moving bundles of equipment.

It seemed impossible. The equipment was still a couple of hundred meters away. The whole landing operation — minutes according to his mental clock — must have been completed in just a few seconds. He had time to examine the bundle of equipment closely, and decide just where he would secure it.

It swung in toward him, drifting down to the surface. The velocity match had been exact. It was less than five minutes work to place another array of pitons in a parabolic curve along the surface, and set up catapult cables to run around the array. The final web of cables and springs looked fragile, but it would hold and secure anything with less than three hundred meters a second of relative velocity.

Peron made one last examination of his work, then activated the suit phone. “All set.” He hoped his voice was as casual as he would have liked it to be. “Come on in anytime. The catapult is in position.”

He took a deep breath. Halfway. When they had explored the surface as a group, the catapult would be used to launch all the others away from Whirlygig; and Peron would be alone again. Then he would make a powered ascent (with fingers crossed) to the safety of the waiting ship.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Peron could not recall the exact moment when he knew that he was going to die on Whirlygig. The knowledge had grown exponentially, over perhaps a minute, as his mind rapidly ran through every possible escape and rejected all of them as impossible. Cold certainty had finally replaced hope.

The landing had gone almost perfectly, as the six other contestants assigned to visit Whirlygig sailed in to a smooth encounter with the landing web. Wilmer, paired with Kallen, had proved the exception. He had come barrelling in too fast and too high, and only Kallen’s hefty pull on their line had brought him low enough to connect with the cables.

He seemed not at all upset by his narrow escape. “Guess you were right, Kallen,” he said cheerfully, once he was safely down. “Odd, that. I’d have bet money I had the speed accurate and you had it wrong.”

“Be thankful you weren’t first man in,” said Rosanne severely — she had seen how close Kallen had come to losing his own hold. “If Peron had done that he’d have been in big trouble. And what do you have in there? That’s probably the mass you didn’t allow for in your calculations.”

Wilmer held up a green case. “In this? Food. I didn’t know how long we’d be here. I’ve no wish to starve, even if you all don’t mind it. And if I had been first one in, Rosanne, with my trajectory I’d also have been first one out. At that speed and height I’d have missed Whirlygig altogether. There’s a moral in that: better come in too high and fast than low and slow.”

He had begun to hop gingerly from one foot to the other, testing his balance. The effective gravity on Whirlygig’s equator was not exactly zero, but it was so slight that a tumbling upward leap of hundreds of feet was trivially easy. Everyone had tried it, and soon lost interest. It took minutes for the feather-light float down back to the surface, and one experience of that was enough.

They soon began the careful trek away from Whirlygig’s equator, travelling in small groups and heading for the comforting gravity of the polar regions. Only Sy was left behind, making his own solitary and perplexing experiments in motion over the rough terrain.

Progress for everyone was slower than expected. They could fly low over the surface with little effort, using the tiny propulsive units flown in after they were all landed. But Whirlygig’s rapid rotation made Coriolis forces a real factor to reckon with, and allowing for them called for constant adjustment to the flight line. The suit computers refused to accept and track a simple north reckoning, and it was easy to stray twenty or thirty degrees off course. After they had been on the way for a couple of hours, Sy caught up and quickly passed them all. He had discovered his own prescription for estimating and compensating for Coriolis effects.

As they flew north the appearance of the land below gradually changed. The equator was all broken, massive rocks, heaped into improbable, gravity-defying arches, spires, and buttresses. A few hundred kilometers farther toward the pole the terrain began to smooth, settling down into a flatter wilderness of rugged boulders. It was not a pleasant landscape, and the temperature was cold enough to freeze mercury. But compared with some of the other worlds, Whirlygig seemed like vacation-land.

The suits had efficient recycling systems, and ample food supplies. The contestants agreed to carry on right to the pole, then rest there for a few hours before returning to the equator and leaving. According to Gilby they would find a sizeable research dome at the north pole, where they would be able to sleep in comfort and remove suits for a few hours. All scientific surveys on Whirlygig had been completed many years earlier, but the dome facilities should still be in working order.

Elissa and Peron had chosen to travel side by side, with their radios set for private conversation. The suit computers would monitor incoming messages and interrupt for anything urgent. Elissa was bubbling over with high spirits and cheerfulness.

“Lots of things to tell you,” she said. “I didn’t have a chance to talk to you yesterday, you were too busy getting ready for the landing here. But I’ve spent a lot of time making friends with one of the crew members — Tolider, the short-haired one with the pet tardy.”

“That hadn’t escaped my attention,” said Peron drily. “I saw you petting it and pretending you liked it, too. Disgusting. Why would anybody want a big, fat, hairy pet worm?”

Elissa laughed. “If I were to tell you what some people want with it, I’d shock your innocent soul. But Tolider just likes it for company, and he looks after it well. Love me, love my tardy, that’s what he seems to think. Once he thought I was a tardy-lover, too, he was ready to bare his soul. Now, are you going to spend the next few hours sounding jealous, or do you want to know what he said?” “Oh, all right.” Peron’s curiosity was too great to allow him to maintain an aloof tone, and he knew from his own experience how good Elissa was at winkling information out of anyone. “What did he tell you?”

“After he felt comfortable with me we talked about the Immortals. He says they aren’t a hoax, or something invented by the government. And they aren’t human, or alien, either. He says they are machines.”

“How does he know?”

“He saw them. He’s been working in space for over twenty years, and he remembers the last time the Immortals came. He said something else, too, once I’d softened him up — shut up, Peron — something that he says the government doesn’t want anyone down on Pentecost ever to know. He told me because he wanted to warn me, because he feels sorry for me. He says that some of the winners of the Planetfest games who go off-planet are sacrifices to the Immortals. They — that means us — will become machines, themselves.”

“Rubbish!”

“I agree, it sounds like it. But he made a lot of good points. You hear about the Immortals, but you never hear a description of one — no stories that they’re just like us, or that they’re big or little, or have green hair, or six arms. And you tell me: what does happen to Planetfest winners when they go off-planet?”

“You know I can’t answer that. But we’ve seen videos of them, after they won the games. How could that happen if they had been converted to machines?” “I’ll tell you what Tolider says — and this is supposed to be common rumor through the whole space division. It’s like an old legend that goes back to the time we were first contacted by the Immortals. We know that the computer records on The Ship were destroyed, but there’s no real doubt that it left Sol over twenty thousand years ago, and travelled around in space until five thousand years ago when it found Pentecost.”

“No one will argue with that, except maybe your old aunt who thinks we’ve been on Pentecost forever. We were even taught it in school.”

“But the old records say that everything on Earth was wiped out, and everyone died in the Great Wars. Suppose that’s not true — partly true, but exaggerated. Suppose there were enough people left to start over again, says Tolider, and suppose they survived the bombs and the Long Winter. They wouldn’t be starting from scratch, the way we began on Pentecost. They’d be able to breed back quickly — it took us less than five thousand years to grow from The Ship’s people to over a billion. Earth would have had at least fifteen thousand years to develop their technology, beyond anything we can imagine, while we were wandering round on The Ship, looking for a home. They would have machines hundreds of generations better than our best computers. Maybe they would have reached the point where the dividing line between organic and inorganic would be blurred. We definitely know they have better computers — did you realize that the Immortals, not Pentecost, control space travel through the Cass system, because their computerized tracking system is enormously better than ours? Sy told me that, and he got it from Gilby. Anyway, that’s what Tolider believes: the Immortals are intelligent computers, maybe with biological components, sent here from Earth. There. You’re the smart one — so find a hole in that logic.” They flew along in silence as Peron thought it over.

“I don’t need to find a logical gap,” he said at last. “Tolider’s story doesn’t fail on logical grounds, it fails on sense. People do things for reasons. If Earth had recovered and gone back to space, they might have sent ships out to look for us, sure — and for the other ships that supposedly left at the same time we did. Suppose that’s true, and suppose they eventually found us. Then they’d come and tell us we had been discovered. Why would they ever not want to tell us? Tolider is repeating old stories. Nothing wrong with that, but you don’t expect legends to make sense. Let me ask you a question that doesn’t depend on myths for an answer. Supposedly we get scientific information from the Immortals, and they drop off a new batch of ideas every twenty years, along with a few rare materials that are in short supply in the Cass system. Right?” “I think that’s definitely true. Tolider says he has actually been involved in the materials transfer. He also says that the government down on Pentecost is obsessed with control and maintaining the status quo, and that they use new technology to remain in power. That’s why we’ve had a stable, single regime ever since we were contacted by the Immortals, and that’s one reason he prefers to stay out in space where there’s more freedom.”

“He should meet my father — he’s been saying for years that the government is run by a bunch of repressive tyrants. But don’t you see the problem? The Immortals give us things, and it’s a one-way transfer. Nobody, not even a machine, will stand for a one-way trade for four hundred and fifty years. If all they wanted to do was give us information, they could do that using radio signals. But they actually come here. So here’s my question: What do the Immortals get from their visits to Pentecost?”

“Some of us, if you want to believe Tolider. You and me, that’s what the government trades to get new information.”

“That makes even less sense if we want to believe Tolider. We winners are a talented group, but we’re not that special. If Earth had been repopulated to the point where they could explore the stars again, they’d have thousands like us.” “Tolider told me that we are an unusual group. Rumor says it’s the first time for many games that all the top five in the Planetfest games are

‘troublemakers’ — he couldn’t define the term for me.”

“I think I can. We won’t take answers without digging for ourselves. That’s one reason I feel so comfortable with the rest of you.”

“I’ll accept that. So let me point out one other thing. You can tell me what it means. The contestant groups for surface visits to Glug and Bedlam and Crater and Camel and the other planets were all some random mixture of all twenty-five winners. But look who’s here on Whirlygig: Sy, me, you, Kallen, and Lum — the top five, all ‘troublemakers,’ plus Rosanne and Wilmer. I think Rosanne can be classed as a wild one, too, difficult to control — your hair would curl if I told you some of the things she’s done. And we all wonder about Wilmer. We’ve been specially picked for this trip, and I’m worried about what might happen here.” Peron moved their suits closer together so that he could see her face. He realized she was genuinely worried, not just joking. He reached across to take her suit glove. “Relax, Elissa. You’re as bad as Tolider, all wild surmises. They wouldn’t bring us all this way to dispose of us on Whirlygig. If we are that much nuisance we could have been chucked out of the contest back on Pentecost, and nobody would ever have suspected a thing.” He laughed. “Don’t worry. Now we’ve landed we’re safe enough on Whirlygig.”

They had made good progress. The north pole would soon be in sight. And in less than an hour, Peron would know the falseness of his final words.

The dome was a hemisphere of tough, flexible polymer, roughly twenty meters across. It was located on the exact axis of rotation of the planet. That axis was highly tilted to Whirlygig’s orbit plane, so at this time of year the golden sun of Cassay was permanently invisible, hovering down over the other pole. Only the weak companion, Cassby, threw its ruddy glow across the landscape, providing adequate light but little heat. There were no free volatiles on Whirlygig, but the surface temperature at polar midwinter would be cold enough to liquefy methane.

Peron and Elissa had been too engrossed in their conversation to make the best speed from the equator, and they arrived last. The others were already landed, clustered around the dome. Sy, Lum and Rosanne were inspecting the entry airlock, without touching any part of the door. Kallen and Wilmer were away around the back, on the opposite side of the dome, looking at something on the wall.

Elissa stepped close to see what Sy was doing. “Problems?”

Lum turned and nodded. “Wondered when you two would get here. Problems. Maybe we won’t have a pleasant night out of our suits after all.”

Sy was still crouched over by the door. He seemed rather pleased to be faced with the new challenge.

“See, here’s how it’s supposed to work,” he said. “There’s an airlock with an inner and outer door. The outer door, this one here, has a fail-safe on it, so it won’t open when there’s any gas pressure in the airlock. First you have to pump out the lock to near vacuum, and you can do it from outside. That’s this control, on the outside wall. When we arrived, there was atmosphere in the airlock, so naturally it wouldn’t open. We pumped it out — the pumps work fine — but it still won’t open.”

“Motor failure?” asked Peron.

“Could be. The next step is to try to open it manually. But we want to be sure we know what we’re doing. Over on the other side of the dome there’s a big patch of black sealant. Suggests there was a meteor impact, and the self-repairing system took care of it. But we don’t know what that may have done to the inside until we get there. And we don’t know how much damage the mechanical systems may have suffered. Maybe the meteor hit the lock, too. We’ll have to get in and find out.”

Peron stepped forward to peer at the door. It appeared quite intact. “You’re sure there’s no pressure now in the airlock?”

“Positive. The gauge there is working. It showed pressure when we arrived, and as we pumped it went down to zero.”

“So it should be safe enough to open manually,” added Lum. “We were preparing to do that when you two arrived. Come on, another pair of hands may help a lot.” The outer door of the lock gave grudgingly, as Sy, Lum, and Peron jerked hard at it. Finally it was about halfway open, almost enough to admit a person. “My turn now,” said Rosanne. “I couldn’t be much use in the tugging and heaving part, but I’m thin enough to get in there where you fatties can’t, and see what’s going on. Give me room.”

She came to the lock door, turned sideways, and began to crab carefully into the opening.

Peron was standing just behind her. He heard Sy’s warning yell at the same moment as the thought came into his own head. Idiots! If we know the outer door isn’t working right, why assume that the controls for the inner one are any better?

He leaned forward, took Rosanne around the waist and with one movement propelled her back and sideways, away from the open outer door of the lock. He heard a gasp of surprise and annoyance over her radio as Rosanne skittered away across the silver-and-brown surface. Then before he could follow her, a great force took him and drove him end-over-end across the jagged rocks.

Even as he was jerked and battered inside his suit, his own thoughts remained quite clear. The inner door seal must have been already broken, ready to fail and hanging on a thread. So long as there was an equalizing pressure in airlock and dome, there was no problem. But once they had pumped down the pressure in the lock, the inner door had tons of air pressure exerted upon it. If it failed, all the dome’s gases would be released in one giant blow-out through the lock. And for anyone standing in the way…

Peron was spinning and ricocheting from one rock formation to the next. He felt three separate and shattering collisions, one on the chest, one on the head, and one across his hip. Then, quite suddenly, it was over. He was lying supine on the surface, staring at the ruby orb of Cassby and surprised to find that he was still alive.

