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Copyright (c) 1976 by Larry Niven
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.
Published simultaneously in Canada by Holt, Rinehart and Winston of Canada, Limited.
A somewhat different version of the first chapter of this book appeared in Galaxy
magazine, November 1971, as a story entitled "Rammer," copyright (c) 1971 by
UPD Publishing Corporation. Other selections from the novel were serialized in
Galaxy magazine in 1976, copyright (c) 1976 by UPD Publishing Corporation.
Two verses from "Little Teeny Eyes" have been included with permission from the author, Tom Digby.
Printed in the United States of America
To Owen Lock and Judy-Lynn del Rey, who edited the manuscript of this book and made me do some necessary rewriting: Where the hell were you when Ringworld was published?
To anyone who owns a first edition of Ringworld: Hang on to that. It's the only version in which the Earth rotates in the wrong direction (Chapter 1).
CHAPTER 1 RAMMER
I
Once there was a dead man.
He had been waiting for two hundred years inside a coffin, suitably labeled, whose outer shell held liquid nitrogen. There were frozen clumps of cancer all through his frozen body. He had had it bad.
He was waiting for medical science to find him a cure.
He waited in vain. Most varieties of cancer could be cured now, but no cure existed for the billions of cell walls ruptured by expanding crystals of ice. He had known the risk. He had gambled anyway. Why not? He'd been dying.
The vaults held over a million of these frozen bodies. Why not? They'd been dying.
Later there came a young criminal. His name is forgotten and his crime is secret, but it must have been a terrible one. The State wiped his personality for it.
Afterward he was a dead man: still warm, still breathing, even reasonably healthy-but empty.
The State had use for an empty man.
Corbell woke on a hard table, aching as if he had slept too long in one position. He stared incuriously at a white ceiling. Memories floated up to him of a double-wailed coffin, and sleep and pain.
The pain was gone.
He sat up at once.
And flapped his arms wildly for balance. Everything felt wrong. His arms would not swing right. His body was too light. His head bobbed strangely on a thin neck. He reached frantically for the nearest support, which turned out to be a blond young man in a white jumpsuit. Corbell missed his grip; his arms were shorter than he had expected. He toppled on his side, shook his head and sat up more carefully.
His arms. Scrawny, knobby-and not his.
The man in the jumpsuit said, "Are you all right?"
"Yeah," said Corbell. My God, what have they done to me? I thought I wa~s ready for anything, but this- He fought rising panic. His throat was rusty, but that was all right. This was certainly somebody else's body, but it didn't seem to have cancer, either. "What's the date? How long has it been?"
A quick recovery. The checker gave him a plus. "Twenty-one ninety, your dating. You won't have to worry about our dating."
That sounded ominous. Cautiously Corbell postponed the obvious next question: What's happened to me? and asked instead, "Why not?"
"You won't be joining our society."
"No? What, then?"
"Several professions are open to you-a limited choice. If you don't qualify for any of them we'll try someone else."
Corbell sat on the edge of the hard operating table. His body seemed younger, more limber, definitely thinner, not very clean. He was acutely aware that his abdomen did not hurt no matter how he moved.
He asked, "And what happens to me?"
"I've never learned how to answer that question. Call it a problem in metaphysics," said the checker. "Let me detail what's happened to you so far and then you can decide for yourself."
There was an empty man. Still breathing and as healthy as most of society in the year 2190. But empty. The electrical patterns in the
brain, the worn paths of nervous reflex, the memories, the person had all been wiped away as penalty for an unnamed crime.
And there was this frozen thing.
"Your newstapers called you people corpsicles," said the blond man. "I never understood what the tapes meant by that."
"It comes from popsicle. Frozen sherbet." Corbell had used the word himself before he became one of them. One of the corpsicles, the frozen dead.
Frozen within a corpsicle's frozen brain were electrical patterns that could be recorded. The process would warm the brain and destroy most of the patterns, but that hardly mattered, because other things must be done too.
Personality was not all in the brain. Memory RNA was concentrated in the brain, but it ran all through the nerves and the blood. In Corbell's case the clumps of cancer had to be cut away. Thea the RNA could be leeched Out of what was left. The operation would have left nothing like a human being, Corbell gathered. More like bloody mush.
"What's been done to you is not the kind of thing that can be done twice," the checker told him. "You get one chance and this is it. If you don't work out we'll terminate and try someone else. The vaults are full of corpsicles."
"You mean you'd wipe my personality," Corbell said unsteadily. "But I haven't committed a crime. Don't I have any rights?"
The checker looked stunned. Then he laughed. "I thought I'd explained. The man you think you are is dead. Corbell's will was probated long ago. His widow-"
"Damn it, I left money to myself!"
"No good." Though the man still smiled, his face was impersonal, remote, Unreachable. A vet smiles reassuringly at a cat due to be fixed. "A dead man can't own property. That was settled in the courts long ago. It wasn't fair to the heirs."
Corbell jerked an unexpectedly bony thumb at his bony chest. "But I'm alive now!"
"Not in law. You can earn your new life. The State will give you a new birth certificate and citizenship if you give the State good reason."
Corbell sat for a moment, absorbing that. Then he got off the table. "Let's get started then. What do you need to know about me?"
"Your name."
"Jerome Branch Corbell."
"Call me Pierce." The checker did not offer to shake hands. Neither did Corbell, perhaps because he sensed the man would not respond, perhaps because they were both noticeably overdue for a bath. "I'm your checker. Do you like people? I'm just asking. We'll test you in detail later."
"I get along with the people around me, but I like my privacy."
The checker frowned. "That narrows it more than you might think. The isolationism you called privacy was-well, a passing fad. We don't have the room for it . . . or the inclination, either. We can't send you to a colony world-"
"I might make a good colonist. I like travel."
"You'd make terrible breeding stock. Remember, the genes aren't yours. No. You get one choice, Corbell. Rammer."
"Rammer?"
"I'm afraid so."
"That's the first strange word you've used since I woke up. In fact-hasn't the language changed at all? You don't even have an accent."
"Part of my profession. I learned your speech through RNA training, many years ago. You'll learn your trade the same way if you get that far. You'll be amazed how fast you learn with RNA shots to help you along. But you'd better be right about liking your privacy, Corbell, and about liking to travel, too. Can you take orders?"
"I was in the army."
"What does that mean?"
"Means yes."
"Good. Do you like strange places and faraway people, or vice versa?"
"Both." Corbell smiled hopefully. "I've raised buildings all over the world. Can the world use another architect?"
"No. Do you feel that the State owes you something?"
There could be but one answer to that. "No."
"But you had yourself frozen. You must have felt that the future owed you something."
"Not at all. It was a good risk. I was dying."
"Ah." The checker looked him over thoughtfully. "If you had something to believe in, perhaps dying wouldn't mean so much."
Corbell said nothing.
They gave him a short word-association test in English. That test made Corbell suspect that a good many corpsicles must date from near his own death in 1970. They took a blood sample, then exercised him to exhaustion and took another blood sample. They tested his pain threshold by direct nerve stimulation-excruciatingly unpleasant-then took another blood sample. They gave him a Chinese puzzle and told him to take it apart.
Pierce then informed him that the testing was over. "After all, we already know the state of your health."
"Then why the blood samples?"
The checker looked at him for a moment. "You tell me."
Something about that look gave Corbell the creepy feeling that he was on trial for his life. The feeling might have been caused only by the checker's rather narrow features, his icy blue gaze and abstracted smile. Still . . . Pierce had stayed with him all through the testing, watching him as if Corbell's behavior was a reflection on Pierce's judgment. Corbell thought carefully before he spoke.
"You have to know how far I'll go before I quit. You can analyze the blood samples for adrenalin and fatigue poisons to find out just how much I was hurting, just how tired I really was."
"That's right," said the checker.
Corbell had survived again.
He would have given up much earlier on the pain test. But at some point Pierce had mentioned that Corbell was the fourth corpsicle personality to be tested in that empty body.
He remembered going to sleep that last time, two hundred and twenty years ago.
His family and friends had been all around him, acting like mourners. He had chosen the coffin, paid for vault space, and made out his Last Will and Testament, but he had not thought of it as dying. He had been given a shot. The eternal pain had drifted away in a soft haze. He had gone to sleep.
He had drifted off wondering about the future, wondering what he would wake to. A vault into the unknown. World government? Interplanetary spacecraft? Clean fusion power? Strange clothing, body paints, nudism? New principles of architecture, floating houses, arcologies?
Or crowding, poverty, all the fuels used up, power provided by cheap labor? He'd thought of those, but they didn't worry him. The world could not afford to wake him if it was that poor. The world he dreamed of in those last moments was a rich world, able to support such luxuries as Jaybee Corbell.
It looked like he wasn't going to see too damn much of it.
Someone led him away after the testing. The guard, walked with a meaty hand wrapped around Corbell's thin upper arm. Leg irons would have been no more effective had Corbell thought of escaping. The guard took him up a narrow staircase to the roof.
The noon sun blazed in a blue sky that shaded to yellow, then brown at the horizon. Green plants grew in close-packed rows on parts of the roof. Elsewhere many sheets of something glassy were exposed to the sunlight.
Corbell caught one glimpse of the world from a bridge between two roofs. It was a cityscape of close-packed buildings, all of the same cold cubistic design.
And Corbell was impossibly high on a narrow strip of concrete with no guardrails at all. He froze. He stopped breathing.
The guard did not speak. He tugged at Corbell's arm, not hard, and watched to see what he would do. Corbell pulled himself together and went on.
The room was all bunks: two walls of bunks with a gap between. The light was cool and artificial, but outside it was nearly noon. Could they be expecting him to sleep? But jet lag had never bothered Corbell. . .
The room was big, a thousand bunks big. Most of the bunks were full. A few occupants watched incuriously as the guard showed Corbell which bunk was his. It was the bottommost in a stack of six. Corbell had to drop to his knees and roll to get into it. The bedclothes were strange: silky and very smooth, even slippery-the only touch of luxury about the place. But there was no top sheet, nothing
to cover him. He lay on his side, looking out at the dormitory from near floor level.
Now, finally, he could let himself think:
I'm alive.
Earlier it might have been a fatal distraction. He'd been holding it back:
I made it!
I'm alive!
And young! That wasn't even in the contract.
But, he thought reluctantly, because it would not stay buried, who is it that's alive? Some kind of composite? A criminal rehabilitated with the aid of some spare chemicals and an electric brainwashing device. . . ? No. Jaybee Corbell is alive and well, if a trifle confused.
Once he had had that rare ability: He could go to sleep anywhere, anytime. But sleep was very far from him now. He watched and tried to learn.
Three things were shocking about that place.
One was the smell. Apparently perfumes and deodorants had been another passing fad. Pierce had been overdue for a bath. So was the new, improved Corbell. Here the smell was rich.
The second was the loving bunks, four of them in a vertical stack, twice as wide as the singles and with thicker mattresses. The doubles were for loving, not sleeping. What shocked Corbell was that they were right out in the open, not hidden by so much as a gauze curtain.
The same was true of the toilets.
How can they live like this?
Corbell rubbed his nose and jumped-and cursed at himself for jumping. His own nose had been big and fleshy and somewhat shapeless. But the nose he now rubbed automatically when trying to think was small and narrow with a straight, sharp edge. He might very well get used to the smell and everything else before he got used to his own nose.
Eventually he slept.
Some time after dusk a man came for him. A broad, brawny type wearing a gray jumper and a broad expressionless face, the guard was not one to waste words. He found Corbell's bunk, pulled Corbell out by one arm and led him stumbling away. Corbell was facing Pierce before he was fully awake.
In annoyance he asked, "Doesn't anyone else speak English?"
"No," said the checker.
Pierce and the guard guided Corbell to a comfortable armchair facing a wide curved screen. They put padded earphones on him. They set a plastic bottle of clear fluid on a shelf over his head. Corbell noticed a clear plastic tube tipped with a hypodermic needle.
"Breakfast?"
Pierce missed the sarcasm. "You'll have one meal each day-after learning period and exercise." He inserted the needle into a vein in Corbell's arm. He covered the wound with a blob of what might have been Silly Putty.
Corbell watched it all without emotion. If he had ever been afraid of needles the months of pain and cancer had worked it out of him. A needle was surcease, freedom from pain for a while.
"Learn now," said Pierce. "This knob controls speed. The volume is set for your hearing. You may replay any section once. Don't worry about your arm; you can't pull the tube loose."
"There's something I wanted to ask you, only I couldn't remember the word. What's a rammer?"
"Starship pilot."
Corbell studied the checker's face, without profit. "You're kidding."
"No. Learn now." The checker turned on Corbell's screen and went away.
II
A rammer was the pilot of a starship.
The starships were Bussard ramjets. They caught interstellar hydrogen in immaterial nets of electromagnetic force, compressed and guided it into a ring of pinched force fields, and there burned it in fusion fire. Potentially there was no limit at all on the speed of a Bussard ramjet. The ships were enormously powerful, enormously complex, enormously expensive.
Corbell thought it incredible that the State would trust so much value, such devastating power and mass to one man. To a man two centuries dead! Why, Corbell was an architect, not an astronaut! It was news to him that the concept of the Bussard ramjet predated his own death. He had watched the Apollo XI and XIII ifights on televi
sion, and that had been the extent of his interest in spaceffight, until now.
Now his life depended on his "rammer" career. He never doubted it. That was what kept Corbell in front of the screen with the earphones on his head for fourteen hours that first day. He was afraid he might be tested.
He didn't understand all he was supposed to learn. But he was not tested, either.
The second day he began to get interested. By the third day he was fascinated. Things he had never understood-relativity and magnetic theory and abstract mathematics-he now grasped intuitively. It was marvelous!
And he ceased to wonder why the State had chosen Jerome Corbell. It was always done this way. It made sense, all kinds of sense.
The payload of a starship was small and its operating lifetime was more than a man's lifetime. A reasonably safe life-support system for one man occupied an unreasonably high proportion of the payload. The rest must go for biological package probes. A crew of more than one was out of the question.
A good, capable, loyal citizen was not likely to be enough of a loner. In any case, why send a citizen? The times would change drastically before a seeder ramship could return. The State itself might change beyond recognition. A returning rammer must adjust to a whole new culture. There was no way to tell in advance what it might be like.
Why not pick a man who had already chosen to adjust to a new culture? A man whose own culture was already two centuries dead when the trip started?
And a man who already owed the State his life.
The RNA was most effective. Corbell stopped wondering about Pierce's dispassionately possessive attitude. He began to think of himself as property being programmed for a purpose.
And he learned. He skimmed microtaped texts as if they were already familiar. The process was heady. He became convinced that he could rebuild a seeder ramship with his bare hands, given the parts. He had loved figures all his life, but abstract math had been beyond him until now. Field theory, monopole field equations, circuitry de
sign. When to suspect the presence of a gravitational point source how to locate it, use it, avoid it.
The teaching chair was his life. The rest of his time-exercise, dinner, sleep-seemed vague, uninteresting.
He exercised with about twenty others in a room too small for the purpose. Like Corbell, the others were lean and stringy, in sharp contrast to the brawny wedge-shaped men who were their guards. They followed the lead of a guard, running in place because there was no room for real running, forming in precise rows for scissors jumps, push-ups, sit-ups.
After fourteen hours in a teaching chair Corbell usually enjoyed the jumping about. He followed orders. And he wondered about the stick in a holster at each guard's waist. It looked like a cop's baton. It might have been just that-except for the hole in one end. Corbell never tried to find out.
Sometimes he saw Pierce during the exercise periods. Pierce and the men who tended the teaching chairs were of a third type: wellfed, in adequate condition, but just on the verge of being overweight. Corbell thought of them as Olde American types.
From Pierce he learned something of the other professions open to a revived corpsicle/reprogrammed criminal. Stoop labor: intensive hand cultivation of crops. Body servants. Handicrafts. Any easily taught repetitive work. And the hours! The corpsicles were expected to work fourteen hours a day. And the crowding!
Not that his own situation was much different. Fourteen hours to study, an hour of heavy exercise, an hour to eat, and eight hours to sleep in a dorm that was two solid walls of people.
"Time to work, time to eat, time to sleep! Elbow-to-elbow every minute! The poor bastards," he said to Pierce. "What kind of a life is that?"
"It lets them repay their debt to the State as quickly as possible. Be reasonable, Corbell. What would a corpsicle do with his off hours? He has no social life. He has to learn one by observing citizens. Many forms of felon's labor involve proximity to citizens."
"So they can look up at their betters while they work? That's no way to learn. It would take. . . I get the feeling we're talking about decades of this kind of thing."
"Thirty years' labor generally earns a man his citizenship. That gets him a right to work, which then gets him a guaranteed base income he can use to buy education shots and tapes. And the medical benefits are impressive. We live longer than you used to, Corbell."
"Meanwhile it's slave labor. Anyway, none of this applies to me-"
"No, of course not. Corbell, you're wrong to call it slave labor. A slave can't quit. You can change jobs anytime you like. There's a clear freedom of choice."
Corbell shivered. "Any slave can commit suicide."
"Suicide, my ass," the checker said distinctly. If he had anything that could be called an accent it lay in the precision of his pronunciation. "Jerome Corbell is dead. I could have given you his intact skeleton for a souvenir."
"I don't doubt it." Corbell saw himself tenderly polishing his own white bones. But where could he have kept such a thing? In his bunk?
"Well, then. You're a brain-wiped criminal, justly brain-wiped, I might add. Your crime has cost you your citizenship, but you still have the right to change professions. You need only ask for another- urn, course of rehabilitation. What slave can change jobs at will?"
"It would feel like dying."
"Nonsense. You go to sleep, only that. When you wake up you've got a different set of memories."
The subject was an unpleasant one. Corbell avoided it from then on. But he could not avoid talking to the checker. Pierce was the only man in the world he could talk to. On the days Pierce failed to show up he felt angry, frustrated.
Once he asked about gravitational point sources. "My time didn't know about those."
"Yes, it did. Neutron stars and black holes. You had a number of pulsars located by 1970, and the mathematics to describe how a pulsar decays. The thing to watch for is a decayed pulsar directly in your path. Don't worry about black holes. There are none near your course."
"Okay. . ."
Pierce regarded him in some amusement. "You really don't know much about your own time, do you?"
"Come on, I was an architect. What would I know about as-
trophysics? We didn't have your learning techniques." Which reminded him of something. "Pierce, you said you learned English with RNA injections. Where does the RNA come from?"
Pierce smiled and walked away.
He had little time to remember. For that he was almost grateful. But very occasionally, lying wakeful in his bunk, listening to the shshsh of a thousand people breathing and the different sounds from the loving bunks, he would remember. . . someone. It didn't matter who.
At first it had been Mirabelle, always Mirabelle. Mirabelle at the tiller as they sailed out of San Pedro Harbor: tanned, square face, laughing mouth, extravagantly large dark glasses. Mirabelle, older and marked by months of strain, saying good-bye at his. . . funeral. Mirabelle on their honeymoon. In twenty-two years they had grown together like two touching limbs of a tree.
But now he thought of her, when he thought of her, as two hundred years dead.
And his niece was dead, though he and Mirabelle had barely made it to her confirmation; the pains had been getting bad then. And his daughter Ann. And all three of his grandchildren: just infants they had been! It didn't matter who it was that floated up into his mind. Everyone was dead. Everyone but him.
Corbell did not want to die. He was disgustingly healthy and twenty years younger than he had been at death. He found his rammer education continually fascinating. If only they would stop treating him like property.
Corbell had been in the army, but that was twenty years ago. Make that two hundred and forty. He had learned to take orders, but never to like it. What had galled him then was the basic assumption of his inferiority. But no army officer in Corbell's experience had believed in Corbell's inferiority as completely as did Pierce and Pierce's guards.
The checker never repeated a command, never seemed even to consider that Corbell might refuse. If Corbell refused, even once, he knew what would happen. Pierce knew that he knew. The atmosphere better fitted a death camp than an army.
They must think I'm a zombie.
Corbell was careful not to pursue the thought. He was a corpse
brought back to life-but not all the way. What did they do with the skeleton? Cremate it?
The life was not pleasant. His last-class citizenship was galling. There was nobody to talk to-nobody but Pierce, whom he was learning to hate. He was hungry much of the time. The single daily meal filled his belly, but it would not stay full. No wonder he had wakened so lean.
More and more he lived in the teaching chair. In the teaching chair he was a rammer. His impotence was changed to omnipotence. Starman! Riding the fire that feeds the suns, scooping fuel from interstellar space itself, spreading electromagnetic fields like wings hundreds of miles out.
Two weeks after the State had wakened him from the dead, Corbell was given his course.
He relaxed in a chair that was not quite a contour couch. RNA solution dripped into him. He no longer noticed the needle. The teaching screen held a map of his course, in green lines in three-space. Corbell had stopped wondering how the three-dimensional effect was achieved.
The scale was shrinking as he watched.
Two tiny blobs, and a glowing ball surrounded by a faintly glowing corona. This part of the course he already knew. A linear accelerator would launch him from the Moon, boost him to Bussard ramjet speeds and hurl him at the sun. Solar gravity would increase his speed while his electromagnetic fields caught and burned the solar wind itself. Then out, still accelerating.
In the teaching screen the scale shrank horrendously. The distances between stars were awesome, terrifying. Van Maanan's Star was twelve light-years away.
He would begin deceleration a bit past the midpoint. The matching would be tricky. He must slow enough to release the biological package probe-but not enough to drop him below ram speeds. In addition he must use the mass of Van Maanan's Star for a course change. There was no room for error here.
Then on to the next target, which was even further away. Corbell watched . . . and he absorbed . . . and a part of him seemed to have known everything all along even while another part was gasping at the distances. Ten stars, all yellow dwarfs of the Sol type, an aver-
age of fifteen light-years apart-though he would cross one gap of fifty-two light-years. He would almost touch lightspeed on that one. Oddly enough, the Bussard ramjet effect would improve at such speeds. He could take advantage of the greater hydrogen flux to pull the fields closer to the ship, to intensify them.
Ten stars in a closed path, a badly bent and battered ring leading him back to the solar system and Earth. He would benefit from the time he spent near lightspeed. Though three hundred years would have passed on Earth, Corbel would only have lived through two hundred years of ship's time-which still implied some kind of suspended-animation technique.
It didn't hit him the first time through, nor the second; but repetilion had been built into the teaching program. It didn't hit him until he was on his way to the exercise room.
Three hundred years?
Three hundred years!
III
It wasn't night, not really. Outside it must be midafternoon. Indoors, the dorm was always coolly lit, barely bright enough to read by if there had been books. There were no windows.
Corbell should have been asleep. He suffered every minute he spent gazing out into the dorm. Most of the others were asleep, but a couple made noisy love on one of the loving bunks. A few men lay on their backs with their eyes open. Two women talked in low voices. Corbell didn't know the language. He had been unable to find anyone who spoke English.
Corbell was desperately homesick.
The first few days had been the worst.
He had stopped noticing the smell. If he thought of it, he could sniff the traces of billions of human beings. Otherwise the odor was part of the background noise.
But the loving bunks bothered him. When they were in use he watched. When he forced himself not to watch he listened. He couldn't help himself. But he had turned down two sign-language invitations from a small brunette with straggly hair and a pretty, elfin face. Make love in public? He couldn't.
He could avoid using the loving bunks, but not the exposed toilets. That was embarrassing. The first time he was able to force himself only by staring rigidly at his feet. When he pulled on his jumper and looked up, a number of sleepers were watching him in obvious amusement. The reason might have been his self-consciousness or the way he dropped his jumper around his anides, or he may have been out of line. A pecking order determined who might use the toilets before whom. He still hadn't figured out the details.
Corbell wanted to go home.
The idea was unreasonable. His home was gone and he would have gone with it if it weren't for the corpsicle crypts. But reason was of no use in this instance. He wanted to go home. Home to Mirabelle. Home to anywhere: Rome, San Francisco, Kansas City, Brasilia-he had lived in all those places, all different, but all home. Corbell had been at home anywhere-but he was not at home here and never would be.
Now they would take here away from him. Even this world of four rooms and two roofs, elbow-to-elbow people and utter slavery, this world which they would not even show him, would have vanished when he returned from the stars.
Corbell rolled over and buried his face in his arms. If he didn't sleep he would be groggy tomorrow. He might miss something essential. They had never tested his training. Not yet, not yet.
He dozed.
He came awake suddenly, already up on one elbow, groping for some elusive thought.
Ah.
Why haven't I been wondering about the biological package probes?
A moment later he did wonder.
What are the biological package probes?
But the wonder was that he had never wondered.
He knew what and where they were: heavy fat cylinders arranged around the waist of the starship's hull. Ten of these, each weighing almost as much as Corbell's own life-support system. He knew their mass distribution. He knew the clamp system that held them to the hull and he could operate and repair the clamps under various extremes of damage. He almost knew where the probes went when released; it was just on the tip of his tongue. . . which meant that he had had the RNA shot but had not yet seen the instructions.
But he didn't know what the probes were for.
It was like that with the ship, he realized. He knew everything there was to know about a seeder ramship, but nothing at all about the other kinds of starships or interplanetary travel or ground-to-orbit vehicles. He knew that he would be launched by linear accelerator from the Moon. He knew the design of the accelerator-he could see it, three hundred and fifty kilometers of rings standing on end in a line across a level lunar mare. He knew what to do if anything went wrong during launch. And that was all he knew about the Moon and lunar installations and lunar conquest, barring what he had watched on television over two hundred years ago.
What was going on out there? In the two weeks since his arrival (awakening? creation?) he had seen four rooms and two rooftops, glimpsed a rectilinear cityscape from a bridge, and talked to one man who was not interested in teUing him anything. What had happened in two hundred years?
These men and women who slept around him. Who were they? Why were they here? He didn't even know if they were corpsicle or contemporary. Contemporary, probably; not one of them was selfconscious about the facilities.
Corbell had raised buildings in all sorts of strange places, but he had never jumped blind. He had always brushed up on the language and studied the customs before he went. Here he had no handle, nowhere to start. He was lost.
Oh, for someone to talk to!
He was learning in enormous gulps, taking in volumes of knowledge so broad that he hadn't realized how rigidly bounded they were. The State was teaching him only what he needed to know. Every bit of information was aimed straight at his profession.
Rammer.
He could see the reasoning. He would be gone for several centuries. Why should the State teach him anything at all about today's technology, customs, politics? There would be trouble enough when he came back, if he-come to that, who had taught him to call the government the State? How had he come to think of the State as allpowerful? He knew nothing of its power and extent.
It must be the RNA training. With data came attitudes below the conscious level, where he couldn't get at them.
That made his skin crawl. They were changing him around again!
Sure, why shouldn't the State trust him with a seeder ramship? They were feeding him State-oriented patriotism through a silver needle!
He had lost his people. He had lost his world. He would lose this one. According to Pierce, he had lost himself four times already. A condemned criminal had had his personality wiped four times. Corbell's goddamned skeleton had probably been ground up for phosphates. But this was the worst: that his beliefs and motivations were being lost bit by bit to the RNA solution while the State made him over into a rammer.
There was nothing that was his.
He failed to see Pierce at the next exercise period. It was just as well. He was somewhat groggy. As usual he ate dinner like a starving man. He returned to the dorm, rolled into his bunk and was instantly asleep.
He looked up during study period the next day and found Pierce watching him. He blinked, fighting free of a mass of data on the attitude jet system that bled plasma from the inboard fusion plant that was also the emergency electrical power source, and asked, "Pierce, what's a biological package probe?"
"I would have thought they would teach you that. You know what to do with the probes, don't you?"
"The teaching widget gave me the procedures two days ago. Slow up for certain systems, kill the fields, turn a probe loose and speed up again."
"You don't have to aim them?"
"No. I gather they aim themselves. But I have to get them down below a certain velocity or they'll fall right through the system."
"Amazing. They must do all the rest of it themselves." Pierce shook his head. "I wouldn't have believed it. Well, Corbell, the probes steer for an otherwise terrestrial world with a reducing atmosphere. They outnumber oxygen-nitrogen worlds about three to one in this region of the galaxy and probably everywhere else too-as you may know, if your age got that far."
"But what do the probes do?"
"They're biological packages. A dozen different strains of algae. The idea is to turn a reducing atmosphere into an oxygen atmosphere, just the way photosynthetic life forms did for Earth, something like fifteen-limes-ten-to-the-eighth years ago." The checker smiled, barely. His small narrow mouth wasn't built to express any great emotion. "You're part of a big project."
"Good Lord. How long does it take?"
"We think about fifty thousand years. Obviously we've never had the chance to measure it."
"But, good Lord! Do you really think the State will last that long? Does even the State think it'll last that long?"
"That's not your affair, Corbell. Still-" Pierce considered. "I don't suppose I do. Or the State does. But humanity will last. One day there will be men on those worlds. It's a Cause, Corbell. The immortality of the species. A thing bigger than one man's life. And you're part of it."
He looked at Corbell expectantly.
Corbell was deep in thought. He was running a fingertip back and forth along the straight line of his nose.
Presently he asked, "What's it like out there?"
"The stars? You're-"
"No, no, no. The city. I catch just a glimpse of it twice a day. Cubistic buildings with elaborate carvings at the street level-"
"What the bleep is this, Corbell? You don't need to know anything about Selerdor. By the time you come home the whole city will be changed."
"I know, I know. That's why I hate to leave without seeing something of the world. I could be going out to die. . ." Corbell stopped. He had seen that considering look before, but he had never seen Pierce actually angry.
The checker's voice was flat, his mouth pinched tight. "You think of yourself as a tourist."
"So would you if you found yourself two hundred years in the future. If you didn't have that much curiosity you wouldn't be human."
"Granted that I'd want to look around. I certainly wouldn't demand it as a right. What were you thinking when you foisted yourself off on the future? Did you think the future owed you a debt? It's the other way around, and time you realized it!"
Corbell was silent.
"I'll tell you something. You're a rammer because you're a born tourist. We tested you for that. You like the unfamiliar; it doesn't send you scuttling back to something safe and known. That's rare."
The checker's eyes said: And that's why I've decided not to wipe your personality yet. His mouth said, "Was there anything else?"
Corbell pushed his luck. "I'd like a chance to practice with a computer like the ship's autopilot-computer."
"We don't have one. But you'll get your chance in two days. You're leaving then."
IV
The next day he received his instructions for entering the solar system. He had been alive for seventeen days.
The instructions were understandably vague. He was to try anything and everything to make contact with a drastically changed State, up to and including flashing his attitude jets in binary code. He was to start these procedures a good distance out. It was not impossible that the State would be at war with. . . something. He should be signaling: NOT A WARSifiP.
He found that he would not be utterly dependent on rescue ships. He could slow the ramship by braking directly into the solar wind until the proton flux was too slow to help him. Then, whip around Sol and back out, slowing on attitude jets, using whatever hydrogen was left in the inboard tank. That was emergency fuel. Given no previous emergencies, a nearly full tank would actually get him to the Moon and land him there.
The State would be through with him once he dropped his last probe. It was good of the State to provide for his return, Corbell thought-and then he shook himself. The State was not altruistic. It wanted the ship back.
Now, more than ever, Corbell wanted a chance at the autopilot computer.
He found one last opportunity to talk to the checker.
"A three-hundred-year round trip-maybe two hundred, ship's time," Corbell said. "I get some advantage from relativity. But, Pierce, you don't really expect me to live two hundred years, do you? With nobody to talk to?"
"The cold-sleep treatment-"
"Even so."
Pierce frowned. "You've been briefed on the cold-sleep procedure, but you haven't studied medicine. I'm told that cold sleep has a
rejuvenating effect over long periods. You'll spend perhaps twenty years awake and the rest in cold sleep. The medical facilities are automatic; you've been instructed how to use them. Do you think we'd risk your dying out there between the stars, where it would be impossible to replace you?"
"Was there anything else you wanted to see me about?"
"Yes." He had decided not to broach the subject. Now he changed his mind. "I'd like to take a woman with me. The life-support system would hold two of us. I worked it out. We'd need another cold-sleep chamber, of course."
For two weeks this had been the only man Corbell could talk to. At first he had found Pierce unfathomable, unreadable, almost inhuman. Since then he had learned to read the checker's face to some extent.
Pierce was deciding whether to terminate Jerome Corbell and start over.
It was a close thing. But the State had spent considerable time and effort on Jerome Corbell. It was worth a try. And so Pierce said, "That would take up some space. You would have to share the rest between you. I do not think you would survive."
"But-"
"What we can do is this. We can put the mind of a woman in your computer. The computer is voice-controlled, and her voice would be that of a woman, any type of woman you choose. A subplot enclosing the personality of a woman would leave plenty of circuitry for the computer's vital functions."
"I don't think you quite get the point of-"
"Look here, Corbell. We know you don't need a woman. If you did you would have taken one by now and we would have wiped you and started over. You've lived in the dormitory for two weeks and you have not used the mating facilities once."
"Damn it, Pierce, do you expect me to make love in public? I can't!"
"Exactly."
"But-"
"Corbell, you learned to use the toilet, didn't you? Because you had to. You know what to do with a woman but you are one of those
men fortunate enough not to need one. Otherwise you could not be a rammer."
If Corbell had hit the checker then he would have done it knowing that it meant his death. And knowing that, he would have killed Pierce for forcing him to it.
Something like ten seconds elapsed. Pierce watched him in frank curiosity. When he saw Corbell relax he said, "You leave tomorrow. Your training is finished. Good-bye."
Corbell walked away clenching and unclenching his fists.
The dormitory had been a test. He knew it now. Could he cross a narrow bridge with no handrails? Then he was not pathologically afraid of falling. Could he spend two hundred years alone in the cabin of a starship? Then the silent people around him, five above his head, hundreds to either side, must make him markedly uncomfortable. Could he live twenty waking years without a woman? Surely he must be impotent.
He returned to the dorm after dinner. They had replaced the bridge with a nearly invisible slab of glass. Corbell snarled and crossed ahead of the guard. The guard had to hurry to keep up.
He stood between two walls of occupied bunks, looking around him. Then he did a stupid thing.
He had already refrained from killing the checker. He must have decided to live. What he did, then, was stupid. He knew it.
He looked about him until he found the slender dark-haired girl with the elfin face watching him curiously from near the ceiling. He climbed the rungs between the bunks until his face was level with hers.
The gesture he needed was a quick, formalized one; but he didn't know it. In English he asked, "Come with me?"
She nodded brightly and followed him down the ladder. By then it seemed to Corbell that the dorm was alive with barely audible voices.
The odd one, the rammer trainee.
Certainly a number of the wakeful turned on their sides to watch.
He felt their eyes on the back of his neck as he zipped open his gray jumpsuit and stepped out of it. The dormitory had been a series of tests. At least two of those eyes would record his doings for Pierce. But to Corbell they were just like all the others, all the eyes curiously watching to see how the speechless one would make out.
And sure enough, he was impotent. It was the eyes, and he was naked. The girl was at first concerned, then pitying. She stroked his cheek in apology or sympathy and then she went away and found someone else.
Corbell lay listening to them, gazing at the bunk above him.
He waited for eight hours. Finally a guard came to take him away. By then he didn't care what they did with him.
V
He didn't start to care until the guard's floating jeep pulled up beneath an enormous .22 cartridge standing on end. Then he began to wonder. It was too small to be a rocket ship.
But it was. They strapped him into a contour couch, one of three in a cabin with a single window. There were the guard, and Corbell, and a man who might have been Pierce's second cousin once removed: the pilot. He had the window.
Corbel's heartbeat quickened. He wondered how it would be.
It was as if he had suddenly become very heavy. He heard no noise except right at the beginning, a sound like landing gear being raised on an airplane. Not a rocket, Corbell thought. Possibly the ferry ship's drive was electromagnetic in nature. He remembered the tricks a Bussard rainjet could play with magnetic fields.
He was heavy and he hadn't slept last night. He went to sleep.
When he woke he was in free-fall. Nobody had tried to tell him anything about free-fall. The guard and pilot were watching.
"Screw you," said Corbell.
It was another test. He got the straps open and pushed himself over to the window. The pilot laughed, caught him and held him while he closed a protective cover over the instruments. Then he let go and Corbell drifted in front of the window.
His belly was revolving eccentrically. His inner ear was going crazy. His testicles were tight up against his groin and that didn't feel good either. He was falling, FALLING!
Corbell snarled within his mind and tried to concentrate on the window. But the Earth was not visible. Neither was the Moon. Just a lot of stars, bright enough-quite bright, in fact-even more brilliant than they had been above a small boat anchored off Catalina Island on many nights long ago. He watched them for some time.
Trying to keep his mind off that falling-elevator sensation.
He wasn't about to get himself disqualified now..
They ate aboard in free-fall. Corbell copied the others, picking chunks of meat and potatoes out of a plastic bag of stew, pulling them through a membrane that sealed itself behind his pick.
"Of all the things I'm going to miss," he told the broad-faced guard, "I'm going to enjoy missing you most. You and your goddamn staring eyes." The guard smiled placidly and waited to see if Corbell would get sick.
They landed a day after takeoff on a broad plain where the Earth sat nestled among sharp lunar peaks. One day instead of three: The State had expended extra power to get him here. But an Earth-Moon ifight must be a small thing these days.
The plain was black with blast pits. It must have been a landing field for decades. Transparent bubbles clustered near the runway end of the linear accelerator. There were buildings and groves of trees inside the bubbles. Spacecraft of various shapes and sizes were scattered about the plain.
The biggest was Corbel's ramship: a silver skyscraper lying on its side. The probes were in place, giving the ship a thick-waisted appearance. To Corbell's trained eye it looked ready for takeoff.
He was awed, he was humbled, he was proud. He tried to sort out his own reactions from RNA-inspired emotions, and probably failed.
Corbell donned his suit first, while the pilot and guard watched to see if he would make a mistake. He took it slow. The suit came in two pieces: a skintight rubbery body stocking, and a helmet attached to a heavy backpack. On the chest was a white spiral with tapered ends: the sign of the State.
An electric cart came for them. Apparently Corbell was not expected to know how to walk on an airless world. He thought to head for one of the domes, but the guard steered straight for the ship. It was a long way off.
It had become unnervingly large when the guard stopped underneath. A fat cylinder the size of a house swelled above the jeep: the life-support section, bound to the main hull by a narrower neck. The smaller dome at the nose must be the control room.
The guard said, "Now you inspect your ship."
"You can talk?"
"Yes. Yesterday, a quick course."
"Oh."
"Three things wrong with your ship. You find all three. You tell me. I tell him."
"Him? Oh, the pilot. Then what?"
"Then you fix one of the things, we fix the others. Then we launch you."
It was another test, of course. Maybe the last. Corbell was furious. He started immediately with the field generators and gradually he forgot the guard and the pilot and the sword still hanging over his head. He knew this ship. As it had been with the teaching chair, so it was with the ship itself. Corbell's impotence changed to omnipotence. The power of the beast, the intricacy, the potential, the-the hydrogen tank held far too much pressure. That wouldn't wait.
"I'll slurry this now," he told the guard. "Get a tanker over there to top it off." He bled hydrogen gas slowly through the valve, lowering the fuel's vapor pressure without letting fuel boil out the valve itself. When he finished the liquid hydrogen would be slushy with frozen crystals under near-vacuum pressure.
He finished the external inspection without finding anything more. It figured: The banks of dials would hold vastly more information than a man's eyes could read through opaque titan-alloy skin.
The airlock was a triple-door type, not so much to save air as to give him an airlock even if he lost a door somehow. Corbell shut the outer door, used the others when green lights indicated he could. He looked down at the telltales under his chin as he started to unclamp his helmet.
Vacuum?
He stopped. The ship's gauges said air. The suit's said vacuum. Which was right? Come to that, he hadn't heard any hissing. Just how soundproof was his helmet?
Just like Pierce to wait and see if he would take off his helmet in a vacuum. Well, how to test?
Hah! Corbell found the head, turned on a water faucet. The water splashed oddly in lunar gravity. It did not boil.
Did a flaw in his suit constitute a flaw in the ship?
Corbell doffed his helmet and continued his inspection.
There was no way to test the ram-field generators without causing all kinds of havoc in the linear accelerator. He checked out the tell-
tales, then concentrated on the life-support mechanisms. The tailored plants in the air system were alive and well. But the urea absorption mechanism was plugged somehow. That would be a dirty job. He postponed it.
He decided to finish his inspection. The State might have missed something. It was his ship, his life.
The cold-sleep chamber was like a great coffin, a corpsicle coffin. Corbell shuddered, remembering two hundred years spent waiting in liquid nitrogen. He wondered again if Jerome Corbell were really dead-and then he shook off the thought and went to work.
No flaws in the cold-sleep system. He went on.
The computer was acting vaguely funny.
He had a hell of a time tracing the problem. There was a minute break in one superconducting circuit, so small that some current was leaking through anyway, by inductance. Bastards. He donned his suit and went out to report.
The guard heard him out, consulted with the other man, then told Corbell, "You did good. Now finish with the topping-off procedure. We fix the other things."
"There's something wrong with my suit, too."
"New suit aboard now."
"I want some time with the computer. I want to be sure it's all right now."
"We fix it good. When you top off fuel you leave."
That suddenly, Corbell felt a vast sinking sensation. The whole Moon was dropping away under him.
They launched him hard. Corbell saw red before his eyes, felt his cheeks dragged far back toward his ears. The ship would be all right. It was built to stand electromagnetic eddy currents from any direction.
He survived. He fumbled out of his couch in time to watch the moonscape flying under him, receding, a magnificent view.
There were days of free-fall. He was not yet moving at ramscoop speeds. But the State had aimed him inside the orbit of Mercury, straight into the thickening solar wind. Protons. Thick fuel for the ram fields and a boost from the sun's gravity.
Meanwhile he had most of a day to play with the computer.
At one point it occurred to him that the State might monitor his computer work. He shrugged it off. Probably it was too late for the State to stop him now. In any case, he had said too much already.
He finished his work with the computer and got answers that satisfied him. At higher speeds the ram fields were self-reinforcing- they would support themselves and the ship. He could find no upper limit to the velocity of a seeder ramship.
With all the time in the world, then, he sat down at the control console and began to play with the fields.
They emerged like invisible wings. He felt the buffeting of badly controlled bursts of fusing hydrogen. He kept the fields close to the ship, fearful of losing the balance here, where the streaming of protons was so uneven. He could feel how he was doing. He could fly this ship by the seat of his pants, with RNA training to help him.
He felt like a giant. This enormous, phallic, germinal flying thing of metal and fire! Carrying the seeds of life for worlds that had never known life, he roared around the sun and out. The thrust dropped a bit then, because he and the solar wind were moving in the same direction. But he was catching it in his nets like wind in a sail, guiding it and burning it and throwing it behind him. The ship moved faster every second.
This feeling of power-enormous masculine power-had to be partly RNA training. At this point he didn't care. Part was him, Jerome Corbell.
Around the orbit of Mars, when he was sure that a glimpse of sunlight would not blind him, he instructed the computer to give him a full view. The walls of the spherical control room seemed to disappear; the sky blazed around him. There were no planets nearby. All he saw of the sky was myriads of brilliant pinpoints, mostly white, some showing traces of coloT. But there was more to see. Fusing hydrogen made a ghostly ring of light around his ship.
It would grow stronger. So far his thrust was low, somewhat more than enough to balance the thin pul! of the sun.
He started his turn around the orbit of Jupiter by adjusting the fields to channel the proton flow to the side. That helped him thrust, but it must have puzzled Pierce and the faceless State. They would assume he was playing with the fields, testing his equipment. Maybe. His curve was gradual; it would take them a while to notice.
This was not according to plan. Originally he had intended to be halfway to Van Maanan's Star before he changed course. That would have given him fifteen years' head start, in case he was wrong, in case the State could do something to stop him even now.
That would have been wise; but he couldn't do it. Pierce might die in thirty years. Pierce might never know what Corbell had done-and that thought was intolerable.
His thrust dropped to almost nothing in the outer reaches of the system. Protons were thin out here. But there were enough to push his velocity steadily higher, and that was what counted. The faster he went, the greater the proton flux. He was on his way.
He was beyond Neptune when the voice of Pierce the checker came to him, saying, "This is Peerssa for the State, Peerssa for the State. Answer, Corbell. Do you have a malfunction? Can we help? We cannot send rescue but we can advise. Peerssa for the State, Peerssa for the State-"
Corbell smiled tightly. Peerssa? The checker's name had changed pronunciation in two hundred years. Pierce had slipped back to an old habit, RNA lessons forgotten. He must be upset about something.
Corbell spent twenty minutes finding the moon base with his signal laser. The beam was too narrow to permit sloppy handling. When he had it adjusted he said, "This is Corbel for himself, Corbell for himself. I'm fine. How are you?"
He spent more time at the computer. One thing had been bothering him: the return to Sol system. He planned to be away longer than the State would have expected. Suppose there was nobody on the Moon when he returned?
It was a problem, he found. If he could reach the Moon on his remaining fuel (no emergencies, remember), he could reach the Earth's atmosphere. The ship was durable; it would stand a meteoric re-entry. But his attitude jets would not land him, properly speaking.
Unless he could cut away part of the ship. The ram-field generators would no longer be needed then. . . . Well, he would work it out somehow. Plenty of time. Plenty of time.
The answer from the Moon took nine hours. "Peerssa for the State. Corbell, we don't understand. You are far off course. Your first target was to be Van Maanan's Star. Instead you seem to be curving around toward Sagittarius. There is no known Earthlike world in that direction. What the bleep do you think you're doing? Repeating. Peerssa for the State, Peerssa-"
Corbell tried to switch it off. The teaching chair hadn't told him about an off switch. Finally, and it should have been sooner, he told the computer to switch the receiver off.
Somewhat later, he located the lunar base with his signal laser and began transmission.
"This is Corbel for himself, Corbell for himself. I'm getting sick and tired of having to find you every damn time I want to say something. So I'll give you this all at once.
"I'm not going to any of the stars on your list.
"It's occurred to me that the relativity equations work better for me the faster I go. If I stop every fifteen light-years to launch a probe, the way you want me to, I could spend two hundred years at it and never get anywhere. Whereas if I just aim the ship in one direction and keep it going, I can build up a ferocious Tau factor.
"It works out that I can reach the galactic hub in twenty-one years, ship's time, if I hold myself down to one gravity acceleration. And, Pierce, I just can't resist the idea. You were the one who called me a born tourist, remember? Well, the stars in the galactic hub aren't like the stars in the arms. And they're packed a quarter to a half light-year apart, according to your own theories. It must be passing strange in there.
"So I'l! go exploring on my own. Maybe I'll find some of your reducing-atmosphere planets and drop the probes there. Maybe I won't. I'll see you in about seventy thousand years, your time. By then your precious State may have withered away, or you'll have colonies on the seeded planets and some of them may have broken loose from you. I'll join one of them. Or-"
Corbell thought it through, rubbing the straight, sharp line of his nose. "I'll have to check it out on the computer," he said. "But if I don't like any of your worlds when I get back, there are always the Clouds of Magellan. I'll bet they aren't more than twenty-five years away, ship's time."
CHAPTER 2 DON JUAN
I
The naming of names was important to Corbell. Alone in his little universe, dissociated from all mankind, with only himself and his bland-voiced computer to talk to, Corbell hung tags on everything.
He called himself Jaybee Corbell, as he had in his former life.
Yes, it was a major decision. For a while he was calling himself CORBELL Mark II (Corpsicle Or Rebellious Brain-Erasure: Lousy Loser). He gave that up after the shape of his nose stopped bothering him, after he got used to the look and feel of his shorter arms and slender hands, his alien body. There were no mirrors on the ship.
What he called the Kitchen was a wall with slots and a menudisplay screen. The opposite wall was the Health Club: the exercise paraphernalia and the outlets that would turn this area into sauna or shower or steam bath. The medical dispensary and diagnostic tools were Forest Lawn; the cold-sleep tank was also in that room.
The control room was a hollow sphere with a remarkable chair in the exact center, surrounded by a horseshoe-shaped bank of controls, and approached via a catwalk of metal lace. The chair would assume a fantastic variety of positions, and it gave indecently good massages. The spherical wall could disappear to display the black sky as if Cor
bell and the control bank floated alone in space. It would display textbooks on astronomy or astrophysics or State history, or updated diagrams of the ship.
Corbell called it the Womb Room.
The computer could be voice-operated from anywhere aboard. There was a helmet, like a hair dryer with a thick cord attached, that would plug the pilot directly into the computer's senses. Corbell was afraid to use it. The computer answered to "Computer." Corbell refused to personalize it. He spoke to it only to give orders and request information.
But he dithered for months before naming the great seeder ramship he had stolen from Peerssa and the State. Don Juan, he called it, for its phallic overtones.
Trivial decisions. . . but that was Corbell's problem. He had already made his major decisions. That was his finest hour, when he broke free of Peerssa and drove for the galactic core. Don Juan should have capped his career then, by blowing up.
Twenty-one years from now he could make his next major decision.
A year on his way, and Corbell was starving for the sound of another voice.
He dithered. What could Pierce say that would be worth the hearing? A year ago he had hung up on Pierce, he had had the computer disconnect the message laser receiver, as a gesture of contempt. That gesture was important. Could Pierce know, never mind how, that he was no longer talking to a void?
Corbell held lengthy conversations about it. "Can I possibly be that lonely?" he demanded of himself. "Or that bored? Or that desperate to hear another human voice again? Other than my own-" His own voice echoed back from the Womb Room walls.
"Computer," he said at last, "reconnect the message laser receiver." And he waited.
Nothing. Hours passed, and nothing.
He was savage. Pierce must have given up. Somewhere in the city that Pierce had never shown Corbell, Pierce the checker would be training another revived corpsicle.
The voice caught him at breakfast three days later. "Corbell!"
"Hah?" That was strange. Computer had never addressed him before. Was it an emergency?
"This is Peerssa, you traitorous son of a bitch! Turn this ship around and carry out your mission!"
"Get stuffed," Corbell said, feeling good.
"Get stuffed yourself," said the voice of Peerssa, turned suddenly silky-smooth.
Something was wrong here. Don Juan was almost half a light-year from Sol. How could Peerssa. . . ? "Computer, switch off the message laser receiver."
"That won't work, Corbell! I've beamed my personality at your computer, over and over again for these past seven months! Turn us around or I'll cut off your air!"
Corbell yelled something obscene. The silence that followed commanded attention. The purr of air moving through the life-support system was a sound he never heard anymore; but he heard its absence.
"Turn that back on!" he cried in panic.
"Will you bargain, Corbell?"
"Never! I'll throw-" What was heavy and movable? Nothing? "I'll pry the microwave oven loose and throw it into the computer! I'll give you nothing but a wrecked ship!"
"Your mission-"
"Shut up!"
The voice of Pierce the checker was silent. Corbell heard the purr of moving air.
What next? If Pierce controlled the computer he controlled everything. Why didn't he turn the ship himself?
Had he? Corbell climbed up into the Womb Room and settled in the control chair. "Full view," he commanded.
He floated alone in space.
Half a light-year of distance had not changed the pattern of the stars. A year of acceleration had. Don Juan was now meeting all light rays at an angle, so that the entire sky was puckered forward.
In his first life, during nights spent aboard a small boat, Corbell had made a nodding acquaintance with the constellations. Sagittarius was just where he had left it, directly overhead. A ring of white flame around and below him was hydrogen guided and constricted to fuse in stellar fire: the exhaust of his drive. Sol was a hot pink point beneath his feet. . . and something flickered across it.
Corbell, staring, made out a humanoid form barely blacker than space, walking toward him across the stars. Coming close.
Narrow features, light hair . . . it was Pierce. Corbell watched, barely breathing. Pierce was as big as Don Juan. Pierce was angry. .
Corbell said, "Computer, get that mannequin off the screen."
The figure vanished.
Corbell resumed breathing. "Pierce, or Peerssa, or Computer, or whatever name you will answer to, I give you your orders. You will proceed to the galactic axis under one gravity of acceleration, making turnover at midpoint. You will take all necessary steps to guard my life and the integrity of the ship, subject to this mission. Now speak if you like."
The voice of Pierce the checker said, "I prefer Peerssa."
Corbell sighed his relief. "So do I. Are you in fact under my orders?"
"Yes. Corbell, there are things we must discuss. You owe your very existence to the State. You've stolen a key to the survival of mankind itself! How many seeder ramships do you imagine we can build? How many package probes do you think will succeed in converting alien atmospheres to something men can breathe? Or do you think that men will never need to leave the Earth?"
"Computer, you will henceforth answer to the name Peerssa. Peerssa, shut the fuck up."
Silence.
Now Corbell caught himself giggling occasionally. It could happen anytime. At meals, or sitting in the Womb Room watching the sky, or using the Health Club, he would suddenly start giggling. And then he couldn't stop, because Peerssa could hear, and Peerssa couldn't answer- Peerssa. The naming of names: Pierce the checker was far in Corbel's past, while Peerssa was a personality imposed on a computer's memory bank. The distinction was worth remembering. There would be major differences between the man and the computer. Peerssa had different senses. Peerssa would never suffer hunger pangs or a frustrated sex urge. Peerssa would never exercise or use the rest room. Peerssa might wel! have no sense of self-preservation. That was worth finding out.
And Peerssa was compelled to follow orders. Peerssa was Corbel's slave.
Two weeks passed before Corbell gave in to the urge for conversation. Seated in the control chair, floating among stars that were already brighter and bluer above than below, Corbell said, "Peerssa, you may speak."
"Good. You've instructed me to guard your life and the ship. I can't maintain one gravity all the way without killing you and wrecking the ship."
"Don't lie to me," Corbell snapped. "I checked it out on the computer before I ever passed Saturn. The ram effect works better at high velocities, because I can narrow the width of the ram fields. Greater hydrogen flux."
"You used data already in the computer."
"Yes, of course."
"Corbell, that data was meant for jumps of up to fifty-two lightyears. Not thirty-three thousand. We built the field generator as strong as possible, but it will not stand one gravity at your peak velocity. The strains will tear it apart. We'll have to decrease thrust starting three years from now, if you want to live."
Pierce the checker had never lied, had he? Pierce had never bothered. Why lie to a corpsicle? Peerssa was something else again. Corbell said, "You're lying."
"I deny it. Make up your mind. You've ordered me not to lie. Am I under your orders? If not, why don't I just turn and head for Van Maanan's Star?"
Corbel gave up. "This ruins my itinerary, doesn't it? How long will it take us to reach the core?"
"In near-perfect safety, about five hundred years."
"Give me . . . oh, a ninety-percent chance of getting there alive. How long?"
"Computing. Insufficient data on interstellar mass density. We'll correct that on the way. One hundred and sixty years, four months, plus or minus ten months, all figures in ship's time."
Corbell felt cold. That long? "Suppose we don't go direct? We could skim above the plane of the galaxy-"
"And thin out the interstellar matter. Computing. Good, Corbell. We lose some time thrusting laterally at turnover, but we stifi shave
some time. One hundred and thirty-six years, eleven months, confidence of a year and a month."
"That still isn't good."
"And you'd have to spend the same time coming home. You'd get home dead, Corbell. We could finish your original mission faster than that. Well?"
"For-" Never say Forget it to a computer. "You have your orders. I now amend them. Your mission is to get us to the galactic axis in minimum ship's time relative, ninety-percent confidence of getting me there alive."
"You'll never see Earth again."
"Shut up."
Silence.
"You may speak."
Silence.
"Does it bother you, being cut off like that?"
"Yes, of course it bothers me. I've been silent for a week. That's four weeks added to our trip time. The longer it takes me to persuade you, the longer it will take us to complete our mission!"
"I could order you to give up that idea."
"I would do it. Snarling of my circuits might result. Corbell, I appeal to your sense of gratitude. The State created you, you owe your very existence-"
"Bullshit."
"Is it that easy for you to ignore your duty?"
Corbell swallowed an urge to drive his fist through a bank of dials. "No, it's not easy. Every time you raise the holy name of the State, something in me snaps to attention."
"Then why not listen to the voice of your social conscience?"
"Because it's not my conscience! It's those damn shots! You ifiled me full of memory RNA, and that's where my sense of duty to the State is coming from!"
Peerssa took a good dramatic pause before he said, insinuatingly, "Suppose it's your conscience, after all?"
"I'll never know, will I? And that's your doing, isn't it? So live with it."
"You will never see Earth again. Your medical facilities will not keep you alive that long."
Corbell snorted. "Don't be silly. The medicines and the cold-sleep
tank are supposed to keep me young and healthy for the first two hundred years. The cold-sleep tank has a rejuvenating effect, remember?"
"It doesn't. I lied. You were to remain alive for the duration of your mission. If the medicines had been better, we would have extended the mission."
It rang true; it fitted well with what Corbell knew of the State. "You sons of bitches."
"Corbell, listen to me. In three hundred years the State may discover complete rejuvenation. We could arrive home in time-"
"For noncitizens?"
No answer.
"We're going to the galactic axis. You have your orders."
"You must enter cold sleep immediately," Peerssa said in a dead voice.
"Oh?"
"Your optimum program is ten years in cold sleep, six months to recover, then cold sleep again. You will survive to see the galactic axis, barely."
"Uh-huh. And if you happened to forget to wake me up?"
"That's your problem. Traitor."
II
Raw throat. Cramped muscles. Eyes that wouldn't focus. Questing hands found him in a coffin with the lid still on.
Waking from cold sleep was like waking from death. He had half expected this when they froze him in 1970. And he had half expected never to wake. He whispered, "Peerssa."
"Here. Where would I go?"
"Yeah. Where are we?"
"One hundred and six light-years from Sol. You must eat." Suddenly Corbell was ravenous. He sat up, rested, then climbed down from the tank, treating himself like fragile crystal. He was lean as death, and weak. "Fix me a snack I can take to the Womb Room," he said.
"It will be waiting."
He felt light-headed. No, he felt light. He picked up a large bulb of hot soup in the Kitchen, and sucked at it as he continued to the Womb Room. "Give me a view," he said.
The walls disappeared.
The stars blazed violet-white over his head. The stellar rainbow spread out from there: violet stars in the center, then rings of blue, green, yellow, orange, dim red. To the sides and below there was a!most nothing: a dozen dim red points, and the feathery ring of flame that marked his drive. That had dimmed to, for Peerssa had pulled the ram fields close; and had reddened, because the fuel guided into that ring was moving at near lightspeed relative to the ship.
Peerssa was bitter. "Are you satisfied? Even if we turned back now, we have lost over four hundred years of Earth time-"
"You bore me," said Corbell, though he felt stabbing pain from what he would once have called his conscience. "What happens next?"
"Next? You eat and exercise. In six months you must be strong and fat-"
"Fat?"
"Fat. Otherwise you could not survive ten years in cold sleep. Finish your soup, then exercise."
"What do I do for entertainment?"
"Whatever you like." Naturally Peerssa was puzzled. The State had provided nothing for Corbel's entertainment.
"Yeah, I thought so. Tell me about yourself, Peerssa. We're going to be together a long time."
"What do you want to know?"
"I want to know how you got to be this way. What was it like to be Peerssa the checker, citizen of the State? Start with your childhood."
Peerssa was a poor storyteller. He rambled. He had to be led by appropriate questions. But there was more than his voice to tel! tales with.
He was an inept motion-picture director with an unlimited budget. On the wall of the Womb Room he showed Corbell the farming community where he had grown up, and the schools of his childhood (skyscrapers with playgrounds on the roof), and the animated history texts he had studied during his final training. The memories were usually hazy. Some were shockingly sharp and brightly colored: the enormous ten-year-old who bullied Peerssa on the exercise roof; the older girl who showed him sex and thus frightened him badiy; his civics teacher.
Corbell ate and slept and exercised. He tended Don Juan with the half-instinctive love and understanding absorbecj with his rammer training. In between, he had from Peerssa all the knowledge he had not dared demand of Pierce the checker.
He saw views of Selerdor, the city he had only glimpsed from a rooftop. The buildings were as blocky and unimaginative inside as out. The carvings at street level were in Shtoring, the State language. They were edifying principles, rules of conduct, or the life stories of State heroes.
He grew to know Peerssa as well as he had known Mirabelle, his wife for twenty-two years. In knowing Peerssa he grew to know the State. The computer memory held what Corbell would have called civics texts. He read those, with helpful comments from Peerssa.
He learned of two brush-fire wars that had half destroyed the world. In ashes of war and fires of idealism the State had been born, said Peerssa, and had rapidly grown all-powerful. It was a benevolent fascism, Peerssa said. What Peerssa described had distinct overtones of Chinese and Japanese empire. Society was drastically stratified. A citizen's obligations to those above him (and below him!) were backed with his life.
The government built and controlled every power generator. Once these had been very diverse: damns, geothermal plants, temperaturedifferential plants in the ocean depths; now they were big fusion generators supplemented by rooftop and desert solar-energy collectors. But the State owned them all.
Once he asked, "Peerssa, do you know what a water-monopoly empire is?"
"Pity. A lot of eariy civilizations were water-monopoly empires. Ancient Egypt, ancient China, the Aztecs. Any government that controls irrigation completely is a water empire. If the State controls power of all kinds, they also control the fresh water supply, don't they? With a population of twelve billion-"
"Yes, of course. We built the dams and rerouted the rivers and distilled fresh water for deuterium for the fusion plants and sent the excess water onward. If the State had ever paused to rest, half the world would have died of thirst."
Musing, Corbell said, "I once asked you if you thought the State would last fifty thousand years."
"I don't."
"I think the State could last seventy or a hundred thousand. See, these water-monopoly empires, they don't collapse. They can rot from within, to the point where a single push from the barbarians outside can topple them. The levels of society lose touch with each other, and when it comes to the crunch, they can't fight. But it takes that push from outside. There's no revolution in a water empire."
"That's a very strong statement."
"Yeah. Do you know how the two-province system works? They used it in China. Say there are two provinces, A and B, and they're both having a famine. What you do is, you look at their records. If Province A has a record of cheating on its taxes or rioting, then you confiscate all the grain in Province A and ship it to B. If the records are about equal you pick at random. The result is that Province B is loyal forever, and Province A is wiped out so you don't worry about it."
"We rarely have famines. When we do . . ." It was rare for Peerssa not to finish a sentence.
"There's nothing more powerful than controlling everybody's water. A water-control empire can grow so feeble that a single barbarian horde can topple it. But, Peerssa, the State doesn't have any outside."
Much later, Corbell learned that he had changed his life again. At the time he only suspected, from Peerssa's silence, that he had offended Peerssa.
And Peerssa was not Pierce. The checker was long dead; the computer personality had never harmed Corbell. It was worth remembering. Corbell gave up talking about the State. Peerssa was loyal to the State; Corbell emphatically was not.
There was another topic he eventually gave up. Once too often he told Peerssa, "I still wish you'd sent a woman with me."
"Must I remind you that the life-support system is too small for two? Or that So! is now a vast distance behind us? Or that your sex urge tested low? If it had not, you would not be here."
"It was a matter of privacy," Corbell said between his teeth.
"But the loving bunks in the dormitory were not the only test. In word association you tested low. Your testosterone level tested low."
"You ball-less wonder! How can you talk to me about low sex urge!"
"The State has a superfluity of testicles," Peerssa said with no particular emphasis.
Would Pierce the checker have reacted that way? It was a weird response . . . but Peerssa meant it. Corbel stopped talking about women.
Six months passed. Stars passed, too. A few passed close enough to show like violet windows into Hell, and receded like dim red fireballs. Corbel was fat, too fat for his own tastes, fat enough for Peerssa's, when at last he climbed into the great coffin.
It happened seven times.
III
"Corbell? Is something wrong? Speak, please."
Corbell sighed in the cold-sleep tank. He did not move. He had become very used to this routine: the terrible weakness, the hunger, the six months of exercises and of forcing insipid food down his throat, the climbing into the tank to start the cycle over. At this, his seventh awakening, he felt a deadly reluctance to wake up.
"Corbell, please say something. I can sense your heartbeat and respiration, but I can't see you. Have you turned catatonic? Shall I administer shock?"
"Don't administer shock."
"Can you move, or are you too weak?"
He sat up. It made him dizzy. Ship's thrust was very low. "Where are we?"
"Beyond midpoint of our course, thrusting laterally to force us back into the plane of the galaxy. Proceeding according to plan. Your plan, not mine. Now I want to monitor your health."
"Later. Make me soup. I'll take it to the Womb Room." He moved toward the Kitchen, bouncing oddly in the low gravity. He had aged more than the four years he bad been awake. After each awakening the exercises had taken longer to build him up again. He felt brittle, and ravenous.
The soup was good. The soup was always good. He settled himself in the Womb Room and let his eyes roam the dials. Some of the readings were frightening. The gamma-ray flux would have charred him in minutes, if the power of the ram fields were not guiding the particles aside. Other readings made no sense. Peerssa had told the truth:
The seeder ramship was not designed for velocities this close to the speed of light. Neither were the instruments and dials.
And what about Peerssa's senses? Was he flying half blind?
"Give me a full view," he said.
The stellar rainbow had hardened and sharpened over seven decades. It had lost symmetry, too. To one side the stars were thickly clustered; the arc of blue-whites blazed like diamonds in an empress's necklace. To the other, the side that faced intergalactic space, the rainbow was almost dark. Each star was sharply defined within its band of color. But within the central disk of violet stars (dimmer than the blue, but of a color that made one squint) was a soft white glow: the microwave background of the universe, at 30 absolute, boosted to visible light by Don Juan's terrible speed.
His ship's drive flame had become a blood-red fan of light facing intergalactic space. Peerssa was thrusting laterally to bend their course back into the plane of the galaxy.
"Give me a corrected view," Corbel instructed.
Now Peerssa worked a kind of fiction. From the universe he perceived through the senses on Don Jaun's hull, he extrapolated a picture of the universe seen at rest, and he painted that picture around the wall of the Womb Room.
The galaxy was incomparably beautiful, a whirlpool of light spread out across half the universe. Corbell looked ahead of him for his first view of the galactic core. It was there, just brighter than the rest, and hazy, without definition. He was disappointed. He had thought the close-packed ball of stars would flame with colors. He could pick out no individual stars; only a vague glow around a central bright point. Behind him the stars were similarly blurred.
"I'm getting poor definition in the view aft," Peerssa volunteered. "The light is drastically red-shifted."
"And forward?"
"This is not according to theory. I would have expected more definition within the core. There must be a great deal of interstellar matter blocking the light. Even so. . . I need more data."
Corbel didn't answer. A multiple star cluster had caught his eye, half a dozen brilliant points whirling frantically as they came toward him. They passed on the right, still jiggling madly, and froze in place as they came alongside.
"The next time that happens, I'd like to see an uncorrected view."
"I'll call you, but you won't see much."
So here he was at the halfway point, with his destination in sight. No man before him could have seen the glow of the galactic core, or the frantically spinning star cluster flashing past at this close to lightspeed. His enemy's soul had become Corbell's slave.
Corbell flies toward the core suns like a moth toward a flame, expecting death. But he has his victories.
He finished his anonymous soup. Don Juan's Kitchen and/or chemistry lab supplied just enough taste, just enough variety, to keep a State noncitizen from cutting his throat. On such fare he must grow fat . . . and exercise to distribute the fat. Lately it tended to settle in a potbelly, which was no help at all.
He was getting old. Despite the cold-sleep tank and all the medicines available, he would be decrepit before they reached the core suns.
His second life should have been more like his first. He had hoped to make friends, to carve out some kind of career. . . he had been frozen at age forty-four, there would have been time. . . time even for a marriage, children. .
Things would look better when he had built up some strength. He could go on an oxygen drunk. On request Peerssa would fill the cabin with pure oxygen, while lecturing Corbell on the adverse medical effects for as long as Corbell would let him.
"About now you usually start telling me my duty," he said.
"There's no point," said Peerssa. "We're decelerating now. We'll be among the core suns before we can brake to a stop."
Corbell smiled. "Anyone but you would have given up sooner. Expand my view of the core suns, please."
The hub of the galaxy rushed toward him. Dark clouds with stars embedded in them surrounded a bright core. They looked like churning storm clouds. They had changed position since his last waking period.
But the core itself was a flat featureless glow, except for a single bright point at the center. "The interstellar matter must be almighty thick in there. Can our ram fields handle it?"
"If we give up thrust and settle for shielding the life-support system and nothing else, you'll be amazed at what we can handle."
"I'll be dying anyway, of old age."
"Corbell, there is a way you can go home again."
"Dammit, Peerssa, have you been lying to me?"
"Calm down, Corbell. There is a way to make you young, if you're willing. You can understand why I didn't raise the subject before."
"I sure can. Why now? Why would you do this for someone who betrayed your precious State?"
"Things have changed, Corbell. By now we may be the last remnants of the State. And you weren't even a citizen."
"And you are?"
"I am a human personality imposed on a computer's memory banks. I could never be a citizen. You could have been. Such as you are, you may well represent the State. The State may not survive the seventy thousand years we will be gone. You are worth preserving."
"Thank you." Unreasonably, Corbell was touched.
"The State may exist only in your memory. I'm glad you forced me to teach you speech. I'm glad I told you so much about myself. You must live."
"Make me young," Corbell said with the fervor of a man growing old much too fast. "What does it take?"
"We have the equipment to take a clone from you. You surely find nothing strange about the concept of cloning?"
"We knew about it. Cloning of carrots, anyway. But-"
"We can clone men. We can clone you. Let the individual grow in sensory deprivation, in your cold-sleep tank. We can record your memories and play them into the clone's blank mind."
"How? Oh, of course, the computer link." The link was a direct telepathic control over the computer. Corbell had never dared use it. He had been doubly afraid of it since the computer became Pierce the checker. Peerssa might use it to take him over.
Peerssa said, "We must also have injections of your memory RNA."
Corbell yelped. "You're talking about grinding me up into chemically leeched hamburger!"
"I'm talking about making a young man of you."
"It wouldn't be me, you madman!"
"The new individual would be as much Jerome Branch Corbell as you are."
"Thanks! Thanks a lot! You told me what happened to the real Corbell. Ground up for hamburger and !eeched for RNA and injected into a brain-wiped criminal!"
"The real Corbell must have been insane or stupid. At seventy degrees and below, the phospholipids in the glia in the brain freeze. The synapses are destroyed. Any educated man~ knows this," said Peerssa. "He and the other corpsicles never had a chance. You are an improvement on that Corbell. I will make the clone an improvement over you."
"I thought you might. No, thanks. There isn't going to be a CORBELL Mark III."
Six months later he was not ready for the cold-sleep tank. "You've been shirking your exercises," Peerssa said.
Corbell had just finished an exercise period. Tendonitis had led him to favor his arms these past two months, but they hurt anyway, two hot wires in his shoulders. "It's your schedule," he grumbled.
"I would have to thaw you early. Coming out of cold sleep is a trauma. You want to reach the galactic core in optimum condition. Take another two months awake."
"Fine. I hate that damn tank anyway." Corbell slumped in a web chair. In near free-fall he was too prone to lose muscle tone. His potbelly protruded.
He had nobody else to talk to, and Peerssa had endless patience. It should have been good timing when Peerssa said, "Have you given any thought to regaining your youth?"
Corbell shuddered. "Forget it." Hastily, "I don't mean that literally. If you wipe it from your memory banks you'll only think of it again later."
"I take it you've canceled your command. What is your objection?"
"It's ugly."
"As things stand now, you will die of aging on the return voyage. The cold-sleep treatment is not enough."
"I will not be ground up for hamburger. Not again."
"You know the details of Don Juan's excrement recycling system. Do you find that ugly?"
"Since you ask, yes."
"But you eat the food and drink the water."
Corbell didn't answer.
"You would be a young man when it was over."
"No. No, I would not." Corbel was shouting. "I would be hamburger! Contaminated hamburger, garbage to be recycled for the b-b.. benefit of your damn clone! He wouldn't even be a good copy, because you'd be shoving some of your own thoughts in through the computer link!"
"You have no loyalty to anything but yourself."
Corbell thought, I can shut him up. Anytime. He said, "Whatever it is I am, I'll settle for it."
"The only man who ever saw the galactic core. A wonderful thing." Peerssa had had time and practice to develop that sarcastic tone. "What will you do afterward, once your sole ambition in life is satisfied? Will you order me to self-destruct? A grand funeral pyre for your ending, a fusion flame that alien eyes might see?"
Then Corbell did Peerssa an injustice. "Is that what's been bothering you? Tell you what," he said. "After we have our look around the core suns, why don't we drop some package probes on appropriate planets? You can reach Earth alive. By the time the State sends ships, the algae will have turned some reducing atmospheres to oxygen atmospheres. You can take my mummy home, too, in the cold-sleep tank. Maybe they'll want it for a museum."
"You will not be young again?"
"We've been through that."
"Very well. Will you go to the Womb Room, please? I have a great deal to show you."
Mystified and suspicious, Corbell went
Peerssa had set up displays on the Womb Room walls. There was a greatly enlarged, slightly blurred view of the ga!actic core as Corbell had seen it six months ago: drastically flattened, the glow of the suns blurred by interstellar matter. There was a contrasting enlargement of the center of the spiral galaxy in Andromeda. There was a diagram: an oddly contoured disk cut down the center. Corbell frowned, wondering where he had seen that before.
Peerssa spoke as he settled himself in the control chair. "I have never known why you chose the galactic axis as your destination. I may never understand that."
The core of Andromeda Galaxy glowed with colored lights. Corbell pointed. "For that. For beauty. For the same reason I once went through the Grand Canyon on muleback. Can you imagine a planet on the edge of that sphere? The nights?"
"I can do better. I can put it before you, by extrapolation." And
Peerssa did. Corbell's chair floated above a dark landscape. The sky was jammed with stars competing for space, big apd little, red and blue and pure white, and a spinning pair that threw out a spiral of red gas. The sky turned. A wall of blackness rose in the east, ten thousand cubic light-years of dust cloud . . . and then the Womb Room was as it had been, while Corbell was still gaping.
"I could have done that before your first term in the cold-sleep tank. We could have completed your mission, seeded the worlds assigned to you, and I could have displayed that sky for you at any time. Why didn't you say something?"
"It's not real. Peerssa, didn't any of your aristocrats ever go cruising through, say, Saturn's rings, just for the joy of it?"
"For the mining possibilities-"
"Mining. If they said that, they lied."
"Are you sorry you came?"
Why had he kept on? Knowing that the trip would take more than twenty-one years, that it would take his life, had not changed his mind. Corbell the reconstituted corpsicle would never carve out a normal life for himself. Very well, he would do something memorable.
"No. Why should I be sorry? I expected strangeness in the galactic core. I was right, wasn't I? It's nothing like other galaxies, and I'm the first to know it."
"You're insane. Imagine my amazement. Never mind. Your choice has had unforeseen consequences. State astronomers expected a close-packed sphere of miffions of suns averaging a quarter to half a light-year apart, with red giant suns predominating. Instead, we find this: the matter in the core forced into a disk that flattens drastically toward the center, with a tremendously powerful source of infrared and radio energy at the axis."
"Like your diagram?"
"Yes, very like this diagram which I find in my data banks, a representation of the structure of the accretion disk around the black hole in Cygnus X-l."
"Oh!" He had not seen that diagram during his rammer training. His rammer training had not even told him how to avoid stellar-sized black holes, because there were none to be expected on his planned course. He had seen something very like that diagram in an article in Scientific American!
"Yes, Corbel. Your wonderland of lights is being absorbed by a black hole of galactic mass. Its spin must be enormous, from the way it has flattened the mass of stars around it. Eventually the entire galaxy may disappear into-Corbell? Are you ill?"
"No," Corbel said, his hands covering his face, muffling his voice.
"Don't be depressed. This is our chance for life."
"What?"
"A thin chance to see Earth again before you die. A unique experience, win or lose. Isn't that what you want? Let me explain. . .
IV
At the thirteenth awakening he tried to sit up too fast. He woke again, dizzy, flat on his back in the coffin, with Peerssa calling in his ear. "Corbell! Corbell?"
"Here. Where would I go?"
"Be more careful. Lie there for a minute."
Lean as death he was, and old. Arthritis grated in his knobby joints. With the familiar hunger came nausea. He ran a hand over his scalp-he had been half bald when lie entered Forest Lawn-and more of his hair came away.
"Where are we?"
"One month from the black hole and closing. The view will please you.',
He emerged from the cold-sleep tank like a sick Dracula. He made his limping way to the Kitchen, then to the Health Club. His muscles were slack and tended to cramp. The exercises were hard on him. But the pain and the nausea and the creeping years meant little. He felt good. At worst he had found a brand-new way to die.
He asked of the ubiquitous microphones, "Suppose we go too far in? We won't ever die, will we? We'd be stopped above the Schwarzschild radius."
"Only to an outside observer. Not to ourselves. Are you about to change my orders?"
Some minutes later he eased himself into the Womb Room chair. He sipped the last of the broth. "Full view."
Don Juan raced above a sea of churning stars. In a normal galaxy they would have been crowded enough. Here, forced into a plane by the spin of the giant black hole at the center, they were crowded to
death. Dying stars burned with a terrible light. They stood like torches in a field of candles. It must be common enough for star to ram star here, or for tides to rip stars apart.
Commoner toward the center, Corbell thought The center of the sea burned very bright ahead of him. He could see no dark dot at the axis. He hadn't expected to.
"How far away are we in normal space?"
"Rest space? Three point six light-years."
"No problems?"
"I believe I can hold us above the plane of the disk until we have passed that very active swelling ahead of us, between two and three light-years from the singularity."
Corbell looked down at his drive flame, a dim wisp of white between his feet. There was very little matter above the disk, he guessed. "Suppose you can't? Suppose we have to go through it?"
"You'll never feel a thing. That region is where the stars lose their identity. They become streamers of dense plasma with nodules of neutronium in them. Most of the light comes from there. Beyond, there is very great flattening and some radiation due to friction in the matter spiraling inward."
"What about the black hole itself?"
"I still don't have a view of it. I estimate a circumference of two billion kilometers and a mass of one hundred million solar masses. The ergosphere will be large. We should have no trouble choosing a path through it."
"You said circumference?"
"Should I have given you the radius? The radius of a black hole may be infinite."
There was simply no grasping the size of that disk of crushed stars. It was like flying above another universe. At two billion kilometers, the black hole would almost have contained the orbit of Jupiter; but if Corbell could have seen past that sweffing ahead, that Ring of Fire, he would have found the black hole invisibly small.
Light caught the corner of his eye, and he turned to see a supernova glaring white-on-red. He'd just missed seeing a sun torn apart by tides, its ten-million..degree heart spilled across the sky.
He asked what he had never asked before. "Peerssa, what are you thinking?"
"I don't quite know how to answer that."
"I'm not thinking anything. My decisions are made. They are mathematically rigorous. I face no choices."
"How are you going to find Earth?"
"I know where So! will be in three million years."
"Three-! Won't it be more like seventy thousand?"
"We're diving deep into a tremendous gravity field. Time will be compressed for us. The black hole is large enough that tides will not tear us apart, but we'll lose almost three million years before I fire the fusion motor. What more can I do? The odds are finite that we will find Sol. Or the State may have spread through a million cubic light-years of space before we arrive."
"The odds are finite. Peerssa, you're strange." But Corbell felt no urge to laugh. Seventy thousand years B.C., there had been Neanderthal Man and a few Cro-Magnon. Humans. Three million years ago, nothing but a club-swinging, meat-eating ape. What would inhabit the Earth three million years from now?
Corbell spent most of his time in the Womb Room, watching the accretion disk swirl past. He liked the uncorrected view, the display that showed the universe distorted by Don Juan's velocity.
Since turnover, the ship had shed most of its enormous relativistic mass. Don Juan had been moving faster after Corbell's first term in the cold-sleep tank. But it was still traveling near !ightspeed, and accelerating steadily under the pull of a point-source one hundred million times the mass of the Sun. The accretion disk showed rainbowcolored ahead of him, with the Ring of Fire a violet-white hill coming near. The stars were jammed together; you couldn't tell one from the next unless the next had exploded. They graded back through the rainbow until the sea of flame behind Don Juan was deep red and frozen in place, with the occasional supernova showing yellow-white or greenish-white.
The Ring of Fire-the swollen region where the heat trapped within the streaming star-stuff grew even more powerful than the black hole's compression effect-came near. It was blinding-bright before Corbel gave up. "Reduce that light," he said, half covering his eyes.
"I've cut it to ten percent. Let me know when I must cut it again."
"Are you all right? Will it burn out your cameras?"
"I think not. Remember, you were to dive almost into So! to decelerate at the end of your mission. We can hançlle high intensities of light."
The Ring of Fire was a flattened doughnut twenty light-years in circumference, a quarter of a light-year thick: four or five cubic lightyears of green-to-blue-white star, with every possible grade of fusion and fission going on in it. As if Hel! were a tremendous mountain
coming near. . . and Don Juan crossed it on a fan of fusion flame, thrusting hard. Corbell felt the thrust drop away. He sat forward as the ship dropped along the inner gradient and left the Ring of Fire behind, a dull red wall. The inner accretion disk was drastically thinner, savagely compressed. Corbell peered toward where the black hole ought to be. All he saw was more star-matter, hurtingly violet-white at the center.
It was all happening terribly fast now. Minutes left, or seconds. Peerssa was firing the attitude jets at strange angles. There were no stars to see in this inner disk: no detail at all. It was as uniform as peanut butter.
"It's all neutronium," said Peerssa. "It even has some of neutronium's crystalline structure, but that structure is constantly breaking up. I can see the X-ray flashes, like ripples."
"I wish I had some of your senses."
"The computer link-"
Behind them the Ring of Fire reddened further and was gone. The inner disk grew brighter and bluer and was suddenly past. In the last instant Corbell saw the black hole.
The onboard fusion drive roared beneath him, slammed him down into his chair. Light exploded in his face. It resolved: a blaze of violet light ahead of him, a broad ring of embers around it. Elsewhere, black.
Peerssa said, "There is something we must discuss."
"Wait a minute. Give me a chance to resume breathing." Peerssa waited.
Corbell said, "It's over? We lived through that?"
"Yes."
"Well done."
"Thank you."
"What's happening now?"
"Firing a reaction drive within the ergosphere of a black hole has driven us dangerously near lightspeed. I am using the ram fields to ward interstellar matter from us. I won't be able to use them as a drive until we can shed some velocity. We will reach the vicinity of Sol in thirteen point eight years, ship's time, unless we overshoot."
"Did we really lose three million years?"
"Yes. Corbell, I must have your opinion. Will the State have collapsed over three million years?"
Corbel laughed a little shakily. "We'll be lucky if there's anything like human beings left. I can't guess what they'll be like. Three million years! I wish there'd been another way to do it." He stood up. He was suddenly ravenous.
Peerssa answered: "I was ordered to preserve your life and the integrity of the ship, but never your convenience. My loyalty is to the State."
Corbell stopped. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"There was another way to use the black hole, once we knew it existed. At midpoint we could have continued to accelerate. We would have spent perhaps eighty years reaching the galactic hub. If we passed near enough to the black hole, its spin would have bent our hyperbolic path back upon itself, though we would still have been well outside the ergosphere. Another eighty years of ship's time would have returned us to Sol, seventy thousand years after your departure."
"You thought of that? And you didn't do it?"
"Corbel, I have no data on the nature of water-monopoly empires. I had to take your word entirely."
"What are you talking about?"
His answer came in Corbel's recorded voice. "1 think the State could last seventy or a hundred thousand. See, these water-monopoly empires, they don't collapse. They can rot from within, to the point where a single push from the barbarians outside can topple them. The levels of society lose touch with each other, and when it comes to the crunch, they can't fight. But it takes that push from outside. There's no revolution in a water empire."
Corbel said, "I don't-"
"A water empire can grow so feeble that a single barbarian horde can topple it. But, Peerssa, the State doesn't have any outside."
"-I don't understand."
"The State could last seventy or a hundred thousand years, because all of humanity was part of the State. Therç were no barbarians waiting hungrily for the State to show weakness. The State could have grown feeble beyond any precedent, feeble enough to fall before the hatred of a single barbarian. You, Corbell. You."
"Me?"
"Did you exaggerate the situation? I thought of that, but I couldn't risk it. And I couldn't ask."
He's a computer. Perfect memory, rigid logic, no judgment. I forgot. I talked to him like a human being, and now-"You have heroically saved the State from me. I'll be damned."
"Was the danger unreal? I couldn't ask. You might have lied."
"I never wanted to overthrow the damn government. All I wanted was a normal life. I was only forty-four years old! I didn't want to die!"
"You never could have had what you called a normal life. It was already impossible in twenty-one ninety Aimo Domini."
"I guess not. I just didn't. . . didn't see it. Let's go home."
CHAPTER 3 THE HOUSE DIVIDED
I
He remembered posters. He had bought them in a little shop in Kansas City and taped them to his bedroom wall. They had been there for a year before he tired of them: blown-up photographs of the planet Earth, taken from close orbit and from behind the Moon, by Apollo astronauts.
In his memory Earth was all the shades of blue, frosted with masses and clots of white cloud. Even the land was blue tinged with other colors, except where a rare red-brown patch of desert showed through.
Jerome Branch Corbell, bald and wrinkled and very thin from his time in the cold-sleep tank, hovered in black space in a contour couch surrounded by an arc of lighted dials and gauges. Clouds and landscape raced past three hundred miles below.
It could have been Earth. Even the shapes of seas and continents seemed vaguely familiar. There was far too much reddish-brown in the mix, but after all. . . three million years.
He tried his voice. It was husky, rusty with long sleep, and pitched too high. "Is it Earth?"
"I don't know," said Peerssa.
"Peerssa, that's silly. Is this the solar system or isn't it?"
"Try not to get excited, Corbell. I don't know if this is Sol system. The data conflict. This is the system from which came messages. I followed them to their source."
"Let's hear these messages. Why didn't you wake me earlier, before we were committed?"
"We were committed before I found the anomalies. I waited until we had achieved orbit before I woke you. I was afraid you might die of the shock. You can't tolerate another spell in cold sleep, Corbell. You would not live to reach another star."
Corbell nodded. This last of his thawings was the worst yet. It was like waking with Asian flu and a brandy hangover. He felt sick and ugly. Less than ten years ago, by the evidence of his memory, the State had brought a young man to life. Ten years awake, plus a century and a half in cold sleep, had left of the young man a withered stack of bones. He had grown mortally afraid of senility. . . but his thoughts seemed clear.
"Let's deal with the messages," he said.
What appeared on the Womb Room walls was not quite reality. Peerssa controlled those images; Peerssa projected what his senses picked up from the world below. Now Peerssa made a window appear in what had been deep space. Through the window Corbell saw two translucent cubes, slowly rotating. Within the cubes were shapes and figures formed in much tinier cubes-about a hundred per side.
"A laser was beamed at me while I was still thirty-two light-years distant from this star system," said Peerssa. "There were two separate messages, two sequences of dots and gaps, each totaling one million, thirty thousand, three hundred and one bits each. One hundred and one cubed. One hundred and one is prime. There is some ambiguity, of course; I may have reversed left for right."
It was not the best way to make pictures, but Corbell could recognize a man and a woman holding hands. . . the same figures in each cube. There were polygons of assorted sizes, in rows, and rough spheres. Peerssa created a red arrow for a pointer. "In your opinion, are these intended to represent human beings?"
"Sure."
He indicated the similar figures in the right-hand cube. "And these?"
"Yes."
The arrow returned to the left-hand cube. "This was the first message to arrive. These figures may represent atomss carbon and hydrogen and oxygen. Do you agree?"
"For all of me they do. Why would they be there?"
"They form the basis for protoplasmic chemistry. This bigger row, might it be a solar system? The large, nearly spherical hollow object would be the sun. The symbols inside may be four hydrogen atoms next to a helium atom. The row of smaller polygons would be planets."
"All right. Is it the solar system?"
"Not unless the solar system has changed radically. What about this second cube? Why are these human figures different from the others?"
Corbell looked from one to the other. In the first message the figures were solid, except for hollow bubbles to mark the lungs. The cubistic figures in the second group were hollow, and there was an X of small cubes running through them. "I think I see. They're crossed out in that second message. And those rows of polygons look like eight more stellar systems, suns and planets, drawn smaller. Some double suns."
"What message do you see?"
"Eight star systems, two with double stars. Crossed-out hollow people. All right, read it this way. 'To whom it may concern. We are human, we fit the given model, our chemistry is based on carbon and water. We come from a star system that looks like this. The similar people who come from these eight other systems look human, but they aren't. Accept no substitutes.' Does that sound right?"
"I agree."
"Well, it's a very human thing to say. I could see your precious State sending a message like that, except. . . except the State didn't have any natural enemies. Everyone belonged to the State. So this is the message you followed home?"
"Yes. I felt that human beings must have sent it, and I was not sure of finding Sol otherwise."
"How did they find us? Whoever sent that beam would have had to find us a couple of hundred light-years out. We were still moving at near lightspeed, weren't we?"
"The exhaust from a ramship would be most conspicuous to the
right instruments. But the returning beam was very powerful. Sending it required strong motives."
Corbell smiled in evil satisfaction. "The strongest. Heresy. Your State came apart, Peerssa. The colonies revolted. The State around Sol must have wanted to warn any returning starships. Don't stop at the colonies."
"The State was a water-monopoly empire, as you told me. Such entities do not die by internal revolution. They die only by conquest by an outside force."
Corbell laughed. He didn't like the sound: a high-pitched cackle.
"I'm not a history teacher, Peerssa, you idiot! I'm an architect! It was a friend who told me about water-control empires, and he's one of- he was one of these guys who say everything in absolutes because it gets more attention. I never knew how seriously to take him."
"But you believe him."
"Oh, a little, but what empire ever lasted seventy thousand years? If you hadn't taken me so damn seriously, we'd have been home. two million, nine hundred and thirty thousand years ago." Corbell was studying the pattern of the sun and planets in the left-hand cube. "We're in a system that matches that picture?"
"Yes."
There was the sun, then three small objects, then a large object with a conspicuous lump on it (a large moon?), then three mediumsized objects. "The Earth isn't there. Otherwise-"
"Do you see the body now rising beyond this world's horizon?" For a split second Corbell thought it was the Moon rising above the world's hazy edge. It was half full. It showed bigger than the Moon. It glowed in white and orange-white bands along the lighted side. What should have been the dark side glowed just at red heat.
Peerssa said, "This oxygen-atmosphere world we circle is in orbit about that larger body. The primary is a massive gas giant, hotter than theory would account for. There are other anomalies in this system."
"We're in orbit about a moon of that thing?"
"I said that, yes."
Corbell's head whirled. "All right, Peerssa. Show me."
Peerssa showed him, with diagrams and with photographs taken during Don Juan's fiery fall through the system.
The sun was a young red giant, swollen and hot: of about one solar mass, but with a diameter of ten million kilometers.
Peerssa showed him the inner planet next to a map of Mercury. Granted the two planets resembled each other, but this system's version was scarred and gouged in a different pattern.
The second planet had considerably less atmosphere than Venus, and what there was included some oxygen. But it was the right size and in the right place.
There was nothing in Earth's orbit.
The third planet remarkably resembled Mars, but for the lack of moons and the great featureless mare marring one face. "There are curious parallels all through the system," Peerssa remarked.
Corbell's reaction to these revelations was a slowly mounting anger. Had he come home or hadn't he? "Right. Curious. What about Earth?"
A moon much like the Earth circled this fourth planet . . . a world as massive as Jupiter, but far hotter than a world at this distance from its primary ought to be, even given the hotter sun. It was pouring out infrared radiation in enormous quantities, and more dangerous radiation too.
"And th~ other moons? Their orbits would be funny anyway; they'd have been altered when the Earth was moved into place, if that's Earth."
"I thought of that. But I can find no moon of this world analogous to Ganymede, the biggest of the Jovian moons."
"All right, go on."
The fifth planet was an unknown, an ice giant in a drunken skewed orbit that took it from just inside the Jovian's orbit almost out to the sixth planet's. It was near the Jovian now, naked-eye visible from Don Juan. Peerssa showed him a close view of a marble banded in pale blues.
"This system may be much younger than Sol system," Peerssa said. "The skewed orbit of the fifth planet has not had time to become circular via tidal effects. The Jovian is hot because it only recently condensed from the planetary nebula. The star has not yet settled down to steady burning."
"What about this Earthlike world? Could it have evolved that fast?"
"I didn't think so. And that third planet looked a lot like Mars. But not enough, dammit!"
"Then observe the sixth."
The sixth planet-well, it looked like a target. Don Juan had crossed nearly over the North Pole. Nestled within banded white rings was the fainter banding of an ice-giant planet, in very pale blues and greens. The oval shadow of the planet lay across the rings, rendering the transparent inner ring invisible. The sharp-edged rift must be Cassini's Divide, Corbell thought. He found other, lesser rifts probably caused by tides from smaller moons. "Saturn," he said.
"It resembles Saturn most remarkably. I went to some effort to take our course near this sixth planet. I tried to find discrepancies-"
"That's Saturn!"
"But nothing else matches my memory!"
"Somebody's been mucking with the solar system. Three million years. A lot could have happened."
"The sun So! could not have become a red giant in three million years. It is too young. Theory will not allow it. Theory does allow a similarity in the formation of planetary systems."
"That is Saturn. And that is Earth!"
"Corbell, is it not possible that State citizens settled a~ moon of a Jovian world? Might they have recreated Saturn's rings for nostalgia and the love of beauty? You tell me. Is the love of beauty that powerful?"
It was a strange concept. It bad its attractions, but . . . "No. It doesn't hold up. They'd have put the rings around the Jovian for a better view. And why would they build another Mars?"
"Why would the State destroy the topography of Mercury? What removed two-thirds of the atmosphere of Venus and changed its chemistry? Uranus is missing. Ganymede is missing: a body bigger than Mercury. A gas giant more massive than Neptune orbits nearer the sun in a skewed orbit."
"That hotter sun could have burned away part of Venus's atmosphere. Mercury. . . hmmm."
"What changed the sun? How could the Earth have been moved at all? Corbell, I can't decide!" There might have been agony in the computer's voice. Indecision was bad for men, but men could live with it. A man's memories could fade and grow blurred. But not Peerssa's. .
"They moved the Earth because the sun got too hot," Corbell speculated.
"What do you imagine? Did the State moor huge rocket motors at the North Pole and fuel them with Venus's atmosphere? The ocean would have flowed to cover the northern hemisphere! The Earth's surface would have ripped everywhere, exposing magma!"
"I don't know. I don't know. Maybe they had something besides rockets. But that was Mars you showed me, and that's Saturn, and that's Earth. There! Couldn't that be the coast of Brazil?"
"It does not match my memory." With evident reluctance Peerssa added, "If other evidence were not considered, that shoreline could be the edge of the Brazilian continental shelf, altered by the shifting of tectonic plates."
"The ocean must have dropped. Maybe some megatons of water vapor got left behind when they moved the Earth."
"The State could not have moved the Earth. There would have been no need, because Sol was not an incipient red giant."
"Computer! You can't go against your theories, can you? What if we were in the ergosphere of a black hole longer than we thought? We might have lost more than three million years. In tens of miffions of years, could the sun be a red giant?"
"Nonsense. We would never have found Sol at all."
That was the last straw, because it was true. Corbell was an uncomfortably old man with a cold-sleep hangover. "All right," he said between his teeth, "you win the argument. Now, for purposes of discussion, we are going to assume that that planet is Earth. At long last we have come home to Earth. Now how do I get down?"
It developed that Peerssa had that all figured out.
II
Corbell's pressure suit looked clean and new. It was formfitting, with a bulging bulb of a helmet and a pointy-ended white spiral on the chest. He would not have been surprised to find it rotted with age. It had been waiting for nearly two hundred years, ship's time.
He went out the airlock with the suspicion that he was going to his death. He had never done this before. . . and in fact the suit held up better than he did. Panting, perspiring, with his pulse thundering irregularly in his ears, be maneuvered himself at the end of a tether and turned for a look at Don Juan.
The silver finish had dulled. Corbell winced at the sight of a gaping hole in one of the probes. Peerssa had never mentioned a meteor strike. It could as easily have hit the life-support system.
Four of the probes were missing.
The biological package probes were what made Don Juan a seeder ramship. Each of the probes held a spectrum of algae with which to seed the unbreathable reducing atmosphere of some nearby Earthlike world, to turn the atmosphere into breathable air and the world into a potential colony. Of course they had never been used for that purpose. Deprived in detail of his civil rights, Corbell had stolen the ship and lit out for the galactic core.
There had been ten probes mounted around Don Juan's waist. Now there were six. "I ran the onboard hydrogen tank nearly empty," Peerssa explained. "I had to use four of the thrust systems in the probes to make orbit around Earth. Afterward I put the probes in orbits as relay satellites. You will be able to call me from the surface, wherever you are."
"Good."
"How do you feel? Can you survive a re-entry?"
"Not yet. I'm out of shape. Give me a month."
"You'll have it. You'll have exercise too. We must make ready one of the probes for your descent."
"I'm going down in one of those?"
"They are designed to enter an atmosphere. Don Juan is not."
"I should have thought of that. I never did figure a safe way to get down. Aren't you coming down yourself?"
"Not unless you so order."
Small wonder if he sounded reluctant. It came to Corbell that Peerssa's body was the ship. He would be a total paraplegic if he survived re-entry. Corbell said, "Thomas Jefferson freed his slaves on his death. Can I do less? After I'm down, living or dead, magnanimously I free you from all orders previous or subsequent."
"Thank you, Corbell."
He had trained to work in a pressure suit, under orders from Pierce the checker. But he'd been suspended in a magnetic field, not in actual free-fall; and he had trained in a young body, long ago. The work was hard. On the second day he hurt everywhere. On the third he was back at work. He would stop only when Peerssa insisted.
"We won't try to build you a life-support system," Peerssa told him. "We'll put what you need in the capsule with you and fill the capsule with plastic foam. Your suit will be your life-support system."
But emptying the probe warhead involved moving large masses and manhandling the bulky cutting laser for hours at a time. The algae tanks and the machinery that served them had to be removed in inspection-hatch-sized pieces. Corbell dared not rip the hull. His life depended on its integrity.
He needed long rest periods. He spent them in the Womb Room, watching ifims of Don Juan's entry into what Peerssa now called (rightly or wrongly) the solar system.
For a computer, Peerssa had been starkly ingenious. Corbell would not have thought of using the package probes as thrusters. He would not have looked for Earth as a big new moon of what Peerssa now called Jupiter-and Peerssa nearly hadn't, either. Peerssa came that close to departing Sol with Corbell still in cold sleep, to search nearby systems for remnants of the State. .
Corbell probably would have died en route.
Apparently the question of where they were no longer bothered Peerssa. It had only required Corbell's order to stop his worrying about it. But at the time, Corbell gathered, Peerssa was frantic. He had used fuel he couldn't spare to make close flybys past Saturn and Mercury.
Now Corbell looked down at the Earth and yearned. "All the mistakes I made, and still I got here. The mistakes all canceled. If I hadn't turned the receiver back on you couldn't have beamed your personality into the computer. I'd have wrecked the ship trying to run all the way at one gravity. If I'd been right about the galactic core I'd have died of old age, that far from home. It's like something led me back here."
"Your records call you an agnostic."
"Yeah. I'm whistling in the dark. I keep thinking I'll just barely get killed landing."
He was taking a long rest period in celebration. He had finally finished cleaning debris out of the probe warhead. With a meal in his hand-a layered sandwich baked like a cake-he watched the landscape roll below him. A dull red highlight gleamed on the nightside ocean, below Jupiter.
"Where do I want to land? Is there any sign of civilization down there?"
"There is evidence of the generation and use of power in three places." On the huge blue face of the planet a green arrow suddenly pointed at a green grid pattern. "Here, and on the other side of the world, and in Antarctica. My orbit does not cover Antarctica, but I can land you there."
"No, thanks. Isn't that just about California?" Thinking: Wait a minute, the west coast ought to bulge. And where's Baja California? From what seemed to be central Mexico the coast was a convex sweep all the way up to what must be Alaska.
"Most of what you called California and Baja California wifi be an island near the North Pole. I can land you there too."
"No. Wherever someone is generating power, that's where I want to land. There, where you put the grid pattern. . . which looks a little like a city, doesn't it? Right angles. .
"There are many clustered buildings, yes, but no strong evidence of preplanning. Your era would have called it a city. I advise against your landing there."
"If they're the ones who sent the messages, they probably won't kill me. I served their ancestral State." It might be Nevada, he thought; or Arizona. It was on the seacoast now.
"The differences between. . ." Peerssa stopped.
Corbell got angry. "That's Earth. Earth!" The screwed-up solar system bothered him too, when he let it. "Peerssa, that was Earth's plate tectonics you were describing! Did you find the island that used to be California?"
"I found two islands that might have been California, three miffion years ago."
"Well, then! Did that happen by coincidence?"
"No," Peerssa lied.
"Call that area where you put the grid One City. Call the Antarctic area Three City. Now, what about Two City? Where is that?"
"Bordering the Sea of Okhotsk in Russia."
"Land me in One City, then." More calmly, Corbell added, "I must be nuts, looking for civilization. Why do I want to spend my last days fighting a foreign language? But maybe I'll have time to find out what happened here."
Corbell filled the probe nose cone with medicines, food, a tank of fresh water, tanks of oxygen. The plastic foam would hold them. He moored more solidly the ultrasonic whistle, controlled by signal from Peerssa, that would melt the foam.
He had put on muscle weight. The heart attack he feared, and thought he was prepared for, had never come. Don Juan's twentysecond-century medicines had given him that. But he lived with hot wires in his shoulders: Tendonitis.
At the last-braced in the middle of the ravaged nose compartment, with one hand on the spigot of the foam tank-he hesitated. "Peerssa? Can you hear me?"
"Yes."
"What will you do after I'm down?"
"I will wait until I am sure you are dead. Then I will search other systems for the State."
"You're no crazier than I am." He wondered how long Peerssa expected him to last-and didn't ask. He opened the spigot. Foam surrounded him and congealed.
Thrust built up under his back, held for a time, then eased to almost nothing. Presently there was turbulence. It was a powered landing, not a meteoric re-entry. The thrust built up again, held, died. The probe rotated. . . and there was a jar that drove him two inches into the foam.
Peerssa spoke in his suit radio. "May I consider myself free of your commands?"
Corbell suffered a quick, vividly detailed nightmare. "Melt the foam first!" he cried. But Peerssa was no longer bound by his orders. Peerssa would take vengeance on one whom the State considered a criminal and arch-ingrate. The foam would not melt. Corbell would die here, embedded like a fly in amber, his freedom mere yards away!
He felt a lurch. Then another. The nightmare ended. He sank through melting foam, blind, to a solid bulkhead. The foam ran from his faceplate, and he saw that the inspection hatch was wide open.
Corbell stepped into the opening and looked out and down.
Peerssa had landed the big cylinder on its side, on attitude jets. The sun, high overhead, was nonetheless a sunset sun, red and inflated. The land ran flat to a range of sharp-edged granite hills. It was all dead: browns and grays, dead rock and dust. Heat made the air shimmer like water.
The State had not provided exit ladders for a package probe. Peerssa had been clever again. The foam had run out the hatch and congealed into a foam plastic slope. Corbeli walked down it, and his boots crunched, as on snow partly thawed and refrozen. He stepped out onto the soil of Earth.
The soil had died.
Three million years. Wars? Erosion? Loss of water when Earth fled inexplicably from an inexplicably expanding sun? At this moment he didn't care. He raised his hands to his faceplate- "Do not try to take off your suit. Corbell, have you left the probe?"
-ready for his first breath of fresh air in a long time. "Why not?"
"Have you left the probe?"
"Yeah."
"Good. For purposes of discussion I have spoken of this world as Earth. Now I may speak of the differences. You have landed on a world marginally habitable at best, in a region uninhabitably hot."
"What?" Corbeli looked down. The outside temperature register was set at chin level below the edge of his faceplate. It didn't look bad, not bad at-centigrade! The State used centigrade!
Peerssa said, "It's too hot, Corbell. Temperatures in the equatorial zone range from fifty-five degrees centigrade upward. The oceans are above fifty degrees. I find little chlorophyll absorption in the oceans, and none on land, barring certain mountain valleys. You would have done better to land near one or the other pole."
Somehow Corbell was not even shocked. Had he half oxpected this? My death is the end of the world-a very human attitude. And three million years, after all . . . "So that's what happened to the oceans."
"The atmosphere holds thousands of megatons of water vapor, enough to support the hypothesis that Earth's continental shelves have become dry land. What remains of the oceans should be very salty. Corbell, we still don't know."
"What about those mountain valleys?"
"In a mountain range corresponding to Earth's Himalayas, there are valleys between one and two kilometers high. Some life has survived there."
Corbell sighed. "All right. Which way is civilization?"
"Define civilization."
"One City. No, just point me at the closest place where someone is using power."
"Four point nine kilometers distant there is minor usage of power. I doubt you will find people, or even living beings. The power level has not varied since we made orbit. I think you will find nothing but machines running automatically."
"I'll try anyway. Which way?"
"West. I can locate you. I will guide you."
III
Corbell had not gone hiking in a long time.
The suit was not uncomfortable. Most of his equipment's weight rested on his shoulders. The boots were not hiking boots, but they fit. He set out in a rhythmic stride, breathing the canned air, letting his attention rove the scenery-and bad to stop very soon. He'd chosen too quick a pace.
He rested, then set out in a more leisurely stroll. It was level land: not ankle-breaking country, though he had to watch his footing. It was packed earth with rocks inset, and there were gentle wind-carved risings and failings-off.
Peerssa led him to the range of hills and apparently expected him to walk straight across them. Corbell turned left until he could find an easier slope. He found he was grumbling subvocally.
He had had to grumble subvocally for lo, these eight years' waking time in which he had grown one hundred and eighty years old while three million years passed on Earth. Grumble aloud and you couldn't know what Peerssa might pick up and take as an order. Goddamn literal computers, he grumbled. Sleep tanks and supermedicines that don't keep you young. Air and cooling equipment getting heavier with each step. Why couldn't they have put a belly band in this suit? A belly band was the greatest invention since the wheel. It let a hiker carry the weight on his hips instead of his back. If the State had had its head screwed on right- Which was silly. The suit was designed for free-fall and use aboard
ship. Not hiking. And if Peerssa took orders, it was a damn good thing. And he was lucky to be on Earth at all. And, Corbell thought as he topped the crest, he was damn glad to be here. Puffing, bent over so he could pant better, half listening for the heart attack he'd been expecting for so long, it came to him that he was happy.
Yeah! In three million years, probably no human being had ever done what he had done. Be nice if there were someone to brag to.
He saw the house.
It was on a higher crest of hills beyond this one. Otherwise he might not have noticed it. It was just the color of the hills: gray and dust-brown; but he saw its regular shape against the blue of sky. It was set against the rock slope.
It took him another two hours to reach it. He was being careful with himself. Even so, he knew how his legs would hurt tomorrow, if there was a tomorrow. He was two-thirds of the way up that second range of hills when he found the remains of a broken road. Then it was easier.
The house was extravagantly designed. The roof was a convex triangle, almost horizontal, with the base against the hill itself. Below the roof were two walls of glass, or of something stronger. The house's single room was exposed to this single voyeur, who perched precariously on the slope and clutched at a boulder with thick gloves. It was, he thought, a hell of a place to build a house.
He pressed his faceplate against the (presumed) glass.
The floor was not level. Either the hill itself had settled, or architectural styles had changed more than Corbell was willing to believe.
He was looking into a living-room-sized area with what had to be a bed in the middle. But the bed was two or three times bigger than king size, and it had the asymmetrical shape of a '50s-style Hollywood pool. The curved headboard was a control panel fitted with screens and toggles and tall grills like hi-fl soundboxes, and a couple of slots big enough to deliver drinks or sandwiches. In the darkness above the bed hovered a big wire sculpture or mobile or possibly some kind of antenna, he couldn't tell which.
Two pinpricks of yellow light lived in the control panel.
"This is your power source, all right," Corbell reported. "I'm going to find the door."
Twenty minutes later he reported, "There's no door."
"A house must have an opening. Look for an opening that doesn't look like a door. From your description, there must be more to the house than you can see: a toilet at least, perhaps an office, or a food dispensary."
"They'd have to be under the hill. Mmm . . . all right, I'll keep looking."
He found no trace of a trapdoor in the roof. Could the whole roof lift up in one piece, on signal? Corbell couldn't guess whether the architect would have been that wasteful of power.
If there was an entrance in the road itself, then hard dirt covered it. Corbell was getting annoyed. The house couldn't have been used in a hundred years; possibly a thousand; conceivably ten thousand. Likewise the door, wherever it might be. Maybe the house had a second, lower story, now buried in the hill, door and all.
"I'll have to break in," he said.
"Wait. Might the house be equipped with a burglar alarm? I'm not familiar with the design concepts that govern private dwellings. The State built arcologies."
"What if it does have a burglar alarm? I'm wearing a helmet. It'll block most of the sound."
"There might be more than bells. Let me attack the house with my message laser."
"Will it-?" Will it reach? Stupid, it was designed to reach across tens of light-years. "Go ahead."
"I have the house in view. Firing."
Looking down on the triangular roof from his post on the roadway, Corbell saw no beam from the sky; but he saw a spot the size of a manhole cover turn red-hot. A patch of earth below the house stirred uneasily; rested; stirred again. Then a ton or so of hillside rose up and spilled away, and a rusted metal object floated out on a whispering air cushion. It was the size of a dishwasher, with a head: a basketball with an eye in it. The head rolled, and a scarlet beam the thickness of Corbell's arm pierced the clouds.
"Peerssa, you're being attacked. Can you handle it?"
"It can't hurt me. It could hurt you. I'd better destroy it."
The metal object began to glow. It didn't like that. It fled away in a jerky randomized path, while the red beam remained fixed on one point in the sky. Its upper body glowed bright red verging on orange. It was screaming; its frantic warbling voice sang through Corbel's helmet. Suddenly it tilted and arced away down the hill. It struck the plain hard, turned over and over, and lay quiet.
There was a hole in the roof now. Corbell said, "You think there are more of those?"
"Insufficient data."
Corbell climbed down to the roof and looked through. Molten concrete, or whatever, had set the bed afire. Corbell jumped down onto the flaming bedclothes, prepared to get off fast. Wrong again: It was a water bed, and his feet went right through it. He waded out, then pushed the burning bedclothes into the puddle in the middle with his clumsy gloved hands. The fire went out, but the room filled with steam.
"I'm in the house," he reported. Peerssa didn't bother to answer.
Corbell the architect looked about him.
This room, the visible part of the house, was a triangle. The bed in the center had the pleasing asymmetry of a puddle of water-and it was pleasing. An arc of sofa occupied one corner, facing the bed. In front of the sofa was a slab of black slate or a good imitation, arced like the sofa, but broken in the middle. Corbell bent and lifted one end of the slab. Something on the underside: solid circuitry. At a guess, this had been a floating coffee table until whatever was holding it up burned out.
From inside the room he still couldn't see any doors.
There was only one opaque wall to inspect. He moved along it, rapping. It sounded hollow.
Door controls on the headboard? Nuts. You'd have to walk clear around to the other side-wait, there was something on the back side. Three thumb-sized circular depressions of chrome yellow against black headboard. Corbell pushed them.
The back wall slid up in three unequal sections.
The biggest one was a closet. Corbell found half a dozen garments in it, all one-piece long-sleeved garments with lots of pockets. Some had hoods. A layer of dust at the bottom of the closet was two to three inches thick.
The second section was smaller, no bigger than a telephone booth, with a free-form chair in it. Corbell stepped in. He found another chrome-yellow despression on the wall, and touched it. The door shot up behind him.
A chair. Funny. Now he saw the great hole in the seat of the chair. A toilet? But there was no water in the bowl, and no toilet paper...nothing but a glitteringly clean metal sponge attached to the chair by a wire.
He left the cubicle. By any terms, it was pretty basic for a house with this complexity of design. The owner should have been able to afford something better.
He turned to the clothing still hanging on shaped hangers. Funny, he couldn't tell if they were made for a man or a woman. He tugged at the fabric. It was amazingly resilient-and very dusty. He tugged harder, then tried in earnest to tear the cloth. It stood his full strength.
This clothing seemed new.
But the dust?
Say there were temporary clothes, meant to be thrown out when styles changed, and clothes meant to last longer. How long? If that layer of dust was the temporary clothes.
He still hadn't found a door.
The third cubicle looked promising. There was nothing in it at all except for one unmarked switch like the yellow circle in the bathroom, and a panel of four white-glowing touch points.
"I think I've found an elevator," he said. "I'm going to try it." He used the yellow touch point. The door came up; he turned on his helmet lamp.
Peerssa said, "Dangerous. What if the elevator takes you down and then breaks down?"
"Then you beam me another manhole to climb out of." Corbell pushed the top button. Nothing happened.
He'd expected that. He must be at the top. He pushed number two.
Peerssa's voice came unnecessarily loud. "Corbell. Answer if you can."
"Yeah?" There had been no sense of motion, yet something had changed. There were eight more white-glowing touch points: two additional vertical rows beside the first, set closer together, and each of these was marked with a black squiggle.
Corbell jabbed at the door button.
Peerssa said, "You have changed position by four point one miles southwest and two hundred feet loss of altitude. I place you in One City."
"Yeah." Corbell looked out into a different room. He was beginning to feel like a wandering ghost. Everything was spooky, unreal.
He stepped out, round what once must have been a floating desk but was now only knee-high. Screens and pushbutton panels set into the desk made it look like the control board in the Womb Room; but they were ruined. It must have rained here for hundreds of years.
There was a rug like half-melted cotton candy, deep as his ankles. It squished beneath his boots, and tore, and stuck to his suit fabric. He stepped to the edge of an empty picture window frame and looked out and down.
Thirty stories of windows and empty frames dropped away beneath his toes. He saw much taller buildings around him. There, to the right, a masonry behemoth had fallen, taking buildings and pieces of buildings with it. Beyond that gap, beyond the mist and rain, he thought he could trace a gray-on-gray outline: a cube, impossibly large, whose walls had a slight outward curve.
"Peerssa, did the State ever have any kind of instant transportation? Like a telephone booth, but you dial and you're there?"
"Well, these people did. I should have guessed. Me, of all people! That house wasn't a house, it was only part of a house. I've found the office. It's in the city. There ought to be a bathroom and a dining room and maybe a game room, God knows where. What we broke into was the bedroom."
"It's likely that the machinery has not been tended for a long time. Bear that in mind."
"Yeah." Corbell stepped back into the cubicle. Where next? He pushed the third down in the row of unmarked buttons.
A light flared to life in the ceiling. The extra buttons had vanished. Corbell stepped out, and smiled. Definitely, this was the bathroom.
The outside temperature register at his chin was dropping.
"I think this place is air-conditioned," he said.
"You have traveled three point one miles west by southwest and have lost six hundred feet of altitude."
"Okay." Corbell opened his faceplate. Just for a moment, he'd close it fast if- But the air was cool and fresh.
It came to him, as he let the heavy backpack section fall, that he was exhausted. He pulled himself out of the rest of his armor and crouched at the edge of a bathtub almost big enough to be called a pool.
He couldn't read the markings on the water spigot. He turned it all the way in one direction and pushed it on. Hot water splashed into the tub. He turned it the other way. Boiling water spurted out, spitting steam. He recoiled. If he'd been in the tub. .
Okay, the "cold" water was hot, but it wasn't too hot to stand. It flooded out and around him as he lolled on the curv~ed bottom.
A tiny voice called, "Corbell, answer."
He reached and pulled the helmet to the edge. "I'm taking a rest break. Check back in an hour. And send me a dancing girl."
IV
A tiny voice peeped, "-can. Repeating. Corbell, answer if you can. Repeating. Corbell-"
Corbell opened his eyes.
Every texture was strange to his sight and his touch. He was nowhere aboard Don Juan. Then where-?
Ah. He'd found two projections at the edge of the sunken tub, soft mounds like a pair of falsies, just right to rest his head between. His neck was still between the pil!ows. Lukewarm water enveloped him. He'd gone to sleep in the tub.
"-if you can. Repeat-"
Corbell pul!ed the pressure-suit helmet to him. "Here."
"Your hour's gone, and another hour and six minutes. Are you sick?"
"No, just sleepy. Hang on." He pulled the spigot on. Hot water spurted through cool water and mixed. Corbell stirred with his foot. "I'm still on a rest break. Anything new at your end?"
"Something's watching me. I sense radar and gravity radiation."
"Gravity?"
"Gravity waves going through my mass sensor, yes. I'm being probed by advanced instruments which must have learned a great deal about me. They could be automatic."
"They could also be from whoever sent the messages. Where is all this action coming from?"
"From what would be Tasmania, if this were Earth. The probing has stopped. I can't detect the source."
"If it starts throwing missiles at you you'll have to pull out fast."
"Yes. I'l! have to change my orbit. I didn't want to use the fuel, but my orbit does not take me over Antarctica."
"Do that." Corbell stood up (his legs ached) and waded dripping from the warm water. A line of thick dust against the base of a wall might have been the remains of towels. He stopped before a picture window.
The day had darkened. He looked down across a shallow slope of beach sand, downhill into haze that thickened to opaque mist. Was that a. . . fish skeleton down there, glimmering white through haze? It looked far distant-and big.
Lightning flared, waited, flared again.
The rain fell like an avalanche.
Corbell turned away. He put on his undersuit, then his pressure suit piece by piece, feeling the weight and the chafe spots. The bath had been good. He would have to come back here when he got the chance. There was even a sauna, not that he'd need- Yeah, a sauna. This place was old. If it had been built after the Earth grew hot, the sauna would have been a door to the outside!
He stood in the booth, dithered, and decided not to push the bottom button. Peerssa was right. The machinery had been untended for a long time. So: bedroom or office? He knew those circuits still worked.
Bedroom.
He stepped out. Next to his chin the temperature readout rose in blinking numerals. He stepped around to the headboard, confirmed a memory: He had seen a television screen, and controls.
He turned it on. The screen lit, first gray-white, then- It was a fuzzy view of the ruined bed, showing his own armored
legs.
He tried switches until he found the playback. The scene ran backward. Suddenly the bed was whole and four figures writhed on it at flickering speed. The scene jumped to a different foursome or to the same foursome differently dressed, before he found a way to freeze it.
"Corbell, I have tried to signal the source of the probes, to no effect."
"Okay. Listen, if you have to run, just do it. We'll both be safer if you don't stop to call me about it."
"What will you do now?"
"I'm watching home movies." Corbell chortled. "This place is like the Playboy Mansion. There's an invisible video camera focused on the bed."
"A degenerate civilization, then. Small wonder they could not save themselves. You should not degrade yourself by watching."
"What are you-? What about the loving bunks in the dormitory in Selerdor? That wasn't degenerate?"
"It was not thought polite to watch the loving bunks."
Corbell swallowed his annoyance. "I want to know if they're still human."
"Are they?"
"The tape's faded. And they're wearing clothes, loose suits with lots of openings in them, in pastels. If they aren't human I can't see the differences . . . but they're thin. And they don't seem to carry themselves right." He paused to watch. "And they're very limber. The situation isn't quite what I thought."
"In what way?"
"I thought it was an orgy for four. It isn't. It's like in ancient China: Two of them are servants. They're helping the other pair get into those advanced sexual positions. Maybe they're not servants; maybe they're trainers, or teachers." He watched some more. "Or even . . . they're as limber as dancers. Maybe that's what they are. I wish I had a view of the couch. There might be spectators."
"Corbell."
"Yeah?"
"Are you hungry?"
"Yeah. I may have to use that fourth button."
"I wouldn't bother. If a thousand-year-old kitchen is your only food source, you'll die quickly. Your suit will only recycle air for another seventy-one hours. Your food-syrup reserve is trivial. I suggest you try to reach the South Pole. I am over it now. I see a large continental mass, and forest."
"Well, fine." Corbell switched off the stag movie and made for the booth.
The second button down created a panel of eight buttons beside the smaller panel.
He studied it. The symbols on those eight buttons might be letters or numbers. He reached, then drew back. "I'm afraid of it."
"Of what?"
"Of this panel in the office. See, there are four white buttons in all the booths. I think that's an intercom, a closed circuit; you couldn't get into it except from the office, or by breaking in the way we did. But there are eight buttons with squiggles on them here in the office.
I think they must be more like a telephone dial, and there's a private number that lets you into the office."
"Reasonable."
"Well, what happens when you dial a phone number at random?"
"In my time there was a recorded voice to tell you you had made a mistake."
"Yeah, we had that too. But in this instant transportation setup you might be sent nowhere! Pool!"
"That would be poor design. Can you find a telephone directory?" There was nothing like that in the booth. Corbell opened the door. Rain and howling wind were blowing into the office. Fat drops plated themselves across his faceplate. He walked around the desk, waited a minute for the water to run off the glass, then began puffing at desk drawers. They didn't want to open. He pried one open and found it half full of gray-green mold. An abandoned apple?
Machines were set into the desktop. Telephone, picture-phone, computer link, what? No telling now. Time and rain had destroyed them.
"I'll have to try pushing buttons at random," he told Peerssa.
"Good luck."
"Why did you say that?"
"To be polite."
Corbell examined the array of eight buttons by the light from his helmet. The booth could kill him so fast he'd never know it. Punch at random? He could do better than that. He chose a button-the fifth, counting across and down, whose symbol looked like an upside-down L. A gallows. He pushed it once, pause, twice, pause, thrice- Four did it. Suddenly there was indirect lighting around the rim of the ceiling.
The door wouldn't open.
Annoyed, he chose another button, an hourglass on its side and compressed from both ends: 4 '1 4 4.
"You have changed position twice," Peerssa informed him.
This time the door opened.
There were disintegrating skeletons in identical . . . uniforms? Loose garments, short pants, sleeveless shirts with rolls of fabric at the shoulders. Under the dust the garments looked new, in bright
scarlet with black markings. The bones inside were crumbled with age, but they could not have been big men. Five feet tall or thereabouts. Corbell moved among them looking for bullet wounds. No holes in the garments or the skulls . . . but from the way they sprawled they seemed to have died in a firefight, and they seemed to be human.
He found desks and what looked like computer terminals. A thick sliding door had been melted out of the wall. Beyond it were cells. Their gridwork doors were decoratively lacy, and different on each cell; but they were locked, and there were more skeletons in the cells.
"Police station," he reported to Peerssa. "I was trying for a restaurant. I pushed the same button four times." He heard irritation in his voice. Getting tired? "See, what I didn't want was a number that went nowhere. The numbers the restaurants fight for are the ones that are easiest to remember. At least they used to be."
"The State restricts those numbers to important municipal functions: police stations, hospitals, ombudsmen-"
Corbell stepped through another, larger melted door. Doors beyond retracted before him, and he stepped into a waterfall of rain. He'd finally made it outside. He couldn't see much. A city street.
and occasional heaps of clothing peeking through the mud, skimpy one-piece shorts-and-undershirt garments in every pattern and color save scarlet.
"I'll have to try the other repeating numbers," he said without moving.
"I think it is safe. If you find a number not in use, you will not go nowhere."
"You're willing to risk that, huh?" He still hadn't moved. The rain ran down his faceplate and drummed on his helmet.
"There is an alternative. I have probed the city with my senses. There is hollow space, a system of tunnels underground, leading away in many directions. I can lead you to the underground space where they converge."
"What's the point of . . . ? You think it's a subway system? They'd have stopped using it when they invented the booths."
"If they no longer used the subway cars, they may have kept the buildings as a transportation nexus. Economy."
V
He walked through pelting rain on packed dirt covered by thin mud. It sucked at his boots. He couldn't afford the energy that cost him. He was already too tired.
The streets and buildings were largely intact. He found no more scenes of mass death.
There was a bubble, half glass and half metal, like a Christmastree ornament twelve feet across. It had smashed against the side of a building and was half full of rainwater. Corbell looked inside. He found spongy upholstery, and a pair of seats. One was occupied. Mud with lumps of bone in it oozed from within a yellow shorts-and-undershirt garment. Corbell forced himself to search the big patch pockets. What he found, he stowed in his tool pouch. He could examine it later.
He walked on.
Later there was an intact bubble, abandoned. It looked intact; the brightwork in the interior gleamed. He tried to start it, but nothing he tried seemed to work. He gave up and went on.
Now there was a tremendous empty lot to one side, with windweathered stumps of trees and traces of curving paths. A park? To his other side was a wall that went up and up, curving away from view. It curved away from before and behind him too, so that he had no idea how high it was or how wide.
In the mists beyond the office picture window he had thought to trace the outlines of a cube bigger than belief. So: It had been real.
Streets. Why streets? And cars? Corbell began to suspect what he would find at the transportation nexus.
"You are over the hollow space," said Peerssa.
"That's good. I'm tired." Corbell looked around him. Mummified park to the left, wall to the right. Ahead. . . the wall turned to glass.
An entire wall of glass doors. He pushed through into gloom lit by his helmet lamp.
The ceiling gave no sense of distance: only of random colors that changed with his position. The place was wide. His beam got lost in it. He glanced down at another, confusing light: the glow of dials at his chin.
The temperature was down to 200 C.
"Air-conditioned," he said.
"Good. Your suit batteries will last longer."
"There could be anything in this place," he argued with himself. He opened his faceplate. No heat. Sniffed: a touch of staleness, that was all. "I've got to get out of this suit. I'm tired."
"Drink from the syrup nipple."
He laughed; he'd forgotten it was there. He sucked until his belly felt less empty. Peerssa was right: Half of his tiredness had been hunger.
He pulled himself out of the rest of the suit.
Stepping into the rug was a sudden, thrilling shock. It might be the same as the rotted rug in the office, but it was dry, intact, and ankledeep. Like walking on a cloud. It felt damned expensive, but there must have been an acre of it here in the foyer of a public building.
"Going to sleep," he told the helmet. He sprawled out in the cloud of carpet and let it close around him.
VI
Gray dawn. He wriggled a little in the luxury of the rug. The ceiling was thousands of shades of color in what seemed to be whorl patterns; you could go crazy staring into it and never know how far away it was. He closed his eyes and dozed again.
Came down to die, he thought. He said, "Peerssa, how do you expect me to die? Heart attack?"
No answer. The helmet was out there by his fingertips. He pulled it close and repeated the question.
"I think not," said Peerssa.
"Why? The State's wonderful medicines?"
"Yes, if one counts contraceptives as medicines. After the founding of the State, there was a generation in which no man or woman subject to inherited diseases might have children. The population fell by half. Famine ended-"
"Heart patients?" His father had died of a coronary! "Certainly the children of heart patients were not allowed to have children. Your genes are those of a criminal, but a healthy one."
"You arrogant sons of bitches. What about my children?"
"Their father was cancer-prone."
So they'd edited Corbell's genes from the human race. . . and it was three million years too late to do anything about it. Corbell got up, stretched against stiff muscles, and looked about him.
There were rings of couches around freely curved tables that still floated. The couches looked like humps in the rug.
"Nuts," said Corbell. "I could have slept on a couch." He pushed down on a floating table, finally putting his full weight on both hands. He'd lowered the table an inch. When he released it it bobbed up again.
Set within one wall was a row of booths. Corbell went to examine them. The rug-stuff flowed delightfully around his toes.
In each booth were rows of pushbuttons marked with squiggles. A dozen buttons, with the eight marks he'd seen already and four new ones. He pushed a button larger than the others (oPnI~ToR?) and got no response. Then he noticed the slot.
From the tool pouch of his empty pressure suit he spilled the items he had stolen from a smashed car. A seamless silver lipstick did nothing for him. Handkerchief: faint colors seemed to swirl in the material. Candy wrapper: the hard candy must have melted in untold years of rain; or it could have been drugs or medicine; or he could be wrong on every point. A hand-sized disk of clear plastic, its run, also plastic, embedded with green ornamental squiggles.
That looked about right.
Which way was up? He tried it in one of the booths. It wouldn't fit in the slot with the markings up. With the markings down, it did. He pushed the larger button and the screen lit up.
Now what? The screens might be the phone books he needed. All he had to do was punch for INFORMATION, without reaching a nonexistent number, and read the answer, in squiggles.
Corbell was sweating. He hadn't thought this out. He lowered his hands and stepped out of the booth.
Well. No hurry. His two-days-plus air reserve was not being used. There was time to explore. And there, far at the back of the lobby, were the stairs he'd expected: broad, well designed by the principles he had learned in his first life, carpeted in cloud-rug. A ffight of stairs going down into darkness.
He went back to tuck his helmet in the crook of his elbow and to retrieve the lens-shaped key/credit card. Then he started down the stairs, playing his helmet lamp ahead of him, humming.
With her head. . . tooked . . . underneath her arm, she wa-aaiks the Bloody Tower. .
The stairs unexpectedly lurched into motion, throwing him back-
ward. He sat up cursing. He hadn't hurt himself, but. . . get crippled here and it would be his death.
Light grew below him.
At first he thought this was the last gasp of an emergency power system. The light blossomed. When he reached bottom it was bright as daylight. He was in a vast open space with a high ceiling and alcoves he thought were shops: a place with the feel of a European train station, but with touches of sybaritic luxury more appropriate to a palace. There were fountains, and more of the ankle-enveloping rug swelling to rings of couches. Along one entire wall- "Peerssa! I've found a map!"
"Please describe it."
"It's two polar projections. Damn, I wish I could show you. The continents are about the way they were when I was in school. These maps must have been made before all that ocean water evaporated. There are lines across them, all from"-he checked-"this point, 1 think. Most of the lines are dark. Peerssa, the only lines still lighted run to Antarctica and the tip of Argentina and, uh, Alaska." Alaska had been twisted north. So had the tip of Siberia. "The lines run right through oceans, or under them."
He saw that what he'd taken for shops were alcoves with couches and food-dispensing walls. He tried one. When he inserted the plastic disk, a woman's voice spoke in tones of regret. He tried other slots and got the same reedy voice repeating the same incomprehensible words.
Next stop? Down there at the far end, that line of doors.
Thick doors, with slots for credit disks.
He went back for his pressure suit. The stairs carried him up. How the heck did they handle streams of commuters going both ways? He rode back down with the heavy suit draped over his shoulder.
There were lighted squiggles on the map, next to the lighted lines. He memorized the pattern that marked the route he wanted: not to the center of the thawed Antarctic continent, but to the nearer shore. Shores get colonized first.
The doors: Yes, there was the pattern of squiggles he wanted.
The disk: He found it, turned it blank side up and inserted it.
The door opened. He retrieved the disk, glanced at it and smiled. The squiggles had changed. He'd been docked the price of a ticket.
He faced glass within glass within concrete. The end of the subway
car protruded slightly from its socket in the wall; it was a circle of glass eight feet across, with an oval glass door in it. Through the glass Corbell saw a cylindrical car lined with seats facing each other and padded in cloud-rug. The front of the car was metal.
He found a disk-sized slot in the glass door. He used it. The door opened. He entered, and pulled the disk out of the other side. The door closed.
"Here I am," he said into the helmet.
"Where?"
"In one of the subway cars. I don't know what to do next. Wait, I guess."
"You aren't going to use the instant-transportation booths?"
"No, I think that was a dead end. Maybe they were toys for the rich, too expensive to be practical, or too short-range. Why else would there be streets with cars on them? The streets were too good and there were too many cars."
"I wondered," Peerssa said. "Four digits in base eight gives only four thousand and ninety-six possible booth numbers. Too few."
"Yeah." There was room for about eight people, he decided, on benches of cloud-rug tinted at intervals in contrasting pastels to mark off the seats. He found another food dispenser, which spoke to him regretfully when he tried it. Behind a half-door that would barely hide one's torso, he found a toilet, again equipped with one of the glitteringly clean metal sponges. He tried that too.
His best guess was that the sponge had an instant-elsewhere unit in it. It cleaned itself miraculously.
There were arms for the benches. They had to be pulled out of a slot along the back and locked.
"There is increased power usage from your locus," said Peerssa. "Then something's happening." Corbell stretched out on the cloudrug bench to wait. No telling about departure time. He would wait twenty-four hours before he gave up. His stomach growled.
CHAPTER 4 THE NORM
I
Somebody spoke to him.
Corbell jerked violently and woke with a scream on his lips. Who but Peerssa could speak to him here?
But he was not aboard Don Juan.
The voice had stopped.
Peerssa spoke from his helmet. "I do not recognize the language."
"Did you expect to? Play it again for me." He listened to Peerssa's recording of a boyish voice speaking in reassuring liquid tones. Afterward he sighed. "If that guy was waiting to meet me himself, what could I tell him? What could he tell me? I'll probably be dead before I could learn his language."
"Your story has wrung my heart. Most of your contemporaries only had one life to live."
"Yeah."
"Your self-centered viewpoint has always bothered me. If you could see yourself as-"
"No, wait a minute. You're right. You're dead right. I've had more than most men are given. More than most men can steal, for that matter. I'm going to stop bitching."
New file
"You amaze me. Will you now dedicate your services to the State?"
"What State? The State's dead. My seif-centeredness is as human as your fanaticism."
The stranger's voice spoke again, in beautiful incomprehensible words-and Corbell saw him. His face was beyond the car's forward wall, beyond the metal, as if the metal were transparent. A hologram? Corbell leaned forward.
It was the bust of a boy, fading below the shoulders. He was twelve or so, Corbell guessed, but he had the poise of an adult. His skin was golden, his features were a blend of races: black, yellow, white, and something else, a mutation perhaps, that left him half bald; he had only a fringe of tightly curled black hair around the base of the skull and over the ears, and an isolated tuft above the forehead.
The face smiled reassuringly and vanished. The car shot forward and down.
Corbell was on a roller coaster. He pulled out a chair arm and hung on. The car fell at a slant for what felt like half a minute. Then there was high gravity as car and tunnel curved back to horizontal.
Light inside, darkness outside. Corbell was beginning to relax when the car rolled, surged to the left; rolled, surged to the right; steadied. What was that? Changing tunnels?
His ears popped.
Peerssa spoke. "Your speed is in excess of eight hundred kilometers per hour and still accelerating. A remarkable achievement."
"How do they do it?"
"At a guess, you are riding a gravity-assisted linear accelerator through an evacuated tunnel. You are about to pass beneath the Pacific Ocean. Can you still hear me?"
"Barely."
"Corbell, answer if you can. Corbell, answer. . ." Peerssa's voice faded completely.
"Peerssa!"
Nothing.
Corbell's ears and sinuses felt pressure. He worked his jaw. There was no reason to panic, he told himself. Peerssa would pick him up when he reached Antarctica.
The hissing sound of motion was sleep-inducing. Corbell was tempted to lie down-preferably with his feet forward, because there would be deceleration at the end. To sleep, perchance to dream.
What kind of dreams does the last man on Earth shave while traveling beneath the Pacific Ocean at Mach one-and-a-half in a subway system that hadn't been repaired in hundreds of years? He could be stopped beneath the Pacific, to suffocate slowly, while an almost human ghost reassured him that service would be resumed as soon as possible. Peerssa could wait forever for him to emerge.
Too much imagination and I'll scare myself to death. Too little and I'll get myself killed.
Corbell worked his jaw to relieve pressure in his ears. Had Peerssa said evacuated? He poked his head into the helmet to see the dials.
Air pressure was down and still dropping.
He panted as he worked his way into the pressure suit. "Vacuum tunnel, right," he gasped. "Stupid, stupid! The car leaks." And what else had deteriorated in this ancient system of tunnels?
But now the ride was superlatively smooth. Presently Corbell emptied his bladder; then emptied his suit's bladder into the toilet. The urine ran boiling through the bowl without leaving a trace. A frictionless surface.
Hours passed. He dozed sitting up, woke, lay down on his face, didn't like that, lay down on his back with the backpack a bulge under his shoulders and a chair arm under his head. Better. He slept.
A surge woke him. He sat up. He sucked syrup. . . sucked the last of it, and it was almost enough. He felt acceleration; was he going uphill? Half a minute of low gravity, a final surge backward. He felt himself at rest. There was an almost subsonic thump beyond the metal end of the car.
The glass door, and the metal door beyond it, both popped open at the same time. Corbell had just stood up when the thunderclap slapped him backward.
Sometimes you would end a long backpacking trip with aches in every muscle and a mind void of everything except the determination to keep walking no matter what. In much the same frame of mind, Corbell got to his feet and limped toward the doors. His ears rang. His head hurt where he'd bumped it on his helmet. He'd twisted his back. He felt stupid: The thunderclap of air slamming into vacuum should not have surprised him.
"Peerssa!" he called. "This is Corbell for himself. Answer if you can."
Nothing. Where the hell was Peerssa? There was nothing blocking him now, was there?
Corbell shook his head. All he could do was keep wading through the surprises until they stopped him.
There were dim lights far back in a great open space. He picked out couches and alcoves and the faintly glowing lines of a wall map. Numbers at his chin showed pressure normal or a bit higher, temperature warm but bearable.
He opened his faceplate.
The air was warm and musty. He smelled dry rot. He lifted his helmet, sniffed again. A trace of animal smell- "Meep?"
He jumped, then relaxed. Where had he heard such a sound? It was friendly and familiar. Motion caught at his eye, left- "Meee!" The beast came questing through dusty cloud-rug. It was a snake, a fat furred snake. It came toward him in an Sshaped flow. Its fur was patterned in black and gray and white. It stopped and lifted its beautiful cat's face and asked again, like a cat, "Meep?"
"I'll be damned," said Corbell.
Something rustled behind him.
He forgot the furred snake. He was sleepy, so sleepy that in a moment he knew he would pass out. But there were furtive sounds behind him, and he turned, fighting to stay on his feet.
Under a hooded robe of white cloth with a touch of iridescence in it: a bent human form.
While the cat-snake distracted him, she had struck. He saw her in shadow: tall and stooped, gaunt, her face all wrinkles, her nose hooked, her eyes deep-set and malevolent in the shadow of the hood. Her swollen hands held a silver cane aimed at Corbell's eyes.
He saw her for a bare moment while the numbness closed over him. He guessed he was seeing his death.
II
He was on his back on a form-fitting surface, his legs apart, his arms above his head. The air was wet and heavy and hot. Sweat ran in his crotch and armpits and at the corners of his eyes. When he tried to move the surface surged and rippled, and soft bonds tightened round his wrists and ankles.
His pressure suit was gone. He wore only his one-piece undersuit, on a world uninhabitably hot. He felt naked, and trapped.
Light pressed on his eyelids. He opened them.
He was on a water bed, looking at gray sky through the jagged edges of a broken roof. He turned his head and saw more of a bedroom: curved headboard with elaborate controls, arc of couch with floating coffee table to match.
These bedrooms must have been mass-produced, like prefab houses. But a tornado had hit this one. The roof and the picture windows had exploded outward.
The old woman was watching him from the arc of sofa.
He thought: Norn. Fate in the shape of an old woman. She was vivid in his memory, and so was the silver cane in her hand. He watched her stand and come toward him. . . and the fur boa round her shoulders raised a prick-eared head and watched him back. It was curled one and a half times around her neck. The tip of its tail twitched.
Dammit, that was a cat. He remembered a cat like that, Lion, though he'd forgotten the boyhood friend who owned it. Lots of luxurious fur, and a long, rich, fluffy tail. If Lion's tail had been multiplied by three and attached to Lion's head, this beast would have been the result.
But how could evolution cost a cat its legs?
He didn't believe it. Easier to believe that someone had tampered with a cat's genes, sometime in these last three million years.
The woman stood over him now, her cane pointed between his eyes. She spoke.
He shook his head. The bed rippled.
Her hand tightened on the cane. He saw no trigger, but she must have pulled a trigger, because Corbell went into agony. It wasn't physical, this agony. It was sorrow and helpless rage and guilt. He wanted to die. "Stop!" he cried. "Stop!"
Communication had begun.
Her name was Mirelly-Lyra Zeelashisthar.
She must have had a computer somewhere. The box she set on the headboard was too small to be more than an extension of it. As Corbell talked-meaninglessly at first, babbling merely to stop her from
using the cane-the box functioned as a translator. It spoke to Corbell in Corbell's own voice, to Mirelly-Lyra in hers.
They traded nouns. Mirelly-Lyra pointed at things and named them, Corbell gave them his own names. He had no names for many of the things in the room. "Cat-tail," he called the furred snake. "Phone booth," he called the instant-elsewhere booth.
She set up a screen: a television that unrolled like a poster. Another computer link, he guessed. She showed him pictures. Their vocabularies increased.
"Give me food," he said when his hunger had grown more than his fear. When she understood, finally, she set a plate beside him and freed one of his hands. Under her watchful eye and the threat of her cane, he ate, and belched, and communicated, "More."
She took the plate behind the headboard. A minute or so later she brought it back reloaded, with fruit and a slice of roasted meat, hot and freshly cut, and a steamed yellow root that tasted like a cross between squash and carrot. As he shoveled down the first plateful of food he had hardly noticed what he was eating. Now he found time to wonder: where did she cook it? and to guess that she used the "phone booth" to reach her stove.
The cat-tail dropped from the old woman's shoulders onto the bed. Corbell froze. It wriggled across the bed and sniffed at the meat. Mirelly-Lyra thumped it on the chest and it desisted. Now it crawled up onto Corbell's chest, reared and looked him in the eyes.
Corbell scratched it behind the ears. Its eyes half closed and it purred loudly. Its belly was hard leather, ridged like a snake's, but its fur felt as luxurious as it looked.
He finished his second helping, feeding some of the meat to the cat-tail. He dozed off wondering if Mirelly-Lyra would shake him awake.
She didn't. When he woke the sky was black and she had turned on the lights. His free hand was bound again.
His pressure suit was nowhere in sight. Even if she freed him she would still have the cane. He didn't know if the "phone booth" worked. At the back of his mind he wondered if Peerssa, thinking him dead, had gone on to another star.
What did she want with him?
They worked on verbs, then on descriptive terms. Her language was of no form he had ever heard about, but the screen and mechani
cal memory made it easy for them. Soon they were trading information:
"Take off the ropes. Let me walk."
"No."
"Why?"
"I am old."
"So am I," said Corbell.
"I want to be young."
He couldn't read expression in her voice or in the translator's version of his own. But the way she'd said that jerked his head up to look at her. "So do I."
She shot him with the cane.
Guilt, fear, remorse, death-wish. He cried and writhed and pulled at his bonds for eternal seconds before she turned it off.
Then he lay staring at her in shock and hurt. Her face worked, demonically. Abruptly she turned her back on him.
His thrashings had frightened the cat-tail. It had fled.
"I want to be young-" and blam! And now her back was rigid and her fists clenched. Did she hide red rage, or tears? Why? Is it my fault she's old? One thing was clear: She was keeping him tied up for her protection and his own. If she used the cane on him when his hands were free, he might kill himself.
The cat-tail crawled back onto his chest, coiled, and reached to rub noses with him. "Meee!" It demanded an explanation.
"I don't know," he told the beast now rumbling like a motor on his chest. "I don't guess I'll like the answer."
But he was wrong.
She freed one of his hands and fed him. It was more of the same:
two fruits, a steamed root, roasted meat. She fed the cat-tail while she was at it.
The fruit was fresh. The meat was like overdone roast beef sliced moments ago. She had been out of sight behind the headboard for no more than a minute. Even a microwave oven wasn't that fast, or hadn't been in 1970. It stuck in his mind. . .
And he had to go to the bathroom.
She was irritatingly, embarrassingly slow to understand. He knew she had the idea when she began to pace, scowling, dithering as to whether to leave him in his own ifith. Eventually she freed him, first
(from behind the headboard) his wrists, then his feet. She stood well back, covering him with the cane, while he went into the middle closet.
Alone at last, with the door blocking her eyes, he let out a shuddering sigh.
He wouldn't try to escape. Not this time. He knew too little. It wasn't worth the risk that she wouldn't let him go to the bathroom again. It wasn't worth the risk of the cane.
The cane: It had reduced him to a groveling slave, instantly, twice. He had never even considered keeping his dignity. In that, the cane lost half its power: He could feel no shame. Still, he knew that too many applications of the cane would leave him nothing like a man.
He was a shell of a man reanimated by electrical currents and injections of memory RNA. He had been changed again and again, but whatever he was, he was still a man. What the cane might do to him was cruder, more damaging.
He would cooperate.
But: She was mad. Even if sane by the standards of her time- unlikely-by Corbell's she was mad, and dangerous. Old and feeble as he was, he would have to escape before she killed him.
The "phone booth" must be working; he'd seen no microwave oven here in the bedroom. Good.
Calling Peerssa would have to wait. He dared not ask after his pressure suit; it might show that he was thinking dangerous thoughts. And even if Peerssa were still in the solar system, how could he help?
Corbell left the booth and returned to his spread-eagled position on the bed. Mirelly-Lyra moored his hands from behind the headboard, then his ankles. They resumed their conversation.
The translator skipped words. He missed some of it before he realized what he was hearing. Then he asked questions, got her to back up for the blank spots. He heard it in bits and pieces:
She was Mirelly-Lyra Zeelashisthar, a citizen of the State. (The State? He wondered about that. But she described it in much the way Peerssa had, except that her State had been the government of all known worlds for fifty thousand years-Corbell's years, for the Earth had not yet been moved.)
In her youth she had been supernaturally beautiful. (Corbell tactfully did not question this.) Men went incomprehensibly mad over her. She never understood the force that drove men to such irra
tionality, but she used her sex and her beauty as she used her mind:
for advancement. She was born hyperactive and ambitious. By the age of twenty she was high in the ranks of Intrasystem Traffic Control.
Because she was now in a position of responsibility, the State conditioned her. After conditioning, her ambition was not for herself alone, but for the good of the State. The conditioning was routine- and, Corbell gathered from later data, it didn't quite take.
If she advanced the State's ambitions by guiding the courses of spacecraft within the solar system, certainly she advanced herself. And she came to the attention of a powerful man in a collateral branch of the bureaucracy. Subdictator Corybessil Jakunk (Corbell heard his name often enough to memorize it) was not her direct superior, but he could do her some good.
So powerful a man was allowed some leeway for his personal desires, that he might serve the State more readily. (The old woman saw nothing wrong in this. She was impatient when Corbell did not understand at once. It may have formed a spur to her own ambition.) His personal desire was Mirelly-Lyra Zeelashisthar.
"He told me that I must be his mistress," she said. "I wished more stature for myself than that. I refused. He told me that if I would share his life for a four-day period, he would gain for me a position in full charge of the Bureau. I was only thirty-six years old. It was a fine chance."
She played him as she had played other men. It was a mistake.
Corbell had wondered why he was being made captive audience to an unsolicited soap opera. He began to find out. Three million years later, at what looked to be eighty or ninety years old, she was still wondering what had gone wrong. "The first night I used a chemical to help. To make one want sex-"
"An aphrodisiac?"
It went into the computer memory. "I needed it. The second night he would not let me use chemicals. He used none himself. I had a bad time, but I did not complain then or on the third night. On the fourth day he begged me to change my mind, give up my position, become his woman. I held him to his promise."
For seven months she was Head of the Bureau of Intrasystem Traffic Control. She was then informed that she had volunteered for a special mission, a glorious opportunity to serve the State.
It was known that there was a hypermass, a black hole, at the center of the galaxy. Mirelly-Lyra was to investigate it. After some preliminary use of automated probes, she was to determine by experiment whether (as theory predicted) such a black hole could be used for time travel. If possible, she was to return to her starting date.
"Why did he do it?" she wondered. "I saw him once before I left. He said that he could not bear to have me in the same universe if I was not his. But this was not what he offered at all!"
"He may have thought," said Corbell, "that four days of ecstasy would do it. You'd throw yourself into his arms and beg not to be sent away."
For a moment he feared she would use the cane. Then she broke into dry cackling laughter. He saw something likable reflected there, before her face drooped in brooding hate. Now she looked like death itself, the Norn. "He sent me to the black hole. I saw the end of everything."
"So did I."
She didn't believe him. At her urging he described it as best he could: the colors, the progressive flattening of core suns into an accretion disk, the swelling of the Ring of Fire, the final drastically flattened plane of neutronium flecked with smaller black holes. "I only went in as far as the ergosphere," he said, "and that was only to get me home fast. Did you really go through the singularity?"
She was long in answering. "No. I was afraid. When the time came I did not think I owed the State that much." Her conditioning had worn off to that extent, at least. She had circled the black hole, using its mass to bend her course back on itself, and headed for home. She was eighty years old, still healthy and still beautiful (she said) due to the rejuvenation medicines in her ship's dispensary, when she reached Firsthope.
He checked the times with her. Did her Bussard ramjet accelerate at one gravity all the way? Yes. Twenty-one years each way. Her ship was far superior to Corbell's Don Juan-and looked it. It was a toroid, bigger than Don Juan, and with a cleaner design.
Firsthope was a colony just being established around another star when Mirelly-Lyra left So!. She hoped that Firsthope would not have records of her defection.
Firsthope fired on her. What she at first thought was a message
laser carried no modulation at all: It was an X-ray laser, designed to kill.
She tried again. The next system resembled Firsthope: It held a world of Earth's mass and Earth's approximate temperature range, whose reducing atmosphere had been seeded when the State was still young. Perhaps it had been colonized in the seventy thousand years she had been gone . . . and it had been. She was fired on, and she fled.
"I was bitter, Corbell. I thought it was because of me, because of what I had done. All the worlds would have my record. There was no hope for me. I went to Sol system to die there."
She had already recognized stars in Sol's projected vicinity. At Sol she was not fired on. But the sun was expanding toward red giant status, and Earth was missing. Bewildered, she investigated further.
She recognized Saturn, and Mercury (heavily scarred by mining, just as she had left it), and Venus (showing the signs of an unsuccessful attempt to terraform that useless world). Uranus was in a wildly altered orbit between Saturn and Jupiter, if that was Uranus. Mars bore a tremendous scar, a fresh mare probably left by the impact of Deimos. "The State was going to move Deimos," she told Corbell. "It was too close. Something must have happened."
She found Earth orbiting just inside the orbit of Mars.
Corbell asked, "Any idea how they did that?"
"No. Deimos was to be moved by fusion bombs successively exploded in one crater. Moving an inhabited planet could not be done that way."
"Or who did it?"
"I never learned. I landed my ship and was arrested at once, on my record, by children."
"Children?"
"Yes. I was in a bad position," she told Corbell, smiling wanly. "Even at the last, when I landed on Earth itself, it may be that I hoped my beauty would sway a judge. But how could I sway children?"
"But what happened?"
Earth was ruled by children, twenty bifiion children aged from eleven years to enormous. "It was young-forever that did it. The State had discovered an ideal form of young-forever," the old woman said. "Parents can see to it that their children stop growing older at
an age just below-what is your word? When girls begin their cycle of blood-"
"Puberty."
"Just before puberty, they are stopped. They live nearly forever. There is no resultant rise in numbers, because these Children do not have children. The method was far better than the older method of staying young forever."
"Older method? Of immortality? Tell me about that one!"
Suddenly she was enraged. "I could not find out! I learned only that it was for the few, for the dictator class alone. When I arrived it was no longer used. My lawyer knew about it. He would not discuss it."
"What happened to the solar system?" he asked.
"I was not told."
He laughed, and desisted when she raised the cane. So the State hadn't let her play tourist either.
She let the cane's tip fall. "They told me nothing. I was treated as one not entitled to ask questions. All that I learned I learned from my lawyer, who seemed a twelve-year-old Boy and would not tell his true age. They learned my crime from my ship's log. They sentenced me to-" Untranslated.
"What was that?"
"They stopped time for me. There was a building where some criminals went to be stored against need." The bitter smile again: "I was to be flattered. Only unusual breakers of the law were thought to be of future need to the State. People of high intelligence or with good genes or interesting tales to tell to future historians. The building would hold perhaps ten thousand, no more. I was lucky they let me keep my medicines. At that I could only choose as much as I could carry."
She leaned close above the water bed. "Never mind this. Corbell, I want you to know that there was an earlier form of immortality. If we find it, we can both be young again."
"I'm ready," said Corbell. He pulled at the soft bindings on his wrists. "I'm on your side. I'd love to be young again. So why not untie me?" It can't be this easy.
"We may search a long time. I have already searched for a long time. I must have your youth drugs, Corbell. They may not be as
good as the dictators' immortality, but they must be better than mine."
Oh.
He had to answer. "They're aboard ship, in orbit. They can't help you anyway. You're probably older than I am, not counting the time I gained in cold sleep." He felt discomfort from the sweat pooled under him; he felt more sweat starting; he felt his helplessness. He saw her raise the cane.
She waited until he had stopped thrashing before she said, "I understand you. You come from a time earlier than mine. Your medicines are more primitive than mine. I cannot use them. So you say."
"It's true! Listen, I was born before men landed on the Earth's Moon! When the cancer in my belly started eating me alive I had myself frozen. There was-"
"Frozen?" She didn't believe him.
"Frozen, yes! There was the chance that medical science would find a way to heal the cancer and the damage done by broken cell walls and-" His defense ended in a howl. She held the cane on him for a long time.
He heard: "Open your eyes."
He didn't want to.
"I'll use the cane."
His eyes were clenched like fists, his face a snarl of agony.
"A frozen man is a preserved corpse. You won't lie again, will you?"
He shook his head. His eyes were still closed. Now he remembered what Peerssa had told him about phospholipids in the glia around brain nerves. They froze at 70° F, and that was the end of the nerves. He'd been committing suicide. And why not? But he'd never, never convince the Norn.
"Let me speak this right," said Mirelly-Lyra Zeelashisthar. "I won't tell you about the first time I was taken from the zero-time jail. The second time happened because the zero-time generator had used up its power source. More than a thousand of us came suddenly into a world that was baked and without life. The weather was hot enough to kill. It killed most of us. The rain came down like floods of bath water, but without rain we would all have died. Many of us reached this place where days are six years long and nights are six years long, but life is still possible. I was old. I didn't want to die."
Resigned, he opened his eyes. "What happened to the others?"
"The Boys captured them. I don't know what happened after. I escaped."
"Boys?"
"Don't be distracted. For many years I used my time only to stay alive. I searched for the dictator immortality, but I never found it, and I grew old. I was half lucky. I found a small zero-time, a storage place for records in the forms of tape and of chemical memory, and for gene-tailored seeds. At first I kept my medicines in it. Later I emptied it out to make a zero-time jail just for myself. Then I altered the subway system to take any passenger from the hot places directly to me. I made warning systems to free me from zero-time when the subway system was in use.
"Do you understand why I did all of this? My only hope was the advanced medicines that must be carried by any long-range explorer. One day an explorer would come back from another galaxy or from one of our sateffite galaxies. He would know no better than to land in places of Earth that are too hot. He would need to come to the polar places immediately." She stood above him like a great bird of prey. "The subway system would send him to me, carrying the medicines developed in my future, that will let me grow young when my own medicines have only let me stay old. Corbell, you are that man."
"Look at me!"
She shrugged. "You may be a thousand years old, or ten thousand. What you must know is this: If you are what you say, you are useless to me. I will kill you."
"Why?" But he believed her.
She said, "We are the last of the State. We are the last of people. Those who remain are not people anymore. If we could grow young, we could breed and raise more people. But if you do not have the medicines, of what use are you?" He heard her try to soften her voice. His own voice said to him, "Consider. You are too old for even your advanced medicines to affect you. I am different. Give me back my health and I will search out the real immortality that the dictator class used. You are old and frail. You will rest while I search."
"All right," he said. The old woman was a Norn, right enough. She was both life and death to him now. "My medicines are in orbit. I'll
take you to my landing craft. I'll have to contact my ship's computer."
She nodded. She raised the cane, and he flinched. "If you break your word, you will take your own life, when I let you."
III
When she was safely on the other side of the headboard, Corbell let himself relax. An almost silent sigh of released tension . . . followed by a woffish grin and an urge to whoop, savagely repressed. At last Corbell had set himself a goal.
He had come down to die on Earth. But this was better.
His hands came free. He sat up, but she gestured him back with the cane. She made him put his wrists together and bound them before she freed his ankles.
The cloth stuck to his wrists like bandages. He didn't think he could pull loose.
The bedroom's picture windows had stretched before they broke. The edges were like lines of daggers curved outward. He followed Mirelly-Lyra, stepping carefully through the daggers, into knee-high grass.
She gestured him ahead of her, toward a bubble-car like those he had found in One City. Where his feet fell big insects fled, whirring. It was even hotter outside, but at least there was a breath of breeze. The sun sat on the horizon, huge and red, casting long blurred shadows. A hard-to-see red circle on the red sky, smaller than the sun, must be Jupiter.
The car seemed to rest on the very tips of the grass blades. It did not shift as Corbell climbed in. Mirelly-Lyra gestured to him to slide over (with the cane, the cane that was anesthetic and instrument of torture and what else? He was afraid to learn) and climbed in beside him. She bent to the console, hesitated, then punched numbers. "We go for your pressure suit," said the translator at her belt.
The car moved smoothly away. Mirelly-Lyra half relaxed; she was not steering. Already Corbell knew that he could not return by car. He didn't know the destination number of the house.
Down the hill and into a narrow valley the car drove, accelerating. Now they were moving at hellish speed. Corbell gripped a padded bar on the dashboard and wished he dared close his eyes.
She was studying him. "You did not use such cars?"
"No." Inspiration made him say, "We didn't have such things on Dogpatch."
She nodded. The knot in Corbell's belly eased open. God help him if she came to believe that he had left Sol system ahead of her. He had to convince her that he came from her own future.
But there must have been inventions he would know nothing about, things humanity would not have forgotten. Like what? A bathtub designed to fit human beings? A cold cure? A permanently sharp razor blade, or a treatment to stop the beard growing at all? A hangover cure that works?
If only I'd read more science fiction! Well, coming from another plar?et gives me some leeway- "I really thought I was the first man to reach the galactic core," he said. "Your trip wasn't even in the records."
"How old are you?"
"About six hundred," he said offhandedly. "Our years. In Earth years that's about-" Don't get tricky. Count on her not knowing much about the Earth she came back to. "-five hundred and thirty. How about you?"
"Nearly two hundred. My years, not Jupiter years."
"I'm surprised you never ran out of medicines."
"The children let me take my supply with me into zero-time. I keep them there so that they will not spoil."
A thrill ran up Corbell's neck. She'd keep the food there too, cooking it in large batches and then stopping time for it. That way her meals would always be freshly cooked. And that private jail of hers must be very close to one of the "phone booth" termini.
"What was your sun?" she asked.
The only sun he could even spell was Sirius. "I never heard it called anything but 'the sun,'" he said. "Just how much did you learn about the real immortality, the one the dictators used?"
"Only that. When a dictator died it was through violence." She ~cow~cd. "Such events were remembered. