Steel Beach

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Mister V.M. Smith, leader of the Heinleiners, was a tall man, ruggedly handsome in the mold of some of our more virile movie stars, with white, even teeth that flashed with little points of light when he smiled and blue eyes that twinkled with wisdom and compassion.

Did I say he was tall? Actually, he was a little shrimp of a guy. Or, come to think of it, I'd say he was of medium height. And by golly, maybe his hair was black and curly. Ugly he was, with a snaggled-toothed smile like a dead pig in the sunshine. Hell, maybe he was bald.

When you get right down to it, I'm not even going to swear he was male.

I think the heat is largely off of him by now, but he (or she) thinks differently, so there will not even be a description of him from me. My portraits of the other Heinleiners, children included, are deliberately vague and quite possibly misleading. To picture him, do what I do when reading a novel: just pick a famous face you like and pretend he looks like that. Or make your own composite. Try a young Einstein, with unruly hair and a surprised expression. You'll be wrong, although I will swear there was a look in his eyes as if the universe was a much stranger place than he'd ever imagined.

And that business about leading the Heinleiners… if they had a leader, he was it. It was Smith who had made their isolated way of life possible with his researches into forgotten sciences. But the Heinleiners were an independent bunch. They didn't go in for town meetings, were unlikely to be found on the rosters of service clubs-didn't really hold much of a brief for democracy, when you get right down to it. Democracy, one of them said to me once, means you get to do whatever the majority of silly sons of bitches says you have to do. Which is not to say they favored dictatorship ("getting to do what one silly son of a bitch says you have to do." op. cit.). No, what they liked (if I may quote one more time from my Heinleiner philosopher) was forgetting about all the silly sons of bitches and doing what they damn well pleased.

This is a hazardous way of life in a totally urbanized society, apt to land you in jail-where an embarrassing number of Heinleiners did live. To live like that you need elbow room. You need Texas, and I mean the real Texas, before the arrival of the iron horse, before the Mexicans, before the Spaniards. Hell, maybe before the Indians. You needed the Dark Continent, the headwaters of the Amazon, the South Pole, the sound barrier, Everest, the Seven Lost Cities. Wild places, unexplored places, not good old stodgy old Luna. You needed elbow room and adventure.

A lot of Heinleiners had lived in disneys, some still did as at least a better alternative to the anthill cities. But it didn't take long to discover what toy frontiers they actually were. The asteroid belt and the outer planets had high concentrations of these crotchety malcontents, too, but it had been a long time since either place had been a real challenge to humanity. A lot of ship's captains were Heinleiners, a lot of solitary miners. None of them were happy-possibly that type of person can never be happy-but at least they were away from the masses of humanity and less likely to get into trouble if offered an intolerable insult-like bad breath, or inappropriate laughter.

That's unfair. While there were quite a number of antisocial hotheads among them, most had learned to socialize with the group, swallow the unpleasantness of daily life, put up with the thousand small things we each endure every day. It's called civilization. It's making your needs, your dreams, subservient to the greater good, and we all do it. Some of us do it so well we forget we ever had dreams of adventure. The Heinleiners did it badly; they still remembered. They still dreamed.

Those dreams and five cents will get you a cup of coffee anywhere in Luna. The Heinleiners realized that, until Mister Smith came along and made them think fairy tales can come true, if you wish upon a star.

I followed Smith out of the farm, where he'd left his children and Libby hard at work cleaning out the kewpies' house. We were in one of the long corridors of the R.A. Heinlein, some of which, like this one, were coated with the silvery null-field. I was about to go after him when I remembered Winston. I stuck my head back into the room, snagged his helmet, and whistled, and he came lumbering out from beneath the tables. He was licking his chops and I thought I saw traces of blood around his mouth.

"Have you been eating horses again?" I asked him. He merely gazed up and licked his nose. He knew he wasn't supposed to get up on the tables, but there were always some horselets that had foolishly jumped off and he felt they were fair game. I didn't know what the kids thought of his hunting, since I didn't know if they were aware of it; I hadn't told them. But I know Winston was getting a taste for horsemeat.

I'd thought I'd have to hurry to catch up with Smith, but when I looked up I saw he'd paused a little way down the corridor and was waiting for me.

"So you're still around, eh?" he said. Yessir, my reputation in the old R.A.H. couldn't have been higher.

"I guess it's because I just love children."

He laughed at that. I'd only met him three times before and not talked to him very long on any of those occasions, but he was one of those people good at sizing others up on short acquaintance. Most of us think we are, but he was.

"I know they're not easy to love," he said. "I probably wouldn't love them so much if they were." It was a very Heinleinerish thing to say; these folks cherish perversity, you understand.

"You're saying only a father could love 'em?"