The others came crowding round him, helping him to his feet. He was amazed to see that he was almost fifty meters away from the dome. Rosanne had picked herself up and was waving to show that she was all right.

“I’m all right, too,” said Peron.

There was a long, strange silence from the others. At last Peron noticed a faint, ominous chill on the lower left side of his abdomen. He looked down. His suit there was dreadfully buckled and splintered from chest to thighs, and over his abdomen it showed white instead of the usual metallic gray.

“Air supply working, but he’s lost two tanks.” That was Lum, his voice oddly distorted, from behind him. The suit radio had taken a beating, but it still functioned after a fashion.

“No problem, he can share ours.”

“Motor controls look all right.”

“Food containers gone.”

“We can cover for that.”

“Oh-oh. Thermal system is out. And most of the suit insulation is stripped from the lower torso.”

“That’s a worse problem.”

His radio’s distortion was so bad that Peron found it hard to identify the speakers. He cut to a privacy mode. While they inspected the condition of his equipment, his own mind raced on ahead of them.

Evaluate the options.

Think!

Fourteen hours back to the equator — say that could be shaved to ten hours at maximum speed. A few minutes in the launch catapult, then another six or seven hours to ship rendezvous. Hopeless. Even with full insulation, in these temperatures the suit would protect him for only three or four hours. He’d be dead of hypothermia long before he reached the equator.

Change to a new suit? There was none. They carried spare parts for small suit components, but not for the whole thing.

Think. Bundle him into something that would keep him warm for a long time? Fine — but what? There was nothing.

Take him into the dome, replace the lost atmosphere from tanks, and raise the temperature? Maybe. They could get air in there in less than an hour. But they couldn’t generate heat fast enough. He would be able to breathe, and still he’d freeze to death.

Signal for an emergency landing at the pole of Whirlygig by a small ship? It was probably the best hope — but still too slow. Say three or four hours to prepare, then another three before it arrived here. By then Peron would be an icy corpse. Other ideas? He could find none. His mind ran on, writing its own obituary: Peron of Turcanta, twenty years old, who survived the dunes of Talimantor Desert, the night woods of Villasylvia, the Hendrack Maze, the water caverns of Charant, the Capandor glaciers, the abyssal depths of the Lackro Trench… who had lived on, to freeze on Whirlygig. His name would be added to that list of names that the government never mentioned, the unfortunates who died in the off-planet final trials of the Planetfest games.

Peron turned his suit back to general receiving mode.

“We’re agreed, then,” a clear voice was saying. “Nothing any of us can think of would do it in time?”

The distortion of the damaged radio changed the tone of the voice. Peron came back from his own somber thoughts, and found to his surprise that the speaker was Wilmer.

“Looks that way.” That was obviously Lum speaking. “We called the ship and they’ll have something here as soon as they can, but it will probably be eight hours. Sy did a rough heat loss estimate from the condition of the suit, and calculates that we have a couple of hours to do something — three at the outside.” “Damnation.”

My thoughts exactly, said Peron to himself, amazed by his own calm. Damnation. But what was happening to Wilmer? After tagging along as a good-natured mystery and non-contestant through all the games, he was suddenly the dominant figure of the group. The others were actually deferring to him, letting him control them. Peron had a sudden insight. It was simple shock. Shock had overwhelmed all of them; but somehow Wilmer and he, Peron, the source of all the concern and the one who was condemned to die, could distance themselves from the emotion. He caught sight of Elissa’s horrified face through the faceplate of her suit, and gave her an encouraging smile. Kallen had tears in his eyes, and even Sy had lost that remote look of calm confidence.

“No other ideas?” went on Wilmer. “Right. Give me a hand. Peron, I want to talk to you. The rest of you, I want an atmosphere inside the dome as soon as you can get it. Don’t worry about the temperature, I know it will be low and we can handle that.”

He was opening the green equipment sack that he had carried with him down to Whirlygig, and examining the array of ampoules, syringes, and electronic tools that lay in neat rows within it. After one long, startled look Sy headed for the dome, but the others stood motionless until Lum’s roar: “Let’s get to it.” As he left he turned to Wilmer, his great hands clenched in their suit gloves. “This is no time to talk, but you’d better know what you’re doing. If you don’t I’ll personally skin you alive when we get back to the ship.”

Wilmer didn’t bother to answer. Behind the faceplate his face was set in a scowl of concentration.

“Private circuit. You and I have to talk for a couple of minutes,” he said to Peron, and waited until the personal suit frequency was confirmed. “All right. How do you rate your chances?”

“As zero.”

“Fine. We’ll be starting off without any delusions. I assume you’re ready to take a risk?”

Peron felt like laughing. “You mean, one that gives me less chance of survival than I have now?”

“A fair answer. I know exactly what I’m going to do, but I’ve never tried it under circumstances remotely like these. I’ve got the drugs I need, and the environment in the dome won’t be too far from the lab conditions. All right?” “I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.”

“And I don’t have the time to explain. Never mind. First, I’m going to give you an injection. It will have to go right in through your suit, but I think the needle will take it and the self-sealing will take care of the puncture. After that we’ll get you inside. I think the shoulder seal is best.”

Before Peron had time to object Wilmer had moved to his side, and he felt the sharp sting of a needle in his left trapezius muscle.

“Now we have less than a minute before you’ll begin to feel dizzy.” Wilmer had thrown the hypodermic away and was taking another from his case. “Listen closely. I want you to crack all the suit seals so we can easily take it off you when you’re unconscious. Don’t talk, and go on breathing as shallowly as you can. When you feel you are going under, don’t try to fight it. Let it happen. All right?”

The chilly area in the center of his stomach was spreading rapidly to engulf his whole torso. At the same time he had the feeling that the horizon of Whirlygig was retreating steadily from him, becoming farther and farther away. He nodded to Wilmer, and manipulated the control that transferred all suit seals to external access. His own breathing felt harsh and rapid, and he struggled to inhale and exhale slowly and steadily.

“Good man. Sorry I don’t have time to explain, but I’ve never heard of this situation happening before. I’ll probably get slaughtered when they find out what I’m trying to do. But you’re lucky. I was in bad trouble myself on Whirlygig once, over three hundred years ago. And I remember how I felt.” Wilmer gripped his hand. “Good luck, Peron. When you wake up again you’ll be over in S-space.”

In S-space. If I survive, there’ll be one more mystery to explain. Peron returned Wilmer’s grip.

“I’ll need help,” said Wilmer. He was back on open circuit. “We have to get Peron out of that suit as soon as the pressure will let us. And he’ll be unconscious. Elissa, will you organize the fastest way to do that?” Peron felt an overpowering and irrational urge to laugh. Wilmer, said a voice inside him, my odd and hairless friend, how you’ve changed. You were an old tardy-worm down on Pentecost, and now you’re transformed into a golden-winged butterfly of authority. Or do I mean a plant, a rare exotic form that only blooms when it’s off-planet? That question was suddenly important, but he knew he could not provide an answer.

Control had gone. He knew they were at the dome and ready to go inside it, but he could no longer see the door of the lock. Or the stars, or even the ground he stood upon. The scene before him was blinking out, bit by bit. It was like a great jigsaw puzzle, where every piece was black. All he could see was Wilmer, still holding his arm.

So. This is what it’s like to die. Not too bad, really. Not bad at all. The final piece of the puzzle was placed in position. Wilmer disappeared, and the whole world was dark.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Waking was agony.

It began as only a low murmur of voices, speaking a familiar language but with pitch and intonation so changed that they were barely comprehensible. It was like the voice of a machine. He strained to understand. “… little more asfanol… even a few more minutes… until we know what to do with athers (others?)… heart beat sturdy (steady?) now…”

Then a clearer statement, in an angry and petulant lower voice. “Damned nuisance. Can’t do a thing until we have a policy statement. Why that fool had to do what he did… it will take us a month…”

He was breathing. The air came hot into his lungs, searing the delicate alveoli with every slow breath. He felt it burn across the air-blood barrier, then fiery rivers of oxygen were surging along arteries and capillaries out to every extremity of his body. It was a relentless pain. There was an agony of awaking tissue and returning circulation, accompanied by muscle spasms he could not control.

Peron moved his tongue. As it touched his teeth it felt dry and swollen, too big for his mouth. But when he licked his lips there was a sense of slick, glycerine texture and a taste that puckered the inside of his mouth. He grunted in disgust, but no sound would come from his throat.

“He’s awake,” said another voice. “Get ready. Peron Turca. Can you open your eyes?”

Peron tried to do it. The lashes felt gummed shut, but by a steady effort he could free them, little by little. He peered upward through slitted eyes and found that he was looking at a pale gray ceiling, curving without seam to meet walls of the same color. Somewhere off to his right there was a steady swishing and pulsing sound.

He turned his head to that side. The neck muscles reluctantly creaked, stretched, and obeyed his mental command. He was lying next to a great mass of medical equipment, monitors, pumps, IVs, and telemetering units. Numerous tubes and wires ran across to his bared right arm. Others extended to run up his nostrils and down to his lower body. He was naked.

He lifted his head. There was something subtly wrong in making the movement, but it did not feel like an internal problem. It felt rather as though the laws of mechanics had been changed, so that although he was clearly not in freefall, neither was he moving under any normal form of gravity.

And something was wrong with his eyes. Badly wrong. He could see, but everything was blurred and indistinct, with edges poorly defined and with all colors muted to pastel shades.

Peron turned his head to the left. Next to the table on which he was lying sat a woman. She was middle-aged, frowning, and looking at him with obvious disapproval. Her face had a smooth, babyish skin, and she wore a blue cowl that was closely fitted to her skull.

“All right,” she said. She did not seem to be speaking to Peron. “Motor control seems to be there. Command: Let’s have three c.c.’s of historex in the thigh.” It was the voice that he had first heard, and again it sounded hoarse and oddly mechanical. He saw and heard nothing happen, but after a few seconds there was a brief new ache in his thigh. Then the pain in all his muscles began to decrease. The woman gazed at his expression, and nodded.

“Excellent. Command: Check the monitors, and if they’re satisfactory remove catheters. Gently.”

Peron stared down at the catheters that ran into his lower body, and made sure that he kept his gaze on them. Again he saw and felt nothing, but after a moment they had vanished. Another second, and the tube into his nostrils was gone. He drew in a long, shuddering breath. The fire in the lungs was still there. The woman still looked annoyed. “You feel strange and uncomfortable. I know. S-space has that effect on everybody at first. It doesn’t last. Just be thankful that you’re alive when you ought to be dead.”

Alive! Alive. Peron had a sudden flood of memory, carrying him back to the last despairing minutes on Whirlygig. He had been dying there, resigned to the inevitable, quite sure of his own death — and here he was alive! All the pain washed away in a moment, overwhelmed by knowledge of life. He wanted to speak, to give a great shout of joy at the fact of simple existence; but again no words would come out.

“Don’t try it,” said the woman. “Not yet. You’ll have to learn how to speak, and it takes a little while. And don’t rub your eyes. They’re working normally but things look different here. Now, there are things to be done before you’re ready to talk. That fool Wilmer certainly gave us all a problem, but I guess we’re stuck with it. We can’t kill you now. Command: Bring him a drink. Water will do, but check the ion balances and the blood sugar, and if he needs anything make the necessary additions.”

She held out her hand, and suddenly it was holding a flask of straw-yellow liquid.

“I want you to try to take this from me. Can you do that? Then drink all of it and try to talk to me.”

Peron lifted his arm, and again there was the feeling that the laws of physics had been changed. It took deliberate control to make his hand move in the direction that he wanted. He carefully took the container, brought it back to his mouth, and drank. It was like balm, soothing his throat and making him realize for the first time that he was desperately thirsty. He drank it all. “Good. Command: Take it away.” The flask was gone. The woman looked a little less irritated. “Can you speak? Try a word.”

Peron swallowed, worked his vocal chords, and was rewarded with a grunt and a grating cough. He tried again.

“Yaahh. Y-Yaasss.” His voice sounded alien in his ears.

“Excellent. Give it time. And listen to me. You have to know just a few things, and there’s nothing to be gained by waiting to tell you them. Do you know who the Immortals are?”

“They vissi — vizzit — Pen’coss. Don’ know if ‘uman — or not. Lave — live — f’rever.” “Wish that were true.” The woman gave Peron a sour smile. “I’m an Immortal. And now, so are you. But we won’t live forever. We’ll live about seventeen hundred years, according to our best current estimates — if we don’t get killed somehow along the way. That’s one thing you have to learn. You can be killed just as easily now as you could before. Living in S-space won’t protect you. Understand?”

“Unn-derstand.” The skin on Peron’s face felt as though it had been stretched tight, and it could not show the emotion he was feeling. If he was an Immortal, what had happened to the others? Would he outlive Elissa by sixteen hundred years? No good news could make that thought palatable. He lifted his head — again, that strange feeling — and looked at the woman directly. “What happ’n to others on Whir’gig?”

“I’m not in a position to tell you that. I told you, what Wilmer did for you has made more trouble than he dreamed. Before we are permitted to tell you more, we have to get approval from Sector Headquarters, and that means a long trip. We’ve been on the way for about five hours already, and it will be nearly two days before we get there. Until we do, you’ll have to be patient.

“My patient, as it happens.” She gave him her first real smile. “You can start by resting some. In a few minutes you’ll get a reaction from the historex, and I’m going to give you another sedative and painkiller now. Command: Give this man five c.c.’s of asfanol.”

Nothing visible, but again a surprise ache of something in his thigh. Peron wasn’t at all ready to go to sleep — there were a hundred questions to be answered, and he wasn’t sure where to start.

“Are we going back to The Ship?”

The woman looked startled, then amused. “No. I can’t tell you much, but I can tell you that. We’re on a longer trip — Sector Headquarters is outside the Cass system — nearly a light-year away from Cassay and Pentecost.”

“And we’ll be there in two days. So you do travel faster than light!” Now she was looking very uncomfortable. “I’m not supposed to tell you anything. I’m a doctor, not a damned administrator.” There was an irritation at somebody or something in her tone, and Peron filed it away for future reference. “But we don’t travel faster than light. In S-space, light travels almost two thousand light-years of normal distance in one of our years. We’re travelling at only a fraction of light-speed.”

Peron was overwhelmed by the thought. Could she be telling the truth? If she were, Sol and Earth itself were only a couple of months away. And if they had been on their journey for five hours already, they must be deep into interstellar space. He was beginning to feel drowsy, but suddenly he had a tremendous desire to see Cassay again. And what would the starscape be like, at this tremendous speed?

“What’s wrong?” She had seen his expression.

“Can we look out of here — look at the stars?”

She shook her head. “I sometimes have that wish myself. When you wake up, take a look in the next room. There’s an exterior port there. You’ll find that things look rather different in S-space. But now, I have to go. My name, by the way, is Ferranti; Dr. Olivia Ferranti. I will be seeing a good deal of you until we’re sure that you are stable here. And I’ll be back tomorrow.” She gave him a reassuring nod. “Be patient. Command: Take me to my apartment.”

“But what — “

Peron didn’t bother to finish his sentence. She had gone, vanished instantly into the air. In another thirty seconds the drugs had taken him and he was sound asleep.

The room where he had first regained consciousness lacked clothing, food, or drink. There was a terminal near the table, which must clearly communicate with other parts of the ship, but when he next awoke Peron resisted his first urge, to call and ask for something to eat. He felt ravenous, and still oddly disoriented, but there were other overriding priorities.

All the monitors by the table were still working, but now they received telemetered data originating from small sensors attached to his body. They undoubtedly passed on those signals to some central monitoring computer, possibly one that responded only to emergencies. Peron felt that he should have at least a few minutes before his actions were controlled again. He slid off the table, took a moment to collect his balance, and then headed for one of the room’s two doors.

It led to a long windowless corridor. Wrong choice. He backtracked, and found that the other led to a bigger room, with a great transparent port at one end. Peron went to it and stared out.

He had certainly expected something different from the usual starscape seen from within the Cass system; perhaps the familiar constellations, but subtly distorted. But what he was looking at was wholly inexplicable.

Beyond the port, the whole sky was filled with a faint, pearly glow. It seemed to possess no orientation, and everywhere it was of the same uniform brightness. No stars, no nebulae, no dust clouds, no galaxies; the whole universe had disappeared, lost in a diffuse, glowing haze.

Peron felt his head begin to spin. He was in S-space, and it was so far different from anything he had imagined that he had no idea what to do next. If he had been trapped and held prisoner — for that was the way he was beginning to perceive his situation on this ship — in any ordinary environment he could perhaps have gained control and had some say in his own actions. But what could he do here? There was nothing in Pentecost’s science that even hinted at the possibility of this. Sy, far more able scientifically than Peron, had scoffed at the very idea.

Peron felt a moment of annoyance. If only Sy could be here now, to see how far his theories would take him.…

The rest of the room lacked any furnishings or useful sources of information. There was a set of small and mysterious doors or panels in the base of the wall, each only a couple of feet high, but he could not open them. He turned to go back to the corridor, and was reminded of his own hunger and thirst. He remembered Dr. Ferranti’s ability to conjure drink from nothing (And ask Sy to explain that, while he was at it!). Could it possibly work for him, too? There seemed nothing he could lose by trying.

“Command.” Even though he was alone, he felt self-conscious — what he was attempting was impossible! But it had worked, he was convinced of that. “Command. Bring me a drink.”

He waited, feeling foolish. And to confirm his feeling, absolutely nothing happened. He tried once more. “Command. Bring me something to eat.” Nothing. How could anything else be the result? He must have been hallucinating, to be convinced that Ferranti had magical powers to make objects — including herself — appear and disappear instantly.

Peron had scarcely come to that conclusion when everything about him changed in one brief and bewildering flicker of movement. There was a second of total disorientation. Then he was no longer standing at the entrance to the corridor. Instead he was in a room with pale yellow walls, decorated with elaborate murals and amateurish paintings. He was fully clothed, in well-fitting brown shirt and trousers. His own shoes, last seen when he donned a suit before leaving for Whirlygig, were on his feet. He was seated in a hard chair, with his hands resting firmly on its arms. In front of him was a long, polished desk of silvery metal, its upper surface containing a single, orange folder and one pen. And sitting behind that desk, looking at him with a slightly bored and definitely supercilious expression, was a wizened, brown-eyed, hairless man. Peron took an instant and inexplicable dislike to him.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

“I am Captain Rinker, in command of this ship,” said the man. “Dr. Ferranti tells me that you are fully stable and adapted to S-space. Is that so?” “I don’t know. I feel no pain, but I certainly don’t feel normal.” “That will pass. Anything else?”

“Someone seems to want to starve me to death.”

“Your own fault. When you awoke you could have called for food. Instead you chose to pry.” Rinker gestured at a wall display that was showing the room where Peron had returned to consciousness. “You were observed. It would serve you right if we did not feed you for a while. But you are lucky. Regulations would not permit us to starve you. Command: Bring food and drink, suitable for the awakening.”

A tray appeared instantly, resting on Peron’s knees. The clear carafe held the same liquid as he had drunk before, but the plates of food were unfamiliar. There were brown patties with a coarse granular texture, orange-red jelly, and white slabs of smooth creamy consistency. Rinker gestured to them. “Carry on. You may eat while we talk.”

Peron looked around him. There was no other person in the room, and no sign that the door had opened or closed. “How are you able to do that?”

“It is not appropriate that I tell you. Such information will be given to you at Headquarters — if it is given at all.” Rinker waved his hand at the display. “Your efforts to use the service system were already noted. To save you further wasted time, I will point out that any more efforts on your part will be just as unsuccessful. Let me also point out that I am under no official obligation to talk to you, or to deal with you in any way except to provide safe transfer to Headquarters. But I want you to know how much trouble you have caused, you and that fool Wilmer.”

Peron could not resist the food in front of him. His body insisted that it had been weeks since it had received nourishment. He ate ravenously. The patties had a reasonable resemblance to bread, and although the white material tasted nothing like the cheese that Peron had expected, it tasted good. He stared across the desk at Captain Rinker, swallowed, and spoke.

“I can’t speak for Wilmer, but any trouble I caused was not my doing. I would have died on Whirlygig without his help. I don’t see why you assign blame to me.”

Rinker gave an impatient wave of his hand. “You were marked as a troublemaker before you left the planet. So were your companions on Whirlygig. You were all scheduled for special indoctrination on the ship Eleanora, to be kept apart from the other contestants. As for Wilmer, he was supposed to be there as an observer — not as a participant. I have warned several times of the danger of using local recruits as observers. They have too many ties to your planet and its people. But my advice was ignored.”

“Is Wilmer an Immortal?”

Rinker leaned back in his chair, frowning. His voice rose in pitch. “That stupid term! It is one I never use. Wilmer was recruited to our group, yes. And he shares our extended life span. But he has never left the Cass system, and he certainly knows nothing of our larger mission. Now I must suffer the consequences of his dabbling. For three hundred and sixty of your years, I have visited Pentecost and the Cass system. This is my nineteenth trip. And never has anything gone wrong. I have developed a perfect record in my work. Success is expected of me, and I demand it of myself. But now, thanks to what Wilmer did on Whirlygig, all that has gone. This visit has turned into a disaster. The materials I should be carrying back from the group on Eleanora have been left behind; final selection and indoctrination of recruits has been delayed; and I am carrying six additional and unwanted passengers with me to Headquarters, all of whom are tagged as potential trouble. Do you think I should be happy?” As Peron’s hunger and thirst lessened, he felt an increasing curiosity at his surroundings. It was also matched by a growing annoyance. He had done nothing to justify Rinker’s tirade. What did the foolish man expect him to do? Ask to be taken back to die on Whirlygig?

He lifted the tray and placed it on the desk on front of him. “I don’t say you should be happy. But you shouldn’t blame me for what happened. Why won’t you tell me what’s going on here?”

“So you can cause more trouble?”

“I’m not going to cause trouble. But naturally I have many questions. I don’t ask for your time, but let me at least have access to a terminal and the data banks. And you say that some of the other contestants are here on this ship. I would certainly like to see them.”

Rinker stared angrily at the messy tray lying on his clean and polished desk. He gave Peron an unpleasant smile. “I cannot allow you access to the data banks. As I told you, this situation is unprecedented. No one has ever joined our group here without indoctrination. What happens to you can be decided only after we reach Headquarters, and until we arrive there you must do exactly as you are told. You want to see your companions? Very well. Command: Remove this tray.” It vanished instantly.

“Command: Take us both to the suspense room.” This time Peron had a dizzying image of a long corridor and gray walls.

It lasted for a fraction of a second. Then the world steadied, and he and Rinker were standing together in front of a bank of waist-high metal doors. Each one formed the entrance to a long, deep container like an outsize coffin. Monitors sat on the transparent top of each box, and all the outputs were collected into a thick optic bundle that ran to a computer terminal. The room was freezingly cold.

“Perhaps this will give you an idea of how seriously I regard this situation.” Rinker stepped forward to one of the boxes. “Your companions are here.” “What have you done to them?” Peron felt a sense of horror. Was Rinker telling him that Elissa and the others were imprisoned in those black, icy caskets? “They are in cold sleep, and will remain there.” Rinker’s voice was as chilly as the room. It offered no possibility of discussion. “They are of course in no danger. I run a well-regulated ship, and all the equipment is checked constantly. They will be awakened — a simple procedure — when we reach Headquarters. Then this matter will move to other hands than mine. I will be very glad to see the last of it.”

Peron stepped forward to peer in through the top of the nearest chest. Kallen lay inside, swathed up to his neck in soft white material. He looked dead. His eyes were deep-set in his head, his face gray and drained of all color. Peron stepped to the next container. That one held Elissa. He shuddered to see what she had become. Without its usual animation, her face was like a wax model. “Are you sure that they are all right?” Peron had to ask. “They look — “ “I have no time to waste in repeating myself. They are all right. I have already told you and shown you more than I intended. You will eat your meals with the rest of us, and I will see you then. If you need food before that, use the terminal. Command: Take him to his living quarters.”

There was no chance to protest. Rinker and the room with Elissa and the others suddenly vanished. Peron found himself alone with his worry, perplexity and frustration, in a room that held only a bed, a desk, and a terminal. * * *

The Planetfest games had provided periods of terror, exhaustion, suspense and near-despair. But there had been nothing to match the sheer frustration of the next twelve hours. By the end of it, Peron had reached an unvoiced decision: if he was to be branded as a troublemaker, he was going to earn his label. He had started out simply wishing to know more about the ship and his environment. That had proved to be far more difficult than he expected. The room he had been assigned opened to a narrow corridor, which soon branched in both directions to larger rooms and other passageways. He had tried each one in turn, making mental notes of any changes of direction.

A pattern quickly emerged. If he went off along the left corridor, he was free to wander as he pleased. He had found a dining area and a library whose terminals ignored his requests for information, but readily provided food or drink. It appeared instantly and mysteriously in front of him the moment that his order was placed through the terminal, and was removed just as promptly when he requested that. He had also met some of the other ship’s complement, all much more friendly than Captain Rinker. There were only three of them. It seemed to Peron a preposterously low number to control such a large structure. But as Olivia Ferranti pointed out to him when his wandering took him past her living quarters, it was more people than were needed. Everything was under automatic control; Captain Rinker alone could handle everything. In fact, the rest of them were making their first trip, and had come from Headquarters to the Cass system for their own reasons (which she refused to discuss). She had even offered something like an apology for Rinker’s behavior.

“He’s unusually valuable. There are not many people who like making these long trips, often with no companions. It takes a special temperament. Captain Rinker likes things neat. He can’t stand the idea that you’ve disturbed the pattern of his life.”

“But Wilmer did that, not me.”

“Maybe. But Wilmer isn’t here, and you are. So you’re getting it.” “And he’s allowed to keep my friends unconscious?”

“He’s the captain. He is in control until we reach Headquarters. Then he’ll have to explain his actions, but he’ll have no trouble doing that — he’s following regulations. And honestly, he’s not harming your friends at all. Now, I have to go. We can talk a little more if you like at the next meal period. Command: Take me to the forward exercise facility.”

And she was gone.

Peron found that he could get as far as the door of the suspense room, but it refused to open for him. And he could issue as many commands as he chose, in any tone of voice, for anything he liked, but they were all ignored.

When he left his room and went off along the right-hand corridor, affairs were even less satisfactory. The left corridor led him to the upper part of the ship, in terms of the effective gravity. The right corridor should then have taken him to the lower part, and it certainly started out that way. But no matter which branch he followed, when he had progressed a certain distance there would be a dizzying flicker — and he would be back in his room, sitting at the desk. Some whole section of the ship, of indeterminate size, was inaccessible to him. After a dozen fruitless attempts, Peron lay on the bed in his room, thinking hard. It was twelve hours since his meeting with Rinker, but he didn’t feel at all tired. Olivia Ferranti had told him to expect little need for sleep. “One fringe benefit of S-space,” she had said. “You’ll find you sleep maybe one hour in twenty.”

He continued to feel physically peculiar, but she had been right on that, too. After a while he simply adjusted to it. He still had the impression that he was moving his body in a world where the laws of mechanics had been slightly modified, but it was a feeling that faded.

“Do you want to join us for dinner?” The voice came suddenly from the terminal next to his bed. It was Garao, another of the ship’s company that he had encountered in his travels around the forward section.

“I don’t think so.” Then he sat up quickly. “No, wait a minute. Yes, I do. I’ll come over.” He didn’t feel hungry — except for more information. And the only way to get that seemed to be from other people. Direct exploration of the ship had been totally unrewarding.

“No need for that,” said Garao. “Hold tight.”

There was the now-familiar moment of disorientation. He found he was sitting in the dining area with three others. Captain Rinker was not present. As Ferranti had told him, the captain much preferred his own company and often dined alone. Everyone seemed to take it for granted that Peron would now eat and drink the same things as the rest of them. When he arrived there were already five or six different dishes on the table — all of them unfamiliar. He found something that looked like a fish fillet, but clearly wasn’t. And there were several pseudo-meat products, each flanked by some kind of vegetable. Nothing tasted quite the way he expected — and all the food was cold.

The others seemed surprised when he mentioned that. Ferranti looked at Garao and at the linguist, Atiyah, then shrugged.

“I should have mentioned that to you before. You won’t get hot food in S-space. Better become used to it cold.”

“But why?”

“Wait until we get to HQ, and ask there.” Ferranti was clearly uncomfortable with her non-answer. She was sitting next to Peron, so he was faced only with her profile. But her voice showed her discomfort. “I would tell you, but it’s against captain’s orders. If you like hot food, I can make what we’re eating more acceptable. It’s easy enough to order spices. Command: Bring more of these dishes for Peron Turca, but with added hot spice.”

There was a delay of about fifteen seconds, then additional dishes appeared on the table in front of Peron. He was preparing to help himself to them, when he noticed the expression on Garao and Atiyah’s faces, across the table from him. “What’s wrong? Isn’t it all right for me to eat these?”

“That’s not the problem.” Garao picked up an empty plate. “Command: Take this away.”

Again there was a delay of a few seconds, then the plate suddenly vanished. “See?” Garao looked gleeful. “It’s the same trouble we had on the trip out from Headquarters. Seems even worse.”

“It is,” said Ferranti. “This time it took twice as long.”

“What took twice as long?” Peron felt as though they were speaking in riddles just to confuse him.

“Service,” said Atiyah. He was a man of few words. “It should be instantaneous. Let’s time the delay. Command: Bring me a glass of water.”

They sat in silence, until after about ten seconds a filled glass of clear liquid appeared in front of Atiyah.

Garao nodded. “We’d better notify Rinker at once. He’ll have to leave S-space to correct this. Serves the stiff-necked bastard right — him and his ‘perfectly run ship.’ “

“And won’t that make him pleased,” said Ferranti. “Already he’s complaining what a disaster this trip has been.”

“Leave S-space? But where will he go?”

The others looked at Peron for a moment. “Sorry,” said Garao sympathetically. “But this is captain’s orders again. We can’t include you on this. Command: Take Peron back to his room.”

“Wait a minute.” Peron was frantic. “Look, to hell with captain’s orders. If something is wrong I have a right to know it, too. I’m on the ship as well as you. I want to stay here and find out what’s happening.”

But the last sentence was wasted. Peron added a string of curses to it. The service delay might worry the others, but it was still too short. He was back in his room again, talking to the empty walls.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Peron allowed himself only a few seconds of cursing. Then he ripped off his shoes and ran at top speed along the corridor that led to the upper part of the ship. The monitors would still show his movements, that seemed certain. But now there was an emergency on board, so who would be watching? There would never be a better chance to explore areas that were normally forbidden.

His earlier careful study of the ship’s internal layout had not been wasted. He ran fast and silently toward Rinker’s living quarters, sure of every corridor. At the branch before Rinker’s door he paused and peered around the corner. Was he in time? If Rinker had already left, there would be no way to know where he had gone.

He heard the door slide open and ducked back, then retreated to the next bend in the corridor. No footsteps. Rinker must be heading in the other direction. He ran lightly back and stole another look along the corridor, just in time to see the disappearing back of Rinker’s blue jacket and shiny bald head. He was heading over to the left, angling away from the dining room.

Peron tried to visualize the geometry. What lay in that direction? All that he could remember was two great storage chambers, each filled with some kind of pellets, and more living quarters. The suspense room lay out at the very end of the same corridor.

Rinker was heading steadily on, hunched over and not looking back. Past the storage areas, past the living areas — what could he possibly want in the suspense room?

Had Peron forgotten some branch in the corridor? He knew he could not ignore the possibility. He took a bigger chance and closed the distance that separated them. He was close enough to hear Rinker’s heavy breathing, and to smell the unpleasant musky talc that he used as body powder.

Peron’s nose wrinkled. No wonder the man usually made his trips alone! He hesitated at the door of the suspense room. Rinker had gone inside, but there was no way to follow him in and remain unnoticed.

There was a creaking sound from within. Peron ducked his head briefly into the doorway. Rinker had opened one of the great, gleaming sarcophagi — and now he was climbing inside and closing the door.

As soon as the front panel was completely closed Peron sneaked forward into the room. But instead of going to Rinker’s chest he went to one farther along the line. He looked in through the transparent top. Lum lay there, white and corpselike. Peron tried to ignore the massive, still form and looked instead at the walls of the container.

Strange. Although he had not noticed it on his first visit with Captain Rinker, the box seemed to have a complete set of controls inside, as well as outside — as though those imprisoned frozen figures might waken, and wish to control the apparatus from within. And here was something else, just as odd. At the far end of the container, leading only into the blank wall behind it, was another door, the same size as the one at this end.

A couple of minutes had passed since Rinker had gone inside and closed the door. Peron stepped quietly across to stand beside that box. He placed his ear close to it. There was a hissing of gases, and the dull thump of a pump. Peron risked a quick look in through the top. Rinker was lying there, eyes closed. He looked quite relaxed and normal, but a network of silvery filaments had appeared from the walls of the container and attached themselves to various parts of his body. Fine sprays of white fluid were drifting down from tiny nozzles to dampen his skin. Peron touched the surface of the container, expecting the icy cold he had felt at Lum’s casket. He jumped and pulled his hand away sharply. The surface was hot and tingling, as though it was sending an electric current through him. For a couple of minutes the situation did not change. Then the spray turned off. The nozzles were drawn back into the side of the container and the silver filaments loosened and withdrew. Peron watched and waited. Ten seconds later Rinker’s body seemed to tremble for a moment.

And then the container was empty. In a fraction of a second, before Peron could even blink, Rinker had vanished completely.

Peron was tempted to open the door of the container. Instead, he went to an empty one that stood near to it, and opened that. The internal controls appeared quite simple. There was a three-way dial, a timer with units in days, hours, and hundredths of hours, and a manual switch. The switch setting showed only an N, an S, and a C. The C position was in red, and below it stood a written notice: WARNING: DO NOT USE SETTING FOR COLD © WITHOUT SETTING TIMING SWITCH OR WITHOUT ASSISTANCE OF AN EXTERNAL OPERATOR.

Peron was thinking of climbing inside to take a closer look when he heard a warning creak from the other container. The door was being opened again. He forced himself to move carefully and quietly as he closed his casket. Too late to leave the room — the door was swinging open. Fortunately it came toward him, so that he was hidden temporarily behind it. He moved silently to the shelter of the next box and ducked down behind it.

Rinker had returned. He was slowly heading out of the room, looking neither to right nor left. Peron caught one glimpse or his half-profile, and saw sunken, bloodshot eyes and a pallid complexion. He followed at a discreet distance. The other man walked drunkenly, as though totally exhausted and giddy with fatigue. Instead of continuing to his quarters he went into the dining-room area. Garao, Ferranti, and Atiyah were still there, talking.

And they were still eating dinner. That seemed peculiar, until Peron realized it had been only a few minutes since Garao’s verbal command had whipped him unwillingly back to his room.

“All fixed,” said Captain Rinker harshly. “There’s a defective component in the command translation device. We don’t have replacements on board, so I’ve jury-rigged it for the trip.”

“Will it last, or will it fail again?” That was Olivia Ferranti’s voice. “It will fail again eventually. Not for a while, I hope.” Rinker gave a great yawn. “That was almost too much for me. It took a long time. I was there nearly five minutes, with no rest. I must go and sleep now.”

There was a murmur of semi-sympathetic voices. “Let’s hope it doesn’t go again during the trip,” said Garao — though his tone didn’t support his words. “It won’t,” said Rinker. “I don’t expect any more trouble on this trip.” Peron thought of those words as he tiptoed away along the corridor. Rinker’s actions and comments were revealing, and Peron had some faint inkling now as to what was going on.

If he were right, Rinker had more trouble coming than he imagined. * * *

As soon as he was out of earshot of the dining area, Peron began to run again at top speed. The emergency was over — and that meant his movements would be watched again. Would there be monitors, even within the caskets?

He reached the suspense room and went at once to the same casket that Rinker had occupied. The door opened with the same creak, and he climbed inside and lay down. All the controls were within easy reach. He could stretch up his hand and set them with a simple push of a button. The choice was already fixed. He didn’t want S, since he was already in S-space; and he didn’t want C, since that was the cold sleep of Elissa and the others. It had to be N — but what did N mean? Peron had been moving at top speed, but now he hesitated. Suppose the process that took Rinker out of S-space called for other knowledge that Peron lacked? It was clear that the others on the ship had extra powers, since service commands from Peron were ignored. What if the use of this device required those same powers?

Time was passing. At any moment the familiar dizziness might occur, and he would find that he was once more in his room. But still his finger stayed lightly on the button. When he had been absolutely certain of unavoidable death on Whirlygig he had been able to face it staunchly, with a complete calm. This was different. Whatever Rinker and the others might do to him, he did not believe that they would kill him. But he could die now by his own hand. His next action might prove to be suicide.

Peron took a last look around at the casket walls. Now, or never. He drew a long, deep breath, closed his eyes, and pressed the button marked N.

CHAPTER TWENTY

There was no startling moment of change. Peron had expected a twisting surge of nausea, or perhaps some unendurable pain of transition. Instead he felt a cool touch of electrodes at his temples, and the soothing spray of fluid on his skin. He relaxed, and drifted away into a quiet meditation. It went on for a long time, and ended only when he became aware of his own heartbeat, loud in the secret inner chamber of his ears.

A feeling of well-being was creeping over him, as though he were waking from the best sleep of his life. There was a temptation to lie there for a long time, basking in the sensation. But then he became filled with a sudden fear that he had merely fallen asleep, that nothing else had happened. Worried, he opened his eyes and looked around him.

The inside of the casket had not changed its configuration — but, startlingly, it had somehow changed color from a bland buff-yellow to a pale orange. Even his clothing was different, black instead of brown.

He sat up, then steadied himself against one wall. He had fallen asleep in a one-gee gravity field; now he was in freefall.

The door through which he had entered could not be locked from the inside. What about pursuit? Aware that he was still likely to be followed and discovered, Peron scrambled his way toward the other door. Thank heaven for the freefall experience he had gained after they left Pentecost. He felt a little peculiar now, but there was no vertigo or feeling of nausea.

The door opened readily. He pulled himself through and closed it behind him. There was an outside catch, and he set it so that it could not be opened from within the box. Next he moved along the row of doors, and locked each one in the same way. Then, and only then, did he feel a first moment of safety. He looked around. He was floating free in a long, turning passageway. It was dimly lit by faint yellow tubes that ran parallel to the walls, and far away in the distance he could hear a low-pitched rumbling and whistling. He headed in that direction.

As the passage turned, he came to a square-sided chamber with a fully transparent external wall. He stood there for a long time, overwhelmed by the sight of the universe outside the ship. The faint, luminous haze of S-space had gone. Instead he was gazing on a glittering sea of stars, as bright as they could appear only from open space. The old familiar constellations were there, just as they had looked from orbit around Pentecost. They gave him an odd feeling of reassurance. He was still alive, and he was back in a universe that he perhaps understood.

While he was still watching, there was a louder rumble in the corridor. A machine was approaching, drifting along the wall on an invisible magnetic track. The main device was small, only as big as his head, but a number of long, articulated arms were tucked away in at the side. He watched it warily. It moved along quite slowly, at less than walking speed. A few meters away from him it ducked away into a small door in the wall of the corridor. Peron recognized the type of aperture — there were hundreds of them, all over the ship. They were everywhere, from the living quarters to the dining room to the library, and he had been unable to open any of them. The machine had no such trouble. It slipped through smoothly, and vanished.

Peron continued on his way. He was in a part of the ship that he had never seen before. The passage finally led him to a great chamber, where hundreds of machines were located. Most sat immobile, but from time to time one or more of them would start into action and slide off on some mysterious errand. He followed a couple of them. Each finally passed through one of the small doors that lined each corridor.

Peron decided that he had to find a quiet place to think. He headed farther along the passage, and at last found he was in a different type of chamber. This one was an automatic galley, similar to the one that had served the Planetfest winners on their travels around the Cass system. Peron found a water spigot and drank deeply from it. He reveled in the clean feel of the pure liquid on his tongue and palate. Whatever its other virtues, S-space definitely made food and drink taste less interesting. He took a few moments more to study the arrangement, and noticed that there was processing equipment different from anything he had seen in the other galley. From the look of it, it could produce a standard menu, or something with added and unknown ingredients. While he was watching, four of the little robots came trundling into the galley area. They ignored him. They were carrying plates, most of which still held the remains of a meal. One of those plates caught Peron’s eye. It held the remnants of uneaten spicy food — the same food that had been served to Peron at his last meal in S-space. The surface of the robots was glistening with moisture. Peron went across to one of them and touched it. The metal was icy cold. He put his finger to his mouth and tasted the liquid with his tongue. The droplets were plain water, condensed from the air around him.

He sat down on the floor, put his head between his hands, and pondered. Everything made sense — if he could force his mind to accept one incredible possibility. And it was a possibility that he was finally in a position to check for himself.

Peron stood up. He took the heaviest metal tureen that he could find in the galley, and swung it as hard as he could against the metal wall. It did not bend. He headed back to the chamber where the patient robots sat, and waited until one of them rose from its position. Then he followed it closely as it proceeded along one of the numerous passageways branching off from the central opening.

When the machine turned to move through one of the small doors, Peron was ready. The door opened, and the robot slid through. While the door was still open Peron jammed the sturdy metal container into the gap. There was a squeak of metal and a protesting whine from the door’s control mechanism, but the aperture remained open.

Peron crouched down and looked through.

An icy current of air met him from the other side. The temperature there must be very close to freezing. The little robot had gone on its way, and the area beyond was lit only by the dullest of red glimmers of light.

Peron judged the width of the door with his eye. There would be just enough space for him to squeeze through, provided he was willing to risk the skin on his shoulders. He eased off his jacket, pushed it through ahead of him, and wriggled to the other side.

It was even colder and darker than he had thought. He shivered, and pulled his jacket tight about him. Unless he had more clothing, it would not be possible for him to stay there long.

Peron recognized the room that he was in. It was next to Rinker’s living quarters. He had been there before, in his original explorations of the ship. But there was one great difference. Instead of a one-gee field he now felt that he was still in freefall.

The little robot had disappeared. As he watched it came into view along the corridor. It was carrying an empty bottle of the fermented drink that Rinker usually enjoyed with his solitary meals. The robot came steadily closer. Again it ignored Peron. It hesitated at the door jammed open by the tureen, then went to another door and calmly passed through it. As it did so, another pair of service robots appeared on the other side, and set to work to free the obstruction and repair the door.

Peron did not stay to observe. He hurried through to Rinker’s apartment, where Rinker was sitting in a chair. He was completely motionless, his hand raised and his mouth open. Peron stood and watched for several minutes. Finally the hand inched closer to the open mouth. Peron stepped forward and touched Rinker’s cheek. It was like chilled marble. Fingers stabbed to within an inch of Rinker’s eyes produced no reflexive blink of the lids.

It was proof enough. Peron hurried out and headed for the suspense room. On the way there he passed the dining area, where the motionless figures of Garao, Ferranti, and Atiyah still sat at table, three perfect sculptures of frozen flesh.

The suspense room was deserted. Peron paused for a long moment in front of the cold sleep caskets. Again he wondered at his motives. To risk his own life was one thing; to put the lives of his friends in jeopardy was another. Wouldn’t it be better to wait until the ship arrived at the mysterious Headquarters of the Immortals, and see how the group would be treated there?

He tried to imagine the answers that the others would give. Part of his mind could create a simulated conversation with Lum, Kallen, Sy, Elissa, and Rosanne. “You’re in no danger in the tanks, and I’m not sure just how the revival process works. It looks simple, but suppose there’s a hidden snag? Maybe I should just wait and see what happens when we get to Headquarters?”

He thought he could hear their consensus: “Hell, no. If there’s one thing none of us can stand it’s to have somebody else running our lives for us. You know that — why do you think we were considered as troublemakers? Go on. Make trouble. Get us out of here.”

He stepped to examine each tank in turn. The controls were all identical. He could change the dial setting either to S or N, and there was a table to indicate the correct procedure for each. The return from cold sleep to N-state was a fairly long process. It would take twelve hours. But Peron did not need to stand guard all that time. He would forage for warm clothing for everyone — Elissa and the others were all naked except for the filmy white covering. Then he could crack open another door, and return to the warmer area where the robots lived and the galley was located.

He considered a barricade for the door to the suspense room, then decided that it would not be necessary. If things went according to plan his work would be over before Rinker and the others could interfere.

Elissa first. He couldn’t wait to see her and talk to her again. It took only a few moments to change the setting and press the Start command. Peron peered in anxiously through the transparent top of the tank. There was a hum of motors within the casket, and after a few moments a yellow vapor began to fill the interior. Then Elissa and everything else within were soon invisible. Filled with trepidation, Peron went on from tank to tank, setting the conditions that should bring all the others back to consciousness from cold sleep. * * *

The horror had begun for Elissa when she saw the condition of Peron’s suit. It had been shredded and ruptured by impact with Whirlygig’s rough surface until it must be useless for thermal protection. The outside temperatures guaranteed that he could not survive.

Before their grief could do more than begin, Wilmer had taken charge. Even Lum’s casual self-confidence and Sy’s remote air of superiority had crumbled and been swept aside by the other’s grim certainty. They had done as Wilmer asked — and done it without questions.

First a breathable atmosphere had to be created within the dome. Then Elissa and Kallen had eased Peron gently out of his suit and clothing. His skin had darkened, and veins were prominent against the dusky surface. Elissa bent close. She could see no sign of breathing. She felt for a pulse, but could find no trace. His wrist and throat were ice-cold to the touch of her ungloved hand. “Give me a hand to turn him over,” said Wilmer. “We want him face down. Good. Now you go over there and help Lum with the temperature controls. They have to be precise — and you don’t want to watch this.”

Elissa had watched anyway, unable to tear herself away. Wilmer removed the gloves of his suit and encased his hands in a fine, glassy material that molded itself tight to his skin. He flexed his fingers a few times, testing the fit, then took a silver scalpel from his green case. He made careful incisions into the base of Peron’s neck and at the lower end of his spine. Fine, gleaming catheters were inserted there. Placed at the entrance of each aperture, they snaked inward without further action from Wilmer, insinuating themselves deep into Peron’s body. Wilmer placed a face mask in position over Peron’s nose and mouth, and connected it to a small blue-gray cylinder. He turned a valve, and Elissa heard the hiss of gas.

The temperature in the dome had risen a little. Wilmer opened his faceplate and sniffed the air.

“Warm enough,” he said. “I suggest we all open our faceplates and conserve air in the suits — we may need it.”

He took another cylinder from his case. “Here.” He handed it to Elissa. “This will improve the atmosphere. Bleed this into the central circulator for the dome, then we can take that face mask off Peron.”

“Is he alive?”

“For the moment — but he’s still in danger.”

Elissa took the cylinder across to the air circulation unit and snapped it into position. She cracked the nozzle. At first it seemed that nothing had happened. Then the chilly air of the dome took on a heavy, perfumed weight, as though the oxygen in it was bleeding away. Elissa turned frowning toward Wilmer. She noticed that he had closed the faceplate of his suit. She wanted to ask him what he was doing, but she could not phrase her thought. The moment stretched. Wilmer was motionless, watching and waiting. There was a final, odd sense of detachment, as though she were rising to the ceiling of the dome and leaving her body behind.

And now… she was awakening… to find Peron standing anxiously over her. She blinked her eyes to clear the blurred image.

“Elissa? Are you all right?”

He put his arm around her shoulders and raised her to a sitting position. She shivered uncontrollably, from a mixture of emotion and freezing cold. She looked down at herself. She had been wearing thermal clothing in the dome, now she was naked except for a transparent membrane of fine cloth.

Where was she? How had she come here? She struggled to think clearly. In the moment of waking it was hard to be logical. And what did logic matter? Peron was here, alive. She felt peculiar, chilled but fluffy-headed and giggly. Explanations could wait for a few more seconds. She snuggled into Peron’s embrace.

“Here I am,” she said. Everything was pleasant and vastly amusing. “But Peron, I’m cold.”

“Good, you’re waking up.” He pointed to an assortment of garments in a heap by their side. “Help yourself to any that fit you. I’ve got to see how the others are doing.”

“Peron!” She shivered, then reached out and gave Peron a hug strong enough to make their ribs creak. “Explain. What’s been happening to me?”

“Tell you later.” He returned the embrace with interest. “Come on. I may need help to get Lum out. He should have been called Lump.”

Elissa rummaged through the pile and found an adequate set of coveralls while Peron opened the door of the next tank and did his best to pull out its occupant. There was a good deal of grunting and swearing. Lum was semi-conscious, and offering plenty of disorganized resistance.

“Here. Let me have a go at him.” Elissa moved round to the other side and leaned over. She took hold of Lum’s hair and gave it a great tug. He came suddenly upright, his eyes popped wide open, and he yelped in protest.

“No need to do that. I’m awake.” His eyes closed again, and he started to sink back. “It’s all right, I’m awake, I’ll be up in just a minute.”

“Pull his hair again, then give him a hand with his clothes,” said Peron. “See if you can find anything big enough. Kallen’s next, but I bet he’ll be easier. Rosanne told me Lum sleeps like a dead man, even under normal conditions.” In a few more minutes Rosanne and Kallen had been brought back to groggy wakefulness. Peron left them sighing and shivering and searching for warm clothes. Sy was processed last of all. He went instantly from sleep to full attention. Even as his eyes popped open he was twisting sideways like a cat, moving his body to a defensive posture.

“Relax,” said Peron. “You’re with friends.”

Sy gave Peron one brief, incredulous look, then stared around him. “Where am I? Last thing I remember we were in the Whirlygig dome. What happened?” “That’s a long story. Get some clothes on, and follow me. I’ll explain as we go.”

Peron led them to the dining room, where Ferranti and the others were finally showing signs of movement. Garao was halfway to the door, one foot clear of the floor.

“I wanted each of you to see this to save arguments,” said Peron. “Or you might have told me I was chewing dillason weed. Fourteen hours ago I was in that condition. That’s S-space. Remember how much we were troubled by the idea that the Immortals could travel to the stars in days?”

“I still don’t believe it,” said Sy. “They can’t exceed light-speed.” “You’re right — but you’re wrong, too. Here’s a question for all of you. How far does light travel in one second, or in one year?”

There was a brief silence.

“We all know the answer to that,” said Rosanne. “So I assume it’s a trick question.”

“In a way,” said Peron. “The answer depends on your definition of a second and a year. We’ve been thinking about S-space all wrong. It’s not some sort of parallel universe, or hyperspace. It’s the same space we live in, but S-space is a state of changed perception. If you want proof, look at these people.” Kallen had been watching Olivia Ferranti very closely. “She seems to be unconscious,” he said softly. “And her skin is cold. But her eyes are open. They’re alive, that’s clear. Are they hibernating?”

“No. Each of them is fully conscious. In that condition you feel normal except for a few subtle differences. But their metabolisms have been drastically slowed — two thousand times slower than usual. That’s S-space, and it changes your perception of everything. In one of our seconds, light travels three hundred thousand kilometers. In one of theirs, it travels six hundred million kilometers. To us, Sol is eighteen light-years away. To them, it’s only a little more than three light-days. That’s why we heard that the Immortals can travel between the stars in days — their days. Time passes so slowly for them that what feels like a day to us they experience as less than a minute.”

Peron went close to Garao and passed his hand slowly in front of the other’s face. “See? They don’t even know we’re here.” He moved over to the stationary figure of Atiyah, removed the belt from around the man’s tubby middle, and looped it around Olivia Ferranti’s neck. “In about twenty minutes he’ll notice that his belt is missing. In another hour of our time he’ll begin to wonder where it went. It will be an hour more before he can do anything to get it back.”

The others made their own inspections, touching skin and fingering hair. “How did they get this way?” asked Lum.

“The same way that I did, when Wilmer operated on me back on Whirlygig. I know that’s not much of an answer, but it’s the best one I can give you. There has to be a complicated treatment, but it must be fairly standardized — and it’s fully reversible. I’ve been both ways, and so has Captain Rinker. He had to go back to normal living to fix a mechanical problem with this ship. Let’s take a look at the ship now. We’ll all need that information later.”

Peron led the way back through to the suspense room. As they went he responded to their torrent of questions. The ship they were travelling on was deep in interstellar space, heading for the headquarters of the Immortals. That headquarters was far from any sun or planet, a full light-year away from the Cass system. They were moving at only a fraction of light-speed — probably no more than a tenth. During their journey, nearly ten years would pass back on Pentecost.

The other Planetfest winners were not on board. Their fate could only be conjectured, but Peron thought they were all still back in the Cass system, probably living on The Ship. That was where the Immortals lived in the Cass system. The other winners would probably become Immortals themselves after some kind of indoctrination. They would prefer to live in S-space for the longer subjective life span it offered, and they would return to normal life, as Wilmer had done, only for special duties.

“How long does an Immortal live?” asked Sy. “It’s obvious that nobody can be truly immortal.”

“Seventeen hundred years.”

There was another long silence. Finally Elissa said: “You mean seventeen hundred subjective years? That’s two thousand times seventeen hundred ordinary years back on Pentecost — three million four hundred thousand. They live three million four hundred thousand years!”

“Right,” said Peron cheerfully. Adjusting to that idea hadn’t been easy, and he was glad to see that others had the same reaction. “Of course, that’s only a conjecture. As Dr. Ferranti pointed out, they can only make estimates of full life span — because no one has lived it yet. It’s only twenty thousand years or so since we left Earth, and no one was living in S-space there.”

“But what about side effects?” said Elissa. “When you make such a profound change…”

“I only know of a couple,” said Peron. He brushed his hand through his hair. “See? It has stopped growing, and I think I was starting to lose it in S-space. Better get ready to lose those beautiful locks, Rosanne. I think that when you change metabolic rates for a while you become hairless. That’s what happened to Wilmer, and the other contestant Kallen met. Back on Whirlygig I couldn’t believe it when Wilmer told me that he had been in trouble there three hundred years before. But it makes sense now. That was just a few months in S-space. He was living there until he was with us in the ‘Fest. A hundred years on Pentecost would be only a few weeks for him.”

“That would explain why we only saw videos of former winners,” said Lum. “They didn’t come back to Pentecost. But there’d be no problem with videos. They could take them at S-space speed, then speed them up so they’d look normal. Personal appearances would be impossible unless they had moved back to normal time — N-space, you called it.”

“And they’ll be reluctant to do that,” said Peron. “They lose the benefit of extended life expectancy when they leave S-space. You have to eat special food there, and you don’t feel quite normal. But people will put up with a lot to increase their subjective life span by a factor of twenty.”

They were again in the suspense chamber. Peron led them into and through one of the caskets, using it as a convenient path to the other parts of the ship. There was a substantial temperature change as they passed through the suspense tank, and they all loosened their warm clothing.

“I’ll tell you one thing I still don’t understand,” Peron said. “When I was in S-space, I felt as though I was in a one-gee environment. Now we’re in exactly the same part of the ship, but we’re in freefall. I don’t see how that can happen.”

There was silence for a while, then Kallen made a little coughing noise. “T-squared effect,” he said softly.

“What?”

“He’s quite right,” Sy said calmly. “Good for you, Kallen. Don’t you see what he’s saying? Accelerations involve the square of the time — distance per second per second. Change the definition of a second, and of course you change the perceived speed. That’s why they can travel light-years in what they regard as a few days. But you change perceived acceleration, too — and you change that even more. By the square of the relative time rates — “

“ — which is another reason the Immortals don’t go down to the surface of planets,” said Lum. “They want to spend their time in S-space to increase their subjective lifespans, but then that forces them to live in a very weak acceleration field. They can’t take gravity.”

“Not even a weak field,” added Rosanne. “They’d fall over before they even knew they were off balance. What did you say the time factor was? — two thousand to one? Then even a millionth of a gravity would be perceived by them as a four-gee field. They have to live in freefall. They have no choice about it. But they perceive a four-millionth of a gee as normal gravity.”

Peron looked around him in disgust. “All right. So everybody saw it easily except me. Try another one. Tell me what’s going on outside the ship. One reason I thought at first that S-space had to be some kind of hyperspace was the view from the ports. When you look out, you don’t see stars at all. All you see is a sort of faint, glowing haze. It’s yellow-white, and it’s everywhere outside the ship.”

This time there was not even a moment’s pause.

“Frequency shift,” said Sy at once. “Let’s see. Two thousand to one. So the wavelengths your eyes could see would be two thousand times as long. Instead of yellow light at half a micrometer, you’d see yellow at a millimeter wavelength. Where would that put us?”

There was a hush.

“The Big Bang,” whispered Kallen.

“The three degree cosmic background radiation,” said Rosanne. “My Lord. Peron, you were seeing leftover radiation from the beginning of the Universe — actually seeing it directly with your eyes.”

“And it’s uniform and close to isotropic,” added Lum. “That’s why it looked like a general foggy haze. At that wavelength you don’t get a strong signal from stars or nebulae, just a continuous field.”

“But it can’t be that straightforward.” Sy frowned. “The pupils of our eyes provide too small an aperture to deal with millimeter wavelengths. There has to be a lot more to S-space modification than the obvious changes.”

Peron looked at Elissa. “Don’t say anything. You’ll tell me it’s all obvious, too. I guess it is. But it was a lot more confusing when I had no idea I was dealing with a difference in time rates. I couldn’t imagine where I might be, for the universe to look like that. Here. Try your hands at something else. This time I think I know what’s going on, but I need help — especially from Sy and Kallen. You’re our computer specialists.”

He led them back along narrow corridors to the chamber where the patient robots sat in their silent rows. The others watched warily as three of the little machines came to life and glided past them along the passage.

“Don’t worry,” said Peron. “They don’t move fast enough to be dangerous. We can get out of the way, or even move them around if we have to. They’re the maintenance crew for the ship. All normal functions are automatic and under computer control. One person can run everything, and even he may be unnecessary except for emergencies. But the robots certainly made my life confusing. When I first found myself in S-space I thought I was going mad. Those machines were a big part of the reason. The other people on the ship could make things happen by magic. They asked for something to be done, or they asked to be taken somewhere, and it was accomplished instantly.”

Peron snapped his fingers. “Just like that. I tried to do the same thing, and it wouldn’t work for me. When I reached this chamber and saw the robots I finally understood what had been happening. The machines respond to commands given by people in S-space. The ship’s computer must be voice-coded through the terminals. When a command is given by someone whose voice is recognized and accepted by the system, the computer mobilizes the robots to carry out the instructions. They don’t move very fast, but they don’t have to. They’re quick enough to be invisible in S-space. Even if it takes the robots ten minutes to bring you a drink, or carry you from one part of the ship to another, you don’t notice. That’s only a fraction of a second as you perceive it.”

The others had moved closer to the ranks of robots and were looking at them curiously.

“They seem pretty standard,” said Sy. “I’ve never seen this design before, but they’re computer-controlled. We should be able to understand their instruction procedure.”

“But why?” said Rosanne. “Even when we understand it, Peron, what are we supposed to do with it?”

“Dig into the coding. Change it. Make it so that our voices can give acceptable commands, too. And maybe make it so that the system won’t respond to Captain Rinker and the others in S-space.”

“But what good will all that do?” Elissa was looking puzzled.

Lum grinned at her. “Isn’t it obvious?” He turned to Peron. “Rinker is quite right, Peron, you are a troublemaker. You intend to take over this ship. Then we’ll go and visit Immortal Headquarters — wherever that is — on our terms.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Olivia Ferranti blinked her eyes. The texture of the illumination seemed a little different, not quite the way that she remembered it before she last went to S-space; and her body was light, floating away, as though she was leaving part of her on the padded floor or the container.

She shivered and slowly sat up, rubbing at her chilled forearms; then she suddenly jerked to full wakefulness. She was being observed. Five faces were peering in warily at her through the transparent top of the suspense tank. She pulled herself forward to the casket’s door and eased it open. Peron was standing there, nervously watching.

“You read our message?” he said.

“Of course we did — you were watching us, weren’t you?”

He nodded. “We told you to send someone at once. But it seemed to take you an awful long time.”

Olivia Ferranti was breathing deeply, adjusting to the familiar but surprising taste of the air in her lungs. She shrugged her shoulders, as much for muscular experiment as for any body message.

“Four days — four days here. But we only talked for a few minutes in S-space. I call that a fast response.” She looked around her, at Peron and the others. “Relax. I was only sent here to talk. What do you think I’m going to do, knock the lot of you down and tie you up? Any one of you could beat me in a fight. You’re the Planetfest winners, remember?”

“We remember,” said Peron. “We just want to be sure that you do. You and the others. Why are you here, and not Rinker?”

“He made the transition very recently, just a couple of hours ago, when the automatic systems were going wrong. Transitions too close together have bad effects. In fact, frequent transitions shorten subjective life expectancy. And he doesn’t trust you, either.”

She licked her lips. “I guess he thinks I’m more expendable. Look, I know you’re in a hurry to talk, but I’d like a drink of water.”

Peron glanced briefly at the others, then led the way back through the winding corridor, taking them once more to the central food processing chamber of the ship.

“He didn’t really want anybody to talk to you,” said Ferranti as they moved along the corridor. “But he agreed that there was no choice. ‘They’ll be like a band of wild apes,’ he said. ‘Fiddling around with my ship! They don’t know how anything works — my God, there’s no way of knowing what they may do to it and to us!’ “

She looked around her at the intent young faces that closely watched her every movement. “I must say that I have to agree with him. I’m sure you’re feeling pretty cocky at the moment, with everything under control. But you could kill this ship by pure accident. It’s frightening — you’re smart, but there are so many things you simply don’t know.”

“So why don’t you tell us some of them?” Sy asked in a surly voice. “You’ll find we’re all quick learners.”

“I’m not supposed to tell you much — and some things I don’t even know myself. And before you get paranoid as to why I’m holding some things back from you, I’ll tell you the reason for that. There’s a sound logic for why you weren’t told everything back on Whirlygig.”

They had reached the food chamber. Olivia Ferranti bent over a water spigot, took a long, leisurely drink, then sighed and shook her head.

“That’s one of the things that I really miss. Water just doesn’t taste right in S-space.” She turned to face the group. “How much do you know about the history of your civilization on Pentecost?”

“We know that the first settlers came off The Ship,” said Peron. “It was called Eleanora, and it started out from a planet called Earth, thousands of years earlier.”

“That’s a beginning.” Olivia Ferranti settled herself cross-legged, floating a handsbreadth above the floor, and gestured to the others to gather round her there. “And if you’re anything like most of the candidates we get from Pentecost for indoctrination, that’s almost all that you’ll know. So make yourselves comfortable. I need to give you a bit of a history lesson. You may not like some of it too well, but bear with me.

“Eleanora was the biggest and most advanced of half a dozen arcologies that were built as colony ships in the Sol System, more than twenty-five thousand Earth-years ago. The arcologies were all constructed in orbits close to Earth. Just as Eleanora was close to complete, and the colonists had arrived on board it, the nations down on Earth did what we’d all been afraid they would do for generations. They went mad. Someone pulled the trigger, and after that there was no stopping it. It was a full-scale nuclear war.

“When that war happened, there were about thirty-five thousand people living away from Earth. They were working on mining and construction, or on applications satellites and stations, or they were inhabitants of the colony ships. We were all helpless, watching the world explode before our eyes. And at first none of us knew what to do next. We were numb with shock and horror.” “You said ‘we.’ You mean you were there — yourself?” asked Elissa.

“I was. Me, myself, in person. I was a physician on one of the orbiting space stations.” Olivia Ferranti shook her head and rubbed gently at her eyes. She seemed to be staring far beyond the circle of her listeners, out across space and time to the death of a planet. “Initially we just wouldn’t believe it. Earth couldn’t destroy itself like that. We knew it must have been terrible on the surface, because we had seen the whole globe change in a few hours from a beautiful blue-green marble to a dusky purple-black grape, and the smoke plumes had risen well into the stratosphere. Even so, emotional acceptance was beyond us. Somehow, beyond logic, we believed that the damage was temporary and the surface nations would recover. We waited for radio signals from survivor groups, messages that would tell us that civilization was still going on beneath those dark clouds of dust and smoke. The signals never came. After a few weeks we sent shuttles down into the atmosphere, shielded against high levels of radioactivity and designed to go down below the clouds and examine the surface. There was so much dust in the northern hemisphere that we could see nothing, not even from low altitude. We tried south of the equator, and after a couple of months we finally knew. It was the end.

“We couldn’t rule out the possibility of isolated survivors, clinging on to existence down there in the darkness. But as time went by even that hope seemed less and less likely.

“Some plants would survive, we knew that; and we felt sure there would be life in the sea — but we had no idea how much. We tried to calculate what would happen to the whole food chain when photosynthesis was reduced to less than a tenth of the usual value, but we had no faith in our answers. Anyway, they didn’t really make any difference. For mankind on Earth, it was the end. And we felt as though it was the end for us, too. We seemed like a handful of mourners, circling the funeral pyre of all our friends and relations.

“We were too shocked to think logically, but we were certainly far more than a handful. As I said, there were thirty-five thousand of us, with slightly more men than women. And we had ample power and materials available. There was no question that we could survive very well if we pooled our resources and all worked together. We knew it might be centuries before Earth could be re-visited and repopulated, but there was no reason why we could not go on indefinitely as a stable, spaceborne society.”

Ferranti smiled bitterly. “God knows, many of us had said we wanted just that for long enough. Then when we had no choice, most of us in our dreams imagined ourselves back on Terra.

“There’s one good thing about humans: we forget. Despair can’t last forever. We pulled ourselves together, little by little, and began to think again. On Salter Station we finally arranged for a radio conference of all the space groups. It was difficult to handle, because one arcology had been out near Mars, and we had long radio lags. But we pulled everyone into the circuits — all the arcologies, the mining groups that had been smelting from the Amor asteroids, and the scientists who had been building the Farside station up on Earth’s moon. Everything in space had always been controlled from Salter Station, so it seemed natural that we would still be the organizers.

“Natural to us, on Salter Station. But others didn’t see it that way. “The arcologies had been set up to be as self-sufficient as possible, with independent power plants and six-nines recycling systems. The other space facilities were different. They were dependent on supplies provided from Earth, or on spaceborne resources provided by the mining and extractive industries. “The first planning session to discuss pooling of resources went smoothly. Everyone participated. But when the time came to act, three of the arcologies backed out. I believe that they each operated independently, without even discussing it among themselves. They were afraid, you see — scared that the total group might not be stably self-sustaining, even though they had no doubt about their own ability to survive. There were other reasons, too. From the very beginning the arcologies had been developing their own social and political preferences and differences. Like called to like — colonists tended to apply to the same place as their friends, and to avoid a colony where their views would be ridiculed or in the minority. The last thing that Helena, Melissa, and Eleanora wanted was a merger with Salter Station and the other arcologies. They didn’t ever admit that they were not going to cooperate; they simply cut off radio contact and moved farther out, away from Earth.

“The rest of us were angry with them, but we didn’t take as much notice as you might think. We had our own hands full without them for the first few years. We had to establish our own system, self-sufficient and as foolproof as we could make it. That took ninety-nine percent of our energies. And the rest went into the work on reduced metabolic survival — what we finally called S-space existence. As a doctor I was naturally interested in that, and after a while I began to work on it exclusively. Within a couple of months of the first experiments with human subjects on Salter Station it was clear that we had something absolutely revolutionary, something that changed all our ideas about perception and human consciousness. But it took several years more before we saw the other implications. With our work, humanity had found the easy way to the stars. “There was no need for multi-generation arcologies, or for faster-than-light drives — “

“ — which seem to be impossible,” murmured Sy softly.

“Which may be impossible,” said Ferranti. “Keep an open mind. Anyway, we didn’t need them. The drive system research on Salter Station would allow us to accelerate a ship up to better than a tenth of light-speed, and that was enough. In Mode Two consciousness — S-space — a human being could remain fully aware, live an extended subjective life, and travel across the whole Galaxy in a single lifetime.

“That led to a new crisis. Everyone loved the idea of an extended subjective life span — if it were safe. But everyone was terrified of possible side effects. “We split into two groups. Some of us said, let’s move to S-space, and wait there at least until Earth is habitable again. No one knew how long that would be, but in S-space we could afford to wait centuries and perceive them as only a few weeks. Others were afraid. They argued that there were too many unknowns and too many risks in S-space living; until those were pinned down it was better to stay with our normal perception.”

Olivia Ferranti smiled ruefully. “As it turned out, both groups were right. Earth recovered slowly. It took more than a thousand years to develop new and stable plant and animal communities. None of us had ever dreamed it would be so long. And at the same time, we were discovering serious physical consequences of S-space living.

“Fortunately we didn’t fight over our differences of opinion on the move to S-space. Maybe the destruction of Earth had taught us all something about the need for peaceful resolution of conflicts. We agreed we would pursue both actions. Most people elected to stay as they were, creating a decent society in the spaceborne environment. After a few generations it was clear that a life in space was as satisfying as most of us had ever hoped. By then a few hundred of us had long since moved to S-space, using ourselves as the subjects for experiments that might reduce the risk for those who followed. While we were doing that we discovered a new mode of metabolic change, this one a true suspended animation. Five of you have personal experience of that cold sleep, here on the ship. We still don’t know how long someone can remain safely unconscious in that mode, but it’s certainly a long time — thousands of years at least.

“The move to S-space had two other important consequences. First, we realized that we couldn’t go back down and live on Earth, or anywhere with a substantial gravity field, even if we wanted to. That had been deduced when the experiments were still all on animals, and it was one major reason for moving the work out to orbit and away from the surface of Earth. You see, perceived accelerations — “ “We understand,” said Peron. “Kallen and Sy” — he pointed to them — “figured it out.”

“Smart.” Olivia Ferranti looked at the group appraisingly. “When I’m through, perhaps you’ll tell me a little more about yourselves. All I know so far is what I was told by Peron and by Captain Rinker.”

“Won’t he be wondering what’s happening?” said Rosanne. Then she stopped and put her hand to her mouth.

“He might — in a few more days.” Ferranti smiled and Rosanne grinned back at her. The initial tension of confrontation was fading. They were all increasingly absorbed in the first-person tale of remote history.

Olivia Ferranti leaned against the wall and pushed back the blue cowl from her forehead, to reveal a mop of jet-black tight curls. “We have lots of time. At the moment, Captain Rinker and the others hardly know I’ve left.” “But you’ve got hair!” blurted out Lum.

Olivia Ferranti raised her dark eyebrows at him. “I’m glad to hear that you think so.”

“It’s what I told them,” said Peron. “I thought S-space made you bald.” “It does. Didn’t you ever hear of wigs, down on Pentecost? Most of the men in S-space don’t worry about it, but I don’t care to face the world with a naked scalp. My ideas on the right way for me to look were fixed long before I ever dreamed of S-space. Anyway, I have a lumpy skull that I have no great desire to show off to others.” She patted her dark ringlets. “I much prefer this. The nice thing about it is that it will never go gray.”

“What else does S-space do to people?” asked Sy. More than the rest of them, except possibly for Kallen who had typically not spoken at all, Sy seemed reserved and unwarmed by Olivia Ferranti’s open manner.

“I’m getting there,” she said. “Let me tell you that in a few minutes. I want to do this in a logical order, and explain what happened after Earth had been destroyed. It’s important that you know, so you’ll understand why we behave the way we do in the Cass system.

“While we were still busy working out the stable society for life away from Earth, and some of us were also learning how to live in S-space, we didn’t have time to worry about what was happening to Eleanora and the other arcologies. And to tell the truth, we didn’t really give a damn. They’d selfishly deserted us, said our logic, so to hell with them. As far as we were concerned they could fly away and rot.

“But after a while those of us who were living in S-space — I was one of the first twenty people to take Mode Two hibernation — became pretty curious. You see, we knew we had the stars within reach. We had the drive we needed, and the time we needed. And Helena, Melissa, and Eleanora had all headed off outside the Solar System, in different directions. We didn’t know how much of the reason for their departure was an interest in exploration, and how much of it was fear of reprisals from us. We weren’t planning revenge of any kind, but how were they to know that? All three of them had shown signs of paranoia, back when they were first colonized. We got more and more curious to know what had happened to those three arcologies.

“Eventually we equipped four ships with service robots, similar to the ones on this ship, and with limited life-support systems. We didn’t need perfect recycling, only enough for a few months of travel in S-space. The final design gave the ships a useful exploration range of up to fifty light-years. At the slow speed of the arcologies, we knew they couldn’t be farther out than that. And the stellar profiles in the neighborhood of Sol gave us a fairly good idea where the colony ships were likely to be headed. Political systems change, but the physical constraints are still there. We thought we’d find them about twenty light-years out.

“When we had everything ready, our ships set off with their volunteer crews. We had no shortage of people willing to make the trip — I put my own name in, but didn’t make it. There were many with better qualifications than mine for interstellar cruising.

“As it happened, we had overestimated the distance they had gone. We had made insufficient allowance for the difficulties that Melissa and the others might be having on board. It hadn’t been a smooth ride by any means. There had been a civil war on Melissa, an economic collapse on Eleanora, and a power plant failure on Helena. Those variables affected both their speeds and their directions. Helena actually reversed and started back for Sol for a while, until the trouble was fixed and she could head outward again.

“Our ships had no trouble tracking and finding the arcologies. After all, they had no reason to expect pursuit, and nothing to be gained by concealing their presence. But when we reached them, we found that no arcology had found a habitable planet, and all three were still in deep interstellar space. After reporting back to us — S-space radio signal time was only a couple of days — it was agreed that we would not establish contact with them. We decided to do nothing, and not interfere in any way unless an arcology was in actual danger of extinction. They hadn’t asked for help, and we didn’t want to give it. Your ancestors would be allowed to wander around until either they found a habitable planet, or they decided that a permanent space life suited them better. Then we would reconsider possible contact.

“Our ships left automated tracking probes to follow the arcologies and report on their movements, and headed for home.

“It may seem strange to you that we had so little interest in the arcologies. But we were in no hurry. We could wait in S-space and see what developed. And certainly we had plenty of other things to interest us, because by that time Earth was finally being visited again on a regular basis.

“Still we had doubts that humans could thrive there. The long dust-winter had exterminated ninety percent of the plant species, and all land-based animal forms bigger than the rat — I mean an Earth rat, not one of the thirty-kilo monsters you call rats on Pentecost. We also found that the surviving plants and animals had changed from their old forms. The grasses were unrecognizable. Many of the old food plants tasted wrong in subtle ways, and some had lost all their nutritional value. We all realized that it would take millennia to restore Earth and make it a place worth living. But oddly enough, we all thought it a worthwhile effort — even those who had found life on Earth absolutely intolerable before the holocaust.

“By the time that the Earth visits began we were feeling much more comfortable about S-space. Some of us had been living there for many Earth-generations, and we were all fine — better than fine, because we didn’t seem to be aging at all. Our best estimate, based on limited data, was that the aging rate was twenty times as slow subjectively as it was in normal living. That extrapolated to a seventeen hundred year subjective lifetime — and even if we were wrong by a factor of two, that was still a mighty attractive thought.

“When our result became known, naturally more and more people wanted to move to S-space. It didn’t happen overnight, but as time went by we learned how to make the transitions both ways, with minimal danger. By then we also knew the big problem with S-space existence.”

“You keep referring to problems and never telling us about them,” said Elissa. “What problem?”

“I’ve not been talking because I’m not supposed to talk,” said Ferranti. “No one back on Pentecost should know what I’m telling you until they’ve been through indoctrination, and not one of you has; but you’ll realize the problem for yourselves in two seconds as soon as we arrive at local Headquarters, so I’m not revealing any great secrets.”

Olivia Ferranti moved her thin hands to her cheeks, framing her eyes. “You’ll find no children at Headquarters,” she said abruptly. “A woman cannot conceive in S-space, or a man produce active sperm. S-space is a wonderful place for an individual, but it’s an evolutionary blind alley. Worse than that, anyone who makes frequent transitions between S-space and normal space suffers reduced fertility.

“That presented us with a terrible choice. Did we opt for extended personal life span in S-space, or would we guarantee the survival of the human race by staying in normal space?

“While we were still agonizing over that, we received a signal from the probe that had been tracking Melissa. The colony ship was in the Tau Ceti system, and it had finally found a habitable planet. They were exploring it. We eventually found out that they had named it Thule.

“It was twelve light-years from Earth, which made it a four week one-way journey in S-space when we allowed for acceleration and deceleration. I don’t think I mentioned it, but no matter how we tried we had been unable to come up with an economical drive that would take us much faster than a tenth of light-speed. But it wasn’t important any more. As you can see, that’s good enough when you live in S-space.

“Our ship went out, and in due course it made contact with Melissa. That first meeting was traumatic for the Melissa inhabitants. They had left Earth twelve thousand years earlier — five hundred generations of shipboard life. Earth was nothing but a distant legend. It was something that was still talked about, but stories of Earth’s destruction were regarded as of the same practical importance as tales about the Garden of Eden. When our crew contacted them and claimed to remember the death of Earth, that was too much for the Melissans to take. “After we learned something of their history since leaving the solar system, we could see why. They had never had a stable and trustworthy government that lasted more than a century. We found historical evidence of every form of rule from water-control to neo-Confucianism. When they discovered Thule they were just recovering from the effects of a long dictatorship. Their mistrust and suspicion was considerable. Even the most rational of them had difficulty believing that our intentions were wholly innocent, nothing more than curiosity to learn how another culture was faring after so long without any kind of planetary home. They would not let us visit their colony on Thule. Putting it mildly, they suspected our motives.”

Olivia Ferranti slowly shook her head. “And, of course, they were wholly correct in doing so. Even in S-space, one is not wholly protected from accidents and disease. There would inevitably be deaths, and without replenishment we foresaw our society shrinking — not at once, but over many thousands of Earth years. In Melissa and the other arcologies we saw a possible answer.

“Either we were unusually stupid, or we were simply naive. To make the Melissans believe us, and to show how we could be people who actually remembered Earth’s final war, we explained S-space to them.

“They went crazy. They wanted S-space more than anything else in the Universe. You see, we were misled by our own experiences. We had been slow to accept and move to S-space. We didn’t realize that our reluctance wouldn’t apply to them. They hadn’t been there for the early, risky experiments. To them, our existence proved that S-space must be safe. So they thought we were deliberately goading them, tormenting them with a look at immortality while refusing to share its secret with them.

“Most of our ship’s crew had gone on board Melissa. They took them, eight men and six women, and tried to draw the secret of S-space from them by force. It was useless, of course. The conversion equipment was on the ship, as it is on this ship, and the crew had used it to go from S-space to the perception rate of the Melissans. But they didn’t know the theory, any more than Garao or Captain Rinker know the theory.

“The inquisitors tortured those crew members to death. Only the two who had remained on our ship were able to escape and come back to tell us what had happened.

“That’s when we adopted our rules for interaction with all colony ships and colony worlds. We would have limited contact, and it would be handled with great care and with fixed procedures. We would never again return ourselves to normal space for the purpose of first contact, as was done with Melissa. Contact would be done with robots as intermediaries; and we would never, under any circumstances, allow ourselves to fall into the hands of the colonists.” Olivia Ferranti shrugged. “We just flunked that one, right here. Well, let’s skip forward four thousand years. That’s when another of the arcologies, Helena, finally found a habitable planet. They named it Beacon’s World, colonized it, and moved on. That’s when we learned another lesson. Beacon’s World was settled long before we sent a ship to visit it. When our ship finally got there we found that the population had increased from the original few thousand to forty million; but along the way much of their scientific knowledge had been lost, or had degenerated to hearsay and legend.

“We tried to help. We reintroduced the basis for a more advanced technology. They were keen to receive the information from us — but they applied it to weapons development. Then they started a war, between the two major settlement centers on Beacon’s World. Our ship and crew felt helpless, watching while they slaughtered each other. But we felt we had to do something — it was impossible to stand by, uninvolved, when we knew the information we provided had allowed the conflict to be so savage. The crew of our ship tried a desperation tactic: through our robots, they ordered the warring parties to stop fighting — without saying what would happen if the order were disobeyed.

“It worked. The fighting stopped.

“We had learned another important truth. By being ‘Immortals,’ with a technology and a life pattern that was incomprehensible to the colonists, we could have enormous influence.

“That provided us with our next rule of contact: remain as aloof and mysterious as possible. And if we recruited anyone to join us in S-space — we wanted only exceptional specimens — we would introduce them to our society gradually, through a long and thorough indoctrination.

“Our rules worked very well. People joined us from Maremar and Jade — two other planets settled by Helena — and have been working in those systems and at Headquarters for thousands of Earth-years.

“Finally, there was your world. You probably don’t know it, but Pentecost is a very recent addition to our planetary visits. We found you only a few months ago, as we perceive time in S-space, and it was a minor miracle that we found you at all.

“You see, Eleanora was the unlucky one of the colony ships. The other two arcologies found several planets suitable for settlements. But your ancestors had to wander the interstellar wilderness for over fifteen thousand years, without ever once approaching a habitable world. We know why, now. For the past four thousand Earth-years we’ve been able to predict pretty well the stellar systems and planets likely to support life. And Eleanora just went to the wrong star systems, in terms of our new knowledge. Unfortunately, that same knowledge led us astray in following Eleanora, when our tracking probe finally wore out. As it happens, the Cass system is generally not suited to life, or the occurrence of habitable worlds. The existence of Pentecost, Gimperstand, Fuzzball, and Glug is an accident, the by-product of resonance locks between planetary orbits.

“We could have found you on Pentecost four thousand years ago if we had thought to look. As it was, we only detected your radio emissions a few hundred years ago. And we finally made contact with you.

“We followed our standard rules. Slow and limited involvement, and don’t try to change the government of the world. As it happens, Pentecost has had a classical totalitarian regime ever since first contact — a government more concerned to remain in power than anything else, and sublimely disinterested in interstellar affairs. From our point of view, that was perfect. Everything worked according to plan for hundreds of your years — until this Planetfest, when Headquarters was informed that an unusual group of winners was likely. You don’t know who the winners will be in advance, you see, but our people down on Pentecost had a pretty good idea. We expected trouble, but we didn’t know what. Personally, I think something would have happened even if Wilmer hadn’t taken the action he did on Whirlygig. Your profiles are all too far away from the standard patterns. But that’s my speculation. The main thing is, something did happen. And” — Olivia Ferranti looked at the intent young faces around her and shook her head — “here we are. We have to decide what will happen next.

“I’ll accept that you have control of the ship. And I hope you’ll accept my word when I tell you your control could be dangerous, with the limited knowledge you have. The present situation is bad for everyone, including you. So let me start the ball rolling for more discussions, by telling you that I was sent here with a proposition from all of us — even including Captain Rinker.”

The group around her came to life. They were suddenly fidgeting, looking at each other questioningly. For over half an hour their present situation had been pushed into the background by interest in the fate of others. The return to the present was an uncomfortable one.

Peron met the eyes of each of them in turn. Finally he nodded.

“We’ve nothing to lose by listening to you, so long as you remember that we have physical control of you and of the ship. So all right. We’ll listen. What’s your proposition?”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Slowly, millimeter by millimeter, Olivia Ferranti’s eyes were opening. A thin line of white had appeared behind the long false eyelashes. It broadened, to become a slender crescent. The lids crept apart, at last, to reveal dilated pupils and the luminous brown irises, flecked with gold.

“That’s it,” said Peron finally. “She’s in S-space. At last. There’s no way that anyone could fake an awakening like that. Let’s get back to the chamber and talk.”

Every one of the six had known that a discussion was urgently needed; but the urge to watch Olivia Ferranti had been irresistible and tacitly admitted by all. They had gathered around the great tank as she prepared to enter. They watched in silence while she, impressively calm, went inside. And as soon as the heavy casket door slid into sealed position she lay back, stared up at them through the transparent upper surface, and gave a little wave of her fingertips. Then she reached for the interior control panel and hit the key sequence to initiate her return to S-space.

After a few seconds, clusters of contact sprays moved to drift a fine fluid vapor over her limbs and body, while delicate catheters snaked from the casket walls and insinuated themselves gently into the orifices of her head and trunk. A dense yellow-green vapor filled the interior of the tank, rising after a few minutes to hide Olivia Ferranti’s still form in a soft-edged shroud. There was little to see after that, but they had stood waiting for almost two hours, exchanging brief phrases in hushed tones. Only when the air in the casket finally cleared and Olivia Ferranti began to stir again to slow consciousness were they able to think of other matters.

And now, watching her eyes creep open, they all felt a renewed and ridiculous sense of urgency. Logic said that another day or two of their thought and discussion would pass unnoticed to Rinker and the others in S-space, but the sense of haste went beyond logic. That feeling dimmed a little as they moved back to the computer chamber, and found the control settings and service robots exactly as they had left them.

“So what do you think?” said Peron abruptly, as they settled down in a close circle by the gently flickering displays of the main computer console. “I believe her,” said Rosanne at once.

“I don’t,” Sy added promptly. “She was lying to us.”

“Lum?”

“Some of each.” Lum massaged his full cheeks with one hand, and furrowed his brow. “Mostly I believe her. She kept pretty close to the truth, but I think she exercised selective memory. She left some things out.”

“She sure did.” Sy’s thin face wore a scowl. “Things she didn’t tell us. I could list ten of them. What happens if we reject their suggestion? Who makes the rules that decide what we ought to know, and when? What’s supposed to happen if a Planetfest winner doesn’t swallow the party line? Where do they go? One thing’s for sure, they don’t go back home to Pentecost. I wonder if they have convenient ‘accidents’ in the Cass system — we know there’s ample scope for that around the Fifty Worlds.”

“We’re getting ahead of ourselves,” said Lum. He wriggled uncomfortably inside his jacket, a brown garment too tight in the chest and short in the sleeves. “Let’s take Ferranti’s story one piece at a time, and see what we agree on. Anything?”

“I thought her history lesson sounded genuine,” volunteered Elissa. “So did I,” said Peron.

“More to the point,” said Lum, “I can’t see what advantage she would gain by lying. And I believe her when she says that we are now on our way to their headquarters. But some of her other statements struck me as false. For one thing, I don’t really believe that we’re a danger to the ship and to ourselves, just because we’re strangers here and in normal space. We didn’t get through the Planetfest trials without learning caution. We know how to be careful, and we look before we leap. I think she said we were in danger because they want us in S-space, where they can keep an eye on us. They want to be in control. Well, we can’t afford that. Sy, how’s the reprogramming going for the service robots?” “Done. They’ll obey our voice commands now. But Kallen and I have a question. Do we want it so the computer will activate the service robots in response to our voices, and no one else’s? Or should we leave it working for Ferranti and the others, too?”

“Must it be one or the other?” said Lum. “Couldn’t you set a trigger, so that we can cut people out if we choose to, based on our voice command? Then we’d be quite safe.”

Sy raised his eyebrows inquiringly at Kallen, who pursed his lips and massaged his scarred throat.

“Think so,” he said after a moment. “I’ll try it.”

“All right.” Lum nodded. “Before you do that, let’s think a bit more about what we were told by Ferranti. What about their headquarters? According to her, it’s about a light-year away from Pentecost. But why put it there? If the rest of her story is true, there are fewer colonies near the Cass system than anywhere else. It would make more sense to locate Immortal Headquarters near Tau Ceti, or some other star with more habitable planets.”

“I can answer that,” said Peron. “When I was first awakened, Ferranti referred to Sector Headquarters. That means there ought to be others, in other systems. Remember, according to Ferranti all the colonies are twenty light-years or less away from Sol. For S-space travel, that’s only at most a five-week trip. I’ll bet there are several Sector Headquarters, one near each stellar system that was colonized.”

“So where is General Headquarters?” asked Elissa. “Is there one?” “I’ll bet there is,” said Lum. “Even the Immortals would need some sort of overall organization of resources. And didn’t you get the feeling that at the headquarters we are headed for most of the rules are followed, not made?” “So where is the central one?” repeated Elissa. “Where’s main headquarters?” Lum put his hands up to his head and rubbed at his thick shock of mousy-brown hair. “Lord knows. We have to rethink everything, if travel to the stars is so easy for them. Headquarters could be a hundred light-years away from here. That’s only six months trip in S-space. But it wouldn’t make much sense. Even in S-space, it would be hard to manage an organization where messages take weeks to get around the system.”

“You’re making it hard,” said Sy softly. “Think simple.”

“You mean Sector Headquarters is the only one?”

“No. Think Sol.”

The others looked at him, then at each other.

“He’s right, as usual,” said Peron. “All the ships started from Earth. It was the center of the sphere of expansion, so it’s still the natural hub for coordinating colonies and sector headquarters. Main Headquarters ought to be Earth.”

There was another silence.

“Earth!” said Rosanne at last. Her voice was hushed, and the word came from her lips like a benediction. “If General Headquarters is back on Earth, maybe we can go there…”

“Not actually on Earth,” said Lum. “We know you can’t go down to a planet’s surface if you live in S-space.”

Kallen was shaking his head. “No. Can’t live on planet. We could visit.” He looked greatly excited.

“He’s quite right, you know,” said Sy. “We all agree that anyone in S-space wouldn’t be able to keep their balance in anything more than a micro-gravity field. But perception and physical tolerance are nothing to do with each other. Your body could stand gravity all right. You’d have to be supported and restrained, but you could visit the surface of Earth — or of Pentecost — living in S-space.”

“That would be enough,” said Rosanne suddenly. “Even a short visit, in S-space or in normal space. I want to go to Earth, see where everything began. We’ve talked about it and thought about it so much. Can you imagine flying down through the atmosphere, and walking on Earth’s surface?”

“Steady on,” said Peron. “Don’t get carried away. Sol is eighteen light-years from here. I know that’s only a few weeks travel in S-space, but it’s nearly two centuries back on Pentecost. Everyone we know there would be long dead before we even reached Earth, let alone came back to Cass.”

Rosanne shrugged. “I can’t speak for you, but I already said goodbye to all my best friends. It’s curious, but I think we were set up for it. We said our farewells before we lifted off from Pentecost. Remember, they encouraged us to do it, and we thought it was in case we died in the off-planet trials? But it makes sense. If winners go through indoctrination and move to S-space, they would outlive all their contemporaries on Pentecost in just a few S-space weeks. Do you realize that the people we left back home have already aged five years since we last saw them?”

“I’ve been thinking of that,” said Lum. “I’m not like you, Rosanne, I really miss some of the friends I left — and I’d like to see them again sometime. That’s something else we ought to be worrying about. We’ve been dealing with Olivia Ferranti on the ‘united we stand’ basis, as though we all have identical objectives and want the same things. But we don’t. I know you all well enough to be sure that’s not true. We should get our personal preferences out on the table, so we’ll know what we’re bargaining for with the Immortals.” “But what are our options?” said Elissa. “We can go to Headquarters, I suppose, and live in S-space there. Or we could return to Cass and live on The Ship, and work with the government of Pentecost. But I’m sure they won’t let us go back down to the surface of Pentecost, and live the way we used to do, even if we want to. We know too much. Maybe they’d let us go to one of the other colonies. Or maybe we can go to Earth.”

“That’s why I’d like to know what we want,” said Lum. “We each have our own desires and priorities — but what are they?”

“Why don’t you start?” said Rosanne. “It’s your question, and it gives the rest of us more time to think.”

“Fair enough.” Lum took a deep breath. “I’ve known what I want ever since the moment when I found out there are other planets and colonies, and a way to reach them in a reasonable time. Ferranti mentioned at least seven inhabited planets, and I’ll bet there are more. I want to move to S-space, and see everything. I’d like to visit every planet, and every arcology, and every headquarters. If I could do it, I’d like to see every planet in the Galaxy — even if most of them prove to be like Glug.”

Rosanne nodded. “I don’t know if that’s all possible, but at least you’re voting for a move to S-space — otherwise you’d be dead long before you reached your first colony. Sy? What about you?”

“Wandering around forever isn’t for me.” Sy was smiling, but there was something in his look that suggested his disdain for Lum’s travel plans. “I want to visit Immortal Headquarters — whichever one is the most appropriate, wherever their science is farthest developed. What we learned on Pentecost is probably generations out of date. After that, I’d like to visit the galactic center.” “That’s thirty thousand light-years!” said Peron.

“Sure it is. I don’t mind. If I have to go back to cold sleep for a while to get there, I’ll do it. The rest of us have all been under once, and it wasn’t a bad experience.”

Rosanne was staring at him and shaking her head. “Sy, I worked with you on the Planetfest trials, and I know you’re pretty much all right — but you’re certainly weird. The galactic center!”

He grinned back at her. “So? Let’s hear from somebody normal, then. Where do you want to go?”

“Well…” She hesitated. “I like the Cass system, and I liked Pentecost. But I agree with Elissa, they wouldn’t let us go back there for a long time. So forget that. I’d certainly like to see Earth — who wouldn’t? Apart from that I suppose I’m a lot like Lum. I want to see lots of other places, wander around the colonies and the habitable planets, see what’s there…”

Elissa winked at Peron. I told you so, said her look. I win that bet. Rosanne’s a lot more interested in Lum than she’ll ever admit.

“What about you, Peron?” she said loudly.

Peron looked as perplexed as he felt. “I’m not at all sure, and I just wish I knew. I want it all — to be back home on Pentecost, to travel, and to take a really close look at the Immortals.”

“You’re not much help!”

“I know. I suppose the best answer is that I can’t say for the long term. But for the moment I want to know more about S-space, and the only way to do that is to move there for a while. Olivia Ferranti makes me feel like a child in the cradle. She didn’t exactly say it, but she must think we’re upstart babies. When I think of all that she has seen and done, and the things she told us about…”

“Not to mention all the things she has seen and done, and not told us about,” said Sy drily. “Kallen, it’s your turn.”

The tall youth nodded. He stood silent for a while, as though organizing his words.

“Rosanne told Sy he was strange,” he said at last. He smiled shyly. “I am afraid that she will judge me even more so.” He cleared his throat, and spoke louder than any of them had heard before. “Back on Pentecost, I lay awake at night with my own dreams. I wondered what we are, as a species, and what in time we might become. It has always seemed to me that humans are best regarded as a transitional stage, something between animals and what may come after. I speculated. What will that next phase be? The question always seemed an unanswerable one; but no longer. I want to see the future — the far future. And like Sy, I will be happy to return to cold sleep in order to accomplish that.” He smiled again. “After I have had a good look at S-space, but not before.” “I always told the others you were the dreamer,” said Elissa. “The far future? You’re worse than Sy. Let’s see, what conclusions do we have? We’re quite a mixed bag. We’ve got two votes for the colonies, and for taking the grand tour; one for science and the galactic center; one for the future; and one who’s not sure just what he wants. What else? We all think we’re not getting the whole story, and that Olivia Ferranti knows things about S-space life that she hasn’t told us. Nobody relishes the notion of spending a long time at local Headquarters, but we know we’ll have to start there. And I gather we’re all itching to take a trip to Earth if we can find a way to do it. That’s my summary. Anything missing?”

“At least one thing,” said Peron. “There’s still one person we’ve not heard from. What about you, Elissa — what do you want to do?”

She gave him a peculiar stare. “You mean, where will I go? Peron, you’re a bone-headed idiot and a blind tardy. Are you trying to embarrass me?” To Peron’s surprise there was a burst of laughter and incoherent comments from the other four.

“You name it, Peron!” said Lum.

“Name it. Name what?”

“Anything you like.”

“Lum’s right,” said Elissa. She moved across to Peron and hugged him, while the others cheered.

“You name it.” She ran her knuckles along his ribs. “Shake me loose — if you can. I’m going where you’re going, and it would be kind of nice if you’d make up your mind and tell me where that is. But you don’t have to do it now, because it looks like we all agree on the next step. We go to S-space, then to Earth. Think it’s feasible?”

“We’ll have to do some arm-twisting,” said Lum. “But we have an awful lot of power so long as one of us is here in normal space. Do you realize that a tiny boost from the engines of this ship, one we wouldn’t notice, would make it impossible for anyone in S-space to stand up? You can bet that they all know it — they must be wondering what we might do next.”

“So let’s tell them we’re ready for the next round of bargaining,” said Peron. “And let’s insist that it be done here, not in S-space. That’s going to make any of them uncomfortable, and eager to get back to their usual environment. Agreed?”

The others nodded.

“I can hardly wait to see S-space,” added Rosanne. “I hope that Kallen and Sy changed the control program correctly. I like the idea of all my wishes being granted.

“Or at least.” She did not look at Lum. “Most of them.”