The Starchild Trilogy

THE REEFS OF SPACE

The major snapped: "Check in, you Risks! What's the matter with you?" His radar horns made him look like Satan—a sleepy young Satan with an underslung jaw, but dangerous.

"Yes, sir," said Steve Ryeland, peering around. This was Reykjavik— a new world to Ryeland, who had just come from a maximum-security labor camp inside the rim of the Arctic Circle. Ryeland blinked at the buildings, a thousand feet high, and at the jets and rockets scattered across the air field. The little man next to Ryeland sneezed and nudged him. "All right," Ryeland said, and went into the bare little Security lounge. On the teletype that stood in the corner of the room—in the corner of every room—he tapped out:

Information. Steven Ryeland, Risk, AWC-38440, and O. B. Oporto, Risk, XYZ-99942, arrived at—

He took the code letters from the identification plate on the machine.

—Station 3-Radius 4-261, Reykjavik, Iceland. Query. What are personal orders?

In a moment the answer came from the Planning Machine, a single typed letter "R." The Machine had received and understood the message and adjusted its records. The orders would follow.

A Togetherness girl glanced into the lounge, saw the collars on Ryeland and the little man. Her lips had started to curve in the smile of her trade, but they clamped into a thin line. Risks. She nodded to the major and turned away.

The teletype bell rang, and the Machine tapped out:

Action. Proceed to Train 667, Track 6, Compartment 93.

Ryeland acknowledged the message. The major, leaning over his shoulder, grinned. "A one-way ticket to the Body Bank if you want my guess."

"Yes, sir." Ryeland was not going to get into a discussion. He couldn't win. No Risk could win an argument with a man who wore the major's radar horns.

"Well, get going," the major grumbled. "Oh, and Ryeland—"

"Yes, sir?"

The major winked. "Thanks for the chess games. I'll be seeing you, I guess. Parts of you!" He laughed raucously as he strode away. "No side trips, remember," he warned.

"I'll remember," said Steve Ryeland softly, touching the collar he wore.

Oporto sneezed again. "Come on," he grumbled.

"All right. What was that number?"

The little dark man grinned. "Train 667, Track 6, Compartment 93. That's an easy one—ahchoof Dabbit," he complained, "I'm catching cold. Let's get out of this draft."

Ryeland led off. They walked unescorted across the pavement to a cab rank and got in. All around them, travelers, air field workers and others glanced at them, saw the iron collars—and at once, on each face a curtain descended. No one spoke to them. Ryeland punched the code number for their destination, and the car raced through broad boulevards to a huge marble structure on the other side of the city.

Over its wide entrance were the carved letters:

THE PLAN OF MAN SUBTRAIN STATION

They made their way through a wide concourse, noisy and crowded; but everyone gave them plenty of room. Ryeland grinned sourly to himself. No side trips! Of course not—and for the same reason. It wasn't healthy for a man who wore the collar to step out of line. And it wasn't healthy for anyone else to be in his immediate neighborhood if he did.

"Track Six, was it?"

"Train 667, Compartment 93. Can't you remember anything?" Oporto demanded.

"There's Track Six." Ryeland led the way. Track Six was a freight platform. They went down a flight of motionless moving stairs and emerged beside the cradle track of the subtrains.

Since the subtrains spanned the world, there was no clue as to where they were going. From Iceland they could be going to Canada, to Brazil, even to South Africa; the monstrous atomic drills of the Plan had burrowed perfectly straight shafts from everywhere to everywhere. The sub-trains rocketed through air-exhausted tunnels, swung between hoops of electrostatic force. Without friction, their speed compared with the velocity of interplanetary travel.

"Where is it?" Oporto grumbled, looking around. A harsh light flooded the grimy platforms, glittering on the huge aluminum balloons that lay in their cradles outside the vacuum locks. Men with trucks and cranes were loading a long row of freightspheres in the platform next to theirs; a little cluster of passengers began to appear down the moving stairs of a platform a hundred yards away. Oporto said abruptly: "I'll give you six to five the next train in is ours."

"No bet." Ryeland knew better than to take him up. But he hoped the little man was right. It was cold on the platform. Chill air roared around them from the ventilators; Oporto, already chilled, sneezed and began to sniffle. Ryeland himself was shivering in his thin maximum-security denims.

At the camp, when their travel orders came through, regulations demanded a thorough medical examination before they left. That was the rule under the Plan, and the examination included a steaming shower. "They want nice clean meat at the Body Bank," the guard guffawed; but Ryeland paid no attention. He couldn't afford to.

A man who wore the iron collar around his neck could only afford a limited look into the future. He could think about the day when the collar came off, and nothing else.

A warning horn shrieked into the pit. Ryeland jumped; Oporto turned more slowly, as though he had been expecting it. Which he had.

Red signals flickered from the enormous gates of the vacuum lock on Track Six. Air valves gasped. The gates swung slowly open and a tractor emerged towing a cradle with the special car they were waiting for. "You would have lost," Oporto commented and Ryeland nodded; of course he would have.

The car stopped. Equalizer valves snorted again, and then its tall door flopped out from the top, forming a ramp to the platform. Escalators began to crawl along it.

Oporto said anxiously: "Steve, I don't like the looks of this!" Out of the opening door of the car two men in uniform came running. They ran up the escalators, raced onto the platform and up the stairs. They didn't look at Ryeland or Oporto; they were in a hurry. They were bearing thick leather dispatch cases the same color as their uniforms.

Bright blue uniforms!

Why, that was the uniform of the special guard of—

Ryeland lifted his eyes to look, unbelieving. At the roof of the shed, amid the ugly web of ducts and pipes and cables, a brilliant light burst forth, shining down on the sphere. And across its top, forty feet above the platform, there was a gleaming blue star and under it, etched in crystalline white, the legend:

THE PLAN OF MAN OFFICE OF THE PLANNER

The special car they had been waiting for was the private car of the Planner himself!

The first thought that crossed Steve Ryeland's mind was: Now I can present my case to the Planner! But the second thought canceled it. The Planner, like every other human on Earth or the planets, was only an instrument of the Planning Machine. If clearance ever came to Ryeland— if the collar came off his neck—it would be because the Machine had considered all the evidence and reached a proper decision. Human argument would not affect it.

With an effort, Ryeland put the thought out of his mind; but all the same, he couldn't help feeling a touch better, a degree stronger. At least it was almost certain that their destination would not be the Body Bank!

"What was that compartment number?"

Oporto sighed. "93. Can't you remember anything? Train 667—the product of the two primes, 23 and 29. Track 6, their difference. Compartment 93, their last digits in reverse order. That's an easy one—" But Ryeland was hardly listening. The intimate acquaintance that Oporto seemed to have with all numbers was no longer news to him, and he had more urgent things on his mind. He led the way up the ramp and into the Planner's subtrain car. A woman in the blue uniform of the guard passed them, glanced at their collars and frowned. Before Ryeland could speak to her she had brushed past them busily and was gone. It said a lot for the efficiency of the collars, he thought wryly, that she didn't bother to find out what two Risks were doing wandering freely around the Planner's private car. There was no cause for worry; if they took a wrong turning, the collars would make it their last.

But by the same token, it was highly dangerous for them to wander around. Ryeland stopped short and waited until someone else came by. "Sir!" he called. "Excuse me!"

It was a straight, gray-haired man in the blue of the Planner's guard, wearing the silver mushrooms of a Technicorps colonel. "What is it?" he demanded impatiently.

"We're ordered to compartment 93," Ryeland explained.

The colonel looked at him thoughtfully, "Name," he snapped.

"Ryeland, Steven. And Oporto."

"Umm." Presently the colonel sighed. "All right," he said grouchily. "Can't have you messing up the Planner's car with your blood. Better get secured. This way." He led them to a tiny room, ushered them in. "Look," he said, flexing the knob of the door. "No lock. But I should warn you that most of the corridors are radar-trapped. Do you understand?" They understood. "All right."

He hesitated. "By the way. My name's Lescure, Colonel Pascal Les-cure. We'll meet again." And he closed the door behind him.

Ryeland looked quickly around the room, but it wasn't the splendor of its furnishings or the comfort of its appointments that interested him. It was the teletype. Quickly he reported in for himself and Oporto.

The answer came:

R. Action. Await further orders.

Oporto was beginning to look flushed and to tremble. "Always it's lige this," he said thickly. "I ged a cold and if I don't tage care I'm sick for weegs. I'm feeling lighdheaded already!" He stood up, tottering.

Ryeland shook his head. "No, you're not lightheaded. We're moving." The hand at the controls of the sub train knew whose private car he was driving down the electrostatic tubes. The giant sphere was being given a feather-bed ride. They had felt no jar at all on starting, but now they began to feel curiously light.

That was intrinsic to the way of travel. The subtrain was arrowing along a chord from point to point; on long hauls the tunnels dipped nearly a thousand miles below the earth's surface at the halfway mark. Once the initial acceleration was over, the first half of a trip by subtrain was like dropping in a super-speed express elevator.

Absently Ryeland reached out an arm to brace Oporto as the little man weaved and shuddered. He frowned. The helical fields which walled the tunnels of the subtrains owed part of their stability to himself. On that Friday night, three years before, when the Plan Police burst in upon him, he had just finished dictating the specifications for a new helical unit that halved hysteresis losses, had a service life at least double the old ones.

And yet he could only remember that much and no more.

Had something been done to his mind? For the thousandth time Ryeland asked himself that question. He could remember the equations of his helical field theory that transformed the crude "magnetic bottles" that had first walled out the fluid rock, as early nucleonicists had walled in the plasma of fusing hydrogen. Yet he could not remember the work that had led him to its design. He could remember his design for ion accelerators to wall the atomic rockets of spaceships, and yet the author of that design—himself—was a stranger. What sort of man had he been? What had he done?

"Sdeve," Oporto moaned. "You wouldn't have a drink on you?"

Ryeland turned, brought back to reality. A drink! Oporto was feverish. "I'd better call the machine," he said.

Oporto nodded weakly. "Yes, call in. I'm sick, Sdeve."

Ryeland hesitated. The little man did look sick. While he was standing there, Oporto blundered past him. "I'll do id myself," he grumbled. "Get out of my way."

He reached with fumbling fingers for the keyboard, his face turned angrily toward Ryeland. That was a mistake; he should have been watching. In the unsteady footing he lurched, reached for the keyboard, missed, stumbled and fell heavily against the teletype.

It toppled with a crash. There was a quick white flash from inside it and a sudden pungent smell of burning.

Oporto got slowly to his feet.

Ryeland opened his mouth and then closed it without saying anything. What was the use? Obviously the teletype was out of commission; obviously Oporto hadn't done it on purpose.

Oporto groaned: "Oh, dabbit. Steve, where'd thad colonel go? Maybe he could ged me something . . ."

"Take it easy," Ryeland said absently. The little man's condition was clearly not good but, in truth, it was not Oporto that was on Ryeland's mind just then. It was the teletype.

Always, since the first days after school, there had been no move Steve Ryeland made, no action he performed, without checking in with the Machine. Even at the maximum-security camp there had been a teletype on direct linkage with the Machine, standing in one desolate corner of the bare barracks.

He felt curiously naked, and somehow forlorn.

"Steve," said Oporto faintly, "could you ged me a glass of water?"

That at least was possible; there was a silver carafe and crystal tumblers, fired with gold designs. Ryeland poured the little man a glass and handed it to him. Oporto took it and sank back against a huge, richly upholstered chair, his eyes closed.

Ryeland roamed around the little cubicle. There wasn't much else for him to do. The colonel had warned them against radar-traps in the corridors; it was not to be thought of that they would go out and take the chance of being destroyed by a single wrong move.

For they were Risks; and the iron collars they wore contained eighty grams of a high explosive. A step into an area proscribed for Risks (and such areas were common all over the world) meant that a triggering radar beam would touch off the explosive. Ryeland had seen that happen once. He didn't want it to happen to him.

Brig or no brig, this room was part of the Planner's private car and it was furnished in a way that Ryeland had not seen in three years. He fingered the drapes around a mock-window and reached out to touch the polished mirror of a hardwood table top.

Three years ago Ryeland had lived in a room something like this. No, he admitted, not quite as lavish. But a room that belonged to him, with furniture that no one else used and a place for his clothes, his books, the things he kept around him. But in that life he had been a cleared man, with a place in the* Plan of Man and a quota to be met. That life had ended three years ago, on that fatal Friday afternoon.

Even now, after endless sessions of what was called reconstructive therapy, Ryeland couldn't understand what had happened to him. The vaguely worded charge was "unplanned thinking," but all his merciless therapists had failed to help him recall any thoughts disloyal to the machine. The only material evidence of unplanned activities was his collection of space literature—the yellowed old copies of books by Ley and Gamow and Hoyle and Einstein that he had saved from his father's library.

Of course he knew that the books were not on the list approved by the Plan, but he had intended no disloyalty with his hobby. In fact, as he had many times told the therapists, the special equations of the helical field were related to the mathematics of the whole universe. Without knowing the equations for the expansion of the universe and the continuous creation of matter in the space between the galaxies, he could not have improved the helical units for the subtrain tunnels.

But the therapists had always refused to specify exact charges. Men under the Plan no longer had rights, but merely functions. The purpose of the therapists was not to supply him with information, but to extract information from him. The sessions had failed, because he couldn't remember whatever it was that the therapists had been attempting to extract.

There was so much that he could not remember. . .

Oporto said weakly: "Sdeve, ged me a doctor."

"I can't!" Ryeland said bitterly: "If the Plan wants you sick you'll have to be sick."

Oporto's face turned a shade paler. "Shut up! Somebody may be listening."

"I'm not criticizing the Plan. But we have to stay here, you know that."

"Ryeland," Oporto begged, and went into a coughing fit.

Ryeland looked down at the little man. He seemed to be in serious trouble now. Evidently his system was of an ultra-allergic type. Swept clean of disease organisms in the sterile air that blew down on the isolation camp from the Pole, he had been ripe for infection. He was breathing heavily and raggedly, and heat wafted off his forehead as Ryeland brought his hand near it.

"Hold on, Oporto," he said, "It'll only be a little while. Maybe a couple of hours." At a thousand miles an hour, there was no place on Earth much farther away than that.

"I can be dead in a couble of hours," said Oporto. "Can't you ged me a doctor?"

Ryeland hesitated. There was truth to what the little man said. The Plan provided constant immunization for those who lived in areas exposed to disease; but the hypoallergic, like Oporto, might well lose that immunity in a few months. And Oporto had been breathing sterile air for three years.

"All right," said Ryeland wearily, "I'll do what I can. You come with me, Oporto." Booby-trapped the halls might be, dangerous the trip certainly was; but it was life and death to Oporto.

The door opened easily.

Ryeland, half supporting Oporto, looked out into the corridor. No one was in sight. He sighed; he had hoped that they might find a passerby. Oporto babbled: "Steve, what are you doing? Led me alone. We can't go oud here—the colonel warned us!"

"We have to get you to a doctor, remember?" Ryeland scanned the corridor. At the intersections were curious canopied devices like the sun-shelter over a mogul's howdah. Perhaps they were the radar traps; at least, Ryeland couldn't imagine what else they might be. But there was one back the way they had come, and surely there had been no trap there. . . .

No. Ryeland thought it out carefully. The fact that they had been allowed to get to Compartment 93 didn't prove anything at all; quite possibly the traps had been turned off to allow them to pass. In fact, thinking it over, it seemed certain that the one route that would be prohibited would be the corridor going back to the entrance port.

"Oporto," he said, "do you see those doors? I think we can go into one of them."

"You do, Steve? What mages you think so?" the little man asked sardonically.

"Because there's nothing better to try," Ryeland snapped, and dragged the little man with him.

Around his neck the iron collar weighed heavier than ever. If only he were a superman, like that Donderevo whose name stuck half-forgotten in his mind . . . whose fate, somehow, was linked with Ryeland's own.

Who was Donderevo, exactly? The therapists had questioned him so persistently about the man that there had to be some strong reason. Did Ryeland know him? When had he last seen him? When had he received a message from him? What was the message about?

Donderevo was the son of an explorer and trader who had gathered a fortune from the asteroids and the moons of the outer planets, and had built a commercial empire outside the Plan of Man. Ron Donderevo had come to Earth as a student of space medicine at the great technological institute whe're Ryeland's father was a mathematics professor. While he was there, the Plan had annexed the last reluctant asteroids and moons which had remained outside. Donderevo's father had been defeated in a space fight, resisting the annexation. Donderevo himself had been placed in an iron collar, as a result of a student demonstration. Then one day he had disappeared. The legends said that he had somehow removed the collar, and escaped into space beyond the power of the Plan.

Ryeland remembered meeting him only once, in his own father's study. Ryeland was an eight-year-old Technicub. Donderevo was a grown man, a graduate student, romantic and mysterious with his knowledge of far planets and unknown space. But was that enough to account for the questions?

Ryeland had denied receiving any message from him, but the therapists were unconvinced.

In any event, whatever Donderevo might have been, Ryeland wasn't; his collar was on for good, or until the Machine relented.

Ryeland wondered crazily if he would hear the tiny click of the relay before the decapitation charge went off. Would there be any warning? Would he know?

Or would it all be over, literally, before he knew what was happening?

The only way to find out was to open a door and walk through it.

He pushed a door open, selecting it at random from the half-dozen in the corridor. Oporto broke away from him and, surprisingly spry, ran a few paces down the corridor, whirled and watched him with a face of tense anticipation.

Ryeland didn't stop to think it over, he walked in the door; and nothing happened.

Grinning, embarrassed, Oporto trailed after. "That one was all right, huh, Steve?"

Ryeland nodded; but there was no point in recrimination, although there were a lot of things he had in mind to say to the man who had urged him to take a chance—and then ducked out of the way of the possible consequences. But of more immediate interest was the room they were in.

It was about the size of Compartment 93 and empty. It was quietly furnished: A narrow bed, a table with a few flowers, a large mirror, an array of cabinets. A girl's room, Ryeland guessed, but from the relative modesty of its furnishings, not the room of a girl who was part of the higher brass on this de luxe subtrain. Possibly a secretary's room; perhaps a maid's. Whoever she was, she wasn't in.

But there was another door, leading to a flight of steps.

This time Ryeland didn't wait for Oporto. He caught his breath and held it, and when he had passed through and established once again that that particular door was not radar-trapped, he tasted salt and acid on his lip. He had bitten hard enough to draw blood.

But he was through.

The stairs were steep, but it was easy enough to help Oporto up them, with the plunging of the car taking pounds off their weight. They came out into another room, also empty and small.

But this one was sumptuously furnished. It seemed to be a woman's dressing room. It was white and gold, with ivory-backed brushes and combs on a little vanity table, before a gold-rimmed oval mirror. The stairs, Ryeland guessed, were for the use of the personal maid to whoever used this room.

And he heard someone singing.

Ryeland took a deep breath and called out: "Hello there! Do you hear me? I'm looking for a doctor!"

There wasn't any answer. The singing went on, a girl's voice, clear and attractive; she was singing for her own amusement. Every once in a while she would go back and repeat a phrase, pause, then start again aimlessly. And itfider the singing was a sort of musical cooing accompaniment.

Ryeland looked at Oporto, shrugged and pushed the door open.

They looked into a room that was green and silver. Its walls swam with fading, shifting green light. In the center was a round silver tub, six feet across, partly recessed into the floor. From the mouths of carved crystal dolphins tiny jets of perfumed warm water leaped and splashed, in a foam of bubbles, into the tub.

And above the thick blanket of foam protruded one knee, the head and the arms of the most beautiful girl Ryeland had ever seen.

"I—I beg your pardon," he said, awkward and disturbed.

She turned her head and looked at him calmly. On her wet, white shoulders were perched a pair of—birds? No. They were shaped like birds, like doves, but they were made of metal; their feathers were fine silver scales; their eyes were red-lit jewels. The metal things moved restlessly, as the little eyes poked hotly at Ryeland and Oporto. They cooed soft threats, and the rustle of their wings was like thin whispering bells.

Oporto opened his eyes, stared and emitted a strangling sound. "She —She—" He swallowed and clutched at Ryeland. "Steve, it's the Planner's daughter!" he*gasped, and flung himself to the floor. "Please!" he begged, writhing toward her. "Please, we didn't mean to bother you!"

But the approach must have alarmed her. Not very much; for she didn't raise her voice; but she stopped singing in the middle of a note and said, quite softly: "Guards."

There must have been a microphone to pick up her words, for there was a sudden commotion outside. But more than that, she had defenders nearer still. The doves on her shoulders leaped into the air and flung themselves at the prostrate little man. Sharp beaks tore, wingtips like knives beat at him. The door opened and four tall women in the blue of the Planner's guard raced in.

Death had not been far from Steve Ryeland for these three years. It had worn the neat white smock of Dr. Thrale, the fat, bald, oily man who had been his chief therapist. It had whispered in the soft, asthmatic voice of Dr. Thrale, warning him a thousand times that he stood in danger of the Body Bank, unless he could recall a message from Ron Donderevo, unless he could find the right answers to nonsense questions about a string of words and names that meant nothing to him —spaceling, reefs of space, Donderevo, jetless drive.

Death had taken other forms. The concealed trigger of a radar trap, the menacing horns of a radar-headset, the more subtle and more worrisome peril of orders to the Body Bank; these were the deaths he had known and learned to live with. These women, though, carried projectile weapons, not radar. Queer, thought Ryeland, even in that moment, for if carried through the thought indicated that there were some dangers to the person of the Planner's daughter that did not come from classified Risks like himself. Could ordinary citizens—cleared citizens—be dangerous to the Plan?

But there was no answer to that question just then. Oporto was screaming under the attack of the silvery doves, the woman guards were bearing down on them.

The girl stopped them all with a single word. "Wait." She swept a mound of bubbles away from her face to see better, exposing a throat of alabaster. Her eyes were green-gray and serene. She looked very lovely and very young.

She caught Ryeland completely undefended.

In the isolation camp there had been no women—not even a pin-up picture; and here he was in the presence of a most beautiful woman, in what should have been the privacy of her bath. Apart from everything else, she could hardly have been unaware of the shattering effect she had on him. But she seemed completely at ease. She said, in a voice more polite than curious: "What do you want?"

Ryeland coughed. "This man needs a doctor," he said hoarsely, looking away.

The first of the female guards laughed sharply. She was tall, brunette; a heroic figure of what might have been a lovely girl, if reduced ten per cent in all dimensions. She said in a voice that just missed being baritone: "Come on, Risk! We'll take care of you and your friend too!"

But the girl in the tub shifted position lazily. She waved an arm through the foam, watched the bubbles billow in slow concentric waves and said: "Never mind, Sergeant. Take the sick man to a doctor, if that's what he wants. Leave the other one here."

"But, Madam! The Planner-"

"Sergeant," said the gentle voice, not raised at all; the sergeant turned almost white. She gestured at the others; they half carried Oporto out. The door closed behind them, cutting in twain a look of pure hatred and contempt that passed from the sergeant to Ryeland.

The doves, which had been describing precise circles in the air, shook themselves and returned to the girl's shoulders. Their hot small eyes never left Ryeland, but after a moment they began to coo again.

"You're an iron-collar man, aren't you?" the girl asked suddenly.

Ryeland nodded. "A Risk. Yes."

"I've never spoken to an iron-collar man" she said thoughtfully. "Do you mind if we talk? I'm Donna Creery. My father is the Planner."

"I know." Suddenly Ryeland was aware of his rumpled denims, of the fact that he was an intruder on this girl's bath. He coughed. "Don't you think your father—I mean, I don't mind if we talk, but—"

"Good," said the girl, nodding gravely. She shifted position to get a better look at him. The bubbles rippled wildly. "I was afraid you might be sensitive about it," she told him. "I'm glad you're not. What's your name?"

Ryeland raised his chin and spread the collar of his denim shirt to display the iron band.

"Steven Ryeland," she read, squinting to make out the glowing scarlet letters with his name and number. "Why, I think I know that name. A doctor? No. A rocket pilot?"

"I am a mathematician, Miss Creery."

She cried: "Oh, of course! Your folder is on my father's desk. I saw it this morning, when we were leaving Copenhagen."

An anxious eagerness took his breath. For three years he had been trying to learn the charges against him. The therapists had refused to give him information. Their questions had been carefully phrased to tell him nothing—they had asked him a thousand times what the word space-ling meant, and punished him more than once for guessing that it meant an inhabitant of space.

"Did the folder tell—" He gulped. "Did it specify any charges against me?"

Her greenish eyes surveyed him, unalarmed.

"You displayed unplanned interests."

"Huh? What does that mean?"

"You possessed a secret collection of books and manuscripts, which had not been approved by the machine."

"No, I didn't!" A cold breath touched the back of his neck. "There has been some terrible mistake—"

"The Planning Machine permits no mistakes," she reminded him gravely. "The titles of the forbidden books were listed in the folder. The authors were scientists of the wicked times before the Plan. Einstein. Gamow. Hoyle—"

"Oh!" He gasped. "Then those were just my father's books—a few that I saved. You see, when I was a kid I used to dream of going to space. I've met Ron Donderevo. I wanted to pilot a spaceship, and discover new planets. The Machine killed that dream."

He sighed.

"It transferred me out of the Technicorps and reclassified me as a research mathematician. It assigned me to an installation somewhere underground—I don't know where it was; we were not allowed even to guess whether we were under dry land or the ocean floor or the polar ice. I don't remember, even, if I ever guessed. My memory has . . . holes in it. I had two helpers—a teletype girl and a little man named Oporto, who is a sort of human computing machine. The Machine sent us problems, like the problem of hysterisis loss in the subtrain tunnels. They were problems the Machine couldn't answer, I suppose—even it doesn't know quite everything. Anyhow, we solved the problems.

"Of course I wasn't supposed to need reference books, because I could ask the Machine for any fact I wanted. But for the sake of efficiency it had let me keep a few handbooks, and I had brought those books of my father's among them."

He smiled at her hopefully.

"You see, for a man who had set his heart on space, life in a tunnel isn't very exciting. For a sort of hobby, I read those books about space. They were full of old theories about the nature of the universe. Using modern mathematics, I worked out a new set of equations to describe the expanding universe and the continuous creation of matter in the space between the galaxies—"

Her frown checked him. This was not quite the sort of talk for a young girl in her bath!

"But that was not unplanned," he finished desperately. "It was just a harmless hobby. In fact, it was useful to the Plan. The equations that I used in improving the helical field units were derived from the equations that describe the continuous creation of matter and space."

"And that's what made you a Risk?" She looked at him thoughtfully and frowned. "You don't look dangerous."

He could find no answer to that. He waited while she waved a hand absent-mindedly. One of the doves left her shoulder to fly, tinkling, to the crystal dolphin. It pecked precisely at a fin-shaped lever on the dolphin's back, and obediently the spray of perfumed water dwindled away. Ryeland watched, more than half lulled by the scent of lilac and the strangeness of his surroundings. The room was warm but not steamy; invisible ducts must be sucking the moisture out. "Are you dangerous?" the girl asked suddenly.

Ryeland said: "No, Miss Creery." He hesitated, wondering how to explain it to this child. "The collar isn't a punishment. It's a precaution."

"Precaution?"

He said steadily: "The Machine has reason to believe that under certain circumstances I might work against the Flan of Man. I have never done anything, you must understand that. But the Machine can't take chances, and so—the collar."

She said wonderingly: "But you sound as though you approve of it!"

"I'm loyal to the Plan!"

She thought that over. Then: "Well, aren't we all? But the rest of us don't wear iron collars."

He shook his head. "I never did anything that was against Security."

"But perhaps you did something that wasn't—quite?"

Ryeland grinned. She was amazingly easy to get along with, he thought; the grin became a smile—a real one, and the first one he had worn in some time. "Yes," he admitted, "I did something that wasn't. There was a girl."

"Steven, Steven!" Donna Creery shook her head mock-ruefully. "Always a girl. I thought that was only in stories."

"In real life too, Miss Creery." He was almost relaxed . . . Then, abruptly, her mood changed.

"Your folder contains another specification," she rapped out. "You are charged with concealing information about a device which is dangerous to the security of the Plan of Man."

"But I'm not!" he protested desperately. "Somebody has made a mistake—in spite of the Machine. For three years the therapists in the max-imum-security camp have been working me over, trying to extract information that I don't have."

Her eyes widened, with a calm concern.

"What kind of information?"

"I'm not sure." He winced, with remembered pain. "They were careful not to give me hints, and they punished me for guessing.

"They questioned me about a list of words," he said. "They strapped me down, with electrodes clamped all over me, recording every reaction. They repeated the words a million times. Spaceling. Reefs of space. Fusorian. Pyropod. Jetless drive. And two names—Ron Donderevo and Daniel Horrock.

"Putting all those words and names and other clues together, I guess that the therapists thought that Horrock had brought me a message from Donderevo. A message from space, about things called reefs and spacelings and fusorians. Particularly, about something called a jetless drive. That was what they were trying to dig out of me—how to build a jetless drive."

She frowned.

"What is a jetless drive?"

"There isn't any," he said. "Because a jetless drive would be a system of reactionless propulsion. Crackpots for three hundred years have been trying to invent such a system, but everybody knows it would be a violation of the Third Law of Motion. It's as impossible as pushing a rowboat forward without pushing the water back."

"I see." She was nodding gravely. "Impossible as creating new atoms and new space between the galaxies."

He looked at her sharply. "But I couldn't have had a message from Horrock—or anybody else," he insisted desperately. "Not when they seem to think I did. On the Friday it happened, Oddball Oporto and the teletype girl had been with me all day. We were working late, finishing the specifications for the new helical unit. I let Oddball go about eighteen hundred hours, because he was getting a headache. The teletype girl went out with him, to bring coffee and sandwiches for us. They hadn't been gone half an hour, when somebody knocked on the door. I thought it was the girl—but it was the Plan Police."

"That wasn't on Friday." Donna Creery's eyes were veiled, strange. "According to the records in your folder, you were taken into precautionary custody at eighteen hundred hours on a Monday afternoon. That leaves at least three days missing from your story."

Ryeland gulped.

"That couldn't be!" He shook his head. "Oddball and the teletype girl had just gone out—"

"I studied your folder with considerable care." She failed to say why. "I am certain that you were picked up on a Monday."

Ryeland felt a tingle of excitement. This was more than he had ever been able to learn about the case against him.

"I suppose it's possible," he muttered. "At first I was in a place miscalled a recreation center, somewhere underground. We weren't allowed to inquire where. The therapy sessions went on around the clock. I had no way of knowing the time or the date.

"But I still don't know how to build a reactionless propulsion system. And I still believe that the Machine has permitted itself to make a mistake."

Donna Creery shook her head reprovingly.

Ryeland stopped, the collar tight around his neck. This was crazy! Staying here like this with the Planner's daughter! He said abruptly, harshly: "Miss Creery, I'm interrupting your bath. I must go!"

She laughed, like a shimmer of pale music. "I don't want you to," she coaxed.

"But-your bath-"

"I always stay in the tub in these subtrain rides, Steven. It's comfortable, when the up-grav drag begins to work. And don't worry about my father. He rules the world—under the Plan, of course! But he doesn't rule me." She was smiling. She could hardly be twenty, Ryeland thought ruefully, but there was no more doubt in his mind that she knew she was a woman. She said comfortably: "Sit down, Steven. There. On the bench."

One slim arm, wearing wristlets of foam, gestured at an emerald bench next to the tub. The doves moved nervously as he approached. Donna Creery said: "Don't be afraid of my Peace Doves." He looked quizzically at the silver-steel beaks. "Oh, I'm sorry they hurt your friend," she apologized, "but they thought he was going to hurt me. You see, even without the guard I am protected."

She waved a hand, and faint music seeped into the room from concealed speakers. "What was the girl like?" she demanded.

"She was beautiful," he said shortly.

"And dangerous?"

He nodded, but under the heavy weight of the collar the stiff hairs at the back of his neck were trying to rise. Dangerous? This girl was far more dangerous to him. He had no right to be here. The Machine would not be blind to this. But Donna Creery said soothingly: "Tell me about her. Was she really lovely?"

"I believed she was. She had long yellow hair and green eyes. Eyes like yours. And she was in the secret police, but I didn't know that until the day of the raid."

Laughter pealed from the girl's lips, and the Peace Doves fluttered their wings fretfully for balance. "And she betrayed you. Are you afraid I might? But I won't, Steven, I promise."

He shrugged. "I've told you. I suppose I was lucky, at that. I was sent to a maximum-security camp. It could have been the Body Bank."

She tilted her head to ponder that, and he watched the red glints flow through the dark waves of her hair. At last she sighed and said, "And for that you became a Risk. But you should have been more careful, Steven. You should not have defied the Plan. And now you have to wear that collar. Can't you get it off?"

He laughed sharply.

She said seriously: "No, I suppose not. But if I were you, I think I might. You said you were a mathematician. If I were a mathematician, and wore the collar, it would be only one more problem for me. I would find a way to solve it."

He said with a touch of anger: "The collar was invented by Colonel Zamfirescu, the best engineer in the Technicorps—before he was salvaged himself. He thought of everything."

"It's only a metal band, Steven."

"The toughest armor plate in the world! And inside it there's a decapitation charge, fused with a hydrogen power cell—it won't last forever, no, but it will keep full power for a century! And that's longer than I can wait. And the collar's booby-trapped. If I try to cut it open—if I even try to unlock it, and use the wrong key, or turn it the wrong way-it will kill me on the spot. Have you ever seen a decapitation charge go off, Miss Creery? I have."

She shuddered, but she said: "If I were you, I would run away."

"Not very far! Radar runs faster. And even if you could get away— out to the Cold Planets, say, or to one of the orbiting stations around Mercury—there's a timing device in the collar. It has to be reset periodically, with a key. If not—boom. And you never know when; just that it will be less than a year."

"Oh." She shook her head sadly. "Then you must take it off," she said wisely.

He laughed out loud; he couldn't help it. The idea was preposterous!

"Don't laugh, Steven. Ron Donderevo did," she told him.

"Donderevo! What do you know about Donderevo?"

She said, "Oh, a little. I knew him, you see, when I was very small. I remember seeing him with the collar-and I saw him again, without."

He stopped, staring. He began: "You saw Donderevo—"

But there was a sudden, harsh knocking at the door. "Miss Creery!" a worried male voice clamored. "The Planner has sent for that Risk!"

Ryeland sat bolt upright. For a moment he had forgotten; the voice had brought him back to the realities of his life.