"Or a mother."

"That's what I'm counting on," I said, and patted my belly.

"You'll either love him quick, or drown him." We walked on for a while without saying anything. Every once in a while one of the null-field safety locks would vanish in front of us and re-appear behind us. All automatic, and all happening only for those with null-suits installed.

These people didn't engineer anything any better than they had to, and the reason was simply that they had this marvelous back-up system. It's going to be revolutionary, I tell you.

"I get the feeling you don't approve," he said, at last.

"Of what? Your kids? Hey, I was just-"

"Of what they do."

"Well, Winston sure does. I think he's eaten half their stock."

I was thinking fast. I wanted to learn more from this man, and the way to do that is not by running down his children and his way of life. But one of the things I knew about him was that he didn't like liars, was good at detecting them, and, though a career in reporting had made me a world-class liar, I wasn't sure I could get one by him. And I wasn't sure I wanted to. I had hoped I'd put a lot of that behind me. So instead of answering his question, I said something else, a technique familiar to any journalist or politician.

And it seemed to have worked. He just grunted, and reached down to pet Winston's ugly mug. Once more the hound came through for me, not taking off the hand at the wrist. Still digesting the horselet, probably.

We came to a door marked MAIN DRIVE ROOM, and he held it open for me. You could have driven a golf ball into the room and never hit a wall, and you could have driven a medium-size rover race in it. Whether you could drive a spaceship the size of the Heinlein was very much an open question. But in front of me were the signs that someone was trying.

Most of the cavernous room was filled with structures whose precise description I must leave to your imagination, since the drive room of the Heinlein is still a closely-guarded secret and certainly will be until long after they get the damn thing to work. I will say this: whatever you imagine will surely be far off the mark. It is unexpected, and startling, like opening the hood of a rover and finding it's powered by a thousand mice licking a thousand tiny crankshafts, or by the moral power of virginity. And this: though I could hardly identify anything as basic as a nut and bolt in the fantastical mess, it still had the look of Heinleiner engineering, wherein nothing is ever any better than it has to be. Maybe if they get time to move beyond prototypes they'll get more elegant and more careful, but in the meantime it's "Don't bend that wrench. Get a bigger hammer." Heinleiner toolboxes must be filled with bubblegum and bobby pins.

And yes, O good and faithful reader, they were planning to launch the hulk of the old Robert A. Heinlein into interstellar space. You heard it here first. They were not, however, planning to do it with an endless stream of nuclear cherry bombs pooting out the tailpipe. Just what principles were envisioned is still proprietary information, but I can say it was a variant technology of the mathematics that produced the null-field. I can say it because no one but Smith and a handful of others know what that technology is.

Just imagine them harnessing the old wreck to a team of very large swans, and leave it at that.

"As you can see," Smith was saying as we walked down a long and fairly rickety flight of metal stairs, "they've just about frabjulated the primary phase of the osmosifractionating de-hoo-dooer. And those guys ratattating the willy-nilly say they ought to have it whistling Dixie in three days' time."

No secrecy involved here. I'd have written exactly what he said, if I had any hope of remembering it, and the meaning would have been the same: nothing. Smith never seemed to mind if his audience was coming into the clubhouse two or three holes behind him; he rattled off his own private jargon without regard to whether or not it was being monitored. Sometimes I thought it just helped him to think out loud. Sometimes I thought he was showing off. Probably a little of both.

But I can't get away from the subject of the interstellar drive without mentioning the one time he made an attempt to put it in layman's terms. It stuck in my mind, possibly because Smith had a way of making "layman" rhyme with "retarded."

"There are basically three states of matter," he had said. "I call them wackiness, dogmatism, and perversity. The universe of our experience is almost totally composed of dogmatic matter, just as it's mostly what we call 'matter,' as opposed to 'anti-matter'-though dogmatic matter includes both types. Every once in a great while we get evidence of some perverse matter. It's when you move into the realm of the wacky that you have to watch out."

"I've known that all my life," I had told him.

"Ah, but the possibilities!" he had said, waving his hand at the drive taking shape in the engine room of the Heinlein.

As he did now, providing the sort of segue I hate when a director does it in a movie, but the fact is Smith had a habit of waving his hand grandly when coming upon his mighty works. Hell, he had a right.

"See what can come from the backwaters of science?" he said. "Physics is a closed book, they all said. Put your talents to work in something useful."

"'They jeered me at the Sorbonne!'" I suggested.

"They threw eggs when I presented my paper at the Institute! Eggs!" He leered at me, dry-washing his hands, hunching his shoulders. "The fools! Let them see who has the last laugh, ha ha HA!" He dropped the mad scientist impression and patted a huge machine on its metal flank, a cowboy gentling a horse. Smith could have been insufferably stuffy except for the fact he'd seen almost as many old movies as I had.

"No kidding, Hildy, the fools are going to be impressed when they see what I've wrung out of the tired old husk of physics."

"You'll get no argument from me," I said. "What happened to physics, anyway? Why was it neglected for so long?"

"Diminishing returns. They spent an insane amount of money on the GSA about a century ago, and when they turned it on they found out they'd hubbled it up. The repairs would have-"

"The GSA?"

"Global Supercooled Accelerator. You can still find a lot of it, running right around the Lunar equator."

I remembered it then; I'd followed it part of the way when I ran in the Equatorial Rover Race.

"They built big instruments out in space, too. They learned a lot about the universe, cosmologically and sub-atomically, but very little of it had any practical use. It got to where learning any more, in the directions physics kept going, would cost trillions just to tool up. If you did it, when you were done you'd have learned what went on in the first billionth of a nano-second of creation, and then you'd just naturally want to know what happened in the first thousandth of a nano-nano-second, only that'd cost ten times as much. People got tired of paying those kind of bills to answer questions even less reality-based than theology, and the smart people noticed that for peanuts you could find out practical things in biological science."

"So all the original research now is in biology," I said.

"Hah!" he shouted. "There is no original research, unless you count some of the things the Central Computer does. Oh, a few people here and there." He waved his hand, dismissing them. "It's all engineering now. Take well-known principles and find a way to make a better toothpaste." His eyes lit up. "That's a perfect example. A few months back, I woke up and my mouth tasted like peppermint. I looked into it, turns out it's a new sort of 'bot. Some idiot thought this up, built it, and let it loose on an unsuspecting public. It's in the water, Hildy! Can you imagine?"

"It's a crying shame," I muttered, trying not to meet his eye.

"Well, I got the antidote. Maybe my mouth does taste rotten in the morning, but at least it tastes like me. Reminds me who I am." Which I guess is a perfect example of both the perversity of Heinleiners and the cultural passivity they rebelled against. And the big reason I liked them, in spite of their best efforts to thwart my affection.

"It's all handed down from on high now," he went on. "We're like savages at an altar, waiting for miracles to be handed down. We don't envision the miracles we might work, if we set ourselves to it."

"Like little people, eight inches high and smart as lab rats."

He winced, the first indication I'd had of a moral uncertainty. Thank god for that; I like people to have opinions, but people with no doubts scare me.

"You want me to defend that? Okay. I've brought those children up to think for themselves, and to question authority. It's not unlimited; me or somebody who knows more about it has to approve their projects, and we keep an eye on them. We've created a place where they can be free to make their own rules, but they're children, they have to follow our rules, and we set as few as possible. Do you realize this is the only place in Luna where the eyes of our mechanical Big Brother can't look? Not even the police can come in here."

"I have no reason to love the Central Computer, either."

"I didn't think so. I thought you might have a story to tell about that, or I'd never have let you in. You'll tell it when you're ready. Do you know why Libby makes little people?"

"I didn't ask him."

"He might have told you; might not have. It's his solution to the same problem I'm working on: interstellar travel. His reasoning is, a smaller human being requires less oxygen, less food, a smaller spacecraft. If we were all eight inches high, we could go to Alpha Centauri in a fuel drum."

"That's crazy."

"Not crazy. Ridiculous, probably. Unattainable, almost certainly. Those kewpies live about three years, and I doubt they'll ever have much of a brain. But it's an innovative solution to a problem the rest of Luna isn't even working on. Why do you think Gretel goes running across the surface in her birthday suit?"

"You weren't supposed to know about that."

"I've forbidden it. It's dangerous, Hildy, but I know Gretel, and I know she's still trying it. And the reason is, she hopes she'll eventually adapt herself to living in vacuum without any artificial aids."

I thought of the fish stranded on the beach, flopping around, probably doomed but still flopping.

"That's not how evolution works," I said.

"You know it and I know it. Tell it to Gretel. She's a child, and a smart one, but with childish stubbornness. She'll give it up sooner or later. But I can guarantee she'll try something else."

"I hope it's less hare-brained."

"From your lips to God's ears. Sometimes she…" He rubbed his face, and made a dismissing gesture with his hand. "The kewpies make me uneasy, I'll admit that. You can't help wondering how human they are, and if they are human, whether or not they have any rights, or should have any rights."

"It's experimentation on humans, Michael," I said. "We have some pretty strong laws on that subject."

"What we have are taboos. We do plenty of experimentation on human genes. What we're forbidden to do is create new humans."

"You don't think that's a good idea?"

"It's never that simple. What I object to are blanket bans on anything. I've done a lot of research into this-I was against it at first, just like you seem to be. You want to hear it?"

"I'd be fascinated."

We'd come to an area of the engine room I thought of as his office, or laboratory. It was the place I'd spent most of what little time I'd had with him. He liked to put his feet up on a wooden desk as old as Walter's but a lot more battered, look off into infinity, and expound. So far, his innate caution had always stopped him from getting too deeply into anything when I was around, but I sensed he needed an outsider's opinion. The lab? Think of it as full of bubbling retorts and sizzling Jacob's ladders. Omit the hulking body strapped to the table; that was his children's domain. The place didn't look anything like that, but it's the proper stage set, metaphorically.

"It's a question of where to draw the line," he said. "Lines have to be drawn; even I realize that. But the line is constantly moving. In a progressing society, the line should be moving. Did you know it was once illegal to terminate a pregnancy?"

"I'd heard of it. Seems very strange."

"They'd decided that a fetus was a human. Later, we changed our minds. Society used to keep dead people hooked up to something called 'life-support,' sometimes for twenty or thirty years. You couldn't turn the machines off."

"Their brains were dead, you mean."

"They were dead, Hildy, by our standards. Corpses with blood being pumped through them. Bizarre, creepy as hell. You wonder what they were thinking of, what their reasoning could possibly have been. When people knew they were dying, when they knew that death was going to be horribly painful, it was thought wrong of them to kill themselves."

I looked away; I don't know if he caught it, but I think he did.

"A doctor couldn't help them die; he'd get prosecuted for murder. Sometimes they even withheld the drugs that would be best at stopping the pain. Any drug that dulled the senses, or heightened them, or altered the consciousness in any way was viewed as sinful-except for the two most physically harmful drugs: alcohol and nicotine. Something relative harmless, like heroin, was completely illegal, because it was addictive, as if alcohol was not. No one had the right to determine what he put into his own body, they had no medical bill of rights. Barbaric, agreed?"

"No argument."

"I've studied their rationalizations. They make very little sense now. The reasons for the bans on human experimentation make a lot of sense. The potential for abuse is enormous. All genetic research involves hazards. So rules were evolved… and then set in stone. No one has taken a look at them in over two hundred years. My position is, it's time to think it over again."

"And what did you come up with?"

"Hell, Hildy, we've barely started. A lot of the prohibitions on genetic research were made at a time when something released into the environment could theoretically have disastrous results. But we've got room to experiment now, and fool-proof means of isolation. Do the work on an asteroid, and if something goes wrong, quarantine it, then shove it into the sun."

I had no problem with that, and told him so.

"But what about the human experiments?"

"They make me queasy, just like you. But that's because we were raised to view them as evil. My children have no such inhibitions. I've told them all their lives that they should be able to ask any question. And they should be able to do any experiment, as long as they feel they have a reasonable idea of its outcome. I help them with that part, me, and the other parents."

I probably had a dubious expression on my face. It would have made perfect sense, since I was feeling dubious.

"I'm way ahead of you," he said. "You're going to bring up the old 'superman' argument."

I didn't dispute it.

"I think it's time that one was looked at again. They used to call it 'playing God.' That term has fallen out of favor, but it's still there. If we're going to set out to improve humans genetically, to build a new human, who's going to make the choices? Well, I can tell you who's making them now, and I'll bet you know the answer, too."

It didn't take a lot of thought. "The CC?" I ventured.

"Come on," he said, getting up from his desk. "I'm going to show you something."

I had a hard time keeping up with him-would have at the best of times, but my current state of roly-polytude didn't help things. He was one of those straight-ahead people, the sort who, when they've decided where they're going, can't be easily diverted. All I could do was waddle along in his wake.

Eventually we reached the base of the ship, which I knew mainly because we left square corridors and right-angle turns for the haphazard twists of the Great Dump. Not long after that we descended some stairs and were in a tunnel bored through solid rock. I still had no idea how far this network extended. I gathered it was possible to walk all the way to King City without ever visiting the surface.

We came to an abandoned, dimly-lit tube station. Or it had been abandoned at one time, but the Heinleiners had restored it: pushed the trash on the platform to one side, hung a few lights, homey touches like that. Floating a fraction above a gleaming silver rail was a six-person Maglev car of antique design. It had no doors, peeling paint, and the sign on the side still read MALL 5-9 SHUTTLE. With stops at all the major ghost warrens along the way, no doubt: this baby was old.

Random cushions had been spread on the ripped-out seats and we sat on those and Smith pulled on a cord which rang a little tinkling bell, and the car began to glide down the rail.

"The whole idea of building a superman has acquired a lot of negative baggage over the years," he said, picking up as if the intervening walk had never happened. As if he needed another annoying characteristic. "The German Fascists are the first ones I'm aware of who seriously proposed it, as part of an obsolete and foolish racial scheme."

"I've read about them," I said.

"It's nice to talk to someone who knows a little history. Then you'll know that by the time it became possible to tinker with genes, a lot more objections had been raised. Many of them were valid. Some still are."

"Is that something you'd like to see?" I asked. "A superman?"

"It's the word that throws you off. I don't know if a 'superman' is possible, or desirable. I think an altered human is an idea worth looking into. When you consider that these carcasses we're walking around in were evolved to thrive in an environment we've been evicted from…"

Maybe he said more, but I missed it, because just about then we had a head-on collision with another tram going in the opposite direction. Obviously, we didn't really. Obviously, it was just the reflection of the headlights of our own car as we approached another of those ubiquitous null-fields. And even more obviously, you weren't there to stand up and shout like a fool and see your life pass before your eyes, and I'll bet you would have, too. Or maybe I'm just slow to catch on.

Smith didn't think so. He was very apologetic when he realized what had happened, and took time to tell me about another little surprise in store, which happened a minute later when a null-field vanished in front of us and, with a little gust of wind, we entered vacuum and began to really pick up speed. The tunnel walls blurred in the beam of our headlights, details snatched away before they could be perceived.

He had more to say on the subject of human engineering. I didn't get it all because I was concentrating on not breathing, still learning to wear a null-suit. But I got his main points.

He thought that while Gretel's method was wrong, her goal was worthwhile, and I couldn't see what was wrong with it, either. Basically, we either manufacture our environment or adapt to it. Both have hazards, but it did seem high time we at least start discussing the second alternative.

Take weightlessness, for example. Most people who spent a lot of time in free-fall had some body adaptations made, but it was all surgical. Human legs are too strong; push too hard and you can fracture your skull. It's handy to have hands instead of feet at the ends of your ankles. Feet are as useless as vermiform appendices in free-fall. It's also useful to be able to bend and twist more than the human body normally can.

But the question before the court was this: should humans be bred to space travel? Should the useful characteristics be put into the genes, so children are born with hands instead of feet?

Maybe so, maybe not. We weren't talking radical change here, or anything that couldn't be done just as easily surgically, without raising the troublesome issues of more than one species of human being.

But what about a human adapted to vacuum? I've no idea how to go about it, but it probably could be done. What would he look like? Would he feel superior to us? Would we be his brother, or his cousin, or what? one thing was sure: it would be a lot easier to do it genetically than with the knife. And I feel certain the end result would not look very human.

I chewed that one over quite a bit in the coming days, examining my feelings. I found that most of them came from prejudice, as Smith had said. I'd been raised to think it was wrong. But I found myself agreeing that it was at least time to think it over again.

As long as I didn't have to clean up after kewpies.

The train car pulled into a siding at another abandoned station where somebody had scrawled the word "Minamata" over whatever had been there before. I had no idea how far we'd come, or in what direction.

"This is still part of the Delambre dump, more or less," Smith said, so at least I had a general idea. We started down a long, filthy corridor, Smith's flashlight beam bobbing from wall to wall as we walked. In a movie, rats and other vermin would have been scuttling out of our way, but a rat would have needed a null-suit to survive this place; mine was still on, and I was still thinking about breathing.

"There's really no reason why the stuff in here shouldn't be spread out over the surface like the rest of the garbage," he went on. "I think it's mainly psychological reasons it's all pumped in here. This is a nasty place. If it's toxic or radioactive or biochemically hazardous, this is where it comes."

We reached an air lock of the kind that used to be standard when I was a child, and he motioned me inside. He slapped a button, then gestured toward the air fitting on the side of my chest.

"Turn that counter-clockwise," he said. "They only come on automatically when there's a vacuum. There's gas where we're going, but you don't want to breathe it."

The lock cycled and we stepped into Minamata.

The place had no name on the municipal charts of King City, just Waste Repository #2. The Heinleiners had named it after a place in Japan that had suffered the first modern-day big environmental disaster, when industries had pumped mercury compounds into a bay and produced a lot of twisted babies. So sorry, mom. That's the breaks.

Minamata Luna was really just a very large, buried storage tank. By large, I mean you could have parked four starships the size of the Heinlein without scraping the fenders. Texas is a lot bigger, but it doesn't feel like being a bug in a bottle because you can't see the walls. Here you could, and they curved upward and vanished into a noxious mist. The far end was invisible.

Maybe there was some artificial light in there. I didn't see any, but they were hardly necessary. The bottom third of the horizontal cylinder was full of liquid, and it glowed. Red here, green there… sometimes a ghastly blue. The makers of horror films would have killed to get that blue.

We had entered at what seemed the axis of the cylinder, which was rounded off at this end, like a pressure tank. A ledge, three meters wide and with a railing, curved away from us in each direction, but to the right was blocked off with a warning sign. Looking past it, I could see the ledge had crumbled away in several places. When I looked back Smith was already moving away from me toward the left. I hurried to catch up with him.

I never did quite catch him. Every time I got close my eye was drawn by the luminescent sea off to my right, and a few hundred meters down.

The thing about that sea… it moved.

At first I only saw the swirls of glowing color like an oil film on water. I'd always thought colorful things were just naturally pretty things, but Minamata taught me differently. At first I couldn't explain my queasy reaction. None of the colors, by themselves, seemed all that hideous (except for that blue). Surely that same swirl of color, on a shirt or dress, would be a gorgeous thing. Wouldn't it? I couldn't see why not. I began walking more slowly, trailing my hand along the top of the rail, trying to figure why it all disturbed me so.

The side of the cylinder went straight down from the edge of the ledge we walked on, then gradually curved inward until it met the fluorescent sea. Waves were rolling sluggishly to crash against the metal sides of the tank.

Waves, Hildy? What could be causing waves in this foul soup?

Maybe some agitating mechanism, I thought, though I couldn't see any use for one. Then I saw a part of the sea hump itself up, ten or twenty meters high-it was hard to judge the scale from my vantage point. Then I saw strange shapes on the borderline between sea and shore, things that moved among the mineral efflorescences that grew like arthritic fingers along that metal beach. Then I saw something that, I thought, raised its head on a spavined neck and looked at me, reached out a hungry hand…

Of course, it was a long way off. I could have been wrong.

Smith took my arm without a word and urged me along. I didn't look at the Minamata Sea again.

We came to a series of circular mirrors standing against the vertical wall to our left. Each had a number over it. I realized that tunnels had been bored into the walls here and each had been sealed off with a null-field barrier.

Smith stopped before the eighth, pointed at it, and stepped in. I followed him, and found myself in a short tunnel, maybe twenty meters long, five meters high. Halfway down the tunnel were metal bars. Beyond that point a level floor had been built to support a cot, chair, desk, and toilet, all looking as if they'd been ordered from some cheap mail-order house. On our side of the bars was a portable air plant, which seemed to be doing its job, as my suit had vanished as I stepped through the field. Spare oxygen cylinders and crates of food were stacked against the wall.

Sitting on the cot and watching a slash-boxing show on the television, was Andrew MacDonald. He glanced up from the screen as we entered, but he did not rise.

Possibly this was a new point of etiquette. Should the dead rise for the living? Be sure to ask at your next seance.

"Hello, Andrew," Smith said. "I've brought someone to see you."

"Yes?" Andrew said, with no great interest. His eyes turned to me, lingered for a moment. There was no spark of recognition. Worse than that, there was none of that penetrating quality I'd seen on the day he… hell, how else can I say it? On the day he died. For a moment I though this was just some guy who looked a lot like Andrew. I guess I was half right.

"Sorry," he said, and shrugged. "Don't know her."

"I'm not surprised," Smith said. He looked at me. I had the feeling I was supposed to say something perceptive, intelligent. Maybe I was supposed to have figured it all out.

"What the fuck's going on here?" I said, which was a lot better than "duuuuh," which was my first reaction, though neither really qualifies as perceptive.

"Ask him," Andrew said. "He thinks I'm dangerous."

I'd started toward the bars but Smith put his hand on my arm and shook his head.

"See what I mean?" the prisoner said.

"He is dangerous," Smith told me. "When he first came here, he nearly killed a man. Would have, but we got to him in time. Want to tell us about that, Andrew?"

He shrugged. "He stepped on my foot. It wasn't my fault."

"I've had enough of this," I said. "What the hell are you people doing in here? I saw this man die, or his twin brother."

Smith was about to say something, but I'd finally gotten Andrew interested. He stood and came to the bars, held on with one hand while the other played idly with his genitals. You see that sometimes, in old alkies or voluntary skitzys down in Bedrock. It's a free planet, right? Nobody can stop them, but people hurry by, like you don't stop and stare if someone is vomiting, or picking his nose. I'd never seen an apparently healthy man masturbating with such utter lack of modesty. What had they done to him?

"How did I do?" he asked me, tugging and squeezing. "All they'll tell me is I died in the ring. You were there? Were you close up? Who was it that got me? Damn, the least they could do is give me a tape."

"Are you really Andrew MacDonald?"

"That's my name, ask me again and I'll tell you the same."

"It's him," Smith said, quietly. "That's what I've finally decided, after thinking it over a lot."

"That's not what you said last time," the man said. "You said I was only part of old Andy. The mean part. I don't think I'm mean." He lost interest in his penis and stretched a hand through the bars, gesturing. "Toss me a can of that beef stew, boss man. I've had my eye on that for days."

"You've got plenty of food in there."

"Yeah, but I want stew."

Smith got a plastic can and lobbed it toward the cell; the man snagged it and tore off the top. He took a big handful and crammed it into his mouth, chewing noisily. There was a stove, a table, and utensils plainly in sight behind him, but he didn't seem to care.

"I didn't see you fight," I said, at last.

"Shit. You know, I'd like you if you weren't so fat. You wanna fuck?" A gravy-covered hand went to his groin once again. "Let's get brown, honey."

I'm going to ignore the rest of his antics. I still remember them vividly, and still find them disturbing. I'd once wanted to make love to this man. I'd once found him quite attractive.

"I was there when they carried you back from the ring," I said.

"The good old squared circle. The sweet science. All there is, really, all there is. What's your name, fatty?"

"Hildy. You were mortally injured and you refused treatment."

"What a jerk I must have been. Live to fight another day, huh?"

"I'd always thought so. And I thought what you were doing, risking your life, was stupid. I thought it was unnecessary, too, but you told me your reasons, and I respect them."

"A jerk," he repeated.

"I guess, when it came time for you to live up to your bargain, I thought you were stupid, too. But I was impressed. I was moved. I can't say I thought you were doing the right thing, but your determination was awesome."

"You're a jerk, too."

"I know."

He continued shoving stew into his face, looking at me with no real spark of human feeling I could detect. I turned to Smith.

"It's time you told me what's going on here. What's been done to this man? If this is an example of what you were talking about on the way…"

"It is."

"Then I don't want anything to do with it. In fact, damn it, I know I promised not to talk about you and your people, but-"

"Hang on a minute, Hildy," Smith said. "This is an example of human experimentation, but we didn't do it."

"The CC," I said, after a long pause. Who else?

"There's something seriously wrong with the CC, Hildy. I don't know what it is, but I know the results. This man is one. He's a cloned body, grown from Andrew MacDonald's corpse, or from a tissue sample. When he's in a mood to talk, he's said things we've checked against his records, and it seems he really does have MacDonald's memories. Up to a point. He remembers things up to about three or four years ago. We haven't been able to test him thoroughly, but what tests we've been able to run bear out what we've seen from other specimens like him. He thinks he is MacDonald."

"Damn right I am," the prisoner chimed in.

"For all practical purposes, he's right. But he doesn't remember the Kansas Collapse. He doesn't remember Silvio's assassination. I was certain he wouldn't remember you, and he didn't. What's happened is that his memories were recorded in some way, and played back into this clone body."

I thought it over. Smith gave me time to.

"It doesn't work," I said, finally. "There's no way this thing could have turned into the man I met in only three or four years. This guy is like a big, spoiled child."

"Big is right, babe," the man said, with the gesture you'd expect.

"I didn't say the copy was perfect," Smith said. "The memories seem to be extremely good. But some things didn't record. He has no social inhibitions whatsoever. No sense of guilt or shame. He really did try to kill a man who accidentally stepped on his foot, and he never saw what was so wrong about it. He's incredibly dangerous, because he's the best fighter in Luna; that's why we have him here, in the best prison we can devise. We, who don't even believe in prisons."

I could see it would be a tough one to get out of. If you got past the null-field, there were the toxic gases of Minamata. Beyond that, vacuum.

It seemed that "MacDonald" was the most recent of a long line of abandoned experiments. Smith wouldn't tell me how the Heinleiners had come to have him, except to say that, in his case, he'd most likely been sent.

"Early on in this program, we had a pipeline into the secret lab where this work was going on. The first attempts were pathetic. We had people who just sat there and drooled, others who tore at themselves with their teeth. But the CC got better with practice. Some could pass as normal human beings. Some of them live with us. They're limited, but what can you do? I think they're human.

"But lately, we've been getting surprise packages, like Andrew here. We lock them up, interrogate them. Some of them are harmless. Others… I don't think we can ever let them free."

"I don't understand. I mean, I see this one could be dangerous, but-"

"The CC wants in here."

"Into Minamata?"

"No, this is his place. You saw the water down there. That's his work. He wants into the Heinleiner enclave. He wants the null-field. He wants to know if I'm successful with the stardrive. He wants to know other things. He found out about our access to his forbidden experiments, and we started getting people like Andrew. Walking time bombs, most of them. After a few tragic incidents, we had to institute some security precautions. Now we're careful about the dead people we let in here."

It was not the first time an action by the CC had turned my world upside-down. You live in a time and a place and you think you know what's going on, but you don't. Maybe no one ever did.

Smith had unloaded too many things on me too quickly. I'd had some practice at that, with the CC playing games with my head, but I wonder if anyone ever gets really good at it.

"So he's working on immortality?" I asked.

"Of a sort. The oldest people around now are pushing three hundred. Most people think there's a limit on how long the human brain can be patched up in one way or another. But if you could make a perfect record of everything a human being is, and dump it into another brain…"

"Yeah… but Andrew is dead. This thing… even if it was a better copy, it still wouldn't be Andrew. Would it?"

"Hey, Hildy," Andrew said. When I turned to face him I got a big glob of cold, canned beef stew right in the kisser.

He never looked more like an ape as he capered around his cell, hugging himself, bent over with laughter. It showed no signs of stopping. And the funny thing was, after a brief flash of homicidal intent, I found it impossible to hate him. Whatever the CC had left out of this man, he was not evil, as I had first thought. He was childish and completely impulsive. Some sort of governor had not been copied right; his conscience had been smudged in transmission, there was static in his self-control. Think of it, do it. A simple philosophy.

"Come on next door," Smith said, after giving me some help getting the worst mess off me. "You can clean up there, and I have something to show you."

So we went through the null-field again-Andrew was still laughing-walked eight or nine steps further to cell #9, and stepped in.

And who should I see there but Aladdin, he of the magic lungs, standing on this side of a barred cell identical to the one we'd just left. Only this one was not occupied, and the door stood open.

"Who's this one for?" I asked. "And what's Aladdin doing here?" Some days I'm quick, but this didn't seem to be one of them.

"There's no assigned occupant yet, Hildy," Smith said, displaying something that had once been a flashlight but had now folded out into what just had to be a Heinleiner weapon-it had that gimcrack look. "We're going to ask you some questions. Not many, but the answers may take a while, so get comfortable. Aladdin's here to remove your null-suit generator if we don't like the answers."

There was a long, awkward silence. Being held at gunpoint is not something any of us had much experience of, from either end of the gun. It's a social situation you don't run into often. Try it at your next party, see how the guests handle it.

To their credit, I don't think they liked it much more than me.

"What do you want to know?"

"Start with all your dealings with the Central Computer over the last three years."

So I told them everything.

Gretel, that sweet child, would have invited me in the first weekend, as it turned out. It was Smith and his friends who held up the approval. They were checking me out, and their resources for doing so were formidable. I'd been watched in Texas. My background had been researched. As I went along there were a few times when I missed this or that detail, and I was always corrected. To lie would have been futile… and besides, I didn't want to lie. If anyone had the answers to the questions I'd been asking myself about the CC, it was surely these people. I wanted to help them by telling everything I knew.

I don't want to make this sound more dire than it actually was. Fairly early we all relaxed. The flashlight was re-folded and put away. If they'd been really suspicious of me I'd have been brought here on my first visit, but after the things they had told me it was only prudent for them to interrogate me in the way they did.

The thing that had upset them was my suicide attempt on the surface. It had left behind physical evidence, in the form of a ruptured faceplate, and set them to wondering if I had really died up there.

And as I continued talking about it a disturbing thing occurred to me: what if I had?

How could I ever know, really? If the CC could record my memories and play them back into a cloned body, would I feel any different than I did then? I couldn't think of a test to check it, not one I could do myself. I found myself hoping they had one. No such luck.

"I'm not worried about that, Hildy," Smith said, when I brought it up. In retrospect, maybe that wasn't a smart thing to do, pointing out that they couldn't be sure of me, either, but it didn't matter, since they'd already thought of it and made up their minds. "If the CC has gotten that good, then we're licked already."

"Besides," Aladdin put in, "if he's that good, what difference would it make?"

"It could be important if he'd left a post-hypnotic suggestion," Smith said. "A perfect copy of Hildy, with a buried injunction to spy on us and spill her guts when she went back to King City."

"I hadn't thought of that," Aladdin said, looking as if he wished the flashlight hadn't been put away so hastily.

"As I said, if he's that good we might as well give up." He stood, and stretched. "No, my friends. At some point you have to stop the tests. At some point you just have to go with your feelings. I'm very sorry to have done this to you, Hildy, it's against all I believe in. Your personal life should be your own. But we're engaged in a quiet war here. No battles have been fought, but the enemy is constantly feeling us out. The best we can do is be like a turtle, pull into a shell he can't penetrate. I'm sorry."

"It's okay. I wanted to talk about it, anyway."

He held out his hand, and I took it, and for the first time in many, many years, I felt like I belonged to something. I wanted to shout "Death to the CC!" Unfortunately, the Heinleiners were short on slogans, membership badges, that sort of thing. I sort of doubted I'd be offered a uniform.

Hell, they didn't even have a secret handshake. But I accepted the ordinary one I was offered gratefully. I was in.