The girl said, "You'll have to go, Steven." She whispered, and one of the Peace Doves restlessly rose from her shoulders and circled the room, its hot red eyes fixed on Ryeland. It touched the door, and without sound the door opened. "Be careful," the girl said gently. "And don't think too much about Angela."

"All right," Ryeland said, numb, walking like a mechanical man to where the radar-horned officer of the Planner's guard waited for him, with an expressiofi like malevolent granite. It wasn't until the door had slid silently closed behind him that he remembered he had never mentioned the name of the girl who betrayed him, his teletype girl, Angela Zwick.

For all of Ryeland's life the Planner had been watching him. That fearless, genial, giant face had looked down on him from stereo posters in the home of his parents, the barracks of the Technicubs, the classrooms of his school—in every public square, and all the laboratories and buildings where he had worked. Ryeland knew that face as well as his own father's—better—and so did every other human alive.

The Planner sat behind a great hardwood desk in a chair that was all air cushions and cunning springs. He was looking absorbedly through a folder of papers on his desk. Uncomfortably Ryeland stood waiting.

There was no resemblance between the Planner and his daughter. She was brunette and lovely, with the face of a child saint; he was square and silver, a lion's face. His hair was short, gray-white; it sat firmly on his head like a collision mat. And over his head, on the back of the great chair, a steel-gray falcon sat frozen; but it was not an ornament, for slowly metal-sheathed eyes opened and tiny bright red eyes peered out at Ryeland.

At last the Planner looked up and smiled. He said in a velvet bass voice: "Son, don't you check in?"

Ryeland jumped. "Oh. Sorry, sir." He hurried over to the gold-plated teletype and tapped out his name. The station plate on the machine said simply: "ONE".

The old man chuckled. "You're Steven Ryeland. I saw you once before, but you wouldn't remember that."

Ryeland started. "Sir?"

"It was a long time ago, boy," the Planner said contemplatively. "I visited your home; you were a baby. Don't look shocked. You see, I knew your father."

Ryeland staggered. He was half floating as the hurtling sphere reached maximum velocity, hundreds of miles under the open air; but it was not that which made him dizzy, nor even the fact that he had not eaten for nearly a full day; it was this man on the other side of the desk. He said incredulously: "Sir, my parents never said anything about knowing the Planner. Surely they would have been proud. . . ."

The Planner laughed, a glorious huge laugh. "My boy," he cried, "it's a wise child, eh? And you are not that wise. You don't know much about your parents. They were not proud of knowing me at all; they were ashamed because, you see, your father hated me very much." He nodded, the smile drying on his face. His voice became like the rasp of a file. "Your father was an enemy of the Plan!" he barked.

"Sir," Ryeland protested, "I don't know anything about my father. He disappeared when I was young. And my mother never told me that."

"She wouldn't," the Planner said savagely. "She was a dangerous woman, but not a stupid one. Neither of your parents were stupid, Ryeland; so how is it that you are?"

Ryeland said baffled: "Sir?"

"You're a Risk!" rasped the Planner. "You should not have dared defy the Plan. That was an act of stupidity!"

Ryeland took a deep breath. Perhaps this was his chance to get his case on the record. He began: "Sir, let me explain. I had no intention of defying the Plan. There was a girl who reported me, and the Machine reclassified me as a Risk. I think this was an error, but—"

"You question the Machine?"

"No, sir. Not the Machine, but the information that—"

"Never mind!" snapped the Planner. "I don't want you to incriminate yourself further. You are your father's son, and you must remember that everything you do is suspect for that reason."

It took Ryeland's breath away. For a moment he couldn't speak. He stood there, weaving slightly in the unsteady footing as the sphere rolled restlessly about in the beginning of its up-drive back to the surface.

Then he burst out: "Sir, do I understand you? You're saying that the Machine considers me a Risk because of what my father may have done before I was born! That's not fair. That's-"

"Fair!" bellowed the Planner, while the raven opened its tiny eyes and whirred restlessly over his head. "What sort of word is that, Ryeland? 'Fairness.' 'Freedom.' 'Democracy.' All those words your father used to use, they run in the blood. And they mean nothing. What does 'fairness' have to do with seventeen hundred and fifty calories a day?

"Fairness," he sneered, "is used up, gone, spent! Do you know what your blessed ancestors did, boy? They mined 'fairness' and 'democracy' from the untapped resources of the world. They didn't invent them, they mined them—just as the old farmers mined minerals from their cornfields, twenty crops of corn and a foot of soil! Well, the topsoil's gone now. And so is fairness and freedom. The world is a closed system now boy, and there isn't enough to go around!"

The ferocity of the outburst left Ryeland stunned. "But—but sir," he said, "surely the far planets offer new frontiers, new resources—"

"Be still!" barked the Planner, the square silver head thrust forward like a hammer. Above him the steel-gray falcon whirred theateningly.

The Planner glowered up at Ryeland, shifting his position in the compensating chair as the subtrain began its up-grav thrust. Weight came back to normal, then more than normal. Planner Creery said: "Ryeland, you're like your father. He never learned that the frontier was gone, but you must. The Plan of Man is based upon a systematic reduction of the pernicious personal liberties that almost destroyed our world. War! Dust bowls! Floods! Forest fires!" Each word was a foul epithet; he spat them at Ryeland. "We have to pay the bill for the waste that has gone before —waste that your father, and those like him, would have spread. Never forget it, boy!"

Ryeland stood silent. There was no reasoning with this man; there was a power and assurance that a gun might shatter, but no human power ever could. After a moment Ryeland said: "I haven't forgotten." Nor ever would, he thought. Not while the collar weighed around his neck.

"The collar bothers you," said the Planner surprisingly, and grinned. It was as though he had read Ryeland's thoughts—easy enough, Ryeland realized. "But we all wear them, boy. Each one of us, from the Planner down to the castoffs waiting for salvage in the Body Bank, must account to the Machine for every hour of every day; and each of us wears the Machine's shackle. On some of us they're intangible," he explained gravely, "and I admit that that does make a difference."

Unwillingly Ryeland smiled. Not only power, he realized; the man had personality, charm—even to use on a Risk.

"But if you like," the Planner added, off-handedly, "you can get that particular collar off your own particular neck."

For a moment Ryeland couldn't believe what he had heard. "Get the collar off, sir?"

The Planner nodded majestically. He shifted his position again, touching a button. The massive, cushioned chair inclined slightly backward. The raven flapped with a tinkling metallic sound into the air, hovering, as a neck-rest rose out of the chair's back and enveloped the Planner's silver head. The subtrain sphere was well into its upward thrust now. A faint squeal filtered through the soundproofing of the room—testimony of the pressure that forced the car against the invisible, unfeelable wall of electrostatic force. It wasn't friction that made the squeal, but a heterodyne of vibrations from the generators that drove the car. Ryeland staggered as his weight grew.

The Planner said suddenly: "We are all bound to the Plan in one way or another. I must try to find unbreakable links that can replace your iron collar—or you must find them yourself; then the collar can come off."

Ryeland said desperately: "Surely my work proves that I am loyal."

"Surely it does not!" the Planner mocked. He shook his head like a great father bear with a naughty cub. "It is not what you have done already," he reproved, "but what you can do now that will matter. You have worked freely, Ryeland; perhaps brilliantly, but you must work within the Plan. Always. Every moment. The Planning Machine will assign you a task. If you complete it—"

He shrugged, with an effort.

Ryeland was gasping now, the sag of his flesh a trap as the subtrain sphere forced its way up from Earth's molten center. He wanted to talk —question the Planner—perhaps leave the secret of those missing days. But his body refused. All around them was white-hot rock under pressure; only the electrostatic hoops kept it out; they were down many miles, but now rising. It was like an elevator again, but going up. The vertical component of the sphere's speed was rapidly reaching a hundred and fifty miles an hour; and even the Planner's voice, cushioned and protected as he was, began to grow hoarse and slow.

"You'd better go now, Ryeland," he grumbled. "But would you like to know what your task will be?"

Ryeland didn't answer—he couldn't; but his eyes answered for him. The Planner chuckled slowly. "Yes, of course. The Machine thinks you can handle it. It sounds—Well," said the Planner thoughtfully, "we each have our part to play, and mine is not necessarily to understand everything the Machine requires. Your task is to develop a jetless drive."

Ryeland rocked, and clutched frantically at the edge of the Planner's huge desk. "A—a jetless drive?"

The Planner looked somberly amused. "I see," he said. "Perhaps your task does not include understanding it either? But that is what the Machine asks of you."

"You mean—" Ryeland tried to recover his breath. "You mean, a reactionless propulsion system?"

"Precisely."

"Do you know that your torture experts—your reconstruction therapists—have been trying for three years to make me tell them how to build a jetless drive? They seem to think I know how."

"I know." The big man shrugged. "I know their efforts failed. The Machine had received information that you had designed such a mechanism. Apparently that information was mistaken. But the past three years have made such a device more than ever essential to the security of the Plan—more than ever dangerous to the Plan, if it should fall into unfriendly hands.

"The Machine requires a jetless drive. Its records of your abilities and achievements indicate that you are qualified to develop such a device. I have decided to disregard the evidence of your unplanned behavior, the problem of whether your amnesia is real or assumed, voluntary or not. If you want to come out of your collar in one piece, you will design a working method of reactionless propulsion. Now," he said in an exhausted voice, "you must go."

Through a haze Ryeland saw him make a faint motion with the huge gnarled hand that lay on the arm of his chair. The raven shifted position ever so little and beat the air frantically with its steel wings. Across the room a door opened.

One of the Planner's guard officers came in. He was a giant of a man, but he stepped very carefully under the thrust of the sphere's climb.

"Ryeland," whispered the great old man behind the desk.

Ryeland turned, half leaning on the officer in guard blue.

"About my daughter," said the Planner softly. The squeal had become a roar, almost drowning him out. "Donna has a soft heart, which she inherited from her mother; but her brain she inherited from me. Do not attach importance to the fact that she allowed you to talk with her in her bath." And the old man's eyes closed, as the Planner allowed his head to slump back at last.

Machine Major Chatterji said comfortingly: "You'll like us here, Ryeland. We're a brisk outfit, brisk."

"Yes, sir." Ryeland looked around him. He was in a steel-walled cubicle with a Security designation. He had no idea where on, or under, Earth he might be.

"You don't have to worry about nonsense," the major chattered. "Get the work done, that's all we care about."

Ryeland nodded. The little major moved with the youthful grace of a kitten. He wore the radar-horned helmet of a risk-pusher debonairely, as though it were part of a fancy-dress costume. He caught Ryeland's glance.

"Oh, that," he said, embarrassed. "Confounded nuisance, of course. But you are a Risk and the Machine's orders—" "I'm used to it."

"Not that you're the only Risk here," Major Chatterji added quickly. "Heavens, no! Some of our best men, and all that."

Ryeland interrupted, "Excuse me, Major." He bent to the teletype and rapidly typed out his identification number and the fact that he had arrived. Without delay the teletype rapped out:

R. Information. Machine Major Chatterji is authorized to reconsider your status. Action. Requisition necessary equipment for expansion of equations re unified force field and steady-state hypothesis.

Ryeland frowned. Major Chatterji, peeking over his shoulder at the gray teletype, cried: "At once, Steve! Oh, we move fast here. I'll have a six-deck calculator and a room to put it in before you can change your clothes, I'll bet you a lakh of dollars!"

Ryeland said: "I don't understand. 'Unified force field and steady-state hypothesis'—what's that about?" But the major was cheerfully ignorant. Administration was his job; Ryeland would find out everything else in due course, wouldn't he? Ryeland shrugged. "All right. But I won't need the calculator—not if Oporto is still around."

"The other Risk?" Machine Major Chatterji winked. "Always stick together," he nodded. "I'll have him detailed to you."

Ryeland looked again at the teletype. The truly important part of the message also needed some thought. Machine Major Chatterji is authorized to reconsider your status. Then this man here, with the liquid black eyes and the lean, hooked nose, this was the man who could turn the key that would unlock the iron collar?

Or was that the wrong assumption to make? The Machine was always exact. But sometimes the mere human who read its message failed to understand the meaning. For instance, did that message mean that Machine Major Chatterji* could clear Ryeland—or did it mean that he could downgrade him . . . say from Risk to raw material for the Body Bank?

It was a sobering thought.

The faded unreality of everything in his past except his knowledge of science left Ryeland with a nagging sense of bewilderment and loss.

"Why does the Machine need a jetless drive?" Uneasily, he put the question to Major Chatterji. "The ion jet ships are good enough to reach the planets—and anyhow the Plan of Man seems to be retreating from space and burrowing into the Earth."

"Stop it!" Chatterji warned him sharply. "Such speculation is no part of our function."

Ryeland insisted, "The Machine seems to be afraid that a jetless drive in the wrong hands would be dangerous to the Plan. Whose hands could that be? The Plan has conquered all the planets, taken in the whole human race. Except for a few fugitives like Ron Donderevo—"

"Don't talk about him!" Chatterji looked shocked. "Our own function here is enough to keep us busy without any such unplanned talk."

Ryeland shrugged and gave it up, and Chatterji at once reverted to his cheerful bustle.

"We've got to get you settled," he beamed, his gold-rimmed glasses flashing. "Faith! Come in here, girl."

The door opened. A tall blonde strutted in. She wore tight scarlet pants and a brief scarlet jacket. Two centuries before she would have been a drum majorette; under the Plan she had a more important role to play. "This is Faith, Steve. She's one of our Togetherness girls. She'll help you get adjusted here, I promise!"

The Togetherness girl smiled a lacquered smile. She piped: "'Perform your own function perfectly—and your own function only.' That's our motto here, Mr. Ryeland." It was like a doll talking.

"And a splendid motto it is!" Major Chatterji endorsed, beaming. "Get him started, Faith. And don't forget the Togetherness meeting at nineteen hundred hours."

Ryeland's mind was teeming with jetless drives and the steady-state hypothesis and three missing days and Major Chatterji is authorized to reconsider and the fact that the Planner had known about his interview with Donna in her bath. But this was important too; he swept the other things out of his mind and tried to pay attention to what the Togetherness girl was saying.

"You'll like it here, Steve," she whispered, solemnly squeezing his arm. She smiled up at him, and steered him down a gray-walled concrete tunnel. There were no windows. "This is Point Circle Black. Sounds confusing, doesn't it? But you'll learn. I'll teach you!" Point Circle Black was the headquarters office, where Major Chatterji, the administrative officer, fussed endlessly over his problems of supply and personnel. "Point Triangle Gray." Faith sang, waving at an intersection ahead. "That's the medical section. Tests and diseases, injuries and—" she giggled naughtily—"supply depot for the Body Bank."

Ryeland grunted.

"Oh, that's nothing for you to worry about, Steve," she said reassuringly. "Trust Major Chatterji. You do your part and he'll do his; that's Teamwork."

Ryeland mumbled, "I understand. It's just that—well, I've had to face the chance of the Body Bank for three years now. I admit I don't like the idea of being butchered."

She stopped, scandalized, her perfect eyebrows arched, her clear eyes wide. "Butchered? Steve, what an unplanned word!"

"I only meant—"

"The Planned term," she said firmly, "is 'salvaged'. And you can't deny the logic of the Machine, can you?" She didn't wait for an answer. She was well into her set speech. "The Body Bank," she parroted, "provides the attack team with the necessary stimulus to insure maximum effort. If the effort is successful, the team has nothing to fear. If the effort fails-"

She shrugged winsomely. "The welfare of the Plan of Man," she said, "requires that they must make their contribution in another way. That is, their physical organs must contribute to the repair of more useful citizens. That's Teamwork!"

"Thanks," said Ryeland grumpily. The isolation camp on the rim of the Arctic Circle, he thought wistfully-it had been hard and dull and uncomfortable; but at least he hadn't been exposed to lectures from teen-aged girls!

Point Triangle Gray was a Security designation; all the names were. The whole area was called Team Center. It might have been under Lake Erie or the Indian Ocean; Ryeland never learned.

At Point Triangle Gray he was given his tests. He caught a glimpse of Oporto, looking healthy enough but somehow crestfallen; they waved, but there was no chance to speak as Oporto came out of one laboratory room while Ryeland was going into another. At least, Ryeland thought, the little man hadn't been salvaged.

Then he forgot about Oporto for five rigorous hours. Point Triangle Gray measured his functional indices and his loyalty quotients with every test that he had ever undergone before and one or two that were brand new to him. The lab men stripped him and clamped him in their metering devices, while the interrogators demanded every detail of his life, back to the toys his mother had given him for his third birthday.

In these tests he tasted the after-bitterness of those sessions in the therapy room at the "recreation center"—those long, endless ages when he was punished and punished again because he could not make sense of the crazy questions the therapists flung at him. He dreaded, each moment now, that in the next moment it would start again. Someone would fling him a question about pyropods or Ron Donderevo. Someone would ask him about the missing three days in his life, or demand that he draw them the plans for a device he'd never heard of.

But it didn't happen; the questions were all routine.

In fact, every one of the questions had been asked him before—some of them a hundred times. Every answer had long since been recorded for the memory drums of the Planning Machine. But the interrogation went on. His reactions were studied in blinding actinic light, and photographed by infra-red in what to him was utter dark. His body fluids were sampled again and again. Whole salvos of injections stimulated and calmed him, and for a short time put him to sleep—while heaven knew what pokings by scalpel and probe investigated the muscle tensions of his innermost system.

But at last it was over.

He was dressed in new crisp scarlet slacks and tunic and propelled into the gray concrete corridors where Faith was waiting, the lacquered smile on her face and her eyes glad.

"You've passed!" she sang. "But I knew you would. And now you're a full member of the Team."

She led him caroling: "Next I'll show you your quarters. They're nice, Steve! And then, oh, there's so much here! You'll like the Togetherness Canteen. You'll have wonderful work facilities. Everything is fine —and, of course, that's only fair, isn't it? Because so much is expected of you people on the Attack Team. You're entitled to a great deal in return; that's Teamwork!"

She led him about for an hour, and she did not stop chattering once. She took him to a sort of mess hall to be fed—alone; he was late for dinner, due to the tests at Point Triangle Gray, and the others were all through. The food was General Workers A-Ration—about the same as at the maximum-security camp, though somewhat less of it in terms of calories. But it was pleasant to be allowed to sit and smoke after the meal. And she showed him his quarters.

They were comfortable. A rather surprisingly soft bed, a bookcase (already Machine Major Chatterji had stocked it with conversion tables and reference books), a more than adequate chest for the personal belohgings he had long since ceased to own. "Isn't it nice?⁹³ the Togetherness girl enthused. "But we'll have to hurry, Steve. It's almost nineteen hundred hours!"

The Togetherness Canteen was high over the maze of tunnels that comprised Team Center. Its gray concrete was liberally splashed with bright colors.

It was full of light and sound and people. There were nearly twenty Togetherness girls as pretty as Faith; they danced with laughing officers of the Technicorps, sat with them at tables, sang with them around a piano. There were hurrying waitresses as pretty as the Togetherness girls, or almost, bringing drinks and light refreshment. And there were the officers—Ryeland's new colleagues.

They all wore the crisp scarlet uniform; and his heart bounded, for three of them at least, he saw, wore the same iron collar as himself. But they were laughing. One danced with a red-headed girl as tall as he, two were in a card game.

The iron collar did not seem to weigh heavily on these Risks.

Ryeland took a deep, wondering breath. Maybe this place was the place he had hoped for all those three years. . . .

One side of the room was an enormous window, twenty feet tall, made of armor-glass. Outside weathered cliffs were splashed with orange sun, nearly set. The tops of pines swayed in an unheard wind, and a far mountain slope was splotched with evergreens and golden autumn aspen.

Faith touched his arm. "What's wrong, Steve? Afraid of high places?"

He had hardly noticed the scenery; his thoughts had been on his collar. But he blinked and came awake. "I—I didn't know where this place was, until I saw the outside."

"You still don't know," she laughed. "Come along. You'll want to meet the Team leader."

General Fleemer had big bulging eyes and a tight uniform; it made him look like a very important frog. "So you're Steve Ryeland?" The general pumped his hand, the bulging eyes glowing with friendly Togetherness. "Glad to have you, Steve!" He grinned and flicked the iron collar with a fingernail. It rang faintly. "We'll have that off you in no time. Give us results, we'll give you your clearance! What could be fairer?"

He caught Steve by the other elbow, the one Faith wasn't using, and carried him off. Faith trailed along. "Want you to meet some of the others," he boomed. "Here. Pascal! Come over here. Steve, I want you to meet—"

"But I already know Colonel Lescure," said Ryeland. It was the grayhaired Technicorps officer who had conducted them to Compartment 93 on the Planner's subtrain.

The colonel nodded, and took him aside for a moment while General Fleemer rounded up more of the Team. "I didn't want to say anything before—but I knew you were coming here. And I'm glad. Your—ah—interview was a success, eh?" And he nudged Ryeland's ribs.

It occurred to Ryeland that the colonel might not have been nearly as jolly with him if the interview hadn't been a success, but he let it pass. "Yes," he said, "the Planner was quite—"

"Planner?" Colonel Lescure winked. "I mean the other interview, son! She's quite a girl!" It seemed, thought Steve Ryeland, that there was hardly a human under the Plan of Man who wasn't aware that he had spent three-quarters of an hour with Donna Creery in her bath.

"Over here!" cried the general, beckoning. "You too, Otto!" As Ryeland reached the general Colonel Otto Gottling stumped over, his face like a rock. He was a jet combustion expert, as it turned out; his chamber had powered the last twelve rockets built for the out-planet run.

Everyone was a specialist and Ryeland found it uncommonly difficult to figure out where the specialties fit together. Colonel Lescure, he discovered, was Director of the Plan of Space Biology, for example. A major named Max Lunggren was an astrophysicist. There were two other mathematicians—one an expert in number theory, the other whose name was vaguely familiar to Ryeland as the author of a paper on normed rings. (Coincidentally—or was it coincidence?—both of them wore the collars of Risks.) The third Risk was a food chemist, a fat, jolly man who owned a fund of limericks.

But some hours later Ryeland received a clue, at least; the evening was not entirely devoted to Togetherness.

When everyone was satisfactorily mellow General Fleemer climbed atop a table and hammered it with his heel for attention.

"A toast!" he bawled. "I give you Teamwork—and the Plan!"

There was a rousing roar. Fleemer drained his glass with them and then turned serious. "Some of you," he cried, "wonder what our Team Attack is aimed at. Well, you'll find out! But for the benefit of the new people, first let me review the overall philosophy of the Team Attack itself. It is the essential tool of our scientific progress, and too important to be taken for granted!"

"Hurray for Team Attack!" bawled one of the iron-collar mathematicians, amid a giggle of the Togetherness girls around him.

General Fleemer smiled, quelling him. He said: "Once upon a time-so our Team historians tell me—science was done by individual men. Some of you may think it is still done that way." He gave a frosty grin to Ryeland and the other Risks. "But that is all over. The turning point came with the Einstein Team, which met at a town called Hiroshima to attack the primary problem of atomic fission.

"Unfortunately," the general said sadly, holding out his glass for a refill, "these pioneers were destroyed by the unexpected success of their first experiment with uranium fission. But the principle of team attack survived!

"Since then the Plan of Man has refined the principles and polished the techniques of Team Attack. When the Plan of Man requires a new scientific discovery, a team is created to make it. Such a team is needed now—and you are my Team, all of you!"

There was prolonged cheering.

Then Fleemer paused. He smiled, and it was a scorpion's smile, vastly out of character in that wattled marshmallow face.

He said: "I'm sure you all understand why you can be counted on to do your best." He nodded merrily to Ryeland and the other iron-collar men. "When you succeed, you will learn that Teamwork operates both ways. When you succeed. But if you fail—if you fail—why, then . . . ."

He trailed off, and looked somberly at the men for a second.

Then he grinned and drew one pudgy finger across his non-existent neck. "Zzzzt! The Body Bank! But we won't fail!"

There was a burst of laughter. Machine Major Chatterji leaped to a table, his glasses gleaming. "Three cheers for General Fleemer and the Plan of Man! Hip, hip-"

"Hooray!" The cheer was loud but ragged.

"Hip, hip-"

"Hooray!" Louder now. The whole room was together.

"Hip, hip—"

"Hooray!" Ryeland found himself thundering along with the rest. He couldn't help it. He had been born under the Plan of Man. He could not doubt it. It would have deprived his life of meaning, as the iron collar that was the Plan's gift to him had, for a time, nearly deprived it of hope.

There was a loud applause. And General Fleemer, still smiling, raised his hand. "What the Machine needs," he said, "is a new physical principle." He shrugged winsomely—as best he could with those blubber shoulders. "I'm not a scientist, and I don't know just how tough this job is going to be. Probably some of you think it's going to be very tough. Well," he said, chuckling, "the rest of you are just going to have to convince them otherwise!" And he touched his finger jestingly to his throat.

Ryeland tried, but got little information from the others. It wasn't so much that they refused to tell; it was more that he couldn't understand. The Machine would give him a detailed directive, they assured him, and wouldn't he have another drink?

And an hour later Faith offered to show him a shortcut home to his quarters. They linked arms and wandered off. through the gray-walled corridors. "Here's an area you've never seen," she caroled. "See that? Point Nexus. That's the Message Center."

"Lovely Message Center," said Ryeland comfortably. Funny. Even the iron collar didn't seem as hard or as cold. She was a sweet kind of girl, he thought dreamily. Of course, the Togetherness girls were coached, reared—all but bred for that. But she reminded him of the Fair Lost One, Angela—about whom the Planner's daughter had known more than she should. But of course it could have come from his personnel folder, and—

"Point Crescent Green," sang the girl, pointing to another stenciled emblem on the wall.

"Lovely," said Ryeland automatically, and then took a closer look. "But what's going on?"

The girl hesitated.

She stopped in the middle of a word and frowned at Ryeland. "I tell you," she said after a moment, suddenly gay, "maybe this short-cut isn't such a good idea. Back the other way there's—"

"No, but look," Ryeland insisted planting his feet as she tugged at him. It was quite late now, but there were a couple of guards in Team scarlet, and one of them was turning a key to slide back a massive, lead-shielded door. Beyond was the floor of an enormous pit, lit by a bright single light, high up.

Ryeland recognized it for what it was: A rocket landing pit. There were the great spreading girder arms of the gantry, the enormous ducts for the jet-baffles yawned black in the floor. A piece of his mind catalogued the information that rocket landings commonly took place here; dim in the gloom behind the brilliant light were the enormous doors that would open to the sky.

But there was no rocket in the pit.

There was something else, something in a heavy metal cage.

"What is that thing?" Ryeland demanded. It looked a little like the seals that Ryeland had seen sunning themselves on the rocks off the maximum-security camp; but it was golden—metallic gold, the gold of the setting sun on bright metal, as it lay bathed in the wash of harsh light from above.

The thing was alive. It was, however, no animal that Ryeland had ever seen.

It lay on the floor of the great metal cage as though exhausted by efforts to escape. The golden fur was bloodied and torn about its head. Some of the bars were bent and bloodstained.

Whatever it was, it had fought to get free!

The Togetherness girl said worriedly: "Come away, Steve. Please! Major Chatterji doesn't want anyone to see the spaceling until—" She gasped, confused. She begged: "Forget I said that! I shouldn't have taken you this way at all, but—Oh, please, Steve, come away."

Reluctantly he let her lead him away. The guard had hurried inside and the enormous metal doors were closed; there was nothing more to see in any case.

But what was it that he had seen?

4

At 0700 hours the next morning the teletype rang him out of a deep sleep. Hardly stopping to open his eyes he leaped to answer. It clattered:

Query. Is Steven Ryeland, Risk, AWC-38440, present?

Ryeland blanched and instantly tapped out his acknowledgment. All human instincts ordered him to add an apology, but the Machine was not interested in apologies, only in compliance with its rules. It rapped back at him without pause:

Information. Steady-state hypothesis rests on theory of Fred Hoyle English astronomer physicist 20th century stating that clouds hydrogen gas are continually formed between stars thus replenishing matter converted into energy in stellar power processes. Action. Produce necessary mathematical statements showing when under what conditions process can occur. Action. Make statement as to feasibility additional mathematical statement providing basis for neutralizing or reversing hydrogen formation process.

Ryeland stared. There was a brief tap at the door and the Togetherness girl danced in, carrying a tray with tea and toast and a glass of pinkish fruit juice. "Good morning, Steven! Rise and shine. I—oh!" He impatiently motioned her to be silent; the teletype, as though that were not enough for him to worry about in a single transmission, emitted the whir of marking impulses for a moment and then clattered out a new message:

Information. Experimental evidence available indicating existence of drive mechanism not subject to Newton Third Law Motion. Information. Said mechanism referred to as Jetless Drive. Action. Produce necessary mathematical statements providing basis for reproducing Jetless Drive in Plan space vehicles. Action. Review work of Colonel Gottling unified force field as necessary first step.

Ryeland pulled the tape out of the machine as soon as it was finished and sat staring at it. Somebody, he reflected, had been transferring information from his forbidden books into the Machine!

Gently Faith removed it from his fingers. "Breakfast," she scolded. "A bath. You'll think better when you're more awake!" Groggily Steve allowed himself to be propelled toward the bath, his mind a whirl of hydrogen clouds and non-Newtonian force fields.

The steaming shower woke him. By the time he was dressed and sitting down to breakfast with the Togetherness girl he was alert. "Jetless drive!" he said. "But there can't be such a thing. Newton's law!"

"Drink your tea, Steven," she said soothingly. "Would the Machine ask you to do it if it were impossible?"

"But I can't—well, what experimental evidence? I haven't seen any."

The Togetherness girl looked inconspicuously at the watch on her wrist. "Colonel Lescure will be waiting, Steve. Drink your tea."

The colonel was very crisp in his uniform and white smock. He said: "You're jittery, Ryeland. Relax."

Steve touched his iron collar significantly. The colonel smiled. "Oh, sure," he said, "but you want to get it off, don't you? And the best way is to relax, because your first job is to listen. I have to tell you about the reefs of space."

The reefs of space! Ryeland gulped and tried to relax. A numbing fog of bewilderment and pain swirled up around him, across the lost years at the maximum-security camp. He was lying stretched on the couch in the therapy room, with the cold electrodes clamped to his wrists, and the blinding light blazing into his face. Dr. Thrale was standing over him, fat and gentle and apologetic, wheezing out the words spaceling and pyropod and jetless drive and reefs of space, and methodically charting his reactions.

"Relax, Ryeland." The colonel's voice buzzed out of a great gulf of distance. "We must take this problem one step at a time. The first step is the information which I am to give you now."

"Sure," Ryeland gasped. "I understand."

He was trying desperately to relax. Perhaps this information would answer the riddle of those three lost days.

"Let's have a drink," the colonel was suggesting. "Talking's thirsty work."

Ryeland hesitated. Alcohol had always been forbidden, at the academy and at the isolation camp.

"Come on," said the colonel, twinkling. "A transfusion won't hurt the story."

He opened a cabinet and took out glasses and a little box. While he poured drinks, Ryeland urged: "Reefs of space? Meteor clouds, perhaps?"

Pascal Lescure laughed. "More like coral reefs. Here." He touched glasses. "That's better," he said comfortably, tasting his drink, and he opened the little box.

A collection of fantastic little animals modeled in plastic spilled out. Ryeland glanced at them only abstractedly; his mind was on what Lescure had said. "Butcoralis built by living organisms."

The colonel nodded. "The reefs of space are built by living organisms, too—working over vastly longer stretches of time."

Ryeland set down his untouched glass violently, slopping it over. "What organisms live in space?"

"Why," the colonel said seriously, poking at his plastic toys with a finger, "creatures very much like these. They were modeled from life. And before that—the creators of the reefs themselves, simple little one-celled organisms, originating—everywhere!"

Ryeland forced himself to speak slowly, methodically: "The Machine's orders came this morning. I'm to investigate the steady-state hypothesis. And ever since then I've been thinking—about Hoyle's steady-state theory, and about another speculation he made. That life was born before the planets were, created by the chemical action of ultraviolet light in the cooling clouds of gas and dust around the sun. But how could it survive? The clouds disappear as the planets form."

"Life adapts," the colonel said heavily, and poked at his dragons.

He took a fresh drink. "Leaving out the intangibles," he lectured, "life is a phenomenon of matter and energy. The Hoyle Effect provides the matter, in the clouds of new hydrogen that are always being born between the stars. And life makes its own energy."

"How?"

"By fusing the hydrogen into heavier elements," the colonel said solemnly.

He flicked a switch. A screen slid down out of the ceiling. An image appeared on it, the image of little darting bodies, flashing with light, crossing the field of vision. The picture might have been one of pond life under a microscope, except for the difference in shapes . . . and for the fact that these creatures gave off a light of their own. "The fusorians," said the colonel somberly. "Hardy little things. They fuse hydrogen atoms and generate energy, and they live in space."

Fusorians! Ryeland felt his body tense as though an electric shock had passed through it. He was conscious of the colonel's gaze on him, and tried to relax, but the colonel studied him thoughtfully for a moment.

He said only: "No wonder you're excited." He blinked at Ryeland mildly. "This thing is big. It means that the planets are not lonely oases in a dead desert of emptiness. It means that they are islands in an infinite ocean of life—strange life, which we had never suspected."

"But why haven't any of them ever appeared on Earth?" Ryeland demanded. Infuriating how slowly Lescure spoke! It was life and death to Ryeland—perhaps it was the answer to all his questions—but the colonel treated it only as another lecture, and a rather dull one.

The colonel shrugged. "Perhaps they drown in air. I suppose the heavier elements are their own waste products, and therefore poisonous to them." He took another pull at his drink. "Perhaps these creatures built the Earth," he said meditatively. "It accounts for the proportions of heavy elements better than the theories of the cosmologists. But of course it doesn't really matter—not to the Plan, I mean."

Ryeland frowned. There had been something almost disloyal about the colonel's tone. He changed the subject. "These things—" touching the plastic models—"they aren't fusorians?"

"No. They're pyropods. They live in the reefs." Irritably the colonel waved a hand. The screen glowed with another picture.

Ryeland leaned forward staring. "Fairyland!" he breathed.

The colonel laughed harshly. The view on the screen was of a delicate tracery of glowing vines and plants, where birdlike things moved effortlessly among the branches.

"Call it that," said the colonel. "I called it other things when I was there. You see, there is a constant new flow of matter into the universe. There is a steady rebirth of hydrogen between the stars. I know—I've seen it!"

Nervously he took another drink. "It was a few years ago. The pyropods had been seen, but none had been captured. The Planner ordered me out on a hunting trip to catch one."

Ryeland frowned. "Hunting? But the Plan of Man has no energy to waste on that sort of thing! Every calorie must go to some productive use!"

"You're an apt pupil," the colonel said wryly, "but it was the Machine's decision, not mine. Or so the Planner said. At any rate, we took off for the planet beyond Pluto. Was there one? It was necessary to assume one, to provide a home for the pyropods—or so we thought. We knew they had no home from Pluto sunwards ....

"It was a long trip. You know why interstellar flight has never been possible. There's power enough for us to reach the stars, but the difficulty is in finding the reaction mass to hurl away. Once you pass Orbit Pluto you begin to face those problems in practice. We were in the old Cristobal Colon, with hydrion jets. Our reaction mass was water. All we could carry was barely enough to land us on the hypothetical planet. We were to reload there for the flight home, if we found it." The colonel chuckled dryly. "We didn't find it," he said.

"Then—how did you get back?" Ryeland demanded, startled.

"We blundered into something. What we called the Rim. Don't confuse it with the Reefs of Space—it wasn't them, not for billions of miles yet. It belongs to the solar system, a scattered swarm of little asteroids, strung in a wide orbit all around the sun. A ring of snowballs, actually. Cold snow—mostly methane and ammonia; but we found enough water to refill our tanks. And then we went on. The Machine's orders had been definite."

The colonel shivered and finished his drink. "We went out and out," he said, mixing a fresh one, "beyond the Rim, until the sun was just a bright star behind—then not even particularly bright. We were braking, on the point of turning back—

"And then we saw the first Reef."

Colonel Lescure waved at the strange scene on the screen. He began to look alive again. "It didn't look like much at first. A mottled, lopsided mass, not much bigger than the snowballs. But it was luminous!"

Ryeland found himself gulping his drink. Silently he held out the empty glass and the colonel refilled it without pausing.

"An unearthly place. We came down in a brittle forest of things like coral branches. Thickets of shining crystal thorns snagged at our space-suits when we went out exploring. We blundered through metal jungles that tripped and snared us with living wires and stabbed at us with sharp blades. And there were stranger things still!

"There were enormous lovely flowers that shone with uncanny colors —and gave off deadly gamma rays. There was a kind of golden vine that struck back with a high-voltage kick when you touched it. There were innocent little pods that squirted jets of radioactive isotopes.

"It was a nightmare! But while we were reviving and decontaminating our casualties we worked out the natural history of the Reef. It was a cluster of living fusorian colonies!

"We counted almost a hundred species. They must have grown from a few spores, drifting in the interstellar hydrogen. The rate of growth must be terribly slow—a few inches, perhaps, in a million years. But the fusorians have time.

"We looked at each other. We knew we had found something more than we had been sent for.

"We had found a new frontier."

Ryeland was on his feet, a sudden uncontrollable surge of emotion driving him there. "Frontier? Could—could people survive out there?"

"Why not? They're rich with everything we need. There's hydrogen for power, metal for machines, raw materials for food. We brought treasures back with us! We loaded our ship with every sort of specimen we could carry. Fantastic diamond spikes, and masses of malleable iron in perfectly pure crystals. Living prisms that shone with their own cold glow of fusion. Spongy metal mushrooms, in hundred-pound chunks, that tested more than ninety per cent uranium-235. Much more than critical mass! And yet they didn't explode, while they lived. But one chunk did let go after we had jettisoned it in space, and after that we were careful to divide the masses."

"So that's why the Machine needs a jetless drive?" Ryeland saw a ray of understanding, stabbing through the gray fog of confusion which had followed him from his suite in the maximum-security camp. "To reach the reefs of space—because they're beyond the range of our ion drives!"

"I suppose so." Lescure nodded. "Though such thinking goes a little beyond our function."

"But why would the Machine want to explore them?" Ryeland frowned at him. "Is there something in the reefs which could threaten the security of the Plan?"

"Better not exceed our function," Lescure warned him. "I imagine the planets are pretty well protected from the life of space, by their atmospheres and their Van Allen belts. But of course there was the pyro-pod that rammed us—"

"Pyropod?"

For a second Ryeland was lying on his couch in the therapy room again, with the cold electrodes clamped on his body and Thrale's apologetic voice lisping out the words that had been senseless to him then, jetless drive . . . jusorian . . . pyropod.

Lescure's eyes had narrowed.

"Ryeland, you appear unduly agitated. I don't quite understand your reactions—unless you have heard this story before."

"I have not." That, at least, was true. The therapists had always been careful to tell him nothing at all about pyropods or fusorians or the reefs of space.

For another uncomfortable moment, Lescure stared.

"Relax, then." At last he smiled. "Forgive my question. I asked it because there was an unfortunate breach of security. One member of my crew jumped ship after our return. He had managed to steal unauthorized specimens and descriptions of the life of space. Of course he went to the Body Bank."

His eyes brushed Ryeland again, casually.

"I forget the fellow's name. Herrick? Horlick? Horrocks?"

Ryeland sat still, feeling numb.

Colonel Lescure waved carelessly, and the screen retracted, shutting itself off. "Drink?" he demanded. Ryeland shook his head, waiting.

Lescure sighed and poked through his plastic toys. "Here," he said suddenly.

Ryeland took the tiny thing from him, a two-inch figurine in black and silver with a wicked, knife-edged snout. Lescure's glazed eyes remained on it in fascination. "That's the one that attacked us," he said.

"This little thing?"

The colonel laughed. "It was ninety feet long," he said. He took it back from Steve and patted it. "Vicious little creature," he said, half fondly. "Evolution has made them vicious, Ryeland. They are living war rockets. They've been hammered into a horrible perfection, by eternities of evolution."

He swept the whole menagerie back into its box. "But they are only rockets," he said thoughtfully. "They need mass, too. We've cut up a dozen of them, and the squid is as much a rocket as they .... Perhaps that accounts for their voracity. They'll attack anything, with a hungry fury you can't imagine. Mass is not plentiful in space, and they need what they can find.

"At any rate, this one rammed us, and—well, we had another dozen casualties." The colonel shrugged. "It was touch and go, because the thing was faster than we. But ultimately the survivors manned a torpedo station, and then the contest was over.

"Even the pyropods have not achieved a jetless drive."

"If there is such a thing," said Ryeland.

Colonel Lescure chuckled. He looked thoughtfully at Ryeland, as though choosing which of several to make. Finally he said: "You don't think the Team Attack will succeed?"

Ryeland said stiffly: "I will do my best, Colonel. But Newton's Third Law-"

Colonel Lescure laughed aloud. "Ah, well," he said, "who knows? Perhaps it won't succeed. Perhaps there is no jetless drive." Hilariously amused, though Ryeland could not tell why, he tossed the box of plastic figurines back in a cupboard.

"Ugly little things, good night," he said affectionately.

Ryeland commented: "You sound as though you like them."

"Why not? They don't bother us. If they haven't attacked the earth in the past billion years or so, they aren't likely to start very soon. They aren't adapted for atmosphere, or for direct, strong sunlight. Only a few of the strongest ventured in beyond Orbit Pluto to be sighted, before our expedition. None was ever seen in closer than Orbit Saturn—and that one, I think, was dying."

Ryeland was puzzled. "But—you spoke of danger."

"The danger that lurks in the Reefs of Space, yes!"

"But, if it isn't the pyropods, then what is it?"

"Freedom!" snapped Colonel Lescure, and clamped his lips shut.

5

Faith carried Ryeland off to his next interview. "You liked Colonel Lescure, didn't you?" she chattered. "He's such a nice man. If it were up to him, the reefrat wouldn't be suffering—" She stopped, the very picture of embarrassed confusion.

Ryeland looked at her thoughtfully. "What's a reefrat?"

"Here's Major Chatterji's office," said Faith nervously, and almost pushed him through the door.

Machine Major Chatterji got up, smiling blankly through his gleaming glasses, waving a copy of Ryeland's orders from the Machine. "Ready, Ryeland," he called. "We're all set for you now."

Ryeland advanced into the room, thinking. "I'll need my computer," he said. "And someone to look up all the work that's been done on the Hoyle Effect, boil it down, give me the essential information."

"Right! You can have three assistants from Colonel Lescure's section. And I've already requisitioned a binary computer."

"No," said Ryeland impatiently, "not a binary computer. My computer. Oddball Oporto."

Major Chatterji's gold-rimmed glasses twinkled with alarm. "The Risk? But Ryeland, really!"

"I need him," said Ryeland obstinately. The Machine's orders had been perfectly clear.

Chatterji surrendered. "We'll have to get General Fleemer's okay," he said. "Come along." He led Ryeland out through a short corridor to an elevator; Faith tagged after inconspicuously. The three of them went up, out, down another hall. Chatterji tapped on a door.

"All right," grumbled a voice from a speaker over the door, and it swung open. They walked into a silver room, with silver walls and furnishings plated in silver. General Fleemer, in a silver robe that he was knotting about him, stumped in from a bedroom. "Well?"

Machine Major Chatterji cleared his throat. "Sir, Ryeland wants the other Risk, Oporto, assigned to him."

"For calculation purposes, General," Ryeland cut in. "He's a natural calculator. What they used to call an idiot-savant, or the next thing to it."

The general looked at him through his deepset eyes. "Will that help you solve the jetless drive?"

"Why," Ryeland began, "I haven't started on that yet. This is the Hoyle Effect. The Machine ordered—"

"I know what the Machine ordered," the general grumbled. He scratched his nose reflectively. "All right, give him his man. But Ryeland. The important part of your work is the jetless drive."

Ryeland was startled. "General, the Machine's orders didn't give priority to either section."

"I give priority," said the general sharply. "Get along with it, man! And get out."

In the corridor, Chatterji vanished toward his office and the Togetherness Girl took over again. "A very fine man, the general, don't you agree?" she chatted, leading him back to the elevator.

Ryeland took a deep breath. "Faith," he said, "there's something funny here. General Fleemer lives awfully well! And he seems to take it upon himself to, at least, interpret the Machine's orders. Is that customary, in Team Attack?"

The Togetherness Girl hesitated. She glanced at Ryeland, then led him down the corridor without speaking for a moment. She stopped before another door. "General Fleemer," she said, "is a fine man. I knew you'd like him. And you'll like Colonel Gottling too, don't think you won't!" And without any more of an answer than that, she opened the door to Gottling's office for him and left him there.

But Colonel Gottling proved himself very hard to like.

He was a huge man with a face like a skull, the horned helmet over it. He stood fingering the controls of his radar-horns angrily as Ryeland reported in on the teletype. "Hurry up, man," he muttered, and clumped out of his office, motioning Ryeland ahead of him. "You're next," he snapped. "Lescure had his whacks at the creature and he failed. They wouldn't let me handle it the way I wanted! And now it's up to you."

Ryeland said, "I don't understand. What creature?"

"The spaceling! The reefrat! The creature with the jetless drive."

Ryeland said humbly, "Colonel, I don't know what you're talking about."

Gottling spread his bony hands and stared at the ceiling in exasperation. "What under the Plan is this? What kind of idiots do they salvage for top-priority Teams these days? Do you mean you never heard of the reefrats?"

"Only the word," Ryeland admitted. "But didn't you just say 'space-ling'?"

"Same thing!" Gottling stopped in an anteroom, jerking a thumb at a file cabinet. He barked: "Here! Here's everything you want to know about them. Everything from resting weight to the chemistry of what passes for blood. The only thing I can't tell you is what makes them go, and I could tell you that if they'd let me alone with the thing!"

"But—"

"You fool, stop saying 'but'!" howled Colonel Gottling. "Look here!"

He opened a door. Beyond was a big room, once a repair shop attached to one of the rocket pits, now hastily improvised into a laboratory. There were unpainted partitions, unconcealed electric wiring. Chemical lab benches held glassware and flasks of reagents, reeking acidly. There were transformers; an X-ray generator; various bulky devices that might have been centrifuges, biological research equipment-heaven knew what.

And the lab was busy.

There were at least two dozen men and women in scarlet Technicorps smocks working at the benches and instruments. They glanced up only briefly as Colonel Gottling and Ryeland entered and checked in, then quickly went back to their work without speaking.

Evidently the cheery good will among the brass didn't extend to the lower echelons.

Colonel Gottling, in a good humor again, lighted a long, green-tinted cigarette and waved at the room. "It's all yours now," he grunted. "Temporarily."

Ryeland looked at him.

"Or permanently," grinned the colonel, "provided you can tell us what makes the spaceling fly. Me, I think you can't. You look soft, Ryeland. The collar has not hardened you enough. Still—Do you want me to tell you something about the spaceling?"

"I certainly do," Ryeland said fervently.

"All right, why not? It's fairly intelligent. Lower primate level, at least. It is a warm-blooded oxygen-breathing mammal which—why do you look that way, man?"

Ryeland closed his mouth. "It's just that I thought it lived in space."

Colonel Gottling guffawed. "And it does! An oxygen-breather, living in open space! Amusing, is it not? But it possesses some remarkable adaptations."

"Such as what?"

Colonel Gottling looked bored. "You should have asked Lescure these questions. I am a rocket man. But first, of course, there is the jetless drive. Then there is something else—a field of force, perhaps, which enables it to hold a little cloud of air around it, even out in interstellar vacuum."

Ryeland said thoughtfully: "Could the two effects be linked?"

"Could they? Of course they could, idiot! But are they? I do not know." But Gottling was mellowing; treating Ryeland like an idiot had put him in a good humor. He said condescendingly: "It is possible, of course. I have thought that myself. If the reefrat can accelerate its own body without reaction, perhaps it can also accelerate gas molecules cen-tripetally, also without reaction. How cail one know? But—

"But let us look at the spaceling," he said abruptly. "Then we can talk more better."

He led the way through the laboratory and out the other side.

They went through a steel door into a sort of airlock. Racks in the walls held bulky protective suits and red-painted emergency gear. A warning sign glowed on the inner door of the airlock:

DANGER!

LANDING PIT-WAIT FOR DECONTAMINATION

"It is safe," Gottling assured him. "The pit was deconned months ago, before the spaceling was brought in."

He pulled a lever. Motors groaned; the inner door, an enormous lead-lined mass of steel and fire-brick, inched slowly aside.

Like a Viking in his radar horns, the colonel stalked into the landing pit, Ryeland following.

The pit was an enormous circular cavern. Floodlights blazed on the blackened concrete floor. Even the decon crews, with all their foamants and air-blasting, had failed to remove the black breath of the jets.

Ryeland recognized it at once. It was the pit of which he had caught a glimpse the night before, with the Togetherness Girl. He lifted his eyes, looking for the sky and a settling rocket instinctively; but the dark armored walls lifted up into shadowy mystery. The cranes and the stages above were dark shapes in the dimness. No light passed the enormous doors, hundreds of feet up, that closed off the sky.

Gottling touched his arm and pointed.

Out in the black concrete stood a room-sized cage. Inside the cage was a pale cloud of greenish light; and in the center of the cloud lying motionless on the bare steel floor—

"The spaceling," said Gottling proudly.

It had struggled.

At close range, Ryeland could see how frantically fierce that struggle had been. The steel bars of the cage were thicker than his wrist, but some of them were bent. Red blood smeared them, and matted the spaceling's golden fur. It lay gasping on the stainless steel floor.

"She's skulking now, but we'll put her through her paces," Gottling bragged.

Ryeland said: "Wait, Colonel! The thing's injured. In the name of heaven, you can't—"

"Can't?" blazed the colonel. "Can't?" His finger reached up and touched the buttons of his radar-field suggestively. Under the triggering radar horns, his skull-like face glowered. "Don't tell me what I can't do, fool! Do you want me to expand my field radius? One touch of this and there won't be enough of you left to salvage!"

Ryeland swallowed. Involuntarily his hand reached toward the collar, with its eighty grams of high explosive.

"That's better," grunted Gottling. He clapped his hands and called: "Sergeant, get busy! Goose her!"

A Technicorps sergeant in red came trotting out of the shadows. He carried a long pole tipped with a sharpened blade. Black wires led from it to a battery box on his shoulder.

The spaceling rolled its battered head.

Its eyes opened—large, dark, limpid eyes—a seal's eyes; and they were terrible, it seemed to Ryeland, with suffering and fear. A shudder rippled along the creature's smooth, featureless flanks.

"Goose her in the belly!" Gottling shouted. "Mr. Ryeland wants to see her do her tricks!"

The spaceling screamed.

Its cry was thinly edged with terror, like the voice of a hysterical woman. "Stop it," Ryeland gasped, shaken.

Colonel Gottling blared with laughter. Tears rolled out of his piglike eyes, down the bony cheeks. Finally he got control of himself. "Why, certainly," he gasped. "You're next, as I said, eh? And if you believe you can tell us how the creature flies without even seeing her do it—" he shrugged.

Writhing on the floor of the cage as though it had already felt the prod, the spaceling screamed in fright again.

Ryeland said hoarsely: "Just make him take that prod away."

"As you wish," the colonel nodded urbanely. "Sergeant! Return to duty. And you, Ryeland, I will leave you alone with your friend. Perhaps if I am not here to eavesdrop, she will whisper her secret in your ear!" Bellowing with laughter, Colonel Gottling shambled out of the pit.

After an hour, Ryeland began to appreciate the difficulties of the problem.

Back in the file room, he found a summary of the existing knowledge of the spaceling; he took it to the landing pit and read through it, watching the spaceling, trying to allow it to become accustomed to his presence. The creature hardly moved, except to follow Ryeland with its eyes.

The notes on the spaceling showed a fruitless and painful history. The spaceling had been captured by an exploring Plan rocket retracing the steps of Lescure's Cristobal Colon. A section of notes, showing how the capture had been effected, was missing; the account took up the story with the creature being brought into the hastily converted rocket pit. It had been chained at first, so that the first investigators approached it with impunity. Then the chains had been taken off—and, in quick order, half a dozen investigators had been bashed rather severely against the bars. The spaceling did not seem to have attacked them; they simply were in the way of the thing's terrified attempts at escape. However, after that the observations had been conducted primarily from outside the cage. And mostly—at least in the last two weeks, since Colonel Gottling had taken over charge of the specimen—with the help of the goad. Or worse.

There were reports of blood tests and tissue samples. Ryeland glanced at them, frowned and put them aside; they meant nothing to him. There were X-ray studies, and reams of learned radiologists' reports. Also of no value to Ryeland, whatever they might have meant to Colonel Pascal Lescure.

Then there were physical tests. Dynamometers had measured the pull against the chains. Telemetering devices had registered the change in the recorded curves of its vital processes under various conditions—at rest, as it "flew," and "under extraordinary stimulus," as the report primly put it. Meaning, Ryeland supposed, under torture.

No radiation of any sort had been detected. And someone had thought to surround the creature with plumb-bobs to test for an incident side thrust; there was none; the plumbs were undisturbed.

No thrust!

Then this nonsense that everyone had been spouting so glibly was not nonsense after all!

For if there was no measurable thrust against its environment to balance its measured dynamometer pull—then the spaceling had, indeed, a true jetless drive.

Ryeland looked up from the notes to stare at the spaceling, slumped in the bottom of its cage, its great eyes fixed on him. Jetless drive!

He suddenly felt very small and, for all the Togetherness and the Teamwork, for all the joint effort embodied in the Plan of Man, very alone. Jetless drive—here in this creature lay the seeds of a fact which would destroy Newton's Third Law, change the shape of the Solar System. For unquestionably, with such a drive, the scope of the Plan of Man would widen beyond recognition. Out past the useless, frozen methane giants, the Plan would drive to the stars!

Ryeland shook his head, confused.

For suddenly he didn't want the Plan of Man expanded to the stars. That word that Pascal Lescure had used—"Freedom!"

It did not seem to live under the Plan.

Abruptly his reveries were ended; there was a rumble like thunder in the pit.

Ryeland leaped to his feet, astonished, while the spaceling mewed worriedly in its cage. A blade of light split the dark above. He looked up, and a slit of blue sky widened.

There was a confused clattering behind him and someone came running into the pit. The Technicorps sergeant, shouting: "Mr. Ryeland, Mr. Ryeland! Get out of the way. Some crazy fool is coming in for a landing!"

The sergeant raced over to the cage and began frantically trying to unbolt its heavy fastenings, to push it on its tiny wheel to the side of the pit. There was a wild cataract of flame thrusting into the opening gates of the pit overhead, radio-triggered; and a tiny rocket came weaving in, settling on a cushion of bright white fire.

Ryeland thought grimly: "Thank God it's only a little one!" A big one would have been the end of the spaceling—and of himself and the Technicorps sergeant as well. But this little speedster had plenty of room to land without incinerating them all. It was a one-man craft, built for looks and play; it dropped to the black concrete on the far side of the pit, a hundred yards away, and though heat washed over them like a benediction, it did them no harm. A sudden gale roared through the floor ducts, sweeping the rocket fumes away.

A ramp fell.

A slim figure in white coveralls ran lightly down the ramp and across the concrete, confusingly half-familiar birds fluttering about its head.

Ryeland was galvanized into action. "Stop it!" he shouted. "Keep away from that cage!"

The intruder ignored him. Swearing, Ryeland raced to intercept the stranger. He took a dozen angry strides, caught a slim arm, swung the intruder around—and gasped. Silvery doves tore fiercely at his face and head.

"Get your hands off me, Risk!" It was a girl—that girl! He could see now that her white coveralls did not disguise her sex. Her eyes were a greenish blue, and very familiar eyes; her voice, though charged with indignation, was a familiar voice.

She gestured, and the Peace Doves fluttered muttering away. "What do you mean?" she demanded, shaking his fingers off her arm.

Ryeland gulped. It was the Planner's daughter, Donna Creery. "I—" he began. "I—I didn't know it was you! But what do you want here?"

"Want?" The ocean-water eyes flashed. "I want to know what you people are doing—what you think you're doing by torturing my spaceling!"

6

The girl stood staring at Ryeland. She was an entirely different creature from the lovely girl in the bubble bath, almost unrecognizable. The Donna of the Planner's private subtrain car was a teenager in the process of becoming woman, with the sad shyness of youth and its innocence. But this girl was something else. This was the Planner's daughter, imperious. And not a child.

Ryeland took a deep breath. Planner's daughter or no, this girl was in his way. The only way he had of getting the collar off his neck lay through the creature in the cage. He said sharply: "Get out of here, Miss Creery. The spaceling is dying. It mustn't be disturbed."

"What?" The Peace Dove, settling on her shoulders, whirred and muttered.

"You aren't allowed here," he said stubbornly. "Please leave!"

She stared at him incredulously; then, without a word, turned to the cage. "Here, sweet," she whispered to the great seal-like animal. "Don't worry, Donna's here." The spaceling lifted its head and stared at her with great, limpid eyes.

Ryeland said harshly: "Miss Creery, I asked you to leave."

She didn't bother to look at him. "There's a good girl," she cooed, like a child with a puppy. "Where's the damned door?"

Ryeland was angry now. "You can't go in there!" He caught at her arm. It was like catching a tiger by the tail; there was a quick movement, too fast to follow, and she caught him a stinging blow across the face with her open hand. Sheer astonishment drove him back; and by the time he recovered his balance the Planner's daughter had found the catch and was inside the door of the cage.

The spaceling came heaving seal-like toward her, whimpering.

It was a bad spot for Ryeland. If anything happened to the girl, there was no doubt in the world that he would be held responsible. Gottling would see to that. And then good-by dreams of freedom.

In fact, more likely it would be good-by head!

Ryeland swore angrily. The Peace Doves squawked and rose into the air, circling around him. He paused, searched around, found a length of heavy chain just outside the cage door. Heaven knew what it had been used for—though the stains on it suggested one possibility. He caught it up and dove into the cage after the girl.

"Stop," she said calmly. "I don't want to turn the Doves loose on you."

"Then get out of here!" he demanded. The floor of the cage was slippery with a kind of odorous slime. Part of it was the spaceling's blood, undoubtedly, but there was more—decaying small things that Ryeland couldn't recognize; perhaps they were animals that had come with the spaceling. The stench was powerful and sickening, but Ryeland didn't let it stop him. If that girl could stand it, that dainty creature who lived in an atmosphere of lilac blossoms and ease, certainly he could!

She was bending over the creature, reaching down to caress its golden fur. "Drop that chain," she ordered over her shoulder. "It's afraid of you."

It flinched from her touch at first. Then it relaxed. It licked at her face with a long black tongue. A sudden rumble filled the cage, like the purr of a giant cat.

There was an eruption of noise from outside. Colonel Gottling, radar-horned, deep eyes blazing fury out of the face like a skull, came racing in with a dozen men in Technicorps scarlet. "Get her out of there, you fool!" he roared, waving the electric prod at Ryeland.

The spaceling saw him and the enormous purr stopped. The creature began to whimper and tremble. "Hold it!" cried Ryeland. "You're frightening the spaceling. It may attack Miss Creery!"

But Donna Creery needed no help from him just then. On her knees in the bloody slime, she looked up from the torn, blood-crusted fur of the creature and her eyes were a hawk's eyes. "Colonel Gottling," she said in a thin voice that cut like knives. "I've been wanting to talk to you!"

The skull-faced colonel swallowed but stood his ground. "You must get out of there, Miss Creery! The animal is dangerous. It has already wounded half a dozen men!"

"And what were the men doing to the spaceling?" The girl bent to pat the golden battered head. Two or three fat green flies were buzzing through the thinning cloud of light around the wounds on the spaceling's flanks. "Filthy," she said with scorn. "I want this cleaned up!"

She stood up and gestured Ryeland ahead of her out of the cage. "I want a meeting of the whole Team," she said coldly, closing the cage door behind her, "and I want it now! Meanwhile, Gottling, have your men clean that cage out. And if I catch any of them using that prod again, I'll see how they like it used on themselves!"

Gottling turned purple. In a voice stiff with self-control he said: "It is no longer my project, Miss Creery. Mr. Ryeland has taken it over."

"I give it back," said the girl. "I have another use for Mr. Ryeland."

Ryeland said, shocked: "But the Machine ordered—"

"I'll take care of the Machine," she said calmly. "Get started on this cage, you men! The spaceling needs her symbiotic partners and they're dying fast." She turned to the door. "Now let's have that meeting," she said grimly. "I want to get a few things straight!"

They were back at Point Crescent Green. The Team was buzzing like flies around the spaceling's wounds.

Donna Creery dominated the meeting. Major Chatterji tittered shyly and General Fleemer made half a dozen speeches on Teamwork; Colonel Gottling was in an icy rage and Colonel Lescure fluttered objections. But not one of them could stand up against the girl.

She blazed: "If that animal dies, she's going to take the lot of you with her! I've got news for you. There's a shortage of salvage material at the Body Bank." She stared around the room appraisingly. "Some of you would make pretty good spare parts. Do I make myself clear?"

"Quite clear," General Fleemer said humbly. "But, Miss Creery, our Team objective—"

"Shut up," she said mildly. "Yes? What is it?"

Machine Major Chatterji said with great respect: "There's a message for you on the teletype."

"It can wait." There was an audible gasp but the girl paid no attention. "From this date forward, Mr. Ryeland is in charge of the Team."

General Fleemer choked and sputtered: "Miss Creery, a Risk can't be put-"

"Yes, a Risk can," Donna Creery contradicted. "Oh, all right. Here, I'll get orders for you." She walked through them to the teletype, calmly pressed the "Interrupt" switch—another gasp swept through the Team— and began to type. In a moment the Machine's answer rattled back:

Action. Fleemer Team will comply with directive of Donna Creery

"Anything else bothering you?" she demanded.

"Nothing," croaked General Fleemer. His toad eyes bulged more than ever.

"All right. Now the rest of you clear out. Ryeland, I want to talk to you."

Whispering among themselves, but not audibly, the Team filed out of the conference room. Donna Creery stretched and yawned, the Peace Doves fluttering and cooing. "That's better," she said drowsily. "What are you doing?"

Ryeland coughed. "There seems to be a message coming in for you, Miss Creery," he said.

"There always is," she sighed. She stood behind him, one arm casually on his shoulder, reading:

Information. Planner Creery en route from Mombasa to Capetown. Information. Donna Creery personal rocket refueled and serviced. Information. London Philharmonic acknowledges receipt of opening season program instructions. Action. Request choice of soloist Beethoven piano concerto. Information. Moon colony Alpha-Six requests presence Donna Creery 25th anniversary celebration. Information.

"The usual run of thing," the girl said absently. "It can wait." She looked around. "This place depresses me. Haven't you got a room of your own? Let's go there." She didn't wait for an answer; she got up and beckoned Ryeland to follow.

He was not surprised to find that she knew the way. There seemed to be very little this girl didn't know!

But the situation was getting out of hand.

This girl was giving orders to an entire Research Team. It wasn't her place to do that. Everybody knew that! Under the Plan of Man it was the Machine that gave orders. Human beings—even Planners' daughters —were supposed to do their own job (perfectly) and nobody else's. That was plain logic, the logic of the Plan.

He stood stiffly holding the door to his room, meditating what to say to her. She walked in, looking curiously about; he followed, leaving the door ajar.

"Oh, close it," she said impatiently. "Don't you think my Peace Doves are chaperones enough?" She laughed at the expression on his face, threw herself at full length on his bed and lit a cigarette. The dislodged Peace Doves cooed complainingly and found roosts for themselves on the iron headboard.

Grudgingly Ryeland closed the door. He nodded to the teletype. "Don't you want to check in?"

"The Machine'll find me," Donna Creery said cheerfully. "You watch." And, sure enough, the words were hardly out of her mouth when the keys began to rattle away:

Information. Marseilles Planning Council asks Donna Creery give annual Plan Awards. Information. Life Magazine requests permission use photograph Donna Creery on Woman of the Year cover. Information—

"Someone's always available to tell the Machine where I've gone," the girl told Ryeland seriously. "And if not—well, the Machine can usually make a pretty good guess where I'll be. It knows me pretty well by now."

She spoke, Ryeland noticed wonderingly, as though the Machine were an old friend. But she didn't give him much chance to speculate on that; she said abruptly: "You're not much, Steve, but you're better than those others. Can you keep my spaceling alive?"

"Your spaceling?"

She laughed. "It's mine because I like it. Everything I like belongs to me—that's the way I want it." She added seriously: "But I don't know yet whether or not I like you."

He said, the back of his neck bristling, "I have my duty, Miss Creery. I'm going to do it! I hope it won't mean any further discomfort to the spaceling, but, if it does—Do you see this?" He tugged angrily at his collar. "I want that off! If I have to kill a million spacelings to get it off, I'll do it!"

She stubbed out her cigarette lazily. "That isn't what you told Gottling," she observed.

"How do you know what I told Gottling?"

"Oh, I know very many things. Why shouldn't I? The Machine goes everywhere, and my father is practically part of the Machine. And, oh, yes, I like the Machine, and everything I like—" She shrugged win-somely.

Ryeland stared. She was mocking him. She had to be. It was a joke in terribly bad taste, but surely that was all it was. He said stiffly: "Miss Creery, I don't appreciate that sort of remark about the Machine. I believe in the Plan of Man."

"That's terribly good of you," she said admiringly.

"Blast you," he yelled, pushed a step too far, "don't make fun of me! The Plan of Man needs the jetless drive, you silly little skirt! If the spaceling has to die so the Plan can discover its secret, what possible difference does that make?"

She swung her feet to the ground and got up, walking over close to him. Her face was relaxed and sympathetic. She looked at him for a second.

Then she said suddenly: "Do you still love that girl?"

It caught him off balance. "What—what girl?"

"Angela Zwick," she said patiently. "The daughter of Stefan Zwick.

The blonde, twenty years old, five feet four and a quarter, with green eyes, who became your teletype operator late one afternoon and made you kiss her that very night. The one who turned you in. Do you still love her?"

Ryeland's eyes popped. "I—I know you've got special sources of information," he managed, "but, really, I had no idea—"

"Answer the question," she said impatiently.

He took a deep breath and considered.

"Why, I don't know," he said at last. "Perhaps I do."

Donna Creery nodded. "I thought so," she said. "All right, Steve. I thought for a moment—But, no, it wouldn't work out, would it? But I admire your spirit."

Ryeland took a deep breath again. This girl, she had a talent for confusing him. It wasn't possible for him to keep up with her, he decided, it was only possible for him to cling to the basic facts of his existence. He said stiffly: "It doesn't take spirit to defend the Plan of Man. If the Plan needs to learn the secret of the jetless drive, that's my plain duty."

She nodded and sat again on his bed, the Peace Doves settling gently on her shoulders. "Tell me, Steve, do you know why the Plan of Man requires this information?"

"Why—no, not exactly. I suppose—"

"Don't suppose. It's to explore the reefs of space. Do you know what the Plan wants in the reefs?"

"No, I can't say that-"

"It wants Ron Donderevo, Steve."

"Ron?" He frowned.

"The man who got out of his iron collar, Steve," the girl said, nodding. "A man you might like to know again. That booby-trapped, tamper-proof collar, that nobody can possibly get off until the Machine authorizes it—the Machine wants to talk to Donderevo about it, very badly. Because he took his collar off, all by himself."

Ryeland stared at her.

She nodded. "And Donderevo is out in the reefs now," she said, "and the Machine wants to do something about it. It might simply destroy the reefs. I understand you are working on some such project. But if it can't do that, it wants to send someone out there to find him.

"Someone with a radar gun, Steve! To kill him! And that's why the Machine wants the secret of the jetless drive!"

7

Ryeland's new authority as leader of the Attack Team did nothing to efidear him to his colleagues.

He didn't care. He had work enough to keep him busy. Oddball Oporto made himself useful. The little man's talent for lightning computing saved Ryeland a good deal of time. Not that Oporto was faster than a computer. He wasn't; but Oporto.had a distinct advantage over the binary digital types in that problems didn't have to be encoded and taped, then decoded.

Still, in the final analysis there were not too many problems to compute. In fact, that was the big problem: Ryeland could find no handle by which to grasp the question of the jetless drive.

But Oporto made himself useful in other ways as well. He had a prying nose for news, for example, which kept Ryeland informed of what was going on in the Team Project. "Fleemer's got the sulks," he reported one day. "Holed up in his room, doesn't come out."

"All right," said Ryeland absently. "Say, where's my Physical Constants of Steady-State Equations?"

"It's indexed under 603.811," Oporto said patiently. "The word is that Fleemer is having an argument with the Machine. Messages are going back and forth, back and forth, all the time."

"What?" Ryeland looked up, momentarily diverted from the task of scribbling out a library requisition for the book he needed. "Nobody can argue with the Machine!"

Oporto shrugged. "I don't know what you'd call it, then."

"General Fleemer is filing reports," Ryeland said firmly. He beckoned to Faith, brooding in a corner. The Togetherness girl came eagerly forward, saw the slip, looked glum, shrugged and went off to get the book.

"Sure," said Oporto. "Say, have you heard anything from Donna Creery?"

Ryeland shook his head.

"I hear she's in Port Canaveral."

Ryeland snapped: "That's her problem. No doubt the Planner's daughter has plenty of occasions for off-Earth trips."

"No doubt," agreed Oporto, "but-"

"But you could mind your business," said Ryeland, closing the discussion.

Faith came back with the book. Ryeland verified a couple of figures and turned a sheet of calculations over to Oporto. "Here, solve these for me. It'll give you something to do," he said. He stood up, looking absently around the room. This was his A Section, devoted to the Hoyle Effect. He had a whole sub-Team of workers going here. Still, he thought, it was a waste of time.

"No sweat," said Oporto cheerfully, handing back the completed equations.

"Thanks." Ryeland glanced at them, then dumped them on the desk of one of the other workers. There wasn't much to be done but routine; he could leave it to the others now. That was why it was a waste of time. All the prior art was in hand and digested; it was only a matter of checking out the math now. Then he could answer the Machine's questions—but in fact, he knew, he could pretty well answer them now. Under what conditions could hydrogen growth occur? That was easy. Basic theory gave most of the answer; an analysis of the data from Les-cure's expedition in the Cristobal Colon gave a clue to the rest. And what was the possibility of halting or reversing the formation? That was easy too. Humans could have little control over the processes that could build stars. With finite equipment, in finite time, the probability was zero.

But it was a measure of the Machine's—desperation? Was that a word you could apply to the Machine—a measure of the Machine's, well, urgency that it could even ask such questions as these.

Ryeland said uncomfortably: "Come on, Oporto. Let's go take a look at the spaceling."

And that was B Section, and it was going badly indeed.

Jetless drive! It was impossible, that was all. If Ryeland hadn't had the maddening spectacle of the spaceling right there before him, he would have sworn that the laws were right.

For every action, Newton had stated centuries before, there is an equal and opposite reaction. That law of motion accounted for every movement of every creature on Earth. The cilia of the first swimming Paramecium propelled the creature forward by propelling an equal mass of water backward. It was the same with the thrust of a propeller, in water or in air. Rockets thrust forward by reaction, as the mass of the ejected jet's hot molecules went one way, the vessel the rockets drove went another. Action and reaction!

It was an equation that was easy to write—Mass times Acceleration equals Mass-prime times Acceleration-prime—and it was an equation that was hard to doubt.

But it did not happen to be true. The evidence of the dazed little creature from space made a liar out of Newton. The spaceling's trick of floating without visible reaction confounded the greatest genius the world has ever known.

The spaceling showed no reaction mass at all.

Whatever it was that permitted the spaceling to hover, it (call it "X") did not:

Disturb the currents of the air; affect plumb-bobs hung all about; register on photographic film; discharge a gold-leaf electroscope; disturb a compass; produce a measurable electric, magnetic or electronic field; add to the weight of the cage when the entire structure was supported on a scale; make any audible sound; affect the basal metabolism of the spaceling itself; or produce a discoverable track in a cloud chamber.

"X" did, on the other hand, do a few things.

It affected the "brain waves" of the spaceling; there was a distinctive trace on the EEG.

It seemed to have a worrisome effect on certain other mammals. This was noticed by chance when a cat happened to wander into the rocket pit; when the spaceling lifted itself the cat was "spooked", leaping about stiff-legged, fur bristling, eyes aglare.

And finally, it worked. Whatever "X" was, it lifted the spaceling with great ease.

They even wrapped the spaceling in chains once, more than six hundred pounds of them. And as if amused the spaceling floated with all six hundred pounds for an hour, purring to itself.

It was maddening.

Still, thought Ryeland, though the comfort was small—at least the thing seemed healthier. The wounds were healing. The small symbiotic animals that were left seemed to survive. The spaceling showed life and energy.

Donna Creery would be pleased.

Nobody else seemed very pleased with Ryeland, though. General Fleemer stayed in his room, venturing forth only occasionally to make sardonic comments and get in the way. The other high brass of the Team didn't have Fleemer's ready escape, since they had specific tasks; but they made sure to be as unpleasant to Ryeland as they could manage.

Only Major Chatterji was affable at all, and that was second nature to him. He came by every hour on the hour for a report. He was very little trouble. If Ryeland was busy, the major waited inconspicuously in the background. If Ryeland was free, the major asked a minimum of questions and then departed. Ryeland was pretty sure that all the information went, first, to the Machine and, second, almost as promptly to General Fleemer; but he could see no reason why he should attempt to interfere with the process. And he could also see no reason to believe he would be successful if he tried.

He kept busy.

Oporto said one afternoon: "Say, it's definite about your girl friend."

Ryeland blinked up from his papers. "Who?" He was genuinely confused for a moment; then he remembered Oporto's previous remarks. "You mean Miss Creery?"

"Miss Creery, yeah." The little man grinned. "She's off to the Moon. Her daddy, too."

"That's nice," said Ryeland. Carefully he kept his voice noncommittal, though he wondered who he was fooling. No matter how well he disguised his interest from Oporto, he couldn't disguise it from himself: Something inside him reacted to the thought of Donna Creery.

Oporto sprawled lazily over Ryeland's desk. "Well, I don't know if it is so nice, Steve," he said seriously. "Maybe they ought to stay home and attend to business. Did you hear about the Paris tube collapse?"

"What?" Ryeland wearily put down the sheaf of reports and blinked at his friend. His eyes smarted. He rubbed them, wondering if he needed sleep. But that didn't seem reasonable, he figured; he'd had at least eight hours sleep in the previous forty-eight. In any case, he didn't have the time; so he put the thought out of his mind and said: "What the devil are you talking about, Oporto?"

The little man said: "Just what I said. The Paris subtrain to Finland. The tube collapse. More than a hundred people missing—and that means dead, of course. When a tube gives out a hundred miles down you aren't 'missing.'"

Ryeland said, startled: "But that isn't possible! I mean, I know the math for those tubes. They can collapse, all right, but not without plenty of warning. They can't break down without three hours of field degeneration—plenty of time to halt transits."

Oporto shrugged. "A hundred dead people would be glad to know that, Steve," he said.

Ryeland thought for a second. "Well," he said wearily, "maybe you're right, maybe the Planner ought to be around to keep an eye on things like that. . . Oh, hello, Major."

Chatterji came smiling in, peering amiably through his gold glasses. "I wondered if there was anything to report, Mr. Ryeland."

While Ryeland searched through the papers on his desk, Oporto said: "We were just talking about the Paris trouble, Major."

Chatterji's brown eyes went opaque. There was a marked silence.

Ryeland took it in, and realized that Machine Major Chatterji was concerned about the tube failure between Paris and the Finland center. Odd, he thought, why should Chatterji care? But he was too weary to pursue the subject further. He found the requisition he was looking for and silently passed it across to Chatterji.

The major glanced at it casually, then intently. His crew-cut black hair seemed to stand on end. "But, dear Ryeland!" he protested, blinking through his gold-rimmed glasses. "This equipment—"

"I've checked it with the Machine," Ryeland said obstinately. "Here." He showed the teletape to Major Chatterji.

Action. Request approved. Action. Concert with Major Chatterji. Information. Power sources at Point Circle Black not adequate to demands.

"But, my dear Ryeland!" The major's expression was tortured. "It isn't only a matter of power sources. Think of the other considerations!"

"What the Plan requires, the Plan shall have," Ryeland quoted, beginning to enjoy himself.

"Of course, of course. But—" The major studied the list, "You have enough electronic equipment here to run a university lab," he wailed. "And some of it is dangerous. After the, uh, accident Mr. Oporto was talking about, surely you understand that we can't take chances."

Ryeland stared. "What does that have to do with the Team project?"

The major said angrily, "The Plan can't stand accidents, Mr. Ryeland! This equipment creates radiation hazards, if nothing else, and there are eighty thousand people in Points Circle Black, Triangle Gray, Crescent Green and Square Silver alone. They can't be exposed to this sort of thing!"

Ryeland tapped the teletape meaningfully.

"Oh," sighed the major, "if the Machine approves . . ." He thought for a moment, then brightened. "I have it! An orbiting rocket!"

Ryeland was taken aback. "What?"

"An orbiting rocket filled with all the equipment you want." Chatterji said eagerly. "Why not? Everything run by remote control. I can requisition one for you at once, Mr. Ryeland! And you can fill it with all the dangerous equipment you like—what do we care what happens to any wandering spacelings, eh?" He winked and giggled.

"Well," said Ryeland doubtfully, "we could do it that way."

"Of course we could! We'll arrange a TV repeater circuit with remote-controlled apparatus. You work in your lab, the equipment is out in space. Perform any experiments you like. And that way," he beamed, "if you blow the lab up you destroy only one ship, not all of us" He bustled off.

It was astonishing what the Plan of Man could accomplish. The rocket was loaded, launched and orbited in forty-eight hours.

Ryeland never saw it. He monitored the installation of the equipment he wanted via TV circuits, tested the instruments, gave the okay—and watched the fire-tailed bird leap off its launching pad through a cathode screen. At once he put it to work. The only thing they had learned about the force the spaceling generated, what the Planner had called the "jetless drive", was that it was indetectable. But that in itself was a great piece of knowledge. Ryeland's researchers had turned up another fact—a high-energy nuclear reaction which turned out less energy than went into it—and it was just possible, it was more than possible, it was perhaps a fact, that that missing energy was not missing at all, but merely not detectable.

Like the energy of the spaceling . . . Ryeland determined to recreate the nuclear reactions which were involved.

Until the morning that the Togetherness girl woke him with news: "Rise and shine, Steve," she sang, bringing him his breakfast. "Guess what! General Fleemer's going to be at the Teamwork conference today."

Steve got groggily to his feet. "That's his privilege," he said thickly, and looked at her, young, pretty, fresh—though she had been with him, tirelessly running errands, through half the night. "Don't you ever get tired?" he asked sourly.

"Oh, no, Steve! Eat your breakfast." She perched on his chair, watching him, and said earnestly: "We're not here to get tired, Steve. We have our job! We Togetherness girls are the connecting wires that hold the Plan of Man's circuit together."

He gaped at her, but she was serious. "That's right," she nodded. "The Plan of Man depends as much on us as on the transistors and condensers and capacitors—that's you and the other brass. Everyone is important! Don't forget, Steve: 'To each his own job—and his own job only.'"

"I won't forget," he said, and wearily drank his citrus juice. But the girl had something on her mind, he saw. She was waiting for an opportunity to speak to him. "Well? What is it?"

She seemed embarrassed. "Oh, Uh—it's just that—well, there's talk, Steve. The girls were wondering about something."

"For heaven's sake, say it!"

"We wondered," she said primly, "if our Team really had anything to do with these accidents."

Ryeland blinked and rubbed his eyes. But rubbing his eyes didn't change anything; the girl still sat there with the mildly embarrassed, mildly apologetic expression. "Accidents? Faith, what are you talking about?"

"The Paris-Finland tube," she recited. "The Bombay power plant explosion. The cargo-jet crash in Nevada. You know."

"No, I didn't know. Half those things I never heard of. Oporto's been falling down on the job."

"There are others, Steve. And what the girls are saying—" She paused. "I only wondered if it was true. They say our Team project has caused them. They even say that you, Steve—"

"That I what?"

"Oh, I suppose it's ridiculous. General Fleemer said it wasn't really true, anyway, that you had something to do with it. But they say you were involved in planning the subtrains. . ."

He grumbled, "They say some weird things. Excuse me while I dress, will you?"

He couldn't put it out of his mind. It was foolish, he thought testily. How did rumors like that start?

At the day's Teamwork conference, sure enough, General Fleemer had done them the unusual honor of attending. Ryeland scowled at him thoughtfully, then remembered the silly rumor. "Before we get started," he demanded, "has anybody heard anything about our work causing accidents?"

A dozen blank expressions met his stare. Then the head of the computer section coughed and said hesitantly, "Well, there was some talk, Mr. Ryeland."

"What kind of talk?"

The computerman shrugged. "Just talk. One of the data-encoders had heard from a cousin who heard from somebody else. You know how it goes. The story is that our work here has upset the radio-control circuits, heaven knows how."

"That's preposterous!" Steve exploded. "What the devil do they mean by that?" He stopped himself. It wasn't the computerman's fault, after all. "Well," he said grimly, "if anybody hears anything else like that, I want it reported to me!"

Heads nodded; every head but General Fleemer's. He barked testily: "Ryeland! Are we going to gossip about accidents, or is the Team going to chart its course for the day?"

Ryeland swallowed his temper. In spite of the fact that Donna Creery had put him in charge of the Team, General Fleemer's seniority made him a bad man to tangle with.

"All right," said Ryeland, "let's get on with it." Then he brightened. "I saw your report, Lescure. Want to elaborate on it?"

Colonel Lescure cleared his throat. "After a suggestion by Mr. Ryeland," he said, nodding, "we instituted a new series of X-ray examinations of the spaceling. By shadow-graphing its interior and using re-mote-chromotography analytic techniques I have discovered a sort of crystalline mass at the conflux of its major nervous canals. This is in accordance with the prediction made by Mr. Ryeland."

Fleemer demanded harshly: "What does it mean?"

Ryeland said eagerly: "It means we're making headway! There had to be some sort of such arrangement for controlling and directing the jetless drive. After yesterday's computer run, and some further calculations Oporto did for me, I asked Colonel Lescure to make the tests. He did—on overtime, as you see.

"What this means," he said, beginning to lecture, "is that we have found where the spaceling's force is generated and directed. And there's one other thing we learned from yesterday's calculations. Phase-rule analysis indicates zero possibility of any electromagnetic or gravitic force. I have the report here, ready for transmission to the Machine."

General Fleemer nodded slowly, looking at Ryeland. After a moment he said, "Does it account for what happened to the mining colonies in Antarctica?"

Ryeland was puzzled. "I don't understand. . ."

"No? I refer to the explosion of the power reactor last night, which destroyed them, at a very great loss to the Plan of Man. Not the only loss, Ryeland. A spaceship has been lost through a failure of its helical field accelerator. The same helical field which was involved in the reactor explosion—and in other accidents, Ryeland. The same field which you helped to design."

"The design is not to blame," Ryeland protested desperately. "If there have been accidents, they must be due to mechanical failure or human error or deliberate sabotage—"

"Exactly!"

"How could I be to blame for accidents in Antarctica and a hundred miles down and out beyond the Moon?"

"That's exactly what the Machine will want to know."

"Perhaps it is only chance," he suggested wildly. "Coincidence. Accidents have happened in series before—"

"When?"

"I don't remember. I—I can't recall."

He stammered and gulped, and walked away. The veil of gray fog across his past was thicker. Everything except his science was a swirl of unreality and contradiction.

Alone in his room, he tried again to come to grips with that old riddle of the three days missing from his life. What had the therapists suspected that he had done in that lost interval? Why had they expected him to know anything about a call from Dan Horrock, or about fusorians and pyropods and spacelings or about how to design a reac-tionless drive?

Lescure's story had given him clues, but they were too fragmentary to make much sense. Horrock had left the Cristobal Colon with unauthorized specimens and descriptions of the life of space. Did the Machine suspect that he had been in contact with Ryeland, before he was recaptured and consigned to the Body Bank?

Ryeland turned the puzzle over, and saw no light.

According to Donna Creery, there had really been three days between the knocking on his door and the arrival of the Plan Police. Had the knocking he remembered really been Horrock?

If so, what had erased his memory?

He stared at the wall and probed through the fog in his mind. He tried to remember Horrock, still perhaps in his uniform, soiled from his flight, perhaps bleeding from some vtound, panting with terror and exhaustion, lugging the black canvas space bag that held his stolen notes and specimens—

The images had become queerly real. Were they all imagination?

Had Horrock brought him some information vital to the invention of a jetless drive? He couldn't recall. He fell at last into a restless sleep, into a nightmare in which he and Horrock were in flight from the Plan Police.

The next morning Ryeland went directly from his room to the space-ling's cage in the rocket pit—and stopped, appalled.

The spaceling lay crushed and bleeding in its cage.

Ryeland ran to the cage and let himself in. The creature had grown to know him. It lay wrapped in a fading glow of misty green, eyes dulled; but as he entered its eyes brightened angrily. It lifted off the floor. Suddenly apprehensive, Ryeland dodged outside and slammed the cage door —just in time. The spaceling darted toward him with flashing speed. The cage rocked as she struck the closing door. Anchor chains clanked. Fresh blood ran down the bars, and a flap of golden fur was torn loose. She collapsed again, mewing piteously.

Ryeland felt the first real rage he had known in years.

He spun on his heel. "Gottling!" he bawled. "What the devil have you been up to?"

The colonel appeared, looking sardonically self-satisfied. "Mr. Ryeland," he nodded.

Ryeland took a firm grip on himself. Gottling looked more like a skull than ever, the radar horns giving a Satanic expression to a face that was cold and cruel enough to begin with.

But those radar horns were not merely ornament. Team leader or not, Ryeland was a Risk. The cold, complacent smile that twisted the corners of Gottling's thin lips was enough of a reminder of their relative status. One touch of the radar button on Gottling's harness and it was the end of Ryeland.

But this was too much. Ryeland blazed: "You've been torturing the thing again!"

"I suppose so," Gottling agreed mildly.

"Damn you! My orders were—"

"Shut up, Risk!" There was no smile at all now. Gottling thrust a teletape at Ryeland. "Before you go too far, read this!"

Ryeland hesitated, then took the tape. It read:

Information. Agreed present line of investigation unnecessarily slow.

Information. Danger of additional accidents possibly related Ryeland method of research must be investigated. Information. Possibility Ryeland engaged in direct sabotage subtrains, reactors, ion drives. Action.

Direction of Team project returned to General Fleemer. Action. Supplementary lines to be initiated at discretion Colonel Gottling.

Ryeland stared at it, dazed. The Machine had reversed itself again!

But in truth it wasn't his own position, difficult though it had suddenly become, that concerned him. It was the spaceling. "Supplementary lines!" he thundered. "Man, you'll kill her!"

Gottling shrugged, contemplating the spaceling. It lay gasping on the steel floor, looking up at them.

"Perhaps I will not wait for her to die," the colonel said meditatively. "Pascal does not wish to perform a vivisection, but he would hardly dare refuse the orders of the Machine. Even he." He smiled frostily and commented: "You are all alike, Pascal Lescure and the Planner's daughter and you, Risk. Blood frightens you. But pain is not contagious. You need not fear to observe it in others, it will not infect you. Indeed," he beamed, "there is much to learn in the pain of others."

Ryeland said tightly: "I'm going to report this to Donna Creery."

The colonel widened his eyes. "Oh? You need the Planner's daughter to fight your battles?" He allowed a silence to hang over them for a moment. Then, forgivingly: "But it does not matter, for you will not find that possible, Ryeland. Miss Creery is on the Moon. So you see, Risk, what happens to the spaceling from now on is entirely up to me."

Ryeland flung open the door of his room and headed for the teletype in the corner. Oporto and the Togetherness girl were there. He paused, distracted for a moment; he seemed to have interrupted something, but what? It didn't matter. He barked: "Oporto! What's Donna Creery's call number?"

Oporto coughed. "Gee, Steve. I don't know. Three? Fifteen?"

"Cut it out, Oporto," Ryeland warned dangerously.

"Three." Ryeland thumped the teletype keyboard:

Query. Permission for direct hookup communication Donna Creery station 3.

The teletype hardly hesitated:

Information. Refused.

"Well," Oporto said reasonably, "what did you expect? The Machine can't have its circuits tied up with—"

"Shut up." Ryeland was typing again, demanding a connection with the Planner himself.

Information. Refused.

"You see, Steve? You aren't getting anywhere. What's got you so steamed up?"

Ryeland told him in half a dozen sentences what was getting him so steamed up. "Oh, that's too bad," murmured the Togetherness girl. "The poor thing."

Oporto seconded: "Tough. Well, what are you going to do? We're only Risks. We can't buck Gottling and all those." He sneezed, and complained: "See, Steve, you're gedding me all upset. I bet I'm catching a code."

Ryeland looked at him blankly; he had not heard what Oporto had said, and hardly knew the other two were in the room with him. What could he do? Cut off from the Planner or his daughter, he had no chance to keep Gottling from murdering the spaceling. That was the end of the project. If what the Planner had told him was true, it actually endangered the Plan itself; for the jetless drive, the spaceling's queer method of propulsion, was important to the safety of all the Plan. Yet the Planning Machine would not allow him to—

He blinked and the room came into focus. "The Planning Machine!" he said aloud.

"What? Steve,", moaned Oporto, "now what are you going to do?" But Ryeland didn't answer. He sat at the keyboard of the machine and with a steady hand tapped out an account of what had happened. Colonel Gottling had deliberately controverted the orders of Donna Creery and the Machine itself. The spaceling was in danger. The Plan itself was threatened. He finished, and waited.

And waited.

And waited for long minutes, while Oporto and the girl whispered behind him. It was incredible that the Machine should take so long to answer! Ryeland asked himself feverishly: Was it turned on, was the wire cut, could it be possible that the Machine's circuits were so overloaded that the message was not received? He was actually bending over, hardly aware of what he was doing, to be sure that the machine was properly plugged in when abruptly it whirred and rattled.

Ryeland was up like a shot.

But the message was unbelievably short. It said only: R.

"Received and understood," Oporto said sympathetically from behind him. "Gee, Steve. That's all? Well, that's the Machine for you. It isn't up to us to question—Steve. Hey. Steve! Where are you going?" But Ryeland was already gone.

Ryeland hurried down the corridors to General Fleemer's quarters. He had wasted time and it was now late; he would be waking the general up, but he didn't care about that, not now. He tapped on the door and then, without pausing, banged hard.

"A minute, a minute," mumbled a grumpy voice. A wait. Then the door was flung open.

General Fleemer was in lounging pajamas, bright purple tunic, striped purple and scarlet pants. The collar and cuffs were picked out in silver braid, and the room behind him was silver. Silver walls, silver-mounted furniture on a silvery rug. It was a startling effect. Fleemer growled irritably: "Ryeland? What the devil do you want?"

"I have to talk to you, General." He didn't wait for an invitation, but slipped past him into the room. Then something stopped him and he paused, stared, distracted even from the important mission he was on.

There was a statue by the fireplace, a bright silver statue of a girl. But it moved! It opened silver eyelids and looked at him. With pink-tinged lips, like metallic copper in a silver face, it said: "Who is this one?"

"Go in the other room!" the general barked. The silver statue shrugged and stood up. It was no statue but a girl; the motion revealed it as she stared at Ryeland and left.

Ryeland blinked. Dusted with silver to look like living metal, even her hair silver—the general had a remarkable private life. But it was no business of Ryeland's at this moment. He said briskly: "Sir, Colonel Gottling is about to destroy the spaceling. I'm afraid he is deliberately trying to sabotage the project."

Suddenly the general was no longer a cross, sleepy little fuss-budget. His cat's eyes slitted down, his face abruptly became stone. "Go on," he said after a second.

"Why—that's all there is, sir. Isn't it enough? If Colonel Gottling goes ahead with vivisection it will kill the creature, I'm certain. Miss Creery left specific orders—"

"Wait," said the general, but did not invite him to sit down. He turned his back to Ryeland and strode over to his desk. He pressed a button on his desk phone and leaned over to yell into it. "Gottling? Get down to my quarters. Ryeland's here."

Mumble-mumble from the desk phone. It was directional; Ryeland couldn't understand the words and wasn't meant to. "On the double!" the general barked, cutting off discussion, and broke the connection. Without looking at Ryeland he slumped in a chair, shading his eyes with his hands, and remained there until there was a crisp knock at the door.

Colonel Gottling walked in. He did not seem disturbed, not in the least. And he was not alone. Machine Major Chatterji came smiling and bowing behind him. "What a lovely room, General! Oh, really lovely. It takes exquisite taste to transform our dreary barracks into—"

"Shut up." General Fleemer stood. Ryeland waited, poised for whatever excuse Gottling might offer, ready to confront him with the facts as soon as the general began his accusation.

But the general did not begin. The general did not speak to Gottling at all. He said: "All right, Chatterji, have you got the orders?"

"Yes, General. Certainly! Here you are. I knew you'd be wanting them, so—" The general moved slightly and Chatterji was still. Fleemer took a sheet of teletype communication paper from the major's hand and passed it to Ryeland without comment. Ryeland glanced puzzledly at it.

Then he felt a sudden quick burning sensation, as though a knife had reached him unsuspected. The message said:

Information. Ryeland, Steven, Risk, change of status approved. Action. Subject will therefore be transported to stockpile HJK without delay.

"Stockpile HJK?" Ryeland repeated aloud. He shook his head, dazed. "But—there's got to be some mistake here, because, look, stockpile HJK is Heaven. I mean—"

"You mean the Body Bank, as it is otherwise known." General Fleemer nodded wisely. "That's correct, and that is where you're going. You were perfectly right about Gottling sabotaging the Project, you see. Your only mistake was in thinking that he was alone."

Heaven was on the island of Cuba.

The subtrain took nearly an hour to get there. Ryeland hardly noticed. They rode in a gray steel ball, far less luxurious than the Planner's private car. When they stopped, Ryeland, still dazed, still shocked, got out and blinked at a massive concrete archway over a steel gate.

The letter in the concrete read:

Resurrection under the Plan

The station was gray concrete. Air ducts blew a clammy breath at them. A guard in white, a red heart stitched on the breast of his tunic, came forward to take charge.

The major who had convoyed Ryeland's detail, twenty-two new cadavers for the Body Bank, turned them over gratefully and went back into the subtrain without a look. He didn't like this escort detail. No one did. It was a reminder of mortality; even a machine major could be made to realize that one bad blunder, or one bad break, could put him in Heaven too. "Come on!" bawled the guard, and apathetically the twenty-two walking collections of spare parts followed him through the gate.

A narrow corridor. A long rectangular room, with wooden benches. Ryeland sat and waited and, one by one, they were admitted to a smaller room. When it was his turn Ryeland walked through the door and a girl grasped his arm, thrusting it under the black-light. Her hair was red, the same bright red as the heart that was stitched on her uniform. Under the light his tattoo glowed faintly. She read off his name and number in a rapid drone. "Steven Ryeland," she said in the same continuous drone, "when you enter this gate you leave life behind as an individual you have failed to justify your place in the Plan the tissues of-"

She yawned sharply. She shook her head and grinned. "Excuse me. Where was I? The tissues of your body however may still serve the Plan before you enter have you anything to say?"

Ryeland thought. What was there to say? He shook his head.

"Go ahead, then. Through that door," said the girl.

Behind Ryeland the door clanged with a steel finality.

First there were tests.

Ryeland was stripped, scrubbed, weighed, measured, X-rayed, blood-tested, tissue-tested, ascaulted, palped and all but sniffed and tasted. A bit of his flesh was snipped and whisked to a complex bench where a team of girls put it through a process of staining and microscopy. From their studies a genetic map was made of his chromosomes, every allele and allomorph in place, and coded into binary symbols which were stamped on his coilar.

It was interesting. Transplants of body organs did not survive, not even with suppressants, if the donor and subject were too different in their genetic makeup. Antibodies formed. The new tissue was attacked by the environment it found itself in. It died. So, usually, did the patient. The more delicate the tissue involved, the closer the genetic resemblance had to be. It was an old story. Any cornea can be imbedded in any other eye; the tissues are crude and simple, mostly water. Millions of humans can transfer blood from one to another—blood is a tissue little more complex than the cornea.

But the more highly specialized members are transferable, without suppressants, only between identical twins. Suppressants—something like the allergy-controlling pharmaceuticals which once helped hold down hay fever—can make the range of tolerance broader; but, even so, genetic patterns must be matched as closely as possible. It was good that it was interesting. Ryeland was able to keep his mind on it. He did not find himself dwelling on the fact that he was now in the position of the spaceling under Gottling. He did not have to contemplate the prospect of what was essentially (however gentle, however carefully anesthetized for him) the Death of a Thousand Cuts.

And then they turned him loose, without warning.

He had expected a cell. He was given a millionaire's playground. He tripped over a tuft of grass and, blinking in warm Caribbean afternoon sun, found himself in a broad park, with trees and comfortable-looking cabins. He started forward, then happened to think of something and returned to the guard. "What do I do now? Who do I report to?"

"Nobody," said the guard, gently closing the door. "Nobody at all, any more."

Ryeland walked down a broad green lane toward the glint of water, it was as good a direction to go as any. He had never in all his life before had the experience of being without orders. It was almost more disturbing than the sure prospect of dismemberment that lay before him. He was so absorbed in the feeling that he hardly heard someone calling to him until the man raised his voice. "You! Hey, you new fellow! Come back here!"

Ryeland turned.

The man who was calling him was about fifty years old—the prime of life. He should have been a husky, bronzed creature with all his hair. Statistically he should hardly have needed even glasses. Forty good years should still be ahead of him at least.

But the man who limp-stumped up to Ryeland had none of these things. He was totally bald. (In a moment, as the sunlight caught it, Ryeland saw that what had seemed to be the man's scalp was a plastic covering.) He walked with a shoulder-cane—almost a crutch. And what he walked on were not flesh-and-blood feet but prosthetic appliances. One eye was only a patch; the other was drawn into a squint by another area of pink plastic that covered the place where once he had had an ear.

"You! Did you just come in?" he cried. His voice was deep and vibrant; that, at least, he had kept.

Ryeland said, keeping his expression polite with some difficulty, "Yes, that's right. My name is Steve Ryeland."

"Never mind that. Do you play bridge?"

The difficult expression collapsed for a second, but Ryeland got it back. "I'm afraid not."

"Damn." When the man scowled it pointed up another peculiarity of his face. He had no eyebrows. "How about chess?"

"Yes, a little."

"Speak up!" the man barked, turning his good ear irritably to Ryeland.

"I said yes!"

"Well, that's worth something," the man said, grudging the words. "Um. Maybe you could learn bridge, hey? We're a good house. No rough stuff, no stealing. And no basket cases." He said proudly: "I'm the senior inmate in the house. Take a look at me. See? I've got plenty left."

Ryeland said slowly, "You mean I can pick out the house I live in? I don't know the rules here yet."

"There aren't any rules. Oh," the man shrugged, "no fights resulting in bodily injury, no hazardous sports—they salvage you total for that sort of thing. You know. What you've got, it doesn't belong to you any more. It's the Plan's and you're supposed to take care of it." He hitched himself forward on his shoulder-cane. "Well, what about it? You look all right to me. Take my advice and come in with us. Never mind what the other houses say—those Jupiters will be talking about their pingpong table, and what good is that when tomorrow morning you maybe won't have what to play pingpong with!" He grinned confidentially, revealing a set of casually placed artificial teeth.

Ryeland went with the one-eyed man, whose name turned out to be Whitehurst. The man was a good salesman, but he had not exaggerated the value of choosing the right hut. Ryeland could see that for himself; some cottages had a rundown, disreputable air, the inmates lounging around, surly and bored. Whitehurst's house was busy if nothing else.

It was amazing, but Ryeland found Heaven rather pleasant. There was food—good food. Whitehurst told him proudly, no synthetics or retreads! (The tissues had to be kept up.) There was plenty of leisure. (The patient had to be always in shape for major surgery.) There was . . . well . . . freedom, said Whitehurst, almost embarrassed as he said it and unwilling to explain. But Ryeland found out that it was so. If Heaven was a jail, at least the walls were out of sight. There was no fear of making a mistake and falling to ruin; there was no farther to fall.

The physical plant was ideal. Small cottages dotted a green landscape. Palms stood on green hills. There was a grove of oaks and cedars by a lake, and the lake contained actual fish. The tropic sky was a permanent milky blue, with high-piled cumulus to give it life.

Whitehurst's cottage called themselves the Dixie Presidents. No one remembered what doomed antiquarian, generations before, had selected the name, but it was the custom to name each house and successive inmates kept the names; it was a tradition. The Dixie Presidents were an all-male cottage, by choice. It was up to the inmates. Not all the houses were so monastic. There were as many women as men in Heaven, and the co-ed cottages were given to wild sounds late at night. But that was up to the inmates too.

Listening to the evening conversation of his fellow inmates, Ryeland found a few things which struck him as odd. The cottage across the way was occupied by a family group. Strange! Their name was Minton— Mr. Minton, Mrs. Minton and their five grown children. What mass crime had the Minton family committed to be scrapped en masse? It was queer.

The principle that lay behind the Body Bank he knew well. It had been explained to him in detail on his travel orders, even if he had been the one man alive under the Plan who didn't know all about it from infancy. Each human under the Plan of Man was required to make a contribution toward the good of all. If inefficiency, malevolence or carelessness kept him from doing what he was asked, he would then be permitted to contribute in another way. He would be scrapped. His limbs and organs would be put to the use of more valuable citizens, replacing parts damaged through accident or disease.

It was a project more attractive to the recipient than to the donor, of course. Yet it did have a sort of rough justice, and Ryeland thought he could bring himself to tolerate whatever might happen—the world's good was more important than his own!

And yet. . .

One thing did bother him. In his life he had known or heard of a fair number of persons who had been scrapped for the salvage of their parts in the Body Bank.

And yet he could not remember ever, not even once, having encountered a man who had benefited from these organs. , .

Now at last, when it was too late to matter, Ryeland had time to return to the riddle of his three missing days. He was tormented with the possibility that he had once known a precious secret which could somehow transform the Plan of Man—if he could just recall it.

That night after he had watched the bridge game for a few minutes he lay trying to remember. Had there been a knocking twice on his door, on Friday and again on Monday? If Horrock had really come to him, what message could he have brought? Even if a jetless drive could be invented, how could it threaten the Plan? Who besides Donderevo was free from the Machine?

He found no answers. The fog was thicker in his memory. Even the fat, apologetic face of Dr. Thrale was growing dim. He no longer flinched when he remembered the cold electrodes clamped on his body. He fell asleep and dreamed that he had discovered a jetless drive.

It was a broomstick. He rode it through a jungle of five-pointed tinsel stars, with General Fleemer astride a spaceling close behind him. Fleemer was goading and spurring the spaceling, and it was screaming horribly.

"Reveille! Reveille! Everybody up!"

Ryeland woke up with a start; he had been dreaming that he was in the Body Bank, in an unusually soft bed, and woke to find it true. He sat blinking at the bunk across from him. It looked more like a surgical supply house than a human being's bed. The cords of a bone conduction hearing aid dangled from the stainless-steel shafts of a prosthetic arm. A self-powered wheelchair bore ten pounds of assorted steel, copper, rubber and plastic. As in the ancient joke about the wedding night, there was more of Ryeland's roommate on the bureau than in the bed.

The roommate was a plump man of rosy complexion, what there was left of it, and ill temper. His name was Alden. "Come on, Ryeland," he screeched faintly in the high-pitched whisper of the newly deaf. "You know the rules of the house. Give me a hand."

"All right." There was plenty of time before morning shape-up and breakfast, so Ryeland had been told; there had to be, for the senior members of the community needed plenty of time to get their miscellaneous artificial parts in place. As a newcomer, still complete in his organs, Ryeland had obligations. The juniors took care of the seniors. Seniority ruled—not age, but length of time in Heaven. It was a fair system, it was explained to Ryeland, and it was enlightened self-interest besides. "You'll find out," Whitehurst had said grimly. "Wait till you're missing a few little chunks."

In the morning the conversation was less placid, less polite than at night. It was odd too, thought Ryeland, listening carefully. In the morning the one universal topic was Escape. Perhaps it was only the wake-up irritability of the normal human, but even the advanced basket cases from the huts next door laid their plans and carefully measured the daily patrol of the guard helicopters. Alden muttered for twenty minutes about the chance of swimming to a miraculously borrowed fishing submarine that some incredibly loyal friend from Life might arrange to have out beyond the breakers. It was foolish, it was pathetic. There was hardly enough left of him to bother escaping with. And his tone the night before had been bland resignation: "You'll learn, my boy," he told Ryeland, "we're here for a reason. It's right" It was puzzling.

In the night Ryeland had been bothered by something sticking him in the ribs.

Once Alden was wheeled away he searched, and there, thrust under the seams of the mattress, was a flat aluminum case. He opened and spilled out lump sugar, maps, terribly amateurish faked travel orders from the Machine. And a journal.

The journal was the work of some previous occupant who signed himself only by initials—D.W.H.—and it covered a period of almost three years. The first entry was sober self-appraisal:

June 16. I arrived in Heaven this morning. I can't get out. If I did get out, there would be no place to go. But if I let myself give up the hope of somehow getting out I might as well be dead. Therefore I will try to escape. And I will not brood.

The last entry, in a palsied hand, was less sober, less analytic:

May the—what? 9th, maybe. Just a min. bfr shape-up. I think I've got it! Nbdy ever looks at the scrap-heap carcasses! I've seen some that look better than I do now and, whoosh, they're down the chute & out on the barge when they clean up. So tonight's the night. All I have to do is pass one more shape-up. I've plenty left. Aprnces don't matter. If I can just—There's the bell. More ltr.

The remaining pages were blank.

Breakfast came before the morning shape-up and Ryeland, stuffing the journal back in the mattress, went thoughtfully out to eat.

The food was all Whitehurst had promised! There was no rationing here, none at all. Sugar. Coffee. Real, thick cream. Ham with red gravy; cereal with more of the thick cream; fruits and hot biscuits.

Ryeland ate until his stomach bulged. He began to feel better. The world seemed calmer, brighter; his housemates left off grumbling and plotting and began to laugh and shout along the long tables.

Ryeland sat next to Whitehurst and brought up the subject of the previous occupant of his bunk.

"Oh, him," said the one-eyed man. "Old Danny. He was here for ever, considering. I mean, he must have been a very popular type, they took so much of him. I thought they'd never salvage him total, though all he had keeping him going at the end was a whirl-pump heart and twice a day Alterations on the kidney machine. Funny thing about Danny, his bidding was good enough but when he played a hand—" "What happened to him?"

Whitehurst scowled. "Took both lungs at one time. Pity, too. He still had two arms, clear down to the fingers."

The bell summoned them out to the morning shape-up. There were three of them a day, Whitehurst whispered, and you had to be present. Otherwise total salvage, right away. The white guards with red hearts appliqued on their tunics moved up and down the ragged lines, checking the tattooed identification against lists. "Gutnick, Fairweather, Breen, Morchant," the one at the house of the Dixie Presidents chanted. "Nothing for you boys. You can fall out. Alden, Hensley—Hensley? Say, how did that name get on the list? Wasn't he scrapped last week?" Half a dozen voices agreed he had been; the guard scratched the name off his list. "Lousy administrative work. Say. Who are you?" He took Ryeland's arm. "Oh, Steve Ryeland. Welcome to our little community. Nothing for you today, though. Whitehurst. Oh, yes. Come on, Whitehurst, you're in business."

Ryeland got away as soon as he could. The others were laughing and relaxed, but seeing Whitehurst led away had chilled the soft warmth that had spread over Ryeland at breakfast. At any moment it might be his name that was on the list; if there was anything at all he could do about it, the time to do it was now.

He retrieved the journal from his bed, escaped the back way and found a sunny spot on a hill. He sat down against a stone retaining wall and studied the diary of the late D.W.H.

There was nothing about the man's life-in-Life in his journal. But whatever he had been he was a man of method and intelligence. He had begun by systematically investigating his surroundings. From the first month's entries Ryeland learned a number of possibly useful statistics. There had then been 327 inmates in Heaven, counting twelve children under the age of eighteen (and what had they done to be here?). This was not the only Heaven; there probably were a number of others; twice shipments of inmates had gone out through the gate, to replenish another Heaven temporarily low in stock. There were never any guards inside the walls except at the shape-ups. Usually about a dozen came in then, and D.W.H. had once been able to count the outside guards at fifteen more. Heaven roamed over nearly a hundred acres, and there was a map, heavily erased and redrawn, tucked into the journal. A note on the map told Ryeland that the walls were electrified and impenetrable, even down to a depth of fifty yards under the surface. Apparently someone had actually dug that far!

The beach was not fenced, but there was a heavy steel net and, beyond that, a persuasive tradition of sharks. The only other break in the wall was the building through which he had entered, and its satellite structures—the clinic, the administration building, the powerhouse. And the sanitation building. It was there that the "scrap-heap" had attracted D.W.H.'s attention. It was near the beach, and a chute led to a barge which, towed to sea, disposed of the left-over parts of the inmates as well as the more ordinary wastes of a community of several hundred.

Ryeland mused thoughtfully over the map. Only the scrap disposal chute looked promising. Yet the writer had not thought of it until after some months and, judging by the increasingly panicked and incoherent quality of his notes, his judgment must by then have begun to deteriorate. Still, it was worth a thought. He said a man could escape that way. Perhaps a man could. . .

If he had a place to escape to.

Ryeland put that thought out of his mind and read industriously in the journal until movements outside the cottages revealed that it was time for the mid-day shape-up.

No Dixie President was called at noon. Only when they were dismissed did Ryeland realize he had been holding his breath almost continuously. Gutnick, the man next to him in line, winked and said: "It gets you that way at first. It keeps on getting you that way too."

Ryeland said only: "What's that?"

Gutnick turned and looked. Down the gravel path two guards were solemnly pushing a wheelchair and a handtruck of appliances. All were connected to the occupant of the wheelchair. There was little left of the man, if it was a man. All of his head was swathed in bandages—if that was his head. Only a little gap showed where the mouth was. The auxiliary handtruck carried a considerable array of pumps and tubing, stainless-steel cylinders and electric equipment.

Gutnick said, "Oh, him." Gutnick could not wave, as both his arms had been needed elsewhere, but he inclined his torso and called: "Hi, Alec. What did you lose this time?"

The bandaged head moved faintly. Nothing else moved on the man. The nearly invisible lips parted to gasp, in words like puffs of smoke. "That you, Gutnick? Just the other kidney, I think."

"You've got plenty left," lied Gutnick cheerfully, and they went in to lunch. Ryeland could not get the basket case out of his mind.

"I didn't think they bothered to keep us alive, with that much gone."

"I guess Alec's something special. He's senior in all Heaven. He's been here—" Gutnick's voice was respectful—"almost six years."

Ryeland didn't have much appetite; but after he'd taken a few bites he had to stop in order to feed Gutnick anyway; and then he himself began to perk up. It was astonishing, he marveled after lunch, trudging aimlessly around the walks of Heaven, how the food here made life so bearable. It showed that a good diet made a happy man. It showed—why, he thought with a sudden miserable flash of insight, it showed nothing at all except that even a doomed creature like himself could submerge the forebrain in a wallow of physical pleasures. He determined to go right back to the house and get the diary, study it; plan—

Someone was calling his name.

He turned, and Oddball Oporto was rushing toward him. "Gee! Ryeland! It's you!"

Oporto stopped. So did Ryeland; and then he realized that what they were doing was appraising each other, looking for missing parts. So soon it had become a habit in this place.

"You don't seem to be missing anything," said Ryeland.

"I've only been here two days. Got here right ahead of you—I saw you come in. I guess you stopped to turn in your gear? They didn't bother with that, \vith me ... I should've stayed in Iceland, hey? Not that I hold it against you," he finished glumly.

"Sorry."

"Yeah. Well, where you living?" Ryeland told him about the Dixie Presidents, and Oporto was incredulous. "Gee! Those moldy old creeps? Say, why not come over to our place? There's two vacancies right now, and some of the boys are real sharp. You know, you lose a few parts and there isn't much left but the brain; so what you want is a few little problems to work on. Well, fellow next to me, he has a whole bunch of stuff from the Lilavata—old Hindu math problems, mostly diophantine equations when you come down to it, but—"

Ryeland said gently: "I'm working on a different problem right now."

Oporto waited.

"I want to get out of here."

"Oh, no. Wait a minute! Steve, don't be crazy. A fellow like you, you've got years here. Plenty to look forward to. You don't want to—"

"But I do want to," said Ryeland, "I want to get away. It isn't just my life, though I admit that's got a lot to do with it."

"What else? Oh. You don't have to tell me. That girl."

"Not the girl. Or not exactly. But she's part of it. Something bad's happening with the spaceling and Colonel Gottling. It ought to be stopped."

Oporto said dismally, "Gee, Steve. You don't want to talk like that. Anyway—" He stopped.

Ryeland knew Oporto well enough to wait him out. He prompted: "Anyway what?"

"Anyway," said Oporto with some hesitation, "I don't know why you want to bother with her. I thought that other girl was more important to you. You know, 837552—I forget her name."

Ryeland took it like a blow between the eyes. That number—he didn't have Oporto's queer memory for any arithmetical function, but surely it was the number of. . .

"Angela Zwick," he whispered, remembering blonde hair, blue eyes and a mouth that testified against him at his hearing.

"That's the one. Well, now! So you didn't forget her?" Oporto was enjoying his bombshell. "Why not go see her? She's been here quite a while—over in a cottage by the lake."

"She's really here? But she was with the Plan Police." Ryeland was dazed. Had the Plan come to this, that it scrapped its own undercover agents?

"Well," said Oporto judiciously, "I guess you'd say she's here. Anyway, there's a quorum present. Why not go see for yourself?"

The first sensation was shock, and a terrible embarrassment. Ryeland scraped one foot against another, staring at the girl in the wheelchair. He said her name gruffly, and then he met her eyes and could say nothing else. Angela? This thing in the chair, was it the girl he had known? She had no arms and, from the flatness of the lap robe that draped her, no legs either. But her face was intact, blue-green eyes, golden hair; her husky, warm voice was the voice he had known.

"Steve! It's good, to see you!" She was not embarrassed at all, only amused. She laughed. "Don't gawk. But I know how you feel. You've only just arrived, and I've been here twenty-one months."

Ryeland sat awkwardly on the grass before her. Her cottage lay in a little clump of woods, and there were neatly tended beds of flowers around it. Flowers! Ryeland could not remember ever having seen flowers around a dwelling before, only in parks. Though this was a kind of a park, at that.

Angela said softly: "I wondered if I would ever see you again, after what happened." She cocked her chin, and a tiny motor droned; the vel-vet-covered chin rest that supported her head seemed to have switches in it, so that she could move the wheels of her chair. Facing him, she said seriously: "You don't blame me, do you?"

Ryeland muttered: "You did your job under the Plan."

"So wise of you to say that, Steve. Ah, Steve! I'm glad to see you again." She lifted her lovely chin. "We've got so much to talk about. Take me down by the lake," she commanded. . .

For nearly three years Ryeland had rehearsed the speeches he would make to Angela Zwick if ever they chanced to come together, but in this place they were all wrong, he forgot the words. He had raged silently in his bed, he had pleaded with the stony fields of the isolation camp; now, facing the girl, he found himself engaged in a little conversation. They chatted. They laughed. It was pleasant. Pleasant! And she had put the collar around his neck.

"There is always peace in serving the Plan," she told him wisely, reading his mind.

They stopped by the lake and he sat down. "I don't even mind the collar any more," he murmured, suppressing a yawn. "Of course not, Steve."

He scratched his shoulderblades against the bole of a palm. "I never thought I'd stop minding that. Why, I remember talking to a fellow about it in the isolation camp. He said I'd get over it. I said—" He stopped, and frowned faintly. "What did you say to him, Steve?"

"Why," he said slowly, "I told him that I'd never stop hating the collar unless I was dead, or drugged." She smiled at him with mandarin calm.

Back at the cottage of the Dixie Presidents, Ryeland thumbed through the journal that had once belonged to his predecessor in the bunk. There was an entry that he wanted to read again. He found it:

This place is insidious. The atmosphere is so tranquil—God knows how!—that it is very tempting to relax and let what happens happen. Today Cullen came back from the clinic giggling because a nurse had told him a joke. He had lost both eyes!

And two days later:

Yesterday I lost my other leg. It is painful, but they gave me shots for that. I wonder why it doesn't bother me. I keep thinking of Cullen.

Frowning, Ryeland closed the book and went out to stand in the afternoon shape-up. The other Dixie Presidents were already there, and their greetings were chill. Ryeland paid very little attention, although he knew they were annoyed because he had spent so little time conforming with the customs of the cottage. He hardly even noticed the guards, with their scarlet hearts blazoned on their white tunics, as they came droning down the line with their rolls.

There was something more important on his mind. Ryeland was reasonably sure that his mind was functioning as well as it ever had. But he was finding it hard to think this matter through. He didn't mind the collar. That was the first term in the syllogism. Something in the diary supplied the second term. What was the conclusion?

"Come on, I said!" said a guard's voice, annoyed, and Ryeland woke up to the fact that his name had been called. He gawked. "Me? Are you calling me?"

"You. That's what I said, man! You're on orders today. Come on to the tissue bank!"

11

• The group of scrapped men waited for the elevator.

The man next to Ryeland was whispering feverishly under his breath, his eyes fixed on the elevator door as though it were the gate to hell. He caught Ryeland looking at him and threw him a wild smile. "First time for you? Me, too. But I figure it won't be much, you know."

"All right, all right." The guards began to herd them into the opening elevator door. "Move along, now!"

The elevator dropped swiftly and let them out in an underground hall. Blue asepsis lamps winked on the walls, a hum from the air ducts told of purifiers at work. The guards ordered them to sit down. There were a dozen long, wooden benches. The waiting room was not at all crowded, though there were twenty or more walking cadavers in it. Ryeland looked around at them. Some seemed to have all their faculties and parts; if there was anything missing, it was not such as would appear on the surface. Many showed signs of being nibbled away—a leg missing, an ear, a finger or two. And some were so much prosthesis, so little flesh and blood, that it was a wonder that the surgeons could find anything left to take from them.

The nervous man switched seats to join Ryeland and hissed in his ear: "See, the way I see it, they're not going to take much the first time. Why should they? For instance, your body might not transplant right. They can't tell. They'll have to do a couple little jobs first and see how they take, before they try anything big. I'm positive of that, friend. . ." He stopped as the door opened, his eyes like a tortured kitten's. But it was only a nurse walking through, and she paid no attention to them.

Ryeland took time from his own worries to comfort the man. "That's right," he said. "That figures." It didn't, of course; the Plan knew all it had to know about them already. But the nervous man seized at the reassurance.

He babbled: "Now, all we have to worry about is something little.

Maybe some clumsy oaf lost a couple of fingers somewhere. Well, they'll take a finger. Or a couple of fingers. . He glanced wonderingly at his hand. "A couple of fingers. They'll take—But what's that? You can spare them. Or a foot, maybe. But they aren't going to take anything big the first time, because—"

The door opened.

A young, slim guard walked in. He was bored, and the look he gave the waiting cadavers was not intended for anything human. "Eckroth?" he called, reading from a list. The man next to Ryeland jumped. "Come on!"

The nervous man stared frantically at Ryeland, swallowed, stood up and left, into a door that closed, silent and final, behind him.

Ryeland sat and waited.

One by one the cadavers were summoned to their operating rooms to give to the Plan what the Plan demanded of them. Ryeland watched them, because it was better to think of them than to think about himself: the oldster with the fire-blue eyes, weeping into the maze of tubes that had replaced his breathing apparatus; the young girl with the curiously flat dressings along one side of her body; the men and women of all sizes and descriptions. Ryeland was almost the last of them all to be called.

But at last it was his turn. A nurse beckoned to him. He stood up, feeling strangely empty. A queer premonitory tingling raced all over his peripheral nervous system, like a pain looking for its proper place to settle down and begin aching.

What would it be? A foot, an arm, a set of teeth, some internal organs?

"Oh, come on" said the nurse, looking ruffled. She was a pretty girl with red hair. She even wore a ring on her finger. Ryeland marveled. This girl was engaged! Somewhere there was a Plan-fearing man who looked at her with affection and warmth. And, here, she was the embodiment of something that was going to deprive Steve Ryeland of a part of his body.

He walked stiffly after her. There was a roar in his ears: the drumming of his blood. It was very loud; he felt his heart thumping, very strong. Colors were bright, an antiseptic odor in the room was very sharp. His senses missed nothing. He felt the stiffness of his worn red uniform. The blue glare of the sterilamps was painfully bright.

He was in a small room, dominated by a neat, high operating table, stainlessly white.

Ryeland looked at the table and licked his lips.

Unexpectedly the nurse giggled. "Oh, I swear. You cadavers take everything so hard. Don't you know why you're here?"

Ryeland nodded stiffly. He knew very well. Still, it was odd that he didn't see the bright metal gleam of instruments.

She said, humorously exasperated: "I don't think you do. Your blood, friend. That's all I'm going to take from you today. Maybe next time it will be different, of course. But right now we only need half a liter of your good red blood."

Rat on his back, with his arm strapped to the table and a crisp, cool sheet covering his legs, Ryeland lay. He was watching his blood slowly fill a liter beaker up to a measured mark. His blood was wine-purple colored, and it seemed to flow very slowly.

There was nothing at all painful about the process. Of course, it wasn't exactly pure pleasure. There was a queer jumpy sensation in his skin, a sort of warning of something that might hurt—as though the nerve-ends, evolved to cope with grosser wounds and warn of in-stanter dangers, did not know quite what to tell the brain, and could only express a sort of worry. The tube made a faint vulgar sound from time to time, like a siphon sucking air, but there was no other noise. The nurse had left him. It was amazing how still the world was. . .

And it was amazing how clearly Ryeland could think.

He was tranquil.

More than that, he knew he was tranquil.

More still, he was beginning to realize that he had been tranquil— stupidly, crazily tranquil—ever since he had arrived in the Body Bank! And so was everyone else! It accounted for the cheerful amputees and his heedless roommates at the Dixie Presidents. Tranquil! But it was not natural, and so it was due to drugs.

Ryeland lay lazily watching the thick froth at the top of the beaker of his blood and marveled that he had not seen it before. Even the man who wrote the diary had never seen it, though he had come so close. Drugs!

The Plan of Man understood that there were circuits in the human brain not subject to reason. Self-preservation was one of them. The Machine would not risk a sudden flare-up of that instinct. The Machine must have known that, whatever the mood of the Body Bank's raw materials as they went in, however carefully conditioned to their duties under the Plan of Man, the threat of dismemberment and death could upset all conditioning.

Therefore the Machine had taken steps. The obvious step—how was it that no one had seen it?—was to flood the cadavers with tranquilizing drugs.

The nurse came in. She tapped the beaker lightly with a finger, fussed with the tubes, and in a moment deftly removed the needle from Ryeland's arm. She was humming to herself. She pressed an alcohol pad over the little puncture in his arm and ordered: "Hold it that way to keep the pad in place."

Ryeland was hardly listening. Tranquilizing drugs, he thought, like an echo; it explained everything. It explained why D.W.H.'s careful plans had come to nothing; before they could mature, the drive that would make them reality had been sapped. It explained why Ryeland himself had loafed for irretrievable days. The only astonishing thing was that he had found out.

The nurse straightened his arm, plucked off the pad and pointed. "Out that way."

Ryeland started obediently out the door, then stopped, shocked to alertness at last.

An orderly was guiding an electric stretcher down the hall. On it, his eyes closed, lay the nervous man from Ryeland's group of donors. He looked to be asleep. Surely he had lost something—but what? Arms were there, legs showed under the sheet, there was no mark on the motionless face.

Ryeland said to the nurse: "Excuse me. That fellow. What happened with him?"

The nurse peered past him. "Oh, that one." A shade came down over her eyes. "That was a big one. Did you know him?"

"Yes."

"I see." After a second she said briskly: "We needed a whole spine. There wasn't much point in trying to salvage any of the rest of him."

Ryeland stumbled out into the corridor, following the corpse of the nervous man, who never again would have to be nervous. He glanced over his shoulder at the nurse and said: "Good-by."

She said: "I'll be seeing you."

Outside Heaven, thirteen billion human beings worked, studied, loved, quarreled and in general fulfilled their tiny assigned missions under the Plan of Man. In Saskatchewan an engineer turned a switch and the side of a mountain lifted itself, grumbled and slid into a lake, revealing an open vein of low-grade uranium ore, one of the last deposits left to tap. In the hillside town of Fiesole, in Italy, a Technicorps colonel made a field inspection of the new reservoir. The water level had risen a gratifying nineteen inches since his last report. He observed, from his flat-bottomed boat, how a certain jumbled pile of masonry he remembered seeing was now almost entirely submerged; it was the Pitti Palace, but he had never heard the name. (The Ponte Vecchio was already twenty feet under the bottom of his boat.) Under Honduras, a subtrain shaft collapsed and eighteen hundred migratory agricultural workers were simultaneously cremated and dissolved in molten rock. The Planner, returned from the Moon, signed an order which would ultimately lower the level of the Mediterranean sea ninety feet, creating thousands of miles of new land around its dwindled shores and providing an enormous hydroelectric station at the Straits of Gibraltar. . .

But on the isle of Cuba, no echo of these rumblings penetrated. Everything was calm. Everything was pleasant. And Steve Ryeland fought against it as hard as he could. He quarreled vigorously with his Dixie Presidents. The senior cadaver was hurt, shocked and mortified; as a consequence, half an hour later he lost count of trumps and suffered an eight-hundred point penalty in the afternoon's bridge game. Ryeland was well pleased. Quarreling stimulated his adrenals. He went out to find someone to quarrel with.

His logical candidate was Angela, and he found her where he had left her, sunning herself in front of her cottage. "Steve, dear," she whispered, but he did not want to be charmed.

He said brutally: "I just made my first donation. Guess what it was?" He gave her a chance to scan him and look perturbed, then said: "Nothing much, only blood. Lucky, eh?"

It was terribly bad manners. She said, "Yes, Steve, that's lucky. Must we talk about it? Oh, I know! Let's go down to the lake again. It's warm today, and there's bound to be a breeze at the fountains—"

"That's all you care about, isn't it?"

"Steve!"

"Food and comfort. Are those the only things that matter to you?"

Angela said petulantly, "Steve, you're in an unpleasant mood this afternoon. If you don't want to come with me I'll go alone."

"Do you care?"

She opened her mouth, closed it, looked at him and shook her head. She was angry; but she was also untouched by it. As Ryeland was an irritation, she removed herself from it.

He stood there thoughtfully. Even after Angela had flounced away, as best a woman with neither arms nor legs can flounce, he stood there, thinking. Knowing that there were tranquilizers flooding his bloodstream was one thing, knowing what to do about it was something else. He could keep his adrenal glands combating the drug by quarreling, even by exercising, but it was wearing. It would be better to keep the drug from his system in the first place. . .

It was very simple.

It needed only one thing, Ryeland saw. He would merely have to stop eating and drinking entirely.

By lunchtime the next day he began to see the flaws in that scheme.

He had worked it out very carefully. He had to eat something, otherwise he would die, and that would be no improvement at all. He settled on eating sugar. That day after the noon formation he entered the mess-hall, carried his tray to a corner—and abandoned it there, untouched. He filled his pockets with sugar, as inconspicuously as he could. It was a calculated risk. All foods were suspect, sugar included. But even the thorough Machine would not be likely to bother with sugar.

Of course, water was out of the question. Already Ryeland was beginning to feel parched. He thought of making a still, somehow, and purifying the water from the lake. It would attract attention . . . but he was getting very thirsty.

He went to see Angela and tried to take his mind off his thirst. They roamed about, the girl in her remarkably agile wheeled chair. She found him hard to endure that day. They sat by the lake and Steve Ryeland stared at it longingly. Water, lovely and clear. Beautiful water. Sweet water! But it was the source for all the drinking water in Heaven, and undoubtedly it was already treated. He talked about swimming and clinking ice in a glass and the spray from the prow of a boat until Angela, faintly exasperated, said; "Go swimming, then. No, don't worry about me." Gentle smile. "I'd rather not, for reasons which are apparent, but you go ahead. It's what you want, isn't it?"

And it was; but Ryeland refused vigorously until he thought of something and then went to get a pair of trunks. Why not go swimming? It was a trick torpedoed sailors had learned centuries before. If one merely lay in the water and relaxed, it would help control thirst. It wouldn't help much. But it would help a little—perhaps it would keep him alive until his brain was clear and he could think surely enough to find a way out. But, oh, that water was tempting!

He lay in the shallows and played a sort of game. It was for high stakes, his whole life riding on the turn of the wheel. He let the water come up to his chin. He let it touch his lip. He even let a few drops of it into his mouth; then he filled his mouth and held the water there.

It would be so easy to swallow! So simple to ease his thirst! And surely, he said reasonably to himself, his eyes closed against the thirst, swishing the water back and forth with his cheeks and enjoying the sensation, surely one little drink would be of no real importance. . .

Sputtering and coughing, he floundered out of the lake.

That had been a close one. But he had learned something; the thirst was a counter-irritant; already he was fully aware of things that had been tempered and dull even an hour before. The puncture inside his elbow hurt. The nurse had been clumsy with the needle. The denims had chafed his thighs raw—a poor fit, miserably poor—and what a joy, he exulted, to be able to realize it.

Angela was looking at him suspiciously. "What's the matter with you?" she demanded.

"Nothing."

"You act—oh, I don't know. As if the Machine canceled your orders here. As though you were going to get rid of your collar."

And even that was not impossible, thought Ryeland. If only he could hold out until somehow, some way there was a chance. He toweled himself dry and said, "Why not? Donderevo did it."

"Steve," she scolded, "that's unplanned thinking! I'm disappointed in you. Nobody else can escape the way Donderevo did, and even if you could, your duty to the Plan—"

"Wait a minute." He stopped toweling and turned to look at her. "What did you say? What do you know about Donderevo?"

"I know how he escaped. After all, this is where he escaped from."

Ryeland heard a ripping sound, and glanced down to see that his hands, without command from his brain, had clenched so tightly on the towel that it had parted. He dropped it to the ground and whispered: "How?"

Angela writhed carelessly, angling her head to start the motors that turned her chair away from the sun. She frowned thoughtfully, then said, "Well, I don't suppose it would do any harm. You can't possibly duplicate his escape. No one can."

"Angela! How did he do it?"

"Not by any method you can follow, Steve." Her smile teased him. "He found a group on the staff here who could be tempted into unplanned thinking—and he tempted them, with talk of space outside the Plan. He managed to corrupt them, with promises of freedom and wealth in the reefs of space. He bribed them to remove his collar—surgically."

"Huh?"

"The thing was expertly planned," she said. "The disloyal surgeons forged the requisitions, and issued false documents. Donderevo was called out of the lineup one morning, exactly in the ordinary way. In one operating theater, he was disassembled, down to the head and the spine. All the parts were rushed into the adjoining theater—and put back together, without the iron collar.

"But don't go getting any ideas," she warned him. "Because the plot was eventually discovered. The surgeons who had participated were promptly junked. Unfortunately, by that time Donderevo had escaped."

"How did he get away?"

"That was the most important part," she said. "You see, the surgeons made a rather ingenious effort to cover their tracks. They used junk parts to assemble a complete patchwork man inside the collar. This junk man took Donderevo's place, until it was too late to trace him."

Ryeland shivered in the warm sunshine. That method of escape seemed gruesomely drastic, even if it had been open to him, which it was not.

"Let's do something more amusing," Angela urged him.

"There's one more thing I want to know." He looked at her, caught with an unpleasant fascination. "How did you happen to know all this?"

She stretched her torso lazily in the sunshine, with a slow, graceful, serpentine movement.

"I suppose I can tell you, Steve." She smiled at him confidentially. "After all, it's no secret between us that I once worked for the Plan Police. The fact is that I first came here on the Donderevo case. It was not broken until I had managed to persuade one of the guilty surgeons to use the same method to help me escape."

She yawned, smiling with a feline satisfaction.

"If you came here as a spy, why are you—"

He stopped, feeling a horrified embarrassment.

"Why am I still here? Don't be ashamed to ask that, Steve. I'm here because by the time I finished my task I was—well—as you see me. Naturally the Plan could not divert resources for my sake ... so ... I was declared surplus. Oh, I won't deny it disturbed me a little, at first. But I came to accept it. And you will too, Steve. You see, you have no other choice."

12

Accept the fate he would not, though he was powerfully tempted. A rain shower in the middle of the night woke him and he ran out, careless that he woke his cabin mates and left them staring, to find a standpipe under the eaves and drink, drink, drink. It gave him the strength he needed. The next morning he could see a difference. He held out his hand before him and it shook. It shook! He was nervous.

He was also very hungry.

Water was not, for the moment, a problem. He had found a jug that would do and carefully filled it from the drain of a dozen roofs. It tasted of zinc and tar. But he was off the drug. . .

And hungry.

He did not dare to eat in the commissary.

Oporto came to see him at breakfast and that little dark face missed nothing. "Not hungry, Steve?"

Ryeland pushed aside his untouched plate—ham hash! lovely, irresistible coffee!—and said, "No. I'm not hungry." Later, in the hut of the Dixie Presidents, Oporto still tagging along, the little man pointed at the jug of rain water. "What's that?"

"It's water. In case I get thirsty," said Ryeland, allowing himself a small drink.

Oporto's face remained thoughtful.

Ryeland found a sense of doom pressing in on him, a fear that dried his mouth and bothered his digestion—damaged already by the curious nature of the few substances he dared eat. He enjoyed it. He welcomed the fluttering of terror between his shoulderblades. He looked around him at the other cadavers of Heaven, and they were zombies, dead-alive, the victims of asphodel. They laughed and smiled and walked about (when they had what was needful to walk with), but they were dead men. Not Ryeland. He was alive, and in a panic. And very hungry.

He managed to shake Oporto just before the second shape-up, and seized time to study some of the entries in the journal:

Oct. 16. The only examination given to the discarded parts in the trash pile is visual. They are under the observation of a guard stationed on the watch balcony of the North Clinic. Sometimes he isn't there, but I do not know why.

Nov. 5. Today I was in the North Clinic on the fifth floor, where the guard is stationed. I found out why he is sometimes absent, I think. Twice he was called in to help move patients; apparently this is part of his job. Since I was strapped to the table with a spinal tap I couldn't watch closely, but it seems evident that each time he is called inside he will remain there for at least half a minute, and that the periods at which he is most likely to be called are those when the operation schedule is heavy. Probably the three hours or so following each shape-up would be the best time. The morning and lunch shape-ups are no good. First, I would not be able to conceal my absence for more than a couple of hours; second, they don't usually dump the scraps until night anyway. That leaves only the night. Unfortunately not much operating is done then . . . Today it was the left leg, including the femur.

Dec. 3. Unusually heavy call-outs at the shape-up this morning. The rumor is that there was a nuclear explosion in Baja California and a great many spare parts will be needed. I wonder. Tonight?

Ryeland turned the page, but he already knew what he would find. The next entry was the last. It had been close for D.W.H., but not quite close enough.

Hunger was beginning to prey on him seriously. His system began to refuse the sugar.

Oporto was openly suspicious now. He walked with Ryeland all over Heaven. Dov^i by the palm-fringed lake he sat with his back against a boulder and watched Ryeland grimly hurling rocks at the hanging coconuts. Ryeland did not succeed in knocking one down, but he did, after visiting a few clumps of palms, find one that had fallen. "I guess you like coconut milk a lot," Oporto said sulkily, seeing how greedily Ryeland hammered off the outer husk and bashed in the shell.

"I love it." Actually the nut was overripe, and the milk had a foul taste.

"Tastes good with garlic, huh?" Oporto was referring to some wild roots Ryeland had found, dark green spears thrusting out of the grass with a cluster of muddy little strong-flavored knobs underground; Oporto had found him nibbling them experimentally.

Ryeland said: "Leave me alone, will you? I—ah—don't feel very well."

Oporto sighed. "I'm not surprised." But he wandered away after a while.

Ryeland dismissed him from his mind. He felt weak and starved. It was only psychological, he told himself; why, shipwrecked mariners had lasted for months and years on little more than what he had so easily come by!

But they had not, it was true, been subjected to the thrice-daily temptation of a loaded table from which they dared not eat.

And there was another consideration. He looked longingly at the little fish in the lake, for example. He could easily catch one. What was to stop him from broiling it over a fire?

But he had already attracted enough attention, he dared no more. Surely the guardians of Heaven would know what to do with a cadaver who had stumbled on the necessity of avoiding their drugs. Once they found one such it would be only a name on the shape-up list, a needle in the arm, and all the drug his system could absorb thrust into him at one moment. Will power would not help him then.

Yet he could not avoid suspicion entirely, not as long as he continued to reject the all but irresistible food of Heaven. Already he was concerned over his mates in the Dixie Presidents, not to mention Angela Zwick and, above all, Oporto, whose behavior was no longer suspicious but sure. There was no doubt; Oporto knew.

The next morning he got away from the others and scouted the periphery of Heaven. Reluctantly he decided that what everyone said was true; the fence was impassable. It would have to be the garbage heap.

The leftover bits from the cadavers in Heaven were deposited in a stainless steel sump next the North Clinic. The pit was empty at this hour; it had been sluiced clean, its tons of abandoned humanity chuted into a barge and towed away. The hot sun had baked it gleaming. It was surrounded by a wire fence, and that in turn screened by red-flowered bougainvillea bushes. Ryeland wondered if the fence was electrified. Probably not. . .

It would, he thought, be wise to make his bid for freedom soon. The quicker he tried, the more likely that he would retain all his parts. Even now, he saw, there was some sort of activity going on; guards \yere on the roof of the North Clinic, working around what looked like searchlight projectors. Ryeland scowled. If they flooded the garbage heap with light, that would make things more difficult. Still the projectors were peculiar; they had reflectors but no lenses, and they seemed to be rather small for the task involved. Ryeland crossed his fingers. Perhaps they would be for some other use entirely. He could only hope.

"Sdeve! Sdeve Ryeland!" a familiar voice called loudly. It was Oporto —shouting, waving, smiling.

Ryeland waited, suddenly wary. How had the little man known he would be here? And what was this sudden excitement in his manner? Oporto was sniffing, almost quivering. "Whad a mess, hey, Steve? You hear about id?"

"About what?"

"Another tube collabze! Eighdeen hundred people this time. You know whad I think? Sabotage. Thad's whad I think."

Ryeland shook his head. He was not feeling overfriendly to the little man; he was still wary. Still, there was the chance that Oporto knew something, even here, cut off from the world as they all were. "Sabotage by whom?"

"Anti-Plan elemends," Oporto explained cheerfully. "They've been happening all over the world, you know. Thousands dead! Commudica-tion wrecked!" He glanced over his shoulder, smiled, and said quite loudly: "Or don'd you think so, Steven Ryeland?"

Ryeland's nostrils flared; he smelled danger. He looked where Oporto had glanced, and saw what Oporto had seen. Three big men in the white uniforms, coming toward them with purpose. He understood why Oporto had spoken his name so loudly; and the little man nodded, quite unabashed. "Yes, Steve, Judas Isgariot, thad's my other name."

The guards looked as though they were spoiling for a touch of resistance from him. He didn't offer it. He let them take him to the clinic, and when the needle was presented to his arm he stared at it without emotion. The shot was painless enough, even though he knew what it was. It was asphodel again, but this time he was ready for it. "Don't give us any more trouble, Zero-Dome," growled the guard, and released him at the gate of the clinic.

Ryeland's body responded at once to the shot. He accepted it; it was warmly comforting; it would not matter now. He almost laughed out loud. He could not feel betrayed by Oporto, even; Oporto could no longer commit betrayal; he was no longer trusted. And meanwhile . . . Ryeland could eat!

There was a guard brooding over the tables assigned to the Dixie Presidents at lunch. Ryeland conscientiously gorged himself on roast pork and sweet potatoes, with three cups of coffee. It tasted very good. Why not? It didn't matter any more. Meprobamate is not a narcotic; it doesn't keep you from thinking. It only eases jitters—that sovereign incentive to action!—and for Ryeland the worrying fear had already served its purpose. He had his plan. He would carry it out that night, if he could; the next night certainly. He recognized quite calmly that, now that Oporto had told the guards he was avoiding food, he would no longer serve any purpose by not eating; they would pick him up and inject him. All right. It didn't matter, nothing mattered, he was on his way out.

He could hardly wait for sundown and escape.

It was time, too. There were heavy callouts that day. Ryeland's bunk-mate had gone at breakfast and had not returned by lunch—wouldn't ever return, now, said the wise old heads; if you didn't come back by the next shape-up, you weren't coming back at all. Five names were called at noon. At dinner, seven more—why, thought Ryeland through his comfortable haze of meprobamate, that left only three in the entire cottage who had not been called for some donation that day, and Ryeland was one of them..Clearly he was pushing his luck.

After the evening shape-up he looked one last time around Heaven and strolled away. Just in time.

For as he was almost out of earshot in the gathering dark, a white-clad guard came down the shell path. Ryeland paused, listening. "Ryeland," the guard was saying, and something with the word "clinic."

Rumble-rumble; the bass voice of one of the few survivors of the Dixie Presidents, answering.

"Oh." The guard again, not very interested. "Well, when he turns up, tell him to report. She can wait."

Ryeland hid himself in the night. What they wanted with him he could not know; but he was very sure that his time was even shorter than he had thought. But who was the "she" who could wait? Angela?

He could hardly think so, but—well, why not go to see her? If it turned out to be Angela, who had somehow inveigled a guard into being messenger-boy for her, there was no reason he should not find out why. If it turned out not to be her ... he was surely all the better off for being as far as possible from the cabin of the Dixie Presidents.

It wasn't Angela. She was completely ignorant of why the guard had been looking for him, and completely disinterested.

Uneasily, keeping an alert eye open for any possible guard who might come their way, he sat down beside her in the warm tropical evening. More to see what she would say than to relieve his feelings, he told her about Oporto's reporting him to the guards and his consequent new dose of tranquilizer. "Very right of him, Steve. You shouldn't go against the Plan!"

He shook his head ruefully. "I can't understand you," he admitted. "To work for the Plan—yes. That's duty. But to betray a friend—" He stopped, and looked quickly at her, but she only laughed.

"I know, Steven. But you're wrong. Do you remember what I was doing when we first met?"

"Running a computer."

"That's right! And we would set up problems—oh, enormous problems. I loved that job, Steven! And the computer would solve them, one-two, click-click, ting-a-ling! It could do it without fail; well, it was part of the Plan, you see. Only one unit in the master Plan of Man that the Machine itself runs. Do you know why it was never wrong?"

"You tell me," he growled. She was so calm!

"Because we tested it!" she cried. "There was a special test-circuit switch. After a big problem we'd send a charge—oh, five times normal voltage!—through every last tube and transistor and relay. If anything was going to fail, it would fail then—and we'd know—and we could replace it. And . . . well, Steven," she said, quite serious, "that's what I am, you see. I'm a test charge."

She leaned forward against the high restraining chairarms that kept her limbless body from toppling. "You can't be allowed to fail the Plan!" she cried. "You must be found if you are weak . . . and replaced. Oporto and I, we have one purpose under the Plan of Man: to find and report the bad tubes. Did I trick you? I don't know; is the excess voltage flushing out a computer a 'trick?' You were a bad tube. Admit it, Steven; you could fail. You did fail! And the Machine is better without you!"

Ryeland paced about. The girl watched him solemnly, her eyes large and compassionate. He said at last, unwillingly: "And you are willing to serve the Machine, even after it lops your arms and legs off?"

"I'm willing."

"Then you're crazier than Oporto!" he roared. "The Machine is a monster! The Plan of Man is a hoax!"

She refused to be shocked. "It keeps thirteen billion of us alive," she reminded him.

"It keeps thirteen billion of us enslaved!"

"Do you have another way!"

He scowled. "I don't know. Maybe—out in the Reefs of Space—"

"The Reefs of Space are no longer of any importance to you, my dear. Just like Ron Donderevo. Oh, he was a real man—and maybe there are Reefs, I don't know. But there's nothing there for us." She moved her head, and the obedient wheels brought her closer to him. "And is it so bad, Steven? Being slaves? I know you have ideals—I respect you for them, truly I do! But this is a matter of life and death for Mankind. And isn't it true that, for almost all of us, under the Plan of Man there is happiness?"

He laughed shortly. "It comes in the drinking water!"

"All of it?" She leaned back lazily, looking at him with candid huge eyes. "What about me, Steven. Don't you want me?"

It caught him off-guard. He flushed. "I—I don't know what—"

"Because I'm here, Steven," she went on softly. "If you wanted me, I'm here. And I'm helpless; I can't resist you."

He swallowed. "You—You could scream for help. The guards would —Damn you!" He leaped away from her. "I'll never forgive you that, Angela! You've dragged me down to your level, haven't you? But you can't do the same trick again!"

She said, calm, real regret in her voice, "I don't know what you mean, dear." And after a moment Ryeland realized that there was truth in what she said. She meant it; she was his to take, if he chose, and she would not have blamed him. He said brutally:

"You're a high-voltage test circuit, Angela, yes, indeed! But you've already burned me once. I don't intend for it to happen again!"

There was no longer any doubt of what he had to do in his mind. He was inside a wall; well, a wall had two sides. He would reach that other side! Perhaps he would be alive; more likely he would be a cadaver, stripped of useful parts. But he would reach it.

Because . . . because, he thought, on the other side of that wall were many things. There was freedom—maybe—in the Reefs of Space. There was, perhaps, the man who knew how to remove collars.

And there was Donna Creery.

Abruptly he turned to Angela again, surprised at his own thought of the Planner's daughter, unwilling to think farther in that most dangerous of directions. He said, "I—I didn't mean—"

"Don't apologize, Steve. You of all people—"

He became conscious that she had stopped in the middle of a thought. "What were you going to say?"

"Oh . . . nothing. Nothing much. Just that. . ."

"Angela!" he said angrily. "You've always kept secrets from me! Please don't keep on with it—not here! Now, what were you going to say? Something about me 'of all people'? Am I any diSerent from other people?"

Her wide, lovely eyes studied him serenely. Then she said: "Don't you know that you are?"

Her cool regard made him uncomfortable. He had to gulp before he could ask what she meant.

"Haven't you been aware of anything strange about yourself?"

He was about to shake his head, when something froze him. He recalled the riddle of the three days he had lost. Suddenly he remembered a time when he thought he had heard her voice, from the dark outside the circle of pitiless light that blazed down on the therapy couch, before she had sacrificed her limbs to the Plan.

"You must have noticed that you are different, Steve," her soft voice taunted him. "Have you ever wondered why?"

For a moment he wanted to strike her. The iron collar was suddenly tighter around his neck, so tight that he could scarcely breathe, so tight that he felt the veins throbbing at his throat. He sat numb and silent, staring at her.

"Did you think you were human?" Her voice was contemptuous, merciless. "I thought you might guess, when I was telling you how Donderevo got away. You are the junk man."

"Junk—what?"

The hair stood up at the nape of his neck. He shuddered in the sun. The collar was heavier than lead, colder than ice.

"I told you that a thing was patched together out of waste parts. A decoy for the guards to watch while Donderevo got away. Well, Steve, that's what you are."

He sat still, breathing carefully through the cruel constriction of the collar.

"If you're good-looking, Steve, that's because the surgeons were trying to put together a reasonable likeness of Ron Donderevo, who was a handsome man. If you dislike the Plan, it is because your brain and your glands were patched together from what was left of several of its most distinguished enemies. If you have an unusual mastery of helical field theory, it is because one lobe of your brain belonged to the man who invented it. If the rest of your memory is somewhat blurred or contradictory, it is because the rest of your brain was stuck together from odds and ends of tissue."

"No!" he whispered hoarsely. "That can't be true-"

But the collar choked off his voice. He felt weak and numb with a hideous feeling that it could be true. "If I was ever here before," he argued desperately, "I can't remember anything about it."

"That goes to prove it." Angela's slow smile was innocently sweet. "The men who assembled you were research scientists, as well as enemies of the Plan. They had been using bits of waste brain tissue in efforts to improve upon nature. When they were putting your brain together, they seized the opportunity to create a mental mechanism dangerous to the Plan."

Dazed, he could only shake his head.

"There's proof enough, if you don't believe me," she said. "Look at all your feats of sabotage. The subtrain tubes and fusion reactions and ion-drive accelerators that you have demolished with your improved designs—"

Agony wrenched him.

"I don't remember—"

"That's the final perfection of your mental mechanism," she said calmly. "The disloyal surgeons equipped your new brain with a self-erasing circuit, to protect you from any temptation to reveal your secrets under torture. Aren't you aware of the blank in your past?"

"I—I am." Shuddering, he nodded.

"That's all you are." A lazy malice glinted in her smile. "All the special attention that you have been receiving for the past three years is proof that you functioned remarkably well as a sabotage device, but your function has been performed. I suppose you are setting some sort of precedent, now that all your organs are about to be salvaged for the second time. But in spite of that, Steve, I can't help feeling that you are trying to carry your head a little too high. Actually, you're nothing more than a hundred and sixty pounds of bait that those traitors filched from the sharks."

Shark meat! If that was all he was, then this was the place for him!

Ryeland lurked in a clump of the bougainvilleas near the garbage pit, watching the guards on the roof, while the sun went down and the sky purpled and the stars began to find pockets in the cloud cover through which they could appear.

The searchlights—or whatever—were not turned on.

Numbed, Ryeland watched and tried not to think. That was one less worry. Still, there were guards on the roof; he would have to wait until it was darker. The guards were idly looking out over Heaven to the sea. It was a warm night, a fine tropic night.

But what was before him was an ugly spectacle.

It was odd, Ryeland thought dreamily, that the Plan of Man permitted itself this touch of natural human horror. The world was so cuddled in cotton batting, so insulated against shock, that it would seem this sight should have been hidden away. Before him lay some tons of meat and bone—amputated, exsanguinated, raped of corneal tissue and bone grafts, of healthy arterial sections and snips of nervous tissue.

What had been taken from the pale cold cadavers behind the fence was that mere nothing, life. What remained was good organic matter. And that was another queer thing, thought Ryeland. It would have been a superb animal feed! Or, if on this one point the Plan of Man had reason to be tender, why, how many thousands of acres of mined-out farmland could be rejuvenated with the protein and phosphate in those corpses?

The Plan did not choose to use them in that way. Each night the accumulated parts were chuted to a barge—the barge towed out to sea—the contents given the deep six. Fish, crabs, drifting jellies and moored bivalves would ingest their flesh. Why? Men would eat the fish; why not shorten the chain?

Ryeland shifted uneasily, and turned his thought, away—for, if Angela told the truth, from this sort of rubble his own body had been built. . . Anyway, it was almost time.

There was a murmur of public-address speakers from the cottage areas. He couldn't hear the words, but it was unusual for them to be used at all so late at night. Then another cluster of speakers spoke up-nearer, this time. It sounded as though a name were being called.

Ryeland swore under his breath. The sentry nearest him stood rigid as the Machine itself, gazing out over Heaven. Couldn't he at least take a break, stretch, yawn, gaze at the stars—couldn't he do anything but remain alert and watchful at his post?

The loudspeakers again. It was the circuit around the lake, Ryeland guessed. And the .tone was becoming irritable, as though the guard in his microphone room atop the Clinic was being annoyed by higher authority . . . and was passing his annoyance on to the cadavers of Heaven.

Then closer still; and Ryeland heard the name this time. His own name. "Ryeland!" Only it came bouncing off half a dozen speakers at once, each delayed a tiny fraction of a second by distance and echo: "RYELAND^ye/tfftdryeland," ricocheting away.

He was not surprised; he had been more than half expecting it. He listened to the measured words, cadenced to let the echo of each fade before the next word was spoken: "You . . . are . . . ordered ... to . . . report ... to ... the .. . South . . . Clinic . . . at. . . once!" And off toward the lake Ryeland could see lights moving.

Ryeland took a deep breath. He would have to chance it, even if the guard did not look away—

He caught himself, poised. The guard moved. He turned his head and nodded, to someone out of sight; and then, so quickly that Ryeland might scarcely have noticed he was gone if his eyes had not been glued to the man, the guard stepped inside.

Ryeland ran, climbed, swung himself over the fence, ripped off his clothes, balled and hid them under a body and flung himself, naked and acrawl with revulsion, onto the heap of pale, cold corpses.

There was classic terror. It was like the buried-alive man of humanity's oldest, most frightening story: the awakening in the narrow box, the dark, the smell of damp earth, the hollow muffled sound of the hammered coffin lid with six feet of graveyard dirt above. It was like the war wounded given up for dead, awakening in one of Grant's wagons after Shiloh, or the mass graves of Hitler's Sixth Army outside Stahngrad—the dead all around, the man himself as good as dead.

Ryeland thanked God for meprobamate. He lay face down and limbs under him, as much as he could. No reason to make a guard wonder why a relatively intact corpse should be on the heap. He did not move. He smelled an acrid, sour reek that nearly made him vomit and he was, in a moment, bitter cold. He swore silently. It had not occurred to him that the metal walls of the trashbin would be refrigerated.

He waited. And waited.

He dared not look up, dared hardly breathe. It would be, he calculated, at least a matter of hours before the bin would tip and chute its contents into the barge. His flesh crawled and tried desperately to shiver, but he would not allow it.

A bright light flared.

Ryeland froze. He heard a murmur of voices. But that was all right; it probably was time for changing the shift of guards, and that was good, because it meant time was passing even faster than he had dared hope. The light would be only a routine inspection, of course. . . Another light flared, and another.

The area of corpses was flooded with light, he was drowning in light; over him he could hear the wash of copter vanes adding their light to the scene. He dared not move. He dared not even blink, though the lights were cruel; but it was in vain; everything was in vain. There was a sudden string of orders and a commotion at the steel ladder that admitted workmen to the sump. Four guards ran in. They did not hesitate; they picked their way rapidly across the stainless-steel floor, stepping on torsos, pushing limbs aside. Straight to Ryeland.

"Good try," one of them grinned. Then, without humor, "But don't do it again."

They hurried him to the ladder and up it. They had not allowed him to retrieve his clothes. Now that it was too late his body was racked with shivering. He stammered, "How—how did you know?"

The guard caught his elbow and lifted him to the roof of the North Clinic. He was not unkind. He gestured to the row of searchlight-like things that Ryeland had feared might be floodlights. "Infrared scanners, Ryeland. Sniffed out your body heat. Oh, you can fool them—but not while you're alive, not without clothes on to hide your heat. And clothes would have given you away anyhow," he added compassionately, "so don't feel bad. You just didn't have a chance." He opened a door and shoved Ryeland, reeling, into a hall of the Clinic. "Now get a move on. Somebody wants you. Somebody important."

14

They rushed him through the corridors, into a room, left him there for a moment; they threw a pair of coveralls at him, gave him barely time to squirm into them and paid no attention to the fact that they were four sizes too small. "It doesn't matter where you're going," rumbled the guard with the white tunic and the red heart. "Come on!" And they led him to another room and once again left him.

Through an open door Ryeland saw an operating theater.

Thank heaven for meprobomate, he thought without emotion, for this was undoubtedly the end of the trail. The asepsis lights were burning over the twin tables; a full O. R. crew was in view behind the transparent contamination-bar. On one table was a man of Ryeland's approximate build, with a great sighing bellows box pumping air through a complicated nest of piping. A lung machine? Yes. And the man, Ryeland knew, was about to get new lungs. And the lungs would have to come, of course, from Ryeland . . .

Or would they? Ryeland was baffled. For both tables were occupied, the one with a cadaver from Heaven as well as the one with a useful citizen come to collect a new part.

It was very queer.

But it only meant, probably, he assured himself, that he would be the donor for the next useful part. It was not kind of them to make him witness the operation, of course. But the Plan of Man was only impersonally kind. He glanced at the scene, looked away, then watched with helpless fascination. Faintly he could hear the brisk, businesslike orders of the surgeon, slitting skin, slicing through muscle, sculpting bone . . .

The operation was nearly over when he heard a sound behind him.

He turned.

Donna Creery walked in the door.

Donna Creery! She looked at him as though he were furniture. "Took you long enough to get him," she said grumpily to the man behind her—chief surgeon of the Clinic, by his bearing and his frown. "All right. I've got this—" she waved a radar gun—"so he won't give me any trouble. Will you, Ryeland?"

The surgeon said doubtfully, "It's most irregular."

"You've seen the Machine's order," purred Donna Creery, and waved a strip of factape.

"Oh," said the surgeon hastily, "of course, Miss Creery. You know I wouldn't—But it's most irregular, all the same."

Donna nodded coldly and beckoned to Ryeland. "The Machine does not have to be regular," she said. "Now show us how to get to my rocket."

They were out of the clinic beyond the wall, out to a landing pit. And there was Donna Creery's rocket speedster, squatting on its fins. The girl whispered: "Chiquita!"

Ryeland said strongly, "Wait a minute, Miss Creery. Where are you taking me?"

She looked at him thoughtfully. "I have orders from the Machine," she said after a moment. "They direct me to take you to another Heaven, where you are needed for a rush repair job on an important member of the Planning Staff."

"That sounds peculiar," he protested.

"Oh, very. Chiquita!" The girl stamped her foot and glared into the ship.

There was a golden movement inside, then a faint blue luminous haze.

The spaceling floated out.

Its tawny eyes were fixed worshipfully on Donna Creery. It wriggled felinely in the air, curled, spun—in pure joy, it seemed—and halted, poised in the air, before her.

Ryeland started to speak. "Shut up," whispered the girl. "There isn't time to argue. You've got to get out of here before they come to take you back."

"Back? But why should they do that? The travel orders from the Machine—"

"—are forged." She met his gaze calmly. "Yes. I forged them myself, so I should know. So the surgeon will be looking for you, as soon as he gets around to filing a routine report of compliance with the Machine. And that will be—what would you say? Five minutes?"

"But I don't understand!"

_? "You don't have to understand!" the girl blazed. "There isn't time! I'm trying to save your life. Also-" she hesitated. "Truthfully there's another reason. My father needs you."

"The Planner? But—but—why would he have to forge orders from the Machine?"

"I can't tell you now." She stared around. No one was in sight. She said grimly, "Heaven help you if anything goes wrong. I can't take you in my rocket; there isn't room. Anyway, that's the first place they'll look. I don't think they'll bother me. But if you're there—" She shrugged.

"Then what am I supposed to do?"

"Do?" she cried. "Why get on Chiquita's back! What do you think I brought her for? Just get on—she knows where to take you!"

Ryeland rode the spaceling; it was like mounting a running stream.

A slim golden shape, more slender than a seal, floating in the air; gold, pure gold that blended into black at the tail, it was the strangest mount a man ever bestrode. Donna said a quick word of command. The spaceling purred faintly, rippled its lazy muscles and whoom. It was like a muffled slap of metal. Suddenly they had leaped a hundred feet into the air.

There was no shock, no crushing blow of acceleration. There was just a quick vibrant lift, and they were high in the air.

Through the thin coveralls that were his only garment Ryeland felt the purring vibration of the spaceling's body. Down below he saw the Planner's daughter already entering her rocket. She did not intend to wait for trouble. The jets flared. Ryeland heard the sound—but it was receding, receding although the rocket had already begun to climb; they were climbing too, and fast. Ryeland was breathless. He clung to the spaceling. There was no pressure; only his arms held him to that bare, warm, smooth back. His stomach fluttered. His breathing caught. Down below he saw men moving, insects on the lawn and the walks. But they were not looking up, probably couldn't see him if they did; it was still night, and the hovering helicopters, with their floodlights were between him and the ground.

They were nearly a thousand feet in the air now. Donna's rocket, a black dot in the center of its own petaled flame, seemed plastered against the concrete of the pit below. Only the fact that its size stayed constant showed that it was following them; then even it began to dwindle.

Off to the northeast was a storm, the warning cirrus veil across the sky, the dark towering cumulonimbus, the rain squalls already marching across the dark mountains of Cuba. The spaceling turned toward the storm. "Wait!" cried Ryeland. "Don't go into that!" But the spaceling didn't understand, or wouldn't. It purred warmly, like a fat kitten, and arrowed toward the menacing cloud with its violent gusts.

And still Ryeland felt no motion.

All his body was accelerated uniformly by the spaceling's field, whatever it was. The air came with them, the pocket which the spaceling wore like a halo, its blue shroud of faintly glowing light. Their flight was not quite noiseless, though nearly; the only sound was a faint distant tearing, though they were barreling through the sky at surely sonic speed. Incredible! Ryeland's mathematician's mind fitted pieces together; the spaceling, he thought, must form a capsule which instantly shapes itself to meet the resistance—forming the perfect streamline shape for its needs, blunt teardrop at a hundred miles an hour, needle as it approached sound's speed, probably wasp-waisted area-rule profile at higher speeds.

And still there was no sense of motion, though Heaven had dropped away behind them and was gone.

Now they were over water. All around them was cloud. They were hurtling into the furious wall of towering thunderstorms that was the forefront of a hurricane.

Cold rain drenched him in an instant. That was curious, thought the objective, never-stilled part of his mind; rain penetrated the capsule where the rush of air did not! But there was no time to think of it. The rain was pelting ice-water, uncomfortable, chilling. It disturbed the spaceling, too. Its satisfied purr changed to a complaining mew; it shook and shuddered. But it plunged on.

Ryeland was hopelessly lost.

The storm was the same in all directions, a dim void of fog and icy water, flickering with distant lightning. But the spaceling knew where it was going ... he hoped.

They drilled through the top of the clouds and came out above them into clear air. Underneath them the shape of the storm revealed itself in a great spiral, the hurricane wheeling around its open eye. A bright light burst on him. It was the sun, rising again on the western horizon—they were that high! It was a blaze of incandescence in the dark; and still they climbed.

A great elation possessed Ryeland.

He had done the impossible! He had escaped, with all his limbs and faculties, from the hell they called Heaven!

He was no longer a numbered carcass; he was a man again. And Donna Creery had done it, where he had failed; he owed her something. He wondered briefly what it was she had failed to tell him about her father; then dismissed it. That wonder was lost in the greater soaring wonder of free flight. The sky was black around them—surely the air was thin now. And still they climbed, while the vast hazy floor of sea and cloud became visibly convex.

And still they climbed; and the air was thin now.

That was all wrong! Ryeland knew that much; the spaceling's field should hold the air. But the creature itself was gasping now, panting. Its purring and mewing had turned into the choking cough of a tiger. They still climbed, but Ryeland could feel the creature falter.

They were at a dangerous altitude. Suddenly he was breathless. His drenched body was chilled through, even in the white, bright glare of the naked sun.

It was the spaceling's wounds that were endangering them now, Ryeland realized. Gottling's torture chamber had left its marks. The creature's symbiotes had, been destroyed, or some of them had. Its fusorians that gave it power, its parasitic Reef animalcules that made it possible for a warm-blooded air-breather to live in space in the first place, their numbers had been greatly diminished. They were not all gone, for there was still some air. It filled his grasping lungs, kept his body fluids from boiling out, screened him at least a little from the cold and the even more deadly UV of the sun. There was some air . . . but was there enough?

Ryeland laughed grimly, with almost the last of his breath. "That's what I'll find out," he panted, hoarsely . . . and passed out. He was not conscious of the moment when he blacked out; he only knew that he was going.

When he awoke, it was with sheer wonder that he was alive.

Donna Creery's perfect face bent over him, making the wonder all the greater. "I made it," he whispered incredulously.

The girl said seriously, "Yes, so far. But don't crowd your luck, Ryeland. We're still in trouble."

He stirred to get up—and floated free, until the girl's restraining hand pushed him back against the metal acceleration couch. They were in a spaceship, apparently in free-fall. He looked around. Automatically he said, "I've got to find a—" He stopped. He had been about to ask where the teletype was, so that he could check in with the Machine. But that was no longer necessary, of course.

Donna Creery gestured at the cabin of the spaceship. "You like it, Steven? It's yours."

He was startled. "Mine?"

"Oh, yes. Do you remember the ship that General Fleemer equipped for you, with remote controls from Point Triangle Gray? This is it—with some changes. I've removed the remote controls. But it was a perfectly §ood interplanetary rocket, right in orbit where Chiquita could bring you to it. Only—" She looked worried. "Only I'm surprised that Father isn't here."

Ryeland shook his head.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I don't understand. Why does the Planner want me here?"

She said, "He ought to tell you himself, but perhaps I can. Did you know, Steven, that in the past two months there have been over a hundred major seismic shocks? And they always seem to strike centers of population. My father thinks—well, it doesn't sound right when I say it. He thinks the Machine is doing it."

"The Machine!"

"I know, Steven. But Father is worried. He has discovered that General Fleemer and others have been tampering with the Machine! Father is a good man, Steven, and he says he does not understand this. But I do. Fleemer wants to control the Machine—because he wants to control the Plan of Man—and destroying the project for discovery of a jetless drive is only one step in his plan. All those seismic shocks and accidents with subtrain tubes and fusion reactors and the new ion drives—they're all part of it, too. Deliberate sabotage!

"And, oh, Steven! How well it has worked! The Machine is only transistors and relays, you know; it knows nothing but what is fed into it. Fleemer has managed to corrupt its input circuits, and now the Machine is almost openly hostile to Father, and the whole crux of the matter right now is the jetless drive. The Machine has come to think that such a drive will destroy the Plan of Man. It has overruled Father's orders on it—oh, a thousand times—so that Father has to resort to subterfuge and tricks. He let me rescue you, as one of his moves. But I'm afraid it's too late."

She moved away, peering worriedly at the viewports on the spaceship's panel. "They don't seem to be following. Not yet, anyhow."

Ryeland noticed he was shivering. It was not cold in the ship, but he had only the ill-fitting coveralls to wear and they were soaked through. "Who?" he demanded.

"The Plan police," she said, surprised. "General Fleemer will be after Chiquita, even if they don't suspect you are with me. Though we can't count on that, of course; it wouldn't be unreasonable for the Machine to inform them that I had rescued you from Heaven. He was going to kill Chiquita, you see, so I stole her." She frowned as Ryeland shook his head.

"Why shouldn't I steal her?" the girl flared. "She was mine! And the only safe place for Chiquita is out in space—out on the Reefs, if I can get her there. And, of course, that's the only safe place for you."

Ryeland said angrily, "You're asking me to run away from the Machine! You want me to be an outlaw!"

"Oh, Steven, what do you think you are? Have you forgotten Heaven already? I saved your life . . . You're lucky you got here," she said seriously, stroking the spaceling. "I wasn't at all sure Chiquita could make the jump from atmosphere."

"Neither was I."

She smiled, and for a moment she was the impish, confident girl who had interviewed him in her bath. But quickly her face clouded again. "I wish Father would come," she said. "Chiquita can't five forever without getting back to the Reefs to replenish her fusorians. And I—well, I sent my own rocket back to Earth and crashed it where they'll find it. Perhaps they'll think we were both killed. But," she said calmly, "they would have to be stupid to be deceived very long, and the Machine is never stupid. It's—I don't know—unbalanced, now. But it is thorough. Father and I discussed it thoroughly; he knows the Machine well. He thinks we have about twelve hours."

"Then what?"

"Why, then the Machine will trigger your collar."

Involuntarily Ryeland's fingers came up to touch the dull metal that encircled his neck.

The girl was right; that was what the Machine would do. Twelve hours? He didn't know; but probably the Planner did. All right. Then in twelve hours they had to be out of range.

"Can we get away from the Machine's radar beam in twelve hours?" he demanded.

"I don't know, Steven. I think so. The Machine may not realize that you are in space."

The girl restlessly prowled toward the viewports. "But Father isn't here. I don't know how long we can afford to wait. Once we get out to the Reefs, of course, there's nothing to worry about. You won't have your collar any more."

He looked startled. She smiled. "Don't you remember, Steven? Ron Donderevo. The man who got his iron collar off; he's out there. I'm sure he can do the same with yours."

Restlessly Ryeland touched his collar. "Please," he begged. "Tell me what you know about Donderevo" . . . about, he thought silently, the man this ju.nk body of mine was built to replace.

"You know everything there is to tell. Or almost," she said. "He was once a friend of my father—in spite of all their differences over the future of the Plan of Man. It was Donderevo who first told my father something about the spacelings and the Reefs, and convinced him that the Machine should try to develop a jetless drive.

"Unfortunately, when the Plan took over his people, Donderevo engaged in disloyal activities. For that reason he was classified as a Risk and finally sent to the stockpile. The fact that Father communicated with him while he was in the stockpile, and finally connived at his escape, is one of the charges that Fleemer is using now in his effort to discredit Father with the Machine.

"I think Donderevo might be able to help Father now, in this fight with Fleemer for control of the Machine and the future of the Plan. At least he could tell the Machine more about the Reefs than it got from Lescure's reports—after Fleemer had finished doctoring them. And that's where we must go, Steve—to find Donderevo, out to the Reefs of Space!"

Ryeland was suddenly afraid to tell Donna how desperately he wanted to see Ron Donderevo. Donderevo might help him remove the iron collar. Donderevo might help him clear up the fog of oblivion and contradiction in his past. But it was also possible that Donderevo would tell him that the collar could not be removed—not without the elaborate surgical facilities available only at the stockpile. It was even possible that Donderevo would affirm what Angela had told him—that he was a junk man, a meat machine patched together from a few bits of waste tissue, not worth saving from the collar.

If that were true, he thought, he couldn't stand for Donna Creery ever to find it out. The Planner's daughter—and a few pounds of salvaged human garbage. The gulf between them would be too wide for any warm emotion to cross.

Donna Creery looked again at the viewports and sighed. "I don't know why Father isn't here," she said, "but we dare not wait any longer. I'll send him a message and we'll go. Even the Machine's normal radar beam might reach out this far; we've got to get out of range." She smiled. "It isn't only for your sake, you know. If that collar were triggered in this little ship . . ."

She pursed her lips gravely and shook her head.

15

Ryeland was deep in a dream of an armless, legless blonde with Oporto's grinning face coming at him with a sonic hacksaw. When the earth began to shake, his body vibrated like a harpstring . . . and he awoke. Donna Creery was leaning over him.

Uncomfortably he stretched and rubbed his tingling hands and ankles. It took him several seconds to wake up. Not unusual; the sleep that spans interplanetary distances is not lightly thrown off. They had put themselves under for what was to have been a voyage of a hundred and fifty days. Were they at the end of it already?

But Donna's face was worried, and there was a loud excited mewing from the ship's cargo lock. Ryeland groaned and tried to shake the aches out of his bones. Thank heaven they were in space, he thought. The mild thrust of Hohmann-minima orbits kept the endless contact of body-to-bed from producing the bed sores and bruises that would have been inevitable on Earth. "Steven!" the girl cried frantically.

"Sorry," he mumbled, shook himself and woke up at last. "What's the matter?"

"Chiquita's gone crazy!" He grunted and climbed up, peering into the cargo hold. The spaceling was flashing about the lock like a torn on the trail of a skulking mouse. She was mewing frantically.

"Are we here?"

"No, Steven! But Chiquita got so excited that she triggered the alarms and woke me up. We should be traveling for days yet!"

"All right. Let's see what's bothering her."

"But there's nothing to see. We're in deep space now, Steven. Far out beyond Pluto—and yet surely not as far as the Reefs. There couldn't possibly be anything here that could bother her. . ."

She stopped, listening.

Both of them heard it at the same moment. It was an irritated hammering sound.

They stared at each other.

It came again, a muffled banging on their ship's hull. "Let's take a look," Ryeland said grimly. The viewports showed nothing, but on the outer door of the airlock was a small window, shielded against chance radiation. Ryeland slipped the catch and slid open the shields.

A man stared in, with an expression of impatient annoyance.

A man!

Ryeland and the girl looked at each other and then at the face that peered in on them. It was quite impossible. But it was undeniably true.

The man did not even wear a spacesuit. He wore a ragged blanket, hammering on the valve of the airlock with the handle of a long knife. He was a lean little red-bearded man, not young.

Donna cried out suddenly. "Steven! I know him. His name is Qui-veras. Why, he brought Chiquita to Earth—to rescue Donderevo from the stockpile." She hesitated, then said abruptly: "Open the lock, Steven."

"What?"

"Open the lock, man!"

"But the air-"

"Oh, there's no worry about that," she said impatiently. "Look!" She pointed behind the man's head where a smooth-lined shape rippled. Another spaceling! No wonder Chiquita had been so upset; undoubtedly she had sensed its presence, a creature like herself though larger and darker. "He's got his own air. The spaceling carried it. How do you suppose he lives? Open the lock!"

Ryeland hesitated. Reason told him the girl was right; there could be no other explanation. Reason was certain; but his emotional conditioning against opening a door to the great exploding suck of space was too powerful to give in to mere reason without combat; it took a great deal of self-discipline for Ryeland to turn the valve key. But he did it. A metallic whine; a hiss of equalizing pressure. And the lock was open, and they were still breathing air—queerly scented air, with a faint, hot, chemical bouquet, but not unpleasant.

The little man hurried inside.

He whistled sharply and his spaceling followed. It was a red-nosed, stub-winged seal, its nose pulsing with red light. Its huge eyes peered around the chamber; it was whining shrilly with pleasure and excitement.

"Wait!" cried the little man. The spaceling was frantic, but obedient; it paused in the lock while the man spun the closing valve. Then Qui-veras said, "All right, Adam. Go meet your friend."

The two spacelings flew at each other.

Around and around the narrow cargo compartment they spun, mewing and purring in soprano-baritone counterpoint. Quiveras grinned. "Ah, the children! How happy to see each other they are!" He bowed and took off his rag of a hat. "And I, sir and madam. I am Quintano Quiveras, your humble servant."

He looked again at Donna Creery and smiled with real pleasure. "Ah, the Planner's daughter! It is good to see you! And you, sir; it is good to see you as well, though I do not as yet know your name."

"Steve Ryeland." He put out his hand, and gravely they shook.

Donna managed to say: "We're pleased to see you too, Mr. Quiveras. But-"

"But what is Quiveras doing here?" The man smiled and bowed again. "Ah, perhaps I may help. My Adam felt the presence of Chiquita here." He reached out and stroked the golden she-spaceling; the two of them hung poised, their flanks touching, just behind him. "So he wished to join you; and then, there is another reason." The smile left his face. "My Adam and I, we have been watching you for some time. Adam has excellent vision, apart from the way that spacelings have of knowing another spaceling is near even when vision is of no use. And Adam saw something. With his help, I saw it too."

"What's that?"

"Why," said Quiveras seriously, "perhaps you do not know it, but you are being followed by a heavy war rocket of the Plan of Man."

Involuntarily Ryeland's fingers stole up to touch his collar. Donna Creery's face turned chalk-white. Their signal to the Planner must have been intercepted; Fleemer knew where they were.

The equations of military affairs in open space admit of only one solution: The faster vessel could always force battle on the slower. The logic of the radar-pulse that would trigger the collar on Ryeland's neck made it certain that the battle could be decided only one way. If they fled, the Plan cruiser would overtake them. If they stopped their jets, it would calculate course and position from the last recorded points with no chance whatsoever of error. The jets made a magnificent target, their light and heat a beacon for a million miles. Every effort at escape would plot another blip on the Plan cruiser's thermal screens.

And then the radar pulse would detonate the collar.

Ryeland said harshly: "Can we fight? Are there any arms on the ship?"

Quiveras's gnarled face took on an expression of surprise. "Fight against the Plan? Oh, no, my young friend. We do not fight them; that is their way. We follow our way. We merely run away." He nodded. "We are some millions of miles from the Reefs, yes; it is a considerable journey. But at the end of the journey is freedom. Perhaps even—" he followed Ryeland's stroking fingers on the collar with his eyes—"freedom from that thing about your neck."

"We have no lifeboat!"

Quiveras pursed his lips. He pointed to the two spacelings, frolicking about.

Ryeland said with quick comprehension: "The jetless drive! Of course. They can get us away from our rocket, and as they do not use thermal propulsion, the Plan ship won't be able to spot them. But—the female is injured, Quiveras. She almost killed me before, in just a few minutes in space. Look." He indicated the ridged scars Colonel Gottling had left on her golden fur.

"But she's had time to heal, Steven!" cried Donna Creery. "Don't forget we've been aspace for over four months!"

Quiveras looked suddenly worried. Ignoring the girl, he dropped to one knee and crooned to the spaceling. Chiquita frolicked over and hung before him, purring faintly as he stroked the scars. At last Quiveras looked up, his gnarled face concerned. "These were bad wounds, Miss Creery. I did not think you would treat her like that."

"It wasn't I!"

Quiveras shook his head. Obstinately, he said, "They are bad. I do not know if she will ever altogether heal."

Ryeland said stonily, "Are you telling us that we can't get away by spaceling, then?"

"Oh, no!" The little man was upset. "I did not mean to frighten you. My Adam can hold enough air for us all, I promise. We must go quickly."

"No," said Ryeland.

The girl and Quiveras paused, staring at him.

"Not like that," he said. "This rocket was equipped for me, to work out some of the problems of the jetless drive. I need that equipment— for, if it is as important as you say, we must have it. The spacelings will have to tow it—No," he said, not letting Quiveras object, "I know it will be difficult. But I must have it. And one other thing."

Quiveras looked at him coldly, then at last smiled. "Very well. If you are willing to go slowly, Adam and Chiquita can pull along whatever it is you want. What is the other thing?"

Ryeland said: "I want to set a fuse on this ship's fuel compartment. I don't want them poking around in it after we go; I want to blow it up."

In ten minutes they had locked out some tons of computers, electronic instruments, a power source and a handful of other gear; Ryeland took another five to wire contacts to a time-lock and set them to explode the ship's fuel, and then they were ready to leave the spaceship.

It was like making up one's mind to leap off a building. They stood in the open airlock, and there outside was the universe of stars. Ryeland felt more helpless and small than ever before in his life; how could human flesh survive that great cold barrage of light?

But Quiveras assured them that the spaceling's bubble of gas had remained about the ship, held there by the spaceling even through the ship's hull. And in fact, they could see strange shapes and colors, hardly visible, with their eyes still used to the bright ship's interior and dazzled by the distant display of multitudinous suns.

Ryeland and the girl joined hands and leaped, and they floated into the world of the spaceling.

They felt nothing, but they began to move away. The two spacelings swam among them, apparently unheeding, but the jetless drive their bodies produced was moving them all at a tangent to the rocket's line of flight, diverging from it slowly. As they drew off from the ship, the captive air the spaceling carried with it detached itself from its resting places along the hull of the ship. The bubble condensed. The air became denser. Scraps of solid material drifted into place.

Behind them, in a long string pointing toward the rocket ship they had left, an occasional glint of starshine showed the trail of instruments Ryeland had demanded they take with them. But they saw them only briefly, and then the spaceling's world was coalescing about them, and it was a fairyland.

It was incredible! Donna and Ryeland stared about, unbelieving. As the bits and pieces sorted themselves into their accustomed relationships they became a cool green cloud, so bright that Ryeland could hardly see the stars outside. Strangeleafed vines twined through the cloud, laden with clusters of unfamiliar fruit. Small creatures that were half fish and half bird flitted through the vines.

They were at the center, and as the air reached earth-normal density the invisible small creatures that gave it light and life were thickly packed about them. They could move. Ryeland roamed restlessly around the mad little bubble of fife they inhabited, with naked space only yards away, staring, thinking, asking quick questions of Quiveras. The little man had apologetically few answers for him, but the facts spoke for themselves. "Incredible!" he muttered. "Fantastic!" He caught himself on a tendril of vine eighteen inches from the faint veil that marked the end of the bubble and stared out at the stars. He could recognize no constellations; great Orion and the mighty Southern Cross alike were out there, but buried in a swarm of thousands of lesser lights, invisible on earth but here a snow-sprinkling of radiance. One great blue-white needle lanced him, and he knew that he had found one star at least. That could only be Sirius, many magnitudes brighter than from Earth's surface, painful to look at directly.

Behind him Donna said hesitantly, "Steven, what is all this?"

Ryeland turned at last to confront her. "It's remarkable! I think I understand it, though . . . The drive field holds this little cloud of air. Moving through space, it picks up dust and hydrogen gas. These vines have fusorian cells, that fuse the hydrogen into oxygen, carbon and all the other elements—and also release light and heat enough for the space-ling's metabolism, or for ours. I'd guess," he said thoughtfully, "that there's a fair proportion of heavy elements in those plants. Conservation of energy. Fusion liberates nuclear energy at the light end of the scale; if the fusorians made only light elements there would be too much release of energy, we'd all be dead in a moment, one way or another. But up past silver fusion takes energy . . . ." He shook his head. "Sorry. But I can't help running on about it. This is a complete little world, with its own complete economy."

Donna asked simply, "What about food?"

Quiveras interrupted. "Ah, food!" he cried. He launched himself through the air like a swimmer in water, the vines like a strange seaweed. He gathered his hands full of the bright fruits and came soaring back. He begged: "Try them! They are good. Platinum? Gold? I do not know about heavy elements, Mr. Ryeland. But I know about flavor!"

At that moment a great soundless flower of fire unfolded behind them. They all whirled to look.

Ryeland said soberly: "There goes our rocket. I hope we're going to like this place, Donna. It's all we've got now."

They gathered close to the film at the very rim of the bubble, peering out. "Not too close," warned Quiveras. "You must not stick even your little finger through it. You will be blown out, you see."

Ryeland looked startled, then, after a moment, nodded. "Of course. Anything much larger than a molecule is not reflected, eh? And once the field was penetrated, it would be forced out by the pressure differential." Very cautiously they settled themselves to peer out at the ship they had left behind. The flame was gone, but even in its microseconds it had heated metal to red incandescence and they could see a ruddy skeleton that was all that was left of the craft's main supporting beams. The hull and fitting were scattered by the blast; but near the dark red glow they could make out faint points of light. The war rocket, Quiveras declared positively. The lights they saw were the flare of its auxiliary rockets as it matched position with the abandoned hulk.

The spacelings hung looking out through the tangle of glowing vines, searching the dark outward sky. They made soft murmuring and whimpering sounds. Quiveras listened to them, stroking their sleek fur, crooning to them gently.

"They are watching the Plan rocket," he told the others. "The ship radiates its own infrared. They can see it well, now that it is coming closer."

"Closer?" Ryeland was startled.

"Of course, Mr. Ryeland. The Plan is not stupid."

"But—they must think we are dead! And even if not, they have no way of tracing the spacelings' jetless drive—"

"Nor have they," Quiveras told him solemnly. "The Plan is merely thorough. I can understand what they are saying in that cruiser. 'Did they have an escape vessel? If so, where would they be going?' To the Reefs. And the Plan knows where the Reefs must be."

The spacelings were growing uneasy. "And our friends here are tiring," Quiveras said soberly. "They need rest. Carrying all of us, and all of your equipment, Mr. Ryeland—even for two of them it is a great load. They cannot go faster, and so they are going to try to hide. There."

He pointed out through the glowing vines.

Ryeland looked. The brilliance of their little atmosphere was in his way. He kicked himself—very warily!—to the other end of their bubble and hung, clutching a vine and staring; but if there was something to see his untrained eyes could not make it out.

Quiveras followed. "It is a cluster of Reefs," he explained. "There, near those three blue-white stars."

Ryeland's Earth-adapted eyes were not equal to the task. But Chiquita and Adam slipped close to him and hung among the bright leaves, their sad eyes staring into the star-sprinkled space ahead. Ryeland shook his head. "I don't see anything at all."

"Nor did I," Quiveras agreed, "until the spacelings showed me. We are not equipped to find a pebble in the dark, countless miles away; but they are."

Ryeland said doubtfully, "Even if there are the Reefs there, and we get to them—can't the Plan rocket follow us?"

Quiveras shrugged. "Of course. But the Reefs are in a thicker cloud than this little bubble of Adam's, Mr. Ryeland. There are swarms of the little fireflies that you call fusorians; they'll fog his search screens. There are hunks of bigger stuff that will slow him down—perhaps even wreck him, Mr. Ryeland, if he should be careless! Still, he may get through and find us. Yes. It is a chance, but we have no choice but to take it."

They drove on for hours, there was no way of measuring just how long. As destination and pursuer were alike invisible to Ryeland, there were only the shrouded stars as reference points, and their great distance was not affected by the tiny crawl of the spacelings. Adam and Chiquita seemed hardly to be working, as they slipped supplely about through the vines, yet Quiveras assured Ryeland they were moving nearly as fast as the Plan cruiser, in spite of the trail of machines that followed them.

Then Quiveras said, "We are almost there!"

Ryeland sought among the stars for "there." What made it hardest was that there was neither bow nor stern to their tiny captive world, no sure way of knowing which way they were going. He could find nothing. The stars shone splendid and unobscured, as he hung at nearly the edge of their air capsule—red stars, blue-white giants, clouds of nebular matter . . .

Then he saw the Reef ahead.

16

It appeared first as a pale point of light that suddenly grew into a bulgfng, uneven sphere of splendor. It was a jeweled ball, floating in space, and the jewels were forests of crystal.

They came closer, like a comet, then slower. Ryeland saw spiked trees of crystal carbon—diamond!—glittering with their own inner light. There were strange bulging brain-shaped, masses of blue and violet, patches of ghostly white sand, a frozen forest with bright metal leaves.

It was an incredible fairyland to Ryeland and the girl, but Quiveras surveyed it with a shrewd professional eye and shook his head.

"Not a good place to hide," he said, peering at the glowing ball. "Still, that solid part might be useful. The Reefs are mostly hollow— because they're dead inside."

Ryeland nodded. "I suppose the surface organisms are the ones that pick up the free hydrogen and grow. The ones inside die of starvation."

Quiveras was not listening. He cried gleefully: "Yes! There is a cave! —If it is not already occupied."

Ryeland stared at him. Quiveras shrugged. "These Reefs do not have much gravitation; something must be holding the air there, as the space-lings do. It could be another spaceling. It could be small cells in the Reef itself—each Reef is its own world. I do not pretend that I know what to expect on this one. But it could be something quite bad." He raised a hand. "Wait. Let us see."

The jeweled ball swam closer. "Watch," ordered Quiveras. "See how Chiquita enters the air of this Reef. Adam is pulling us now; Chiquita is controlling our atmosphere. Do you see?"

The female spacelkig was darting about, while Adam hung motionless. "I did wonder about that," admitted Ryeland. "When the two spheres meet, air pressure will be forcing them apart."

Quiveras shook his head. "See, she airlocks the Reef in." Ryeland stared. They came closer to the Reef and closer. From the frightened movements of the little fishbirds, he saw that the shell was being contracted; yet there was no increase of pressure—"I see!" he cried suddenly. "She is setting up another shell, big enough for both us and the Reef! Then she'll collapse our inner shell, letting the air leak out as it contracts to keep the pressure steady!"

Quiveras nodded. There was a sudden vibration, as though the shock-front of a distant explosion had raced past them, and a clicking in their ears. The inner shell was finally gone.

Ryeland stared about his new world. The steady rain of starlight, even through their light-fogged atmosphere, gave him a view of a wonderland. The sun itself, hardly brighter than Sirius, made yellowish sparkles in the crystal branches of the—could he call it "vegetation"? But Quiveras gave him little time to admire the world.

"Now we must do our part, Mr. Ryeland," he grinned.

Ryeland saw that the two spacelings were hanging at a distance from the dark cave mouth, regarding it with huge wet eyes. Their red noses flickered swiftly. They whimpered, and a shudder ran along Chiquita's scarred flank. "What is our part?"

Quiveras said calmly: "The spacelings have natural enemies—clumsy, armored killers. Very slow—too slow to catch the spacelings out in space. But extremely deadly. They wait for them in places like these." He said politely, "So we must ferret into this burrow, Mr. Ryeland, if you will do me the honor to join me."

Quiveras propelled himself to the mouth of the cave, peered inside, looked at the others and shrugged. "We will see," was all he said. Calmly he unwrapped a bundle of rags and took out an old Plan Police handweapon. He was not very skillful with it; he worried at it until he had opened the clip, checked the number of charges it contained— Ryeland saw that it only held four; undoubtedly Quiveras had found it difficult to obtain them—snapped it closed and balanced it in his hand. Then with the heel of his worn boot he kicked at a stalagmite of greenish crystal until it broke free. It was eighteen inches long or more and quite sharp. It made a queer but serviceable sword, Ryeland thought, and then realized that it made an even better torch. The interior of the cave was dark. The crystal sword glowed with its trapped fusorian cells.

Quiveras scrambled into the cave and Ryeland followed, unable to look at the girl.

It was a strange dark lair of winding passages. The entrance was worn smooth—alarmingly—as though large bodies had been scraping in and out. Ryeland thought swiftly of the probable age of the Reef, and felt somewhat reassured. Time moved along different scales out here.

Change could be lightning fast, or ponderously slow; those ledges might have been worn smooth a hundred million years ago. The dark passages, smooth-worn rock walls made of the bodies of once-living fusorians had perhaps been dead when the Earth was still a boiling incandescent blob. There simply was no way to tell. Nor had Ryeland any idea of how long or deep the passages might be. They were as labyrinthine as the maze inside a head of sea-coral, where tiny crustaceans wait for tinier fish to blunder in.

Quiveras paused where the passage branched—and, within sight, both divisions inside a dozen yards branched again. He was staring at the wall. As Ryeland joined him, he saw what Quiveras had seen.

The worn sides of some of the passages bore curving parallel scars, as though they had been rasped by the claws of some incredible monster.

Quiveras said cheerfully, "That one looks the most used, Mr. Ryeland. If we only knew when, eh? Well, I'll try it—asking you, if you please, to remain here on guard." He turned away, hesitated and said solemnly: "You see, it is you who must take the post of danger. For if a pyropod should come from one of the other passages while I am gone . . ." He made a grave face, spread his hands politely and left.

Ryeland clung to a projection of rock and waited.

Pyropod . . .

He heard the word again, in the soft, apologetic, wheezy voice of Dr. Thrale. He was lying again on the therapy couch in the recreation center, clamped into the cold electrodes, helplessly enduring the merciless probing into his blank memory. He shuddered again, flinching from the pitiless pressure to make him reveal the secret he had never known—

Or had he really ever known how to build a jetless drive? That haunting fog of black oblivion and insane contradiction flowed into his brain. Through it, he heard the lazy malice of Angela's voice, mocking him with her explanation of the riddle. He was a junk man, a meat machine designed to sabotage the plan, without a memory because he lacked a past.

A queer companion for the Planner's daughter. He resolved again not to tell her what he was. Now when they were alone, when he and Quiveras were the only human beings in her world—could she stand the shock of learning that even he was no real human being?

He shook himself impatiently, as if mere motion might dispel that paralyzing fog and reveal his true identity. That old riddle would have to wait—perhaps until the timing mechanism detonated the collar, and answered it forever. The problems of the present were more urgent now.

It was warm in the cavern, far from the surface of the little deformed globe, where the fusorian cells poured endless heat and light into the atmosphere. But he found himself shivering. Pyropod? Yes. He had heard the term. He did not want to recall just what he had heard about it.

Quiveras disappeared, the needle-sharp crystal blade giving a strange light. It disappeared around a bend in the passage, and then for a time there was no light at all.

Time passed.

It was dark . . . silent . . . empty. Ryeland felt as though the dead walls around him were closing in. He wiped slippery sweat from his palms, listening, reaching out, because he could not help himself, to touch the walls to make sure that they were not about to squeeze him . . . Then involuntarily he felt himself grinning. Claustrophobia—here! Billions of miles from the Earth, a floating dust mote in the middle of absolute emptiness! The incongruity reassured him; and he was calm and cheerful when, at last, he saw the glow of light appear again in the passage Quiveras had taken.

The crystal sword came into sight and Quiveras hailed him cheerfully. "A dead end, and nothing there. Very well.^,, He drew even with Ryeland and gazed at the other passages. "I think," he said, with some doubt, "that we will leave these others for now. They do not seem occupied, and it would take us weeks to explore them all. Consider yourself fortunate, my friend. You have not yet been introduced to a pyropod."

At Quiveras's hail the spacelings came swimming gracefully down the tunnel, their red noses blinking as they probed its depths with infrared. Donna Creery followed more slowly, exploring the caves with a child's wonder and awe. "Is it safe?" she asked.

Quiveras said calmly, "We will never be safe while Ryeland's collar is with us. If you mean are we safe from pyropods, I do not know. From a full-grown one, yes. I do not guarantee there is not a cub lurking somewhere, but if there is we will find it out and meanwhile shall we not try to make this place into a home?"

They worked for three hard days, while the spacelings fluttered and mewed restlessly—because, Quiveras said without emotion, the Plan cruiser was still somewhere about. As there was nothing they could do about it, they did nothing. To their little world they did a great deal.

They carried aerial fusorian vines into the caverns, choosing cubicles for sleeping, for eating, for rest, curtaining and cushioning them with the vines, bringing shining crystals of ruby and topaz for heat and illumination. Donna cried out at its beauty. Indeed it was beautiful; and they were not finished. With Quiveras for a teacher, Ryeland learned how to weave nets and ropes out of the fiber from the vines. The surface of the Reef provided crystal and great branching arms of metal, pure copper, pure aluminum, pure silver. They hammered the metal into crude tools.

And finally they made a sort of curtain, woven from the vines and crusted with broken pieces of crystal, which they stretched across the mouth of the cave to conceal it.

Quiveras stood back and regarded it.

"Well," he said doubtfully, "it could be thicker and it could look more natural and those gadgets of yours could be hidden in better places. But if the Plan cruiser sniffs around here it might miss you, at that."

"Miss us? What about you?"

"I, Miss Creery, will go out to the main Reefs." Quiveras's gnarled face looked eager. "I'll get help, more spacelings. And I'll bring back Ron Donderevo!"

Ryeland and the girl were sorry to see him go, but their sorrow was nothing compared to the unhappiness of the two spacelings at being separated. Adam would carry Quiveras; Chiquita would have to stay with them, to maintain their atmosphere and to be ready to carry them away in desperate flight if the Plan cruiser should grow too inquisitive.

They watched him leave, all three of them, Ryeland, Donna Creery and the spaceling. He was gone out of sight in a moment. Ryeland thought he caught a single reddish wink from Adam's nose—perhaps the male spaceling turning restlessly as it drove away, to bid a last farewell to Chiquita. Then there was nothing. They stared till their eyes watered, but it was useless. The Plan cruiser could be lurking a mere hundred miles away—a thousand men on spacelings could be within ten miles. Without radar gear they were blind. Out there were only the stars.

Ryeland's mind drifted out among those stars wonderingly. He tried to imagine the clouds of new hydrogen, constantly being bora of the Hoyle effect, and the myriad drifting fusorians that built the hydrogen into heavier elements that might someday be planets. There were other Reefs out there, the first concentrations of matter like the one they occupied, the larger ones that provided a home for the exiles of the Plan-great ones, even, that might in some remote millennium become the cores for first condensations of titanic new suns. They were all invisible.

Donna Creery touched his arm. "It's-lonely," she whispered. "Let's go back inside."

"Inside our cave!" he said harshly. "Back to the stone age! Is this the sort of life that's fit for a princess of the Plan?"

She shrank away from him, and in a moment went with the spaceling silently inside the sheltering drift of vines. Ryeland roamed about, trying to work off the sudden storm of anger and helplessness that was besieging him. He tried to calm himself.

But calm was impossible to him. Calm, he knew, was a sensation he would not be likely to feel, until he had managed to rid himself of the choking, threatening thing about his neck—and until he had managed to bridge that gap in his past, until he had escaped that dreadful, creeping cloud of forgetfulness and contradiction—

Or until the collar's explosion brought him the permanent calm of the grave.

Time passed. They both found plenty to do. Alone now, except for the spaceling, they were queerly constrained in each other's company. Ryeland hardly recognized the bright, sure brat of the bath, with the angry Peace Dove and the fighting guard within instant call. Donna was quieter and younger now. They spoke of her father, and for the first time Ryeland was able to think of that semilegendary Olympian figure as a human being. Donna was terribly worried about her father. "But we couldn't wait for him, Steven. Only—I wish we had."

He asked her again why the Planner had had to hide from the Machine, and got the same answer he had been given before. It was no answer. "I don't know, Steven, but he was worried. And it's your equations that are the key to it." And that, of course, drove Ryeland out to stare at the banked machines he had brought with him from the rocket, but all he could do was stare. They needed space and order, and on this little reefiing there was neither.

They lived like primitive islanders, catching the tiny flying things with nets made of vines, feasting on the shining fruits. Ryeland's mind was queasy at the thought of the radiation they were absorbing with every luscious bite, but his stomach was delighted. And, he thought, they were not the first to eat them and live. Perhaps the radiation was purely photonic; perhaps a sort of bioluminescence, like the green glow of a firefly.

Ryeland asked the girl again how Fleemer and his allies had got the better of her father, and got the same answer he had been given before. It was no answer. "I don't know, Steve. Except that it is all about the jetless drive. Father told me that he approved the search for an interstellar drive as part of the original Plan, built into the Machine. When he first learned about the spacelings, from Donderevo, he knew that a reactionless drive was possible. He began to organize an effort to learn how to build it. Immediately, he ran into fanatical opposition from men like Fleemer. I don't know the reason for their opposition. It must have been something more than just the desire to grab Father's place. Somehow, they were able to manipulate the Machine. They have got it under their own control. But I still believe that we could rescue the Machine and Father and the Plan of Man—if we knew the secret of the spacelings."

That, of course, drove Ryeland to begin assembling and testing the computers he had brought from the rocket. But the crawling fog was thicker in his mind. He sat staring at the banked computers, but he could think of no approach more promising than those he had tried when he was still on Fleemer's team. He couldn't be sure that the failure of the team attack was altogether due to Fleemer's sabotage.

Anyhow, he reflected, there wasn't much that he could do in his cave on this reeflet. Even if he had been given the blueprints for a perfected reactionless drive, he had no shop equipment.

Hopelessly, he gave up the effort.

Days passed. Weeks passed. The spaceling roamed sadly around their little world, still worried. They could not read its ways as Quiveras had, but its worry was plain. Was it the Plan cruiser, still skulking about? Or a nearer menace?. They simply could not tell. Donna grew sulky and unhappy, until they had a brief, brittle quarrel of words one day and it exploded into weeping. She clung to him. "I'm sorry. It's just that I always had so much. Servants, clean clothes, cooked food. Power, too. And now—"

She smiled up at him. Queerly, Ryeland thrust her away then. He was churned up inside with feelings he could neither analyze nor handle. It was his turn to be sulky and irritable, because, though he did not know it, his inner self was becoming a battle ground—the site of a struggle between his common sense, on one hand, and on the other a growing, potent love for the Planner's daughter. . .

Even his dreams were haunted.

He slept restlessly, and felt that he was choking ... He was in his office, miles under the surface of the Earth in the hidden complex of air-conditioned tunnels that held the Machine and its attendants. He heard the knocking on the locked door, and got up to open it for Angela.

But it wasn't Angela.

It was Donna Creery, white-smocked like the nurses at the stock-pile. She had brought the coffee and sandwiches on a plastic tray, but she screamed and threw them on the floor when she saw his face.

"It's Donderevo!" she was screaming. "It was Ron Donderevo—"

He wanted to tell her who he was, but suddenly he was strapped to the therapy couch in the recreation center, with shocks of paralyzing agony stabbing from the electrodes on his body. She was coming toward him again, in the white smock with a stitched red heart on her perfect breast, reaching for him with a long hooked scalpel.

"You might as well tell us now." She was wheezing at him with Dr. Thrale's apologetic, asthmatic voice. "Tell us how to build a jetless drive."

He wanted to tell her. The specifications were clear in his mind, amazingly simple; he couldn't understand why there had to be so much fuss about such a simple thing. But his voice was paralyzed with the shocks that made waves of dazing pain from the collar around his neck. And Donna wouldn't let him talk.

Now she wore a horned radar helmet. She was taunting him, with Fleemer's ugly voice. One touch, Ryeland. Only one little touch on the detonation button, and your precious secret will die with you!

Now she had Angela's face.

But she still had hands, like Donna. He saw her touch the deadly little button. The collar about his neck blossomed and swelled—

He awoke strangling.

"I was dreaming!" He tugged frantically at the collar. No! It was no dream. The collar was there, and surely it was about to explode. His exacerbated imagination felt it pulsing against his rasped throat. He thought he heard a sound from it, a tick, a whine, a purring of faint unstoppable engines. "No!" he shouted and leaped up out of the little nest of leaves where he slept. It was exploding! Not in a year, not in a minute—now. He flung himself wildly about in the no-gravity, shouting.

Donna Creery came swiftly to him, and the terror in her face woke him, drowning his imaginary terrors.

"What's the matter?" he demanded harshly.

"Steven! It's Chiquita. She—she was wandering about the lower passages, where we've never been, and—" She stopped, unable to speak on. Behind her the spaceling came, slowly, painfully, mewing tragically.

Chiquita's flank was a horror, raw flesh and golden ichor, with the mark of a great sharp claw.

17

There were four cartridges in the clip. Ryeland checked them, blessed Quiveras for having left the gun and started down the passages. He didn't say anything to Donna Creery; he didn't know what to say.

Then there was a pyropod on their Reef . . .

Ryeland's throat was raw and dry. Pyropods. "Flamefeet." Outer-space animals which, Ryeland thought, sounded vaguely like Earthly squids. Ryeland tried to picture one, and failed; but Quiveras had said there was a possibility that the caverns in their Reef might house one. And Chiquita's terrible wounds had converted that possibility into something far stronger.

Ryeland paused at the end of the passages they had explored, and picked up the discarded crystal sword Quiveras had left there. It was still bright; it was all the light he had. Then he drove into the first of the great convoluted burrows.

In five minutes he was at an end; the tunnel narrowed sharply, so that he could hardly move, and poised bits of rubble showed that nothing of any size had passed that way in finite time.

He went back again. Another tunnel, a much longer one this time, but again a dead end. It was difficult to maneuver; in no-gravity, he could not walk, and the shape and constriction of the tunnel made it hard to leap.

He came to another branch and stopped.

There were two tunnels, both enormous, both dark and soundless. The air was the air the spaceling had brought, but it had a sharp strange odor, like burning gunpowder.

And one of the tunnels was scarred with the enormous claws that had left their sign near the surface.

Ryeland plunged in without giving himself time to think.

He came almost at once to a chamber. He paused and hung in its entrance, peering about in the faint light his crystal sword gave. It was roughly spherical, so vast that its farther walls were dim; and in a niche at one side of it was a clutter of tangled objects.

Warily he approached.

It seemed to be a sort of midden, and the blood began to pulse in his ears. It contained odd-shaped objects that might have resembled the bones and fangs and carapaces of animals like no animals that had ever lived on earth. He stood staring at it, every sense poised. Then, with infinite pain, he approached. There was no sound. There was no motion. Gently he poked the crystalline light into a gap in the tangle. But nothing moved and there was nothing revealed.

Ryeland moved back and considered.

Space had its own scale of time. The discarded bones and the claw-marks in the rock might look just as fresh after another hundred million years. Undoubtedly the cave had been abandoned.

He turned.

Something screamed behind him. He had only time to halt his turn, to start to move his head back.

And the heap of bones exploded.

What kept Ryeland from dying at once was the tiny scope of the cavern, compared to the scale of interplanetary distances. The pyropod, rocket driven, enormously strong, hadn't the room to maneuver or even to build up speed. But it blasted up at him with frightening speed. It was huge—as Earth animals go—larger than a horse, and armored with mirror-bright scales. It had a solitary eye, a wide mirror on a stalked central organ. It had a single, enormous claw at the end of a writhing, flexible trunk. It roared like a rocket at takeoff—which it was—and the great heavy-metal claw snapped violently.

But the trash in its way screened Ryeland for a moment; he was thrust back and out of the way, and the pyropod flew past to gouge great chips out of the wall of the cavern.

Ryeland took quick aim and fired.

Even in the roar of the pyropod's drive, he could hear his bullet scream away, and knew that it had hit that armor and ricocheted off. The pyropod did not turn to strike toward him again; it turned away, in fact, and its thin bright tail whipped toward him. White fire jetted out furiously. The tail! The tail was a more fearsome weapon than the claw —the mighty drive that could hurl it through space could char him in a second! But Ryeland was already moving, and the blast missed him entirely, though a backwash of flame from the wall caught his leg and (he discovered later) raised great angry blisters on his skin. Ryeland crashed into the wall, spun like a racing swimmer in a pool, raised the gun again and fired—rapidly—one, two, three!

And then his cartridges were gone . . .

But one of those bullets had struck a target. The stalk that held its eye was hit. The bulb exploded; the creature was blinded. It blundered about the chamber like a rocket gone mad, colliding with the walls, recoiling, plunging wildly again. The blazing jet licked perilously close—

And then the jet was screaming away, bouncing and roaring through the tunnel, out, out and away . . .

Ryeland was hurt badly, burned, bleeding, aching in every muscle; and he had no breath left at all after that quick violent encounter. But he did not pause. He leaped to follow the pyropod. Donna was up there!

He sailed throifgh dark space, his crystal torch long since lost, tried to see through the utter dark, tried to shield his head from striking against the wall. It was good, now, that the tunnel was so narrow; there was really only one way to go.

And after interminable moments there was light.

He drove toward it, rounded a bend, and saw Donna Creery hurrying toward him—alive! She bore a coiled branch of the vine with its moons of luminous fusorians.

"Steven! Thank God!"

She tossed a loop of the vine to him: he caught it, and they drew themselves together. Ryeland caught her roughly. "The pyropod! What became of it?"

"Gone," said Donna Creery. "It went right by, out into space. Not having a nucleonic harpoon, I let it go. I think we've seen the last of it."

"It was hiding in a pile of bones," said Ryeland, suddenly drained. "I-I think I hit its eye."

"Yes. At least, it acted blind. And-oh, Steven!"

He looked at her, not comprehending. Reaction? He tried to reassure her. "It won't be back, Donna. You said yourself—"

"No, no. It's Chiquita, Steven. I think she's dying."

He nodded, hardly hearing. "Poor thing. Well, we've avenged her, I guess."

"And what about avenging ourselves? Have you forgotten, Steve—if Chiquita dies, there's nothing to hold our air!"

The spaceling lay motionless in a little cave lined with vines.

Now and then she struggled restlessly—not to move, but to bring fresh air about her. She seemed both bloated and gaunt. And the great wounds along her side were now crusted with dirty ocher scabs.

"Poor Chiquita," the girl whispered, stroking the soft fur. Donna crooned at the creature, and its great dull eyes fastened on her.

Ryeland looked the spaceling over. Her belly was swollen angrily, but the flesh had shrunk from the rest of her body. Her fur was lusterless and unkempt. The flame-red brilliance was gone from her nose; it was cold, black, dry. He touched her: hot. Did she have a fever? Ryeland could not know, but surely she was hotter than when he had clung to her neck, fleeing the Body Bank. The spaceling seemed to know that he was trying to help. She licked her black tongue out at him feebly; it was all the effort she could make.

Ryeland said reluctantly, "I don't think there's anything we can do for her."

"The light seems to bother her."

"All right. That much we can do." But it wasn't easy, in this little world of luminous crystal and vine. They found some growths that glowed only faintly and tugged them into place, thicker and thicker, until the little nook where Chiquita lay became a dim green hiding-hole. Chiquita looked faintly grateful, but mostly she looked sick.

They left her and went out to the surface to look at the stars. It was maddening, it was utterly maddening, to be so helpless! Ryeland clung to the edge of the tunnel, staring out toward emptiness. Somewhere out there, invisible but sure, lay the other Reefs. The great outer Reefs where fugitive humans managed lives that were free of the Plan—where, above all, lived Ron Donderevo, the native spaceman who had been a student of the science of the Plan, a guest and a prisoner of the Planner. He had worn the iron collar of a Risk—the selfsame collar that choked Ryeland now, if Angela had told the truth. He had talked to the Planner about a jetless drive, had been consigned to the stockpile, had ridden Chiquita back to the Reefs.

But—was he superhuman?

Could he remove Ryeland's collar—here in the Reefs, without all the elaborate surgical facilities that had been available at the stockpile? Could he fill the gap in Ryeland's tormented memory—or was there really any gap to fill, except the time before the dissected scraps of a hundred salvaged enemies of the Plan had been assembled to make a thinking thing without a past?

By now Quiveras might have reached him. By now they might be on their way! Perhaps in a few days Quiveras and the stranger would come to the little Reef and look for Ryeland and the girl.

And what would they find?

Ryeland knew that the most probable answer was . . . death.

Time passed, and the spaceling stayed alive. But she was weaker and worse every day.

The Reef became a dream to Ryeland. He lost all sense of time. He had no watch and there were no celestial objects to mark days or years very conveniently. He thought of a calendar, and tried to construct one. The sun was bright enough to be visible, but the trouble was that their little Reef had no perceptible rotation. No force from another object had ever set it spinning, perhaps; the same stars hung always over the tunnel mouth. It could tell them nothing of time. Painfully Ryeland located winking Algol and began a star-watch; its period would be his clock.

Donna said gently: "It won't help. You don't know when the collar will go off."

And he realized that she had seen farther into his mind than he himself. It was the ticking year that he was trying to measure, the year which was in any event his maximum hope of life as long as that collar sat sullenly about his neck. Chiquita might not die, the Plan cruiser might not return, but his assassin was with him at every moment. At one of those moments it would strike. That was the ultimate deadly promise of the iron collar. You could flee the radar guns of the Plan Police and even outrun their cruisers. You could in the Reefs of Space perhaps even avoid the wash of pulsed radar which the Machine would flood through the system. But the timing element would not be stopped and would not be merciful. In less than a year it would go off . . .

And Ryeland's guess, based on Algol's cycle and a careful recollection of how they had slept and eaten, was that no less than six months had already passed.

Chiquita was now terribly sick.

The great claw-gashes had begun to heal, but her fever was high. She seemed thirsty, but she would not drink; she seemed in pain, but she hardly moved. Only a low whimpering mew came from the little bower they had made for her.

Ryeland made a decision and went out onto the shell of their Reef to put it into practice. It was only a matter of moments before Donna followed. "What are you doing?" she demanded sharply. He stopped, caught working over the equipment the spacelings had transported from the ship for him—the equipment that he had not used and now was proposing to put to a use completely unconnected with his original intention.

He said, "How's Chiquita?" But she would not be diverted.

"What are you doing?"

Ryeland said, "Rigging up a radio. I've got all the parts. I—I thought I might be able to reach Quiveras and ask him to hurry—"

"Or maybe you thought you might reach that Plan cruiser?"

Ryeland said strongly: "All right. Why not? Maybe we pushed our luck too far! Things weren't so bad back in the B—back on Earth, I mean. The Plan of Man is reasonable. They'll take us back if I surrender, and even at worst, it can't be worse than waiting here to die."

"Steven!" She reached up to stare into his eyes. "I won't have you going back!"

"Who the devil," he yelled in a cold counterfeit of rage, "do you think you're ordering—" But she stopped his lips.

"Don't say it," she whispered. "I won't let you. And anyway, I'm afraid it's too late."

It took him a second to react. "Chiquita!"

He raced far ahead of her down to the dying spaceling. Chiquita had sunk into a sort of coma, motionless, barely breathing. Her belly was more and more misshapen, as with terminal malnutrition—or whatever might correspond to it in the structure of a creature from space—and the rest of her body as wasted as the gaunt, starved babies of Oriental famines of old times.

Ryeland reached out a hand to her—

And drew it back.

It was too late; it was all over. The spaceling had stopped breathing entirely.

Absently Ryeland brushed the dull fur on her cooling neck. Dead, yes. No matter what secrets her alien metabolism held, there was no doubt that life had gone.

And now . . . how long would the field that contained their air persist?

Ryeland had no idea. In a firefly, he remembered, the biolu-minescence lingered for hours after death. Was this a related effect? Probably not. The strange force that drove the spaceling was something far removed from a mere greenish glow. It might last for a few minutes. It might—at any split second it might—disappear, and kill them instantly in a soundless explosion of released air.

Donna said softly, "Steven. Let's go outside where we can see the stars."

The Reef was a small hollowed planet, wheeling slowly now, perhaps because of some dying convulsion from Chiquita. From the mouth of the cave the whole stardusted splendor of the heavens was revealed. The sun itself, yellow and distant, came up through tangled vines to look at them, like the headlight of a far-off locomotive.

"The sun," whispered Ryeland. "Still the brightest star. We haven't come so far."

They looked out at the mighty constellations, strange in their powdery mask of lesser stars but still identifiable—mighty Orion, the misty cluster of the Pleiades, the vast silvery sweep of the galaxy. There it was, thought Ryeland soberly, the terrible, wonderful new empire that they had hoped to help claim for Man. And they had failed.

It was very strange and wonderful, but he felt almost at peace. They were still alive. It was a fact that brought with it a sense of unbounded wealth. As everything had been lost with the death of the spaceling, now each tiny moment that they were somehow spared was a treasure. Each second was a joy.

Ryeland anchored himself to a ledge of space coral, all silver and ruby, with Donna very light in his arms. They talked, not consecutively. There were things each had to say.

The one central fact—the fact that they were clinging to life by only the feeblest of grips—they did not mention.

Donna said:

"Father's probably still on Earth. He can't have got my message. He'd have followed if he did. He's a busy, a driving man, Steven, and I used to hate him, but—Oh, Steven! Now I am only sorry for him."

Ryeland said:

"You wouldn't remember. You were bathing, and I blundered in. I was embarrassed. I guess you were, too. No, you probably weren't. And you had the Peace Dove. It nearly killed—what was his name? Oporto." Cloudily it struck him as odd: he had almost forgotten the man who had been the nearest thing he had to a friend.

Donna said:

"That was Father's idea, the Peace Dove. If you hate black . . . call it white, and love it. So he took that murdering thing and called it 'Peace'. He always boasted: The Planner is the first ruler in all Earth's history who has never needed a bodyguard.' But what would you call those things? My Peace Doves. His Hawks."

Ryeland said, with a sudden rush of amazement:

"Donna! We're still alive!"

18

They looked at each other in wonderment, for sure enough, it was true. They had not died of air-strangulation. Around them their little world was still intact.

"But surely the spaceling was dead!" Donna cried.

"No doubt of that. I don't understand this."

They looked around anxiously. The stars blazed down on them, and that was all there was to be seen beyond the confines of the tiny air bubble that made their world.

"Look!" cried Ryeland. "Something's happening." At the edge of the reeflet, suddenly, like a vanishing ghost.... puff! There was a soundless explosion of faint, misty fog. And a colony of flying fish, a lacy pattern of vines, a clump of blossoms with liquid gold in their cups— they fluttered, shook, flung madly away; and then that corner, too, was still; but it was dead.

The shape of the bubble had changed. One corner of their little world had lost its air—poof!—like the winking of an eye. For one eternal moment Ryeland thought that this was what they had been waiting for. The spaceling, Chiquita, had died at last; the strange forces that allowed her to hold air about her, and them, had loosened their grasp, and they were face to face with death. Donna, who felt the abrupt clutch of fear, clung to him tightly.

But Ryeland whispered thoughtfully. "It isn't right, Donna. Something's happening, but not what we expected at all. If the field went, it should go all at once."

"But what could it be, then, Steven?"

"Let's go see!" Like biped spacelings themselves, they turned and dove into the cavern. Quickly, quickly. Crazed, confused thoughts floated through Ryeland's mind: Their dying little world ... all worlds, dying ... all the planets of the sun, doomed to death, doomed because

Ryeland had failed to give them inertialess travel in time . . . doomed to die without giving seed to space.

They stopped, clutching at palely glowing vines.

In the very green darkness Chiquita lay. She was surely dead. There was no possibility of a mistake.

But beside her—

Beside her something moved! Beside that shrunken, lifeless skin, something quivered, curled and lifted. It came frolicking toward them, flying—something small, smaller even than Donna, a mere doll beside the dead Chiquita, racked and shrunken though she was.

It was a spaceling!

A baby spaceling! Its red nose winked swiftly; it looked at them with bright, friendly eyes. "Oh, you darling!" cried Donna, holding out her arms to it, and it licked at her face with a slim, quick, black tongue.

"Look there!" croaked Ryeland, astonished beyond words, pointing. There was another tiny, seal-like creature . . . and a third, and a fourth, and—there seemed to be a dozen of them, frolicking and darting with their tiny noses blinking comically, pink light and orange, red and almost purple.

Ryeland said softly: "Chiquita may be dead, but her children are not."

There were eight of them in all, as well as they could count their quicksilver, gamboling shapes. Eight baby spacelings, frolicking like pups. Had they been born after the death of the mother, in some reproductive mystery of the spacelings? Had they been born before, and wandered off? Ryeland could not know. He only knew that they were here.

"Thank heaven," whispered Donna, as Ryeland carried one out into the light to see it.

"Thank Something," murmured Ryeland. "Look, Donna. They're just like adult spacelings, but tiny. Born fully formed—obviously, they are able to maintain a field, able to use the jetless drive! Fortunately for us. Though," he said remembering the lost corner of their paradise, "I think they could stand a little more practice."

He stopped, looking up, jaw hanging.

Out there somewhere past the air curtain, something moved and winked.

"The Plan rocket!" cried Donna in terror.

"No! No," shouted Ryeland, leaping up. "Don't you see? It's too small too close. It's a spaceling! Quiveras has come back, and—look! There's someone else. He has brought Donderevo back with him!"

Donderevo! Six feet eight inches tall, a dark-faced man with blue eyes that blazed. His spaceling brought him daintily into the air bubble of their little haven, and Ron Donderevo sprang free. "Donna!" he cried, and caught her hand.

Joyously Donna threw her arms about him, pressing her face against his bronzed cheek. When she drew free, she said: "Ron, this is Steve Ryeland."

"I remember," Ryeland whispered breathlessly. "When I was a Tech-nicub, about eight years old. And you were a medical student from space, wearing a collar because your people hadn't accepted the Plan—"

Chuckling, the huge man gripped his hand. Ron Donderevo's fringed leather jacket was open at the throat. His neck was a brown muscular column. A thin scar circled it, but he wore no collar.

"And I remember you," Donderevo rumbled. "I admired your father. A philosopher and a historian, as well as a mathematician. He's the scholar who helped me understand the real meaning of the space frontier."

"Your collar?" Ryeland interrupted him. "You really got out of it?"

"Out of the collar, and out of the place they call Heaven." Donderevo nodded solemnly. "I was luckier than your father."

"I was never told what became of him."

Ryeland caught his breath to ask another question, but the sudden iron constriction of his own collar stopped him. He wanted to know how Donderevo had got away, but he was afraid to know the answer. He was afraid that Donderevo would confirm the strange story of Angela Zwick —that Ryeland was the imitation man that the anti-Plan surgeons had assembled in Donderevo's collar, to cover his escape.

"Ron?" Donna's voice was quick and quivering with concern. "Can you get Steve out of his collar?"

"Not quite the way I was taken out of mine." Ron Donderevo shook his shagged, craggy head. "Mine was removed in the surgical center at the stockpile where I had been sent for salvage. Half a dozen surgeons helped, using the best equipment—"

"What was done with your collar?" Ryeland interrupted.

"I promised not to tell," Donderevo said.

"Was a patch—?" Ryeland had to gulp and start again. "Was a patchwork man assembled in it? A kind of living dummy to take your place until the spaceling could carry you away?"

"Right." The big man nodded casually. "I don't suppose it matters to anybody now."

It mattered very much to Ryeland. His flesh turned numb and cold . . . as it must have been before it was sutured and cemented back into the likeness of a man. His knees felt weak.

"What's wrong, Steve?" Donna asked. "You look so pale!"

He couldn't tell her that he was that decoy, that patchwork of junk meat.

"I was hoping you could take my collar off," he told Donderevo. That was a matter desperate enough to account for his agitation. "If you learned medicine on Earth, can't you—can't you possibly do the operation?"

Donderevo started to shake his head, and suddenly looked hard at Ryeland's face. He glanced at Donna, and peered again at Ryeland. His own face twitched and stiffened, gray beneath the bronze.

"I suppose I could try," he admitted reluctantly. "Of course you understand that I lack the experience and the fine equipment those surgeons had. Operating here, with only a portable surgery, without trained assistants, I can promise you one chance in four that you'll survive the operation—one chance in five that you'll walk again, even if you do survive."

Ryeland fell dizzily back against a great crystal branch. Twittering iridescent bird-fish, jarred loose, swam tinkling away.

"And yet," rumbled Donderevo compassionately, "you are right, Steve, for you have no chance otherwise. The Plan can kill you in ten seconds, as easy as that. The rocket is less than three million miles away. Push a button—poof!—your code impulse is transmitted—you're dead. And so am I," he said earnestly, "and poor Quiveras here, and Donna. So you are right, for you see, Steven, we must save you somehow or you may kill us all."

"Describe it to me," said Ryeland emptily. "Tell me what it entails. Exactly."

Donderevo hesitated, and then began.

Ron Donderevo, that huge man, his hands soft as a maiden's, his voice deep as a tiger's growl; Ron Donderevo had performed many an operation for the Plan.

But on Earth, in the Body Bank, he said with meticulous care, there were things that could not be duplicated here. There were nurses and surgeons beyond counting. (Here was only young Donna and old Quiveras, neither of them trained.) There was equipment by the warehouse-full. Here was only what had been packed in on the back of spacelings. Enough, yes—if nothing went wrong. But there were no extras. If a blood pump should fail, there was no other. There in the Body Bank was the unmatched reservoir of human parts that constituted a reserve against spoilage. And here were only the four of them, and no more parts than they needed to go around.

The first step, he said, would be to create an atmosphere of asepsis around the anesthetized Ryeland. Easy enough, particularly in the negligible gravity of the spaceling's bubble, and particularly where the only ambient germs were those the four of them had brought in. A soft hissing from a yellowish metal tube Donderevo had brought—he demonstrated it—accounted for a polyantibiotic spray.

Then—scalpels, retractors, sutures, clamps. Sterile and inherently inhospitable to microscopic life, they came out of the gleaming containers at Donderevo's orders. Donna was whitefaced but steady as she listened and looked at the instruments. She shrank away as he described how the first scalpel would trace a thin red line around Ryeland's neck, just under the collar; but then she was all right.

The epidermis and dermis would have to be slit and pulled back, like a stocking from a leg. Red flesh and white muscle would swiftly be cut and retracted. The great trapezius muscles would have to be cut, caught and held—it was important that muscles be kept under tension. The small blood vessels of the neck needed to be tied off; the large ones—the carotids, the jugular, the vertebral blood supply—were to be cut and quickly clamped to the plastic tubes of a double-chambered mechanical heart—not because Ryeland's own heart was out of circuit, yet, but because there was blood loss, constantly, from every vessel and uncountable capillary, from the disturbed cells themselves. Extra reserves of blood were needed and held in the mechanical heart's chambers, for a man's own heart was not equal to the task.

Then the nerves, carefully dissected out and clamped to the won-derous organic silver leads that alone had made major replacement of parts possible. Nervous tissue does not readily regenerate in the higher vertebrates—not without help. Organic silver is the solder that holds the parts together; organic silver in the form of braided wire strands is the "connection" that permits the extension of a nerve, so that performance is not lost during surgery. As the cervical ganglia were cut, great sections of Ryeland's body would convulse quiveringly.

Then the bones. Sonic saws to slice into the third cervical vertebra. The spinal cord—opened, sealed, tied. The fluid dammed inside its chamber—

"That's enough," interrupted Ryeland, his face frozen into a mask. "I get the picture. I don't need any more." His eyes sought Donna's, and he tried to speak to her . . . but could not. "Go ahead," he said. "Operate!"

He stepped forward, swung himself onto the operating cradle and lay patiently while Donderevo and Quiveras strapped him in. Then Donderevo nodded and Donna moved forward, her face trembling on the verge of repressed tears, in her hand the soft flexible mask that sealed his lips and plugged his nostrils. He moved his head aside quickly.

"Good-by, my dearest," he whispered. "For a while." Then he allowed her to fit the mask.

Crashing, crashing, the crystal trees swam down on him. The little reeflet folded into a bud, with himself in the heart of it like the pure liquid gold in the cup of one of its strange flowers . . .

And he was unconscious.

19

He was unconscious. But his mind was racing on.

He was dreaming. He was remembering. The haunting fog came swirling up out of the past. It had followed him all the way from Earth. It was all around him now, cold and silent and clinging. It covered Donna and Ron Donderevo, and distorted them. Everything changed, twisted into hopeless contradiction.

He was no longer in the portable surgery. Now the straps that held him were those of the therapy couch in the recreation center. The people over him were Dr. Thrale and General Fleemer.

"Tell us, Ryeland," Thrale's soft insistent voice was wheezing. "We know about the knocking on the door, after the teletype girl left your office to bring sandwiches and coffee. We know you left the papers on your desk and went to open the door. Tell us who came in."

Suddenly, he knew.

Somehow, the anesthetic had cleared away that clinging fog. It wasn't Angela Zwick! It wasn't even the Plan Police—they really hadn't come until the following Monday. It was a thin man in a blood-spotted fatigue uniform, bent under the bulging weight of a soiled space bag.

"Horrocks-" "Shhh!"

Ryeland let him into the room and locked the door again. Horrocks dropped the space bag and stood leaning on the desk. He was panting heavily. Droplets of red foam sprayed out of his mouth and spattered over the sheafs of yellow teletape on the desk.

"You're hurt," Ryeland said. "Let me get a doctor."

"That can wait," Dan Horrocks gasped. "I've got a message for you— that's got more priority. From an old—friend of yours."

Ryeland helped him into a chair and listened to the message. It came in gasped words that were sometimes incoherent. The old friend was Ron Donderevo. Horrocks had met him at a tiny colony on an uncharted asteroid twenty billion miles outside the Plan, when Colonel Lescure's ship had stopped there to pick up reaction mass.

The message itself took a long time for the stricken man to deliver, and longer still for Ryeland to grasp. It began with the existence of the Reefs of Space and the fusorian life that had built them. The point of it was the way the spacelings flew.

"Donderevo wants you to know space isn't dead," Horrocks panted hoarsely. "A living frontier—alive and infinite. Rockets can't—can't reach it usefully. We've got to have—propulsion—with no reaction mass."

In the dream he tried to tell the wounded man that any sort of jetless drive was forbidden by the Third Law of Motion.

"Wrong—" the wounded man interrupted him. "Spacelings~fly! Donderevo said-4ell you that. All you need to know. Except the fact—your father taught him. The historic effect—effect of the free front—"

Horrocks coughed, spraying Ryeland with flecks of red.

"Sorry!" he gasped. "Mean frontier. Closed frontier—closed society. That's the Plan." He paused to cough again, turning painfully away from Ryeland. "Open frontier—that's the Reefs. Freedom. Forever!"

Ryeland needed time to understand that agonized summary of a fundamental fact, but later, when he began to grasp it, he thought he knew what had happened to his father. The Plan existed to regiment the closed society that had spread to the last frontier that rockets could reach. His father had seen the infinite promise of the new frontier of interstellar space—but even a dream of that open frontier was treason to the closed world of the Plan.

"Donderevo knows Planner—Creery," Horrocks finished faintly. "Thinks we can trust—trust him to understand—that man is more—important than the Plan. If we can show him a working drive. But he says —he says trust—nobody—nobody else."

Even after his message was delivered, Horrocks didn't want a doctor. He let Ryeland give him a eubiotic emergency shot from the survival kit that he had stolen from the Cristobal Colon, and hid in the rest room across the corridor before Angela Zwick came back with the sandwiches and coffee. By the time Ryeland had got rid of her, Horrocks was gone.

The message was unbelievable—but Horrocks had left the red-spattered space bag. Ryeland dumped it on his desk, and shivered with wonder. There was a great, glowing octahedral crystal of carbon coral. There were dazzling stereos of reefs and pyropods and spacelings. There was a notebook of Ron Donderevo's observations, proving that the spacelings really flew without reaction.

Forced to believe, Ryeland's mind reacted. As Donderevo had told Horrocks to tell him, all he needed to know was the fact that the spacelings flew. With that simple datum actually accepted, the rest was obvious.

As a mathematician, he knew that equations had to balance. As a physicist, however, he had learned that the balancing quantity might be physically elusive. The neutrino, required to balance the equations of a nuclear reaction, was one such example. In his own equations of mass-creation and space-expansion, which described the Hoyle effect, the new mass equalled x—an unknown quantity, more elusive than even the neutrino, which he had failed to identify in nature.

But now he saw it. Printed in the simple fact of the spaceling's flight, it was plain as the fact that two plus two is four. The unknown quantity which equalled the new mass in his equations was at last identified.

It was momentum! The momentum of the expanding universe, which ultimately pushed the receding galaxies beyond the velocity of light!

With a professional satisfaction, he noted that the Third Law of Motion had not been violated. It had simply been transformed. The kinetic energy of the flying spaceling was balanced by a precisely equivalent energy of new mass. The reaction was governed by the classical equation of energy and mass, E = mc². The enormous last factor, the squared velocity of light, meant that a tiny mass was the equivalent of enormous kinetic energy. That was what had made his x so hard to identify. On its longest jetless flight, a spaceling would add only an imperceptible breath of new hydrogen to the cloud of atoms that its own motion had created.

Locked alone in his office, Ryeland went to work. A surging elation had swept away all his fatigue, and even the fear that Horrocks had brought. That single substitution of momentum for the unknown quantity in his own cosmological equations had given him the theory. A simple transformation described the field conditions required for the creation of new mass and the equivalent momentum. The problems of material and design were more troublesome, but by Sunday noon he had set up the complete specifications for a reactionless propulsion system with an effective thrust of half a million tons.

Suddenly hungry and groggy, he stumbled across the hushed dimness of the tunnel to wash his face in the laboratory that had not been scrubbed since Horrocks had sprayed the basin with blood. He ate the last dry beef algae sandwich, and the last bitter drops of cold yeast coffee and went to sleep in his chair, wondering dully how to go about reaching Planner Creery without trusting anybody else.

He woke early Monday morning with a stiff neck and the fading recollection of a nightmare in which he had been running with Horrocks from the Plan Police. He hid the space bag behind a filing cabinet, stuffed the blood-sprayed teletapes into the incinerator, and packed his specifications and the stereos in his briefcase.

Two hours before the time for Angela and Oporto to come, he hurried away, into the maze of gray-walled tunnels that housed all the linked computers of the Planning Machine and the working quarters of the Planner's staff.

Trust nobody . . .

The tunnels were dim and empty. Cool air roared here and there from the ducts. The Monday morning white-collar rush hadn't begun, but now and then he met a maintenance man in gray overalls. It was strange to think of the solid miles of Earth above, when he had the key to the stars in his hands.

Though he had never been to the Planner's office, he knew the way. Outside the automatic elevator, a guard looked at him sharply and waved him on past the warning sign: RESTRICTED! RISKS REQUIRE ESCORT BEYOND THIS POINT.

He was not a Risk. He wore no security collar.

Outside the Planner's suite, another guard studied his badge and tapped the number into a teletype. Waiting for the Machine to answer, Ryeland held his breath. But the guard looked up from the clattering machine, with a reluctant respect easing his official frown.

"Go in, sir."

A teletype girl in the waiting room wanted to know his business. He informed her that he had a confidential report for Planner Creery. She wanted to know the nature of it. When he insisted that it was too confidential for any ears except the Planner's, she made an appointment for him to see an executive associate.

The executive associate was a huge, blue-faced frog of a man. A polished wood slab on his desk was impressively lettered: General Rudolph Fleemer. His bulging eyes were sharp, with a quick curiosity about Ryeland's confidential report.

Unfortunately, Planner Creery had not returned from a weekend cruise with his family. He would doubtless be in his office later in the week, but even then pressure of accumulated work would be extreme. Although Planner Creery was well aware that Ryeland's distinguished achievements in helical field engineering had been useful to the Plan, the extent of his duties forced him to delegate most responsibilities to subordinates. General Fleemer implied that people who refused to trust the Planner's associates were seldom able to see the Planner himself.

Reluctantly, when he saw that he could do no better, Ryeland left a message stating that his business involved Ron Donderevo and a new space propulsion system. General Fleemer promised sullenly to signal him later in the week, if Planner Creery chose to see him.

Noon had passed before Ryeland got back to the office. If Oporto and the teletype girl had come to work, he saw no sign of them. The blood-spattered space bag was still in place behind the filing cabinet, and a long yellow strip of teletape from the untended machine was piling up on the floor. He locked the office door and looked around for a place to hide his specifications for the jetless drive.

There was no space behind his reference books. The gap between the filing cabinet and the wall was already dangerously conspicuous. His desk had no drawers. In fact, he reflected, there was no room in the Plan for personal secrets or private documents. He found no hiding place—none better than his memory.

He was dropping the specifications into the incinerator slot, when he heard the loud impatient knocking on his door . . .

Again in the dream he was an unwilling guest in the deeply buried recreation center. The suites on both sides of him were occupied by disloyal surgeons who had been trapped in some plot against the Plan. The therapy room down the tunnel held the unplanned thing that they had assembled from scraps of waste tissue, which raved insanely in its straps and bandages while it was alive.

Then the surgeons were gone. There was only Horrocks, in the next suite, and Oporto in the one across the corridor. He was seldom aware even of them, because the stewards kept him most of the time in the therapy room where the junk man had died.

He was strapped to the couch, with the iron collar on his neck and electrodes clamped to his shivering flesh. Merciless light blazed down on his face. The white-smocked fat therapist stood over him, wheezing questions in a soft apologetic voice.

What was the message that Horrocks had brought him from Ron Donderevo? Where were fusorians and pyropods and spacelings? What was the way to build a jetless drive?

At first he could have answered, but a burning shock from the collar paralyzed his voice whenever he tried to speak. Even when he was utterly broken, abjectly willing to trust anybody with what he knew, they wouldn't let him say a word. They gave him no chance to understand, left him no will even to dream of escape.

Donderevo? Reefs of space? Jetless drive?

The soft insistent voice and the agony went on, until all his past was lost in a fog of pain and insane contradiction. Even when the collar didn't shock him, he didn't try to speak. He didn't even try to think of the answer. His mind had been erased.

20

Ryeland awoke, blinking against a glare of light and found a man in white bending over him.

It took him a long time to understand that it was not Dr. Thrale, but Donderevo; longer still to realize that the crystal glint and glowing color of the cave was right and natural, so sure he had been that he would find himself in the aseptic white of the therapy room. He was in the operating cradle. The straps on his body had been loosened. Things began to click into place. There was Donderevo, yes, and the girl with her back to him undoubtedly was Donna Creery, and the other figure-

He sat up involuntarily, eyes wide. For the third figure in the room was not Quiveras. It was a Technicorps officer, watching him with the calculation of a poised cobra.

With a sudden spasm of desperate hope and fear Ryeland's hands came up to his neck.

They touched the familiar hard curve of the collar. He still wore it. He was still a Risk, his life hanging on the whim of every guard with a radar pistol or on the fiipover of a relay in the distant synapses of the Machine.

"What—" For a moment his voice was paralyzed, still half in the dream, remembering the violence of the shocks that had conditioned him not to speak the truths he knew. But he fought to get words out: "What went wrong?"

Donderevo said compassionately, "We were too late. Before we had more than started the spacelings let us know the Plan cruiser was nearby. It breached the bubble around this reeflet. We sewed you up, and now we are all back in the Plan of Man." Unconsciously his hand touched the scar on his own throat. "I'm sorry about your collar, Ryeland," he said, "but if I'm not mistaken it will be no long time before I'm once more wearing one of my own."

The nurse turned, and Ryeland had his third shock. For it was not Donna. "Where is she?" he demanded.

"Safe," rumbled Donderevo. "Or as safe as any one under the Plan. Her father was in the cruiser. She's with him now."

"May I—" Ryeland had to stop and gulp, because a memory of agony had paralyzed his throat. "May I see them?"

"I'll tell them you're awake," Donderevo said. He moved toward the doorway, and turned back with a hesitant expression. "I had better warn you that you can't expect much help from Creery. You see, he's not the Planner any longer. In fact, he's wearing a collar of his own."

Ryeland was sitting on the edge of the portable cradle with a sheet wrapped around him, when Donna brought her father into that crystal-lighted cave of space. Though the former Planner was smiling tenderly at his daughter, his face looked pinched and gray. He wore the thin denim of a Risk. The chrome-steel collar shimmered with reflected crystal glints.

Two officious men followed Creery. One was a stocky Technicorps colonel, who looked bleakly Satanic with his radar horns. The other was a communications sergeant, with a gray-cased portable teleset slung to his¹ body.

Donna nervously repeated what Donderevo had already told Ryeland about her father's arrival.

"I was hoping," she finished wistfully, "that Father could unlock your collar."

"Not even my own." Creery's stiff smile faded. "You can see that things have changed. Our old friend General Fleemer is acting Planner now. I have been reclassified, and assigned to this hazardous special mission." He glanced uncomfortably back at the colonel.

Donna's face twitched. She whispered, "What's your special mission, Father?"

"It is concerned with the Plan of Man," he said. "You see, since the Machine had been reliably informed of the limitless extent of the Reefs of Space, it has been projecting a new phase of the Plan. In this second phase, the abundant resources of the space frontier will end any need for the strict regimentation of the original Plan. Unfortunately, this second phase cannot begin until the new frontier is actually open to the masses of mankind. Obviously, that requires a reactionless space drive."

The former Planner paused. His haggard eyes looked sharply at Donderevo, regretfully at Ryeland, blankly at the Technicorps colonel.

"General Fleemer managed to convince the Machine that I was no longer competent," he said. "I suppose you know about the numerous failures of the helical field equipment that you had designed." His dull stare came back to Ryeland. "Fleemer laid all those disasters at my feet. As a result of such apparent executive errors, I was replaced.

"I insisted on one last chance to find a reactionless drive. I had enough power left so that Fleemer was unable to block the assignment. That's my mission now. I saw the spacelings that came out to meet the cruiser. I must learn how they fly!"

His voice was hopeless.

"If Ryeland couldn't find the answer," Donderevo said, "I doubt that it exists."

"But—I found it!"

The collar was very tight. For a moment Ryeland's throat was paralyzed again. The old fog of agony and contradiction thickened in his mind. He looked* at the man and at Donna. Her smile was sunshine, clearing the fog.

He remembered. He could speak.

He explained his theory of the equivalence of momentum and new mass, which related the flight of the spacelings to the expansion of the universe. He recited the specifications that he had memorized before the Plan Police burst into his office on that lost Monday.

The colonel watched, a skeptical Satan, while they discussed the design and dictated the specifications to the sergeant at the portable tele-set. They waited, while the message was digested by the special section of the Planning Machine aboard the cruiser.

Time passed—while slow radio pulsed the message to Earth.

Ryeland looked at Donna Creery's anxious face—and remembered the bandaged patchwork man who had raved and died in the therapy room down the tunnel from his suite in the recreation center.

Then he himself was not the junk man!

That part of Angela's story had been a malicious lie!

The teleset clattered.

Ryeland crowded with the former Planner and Donderevo and the girl to read the tape. Officiously, the colonel waved them back. He peered at the tape, and reached to finger the buttons of his radar gear.

But his expression changed.

"I knew it, Mr. Planner." His voice was suddenly smoothly affable. "I knew that Fleemer was nothing better than a conniving traitor, who will certainly get his comeuppance now! Any man with a spark of wit knew that jetless flight had to come."

Grinning, he offered his hand to Creery.

"I want to be the first to congratulate you, Mr. Planner. And you, too, Mr. Ryeland. The special section of the Planning Machine in the cruiser has completed its preliminary evaluation of your invention.

"It has relayed a message to the master complex of the Machine on Earth, alerting it to prepare the Plan of Man for transition to the second phase, in which the freedom of the space frontier will render our present strict security controls both impossible and unnecessary.

"As a first step toward the effectuation of that second phase, it is propagating a radar pulse—"

Ryeland heard a click at his throat.

His collar snapped open.

As if moved by the same pulse, the girl stepped forward and into his arms. Together they moved out of the cave into the faerie shimmer of the reeflet. To one side hung the great gray mass of the Plan cruiser, no longer an enemy. Beyond lay the stars.

The stars. The limitless frontier for mankind—the space between suns, where hydrogen is constantly born to make new worlds, as freedom is constantly born in the hearts of men.

"A billion billion new worlds," whispered Ryeland.

And the girl said firmly: "Our children will see them all!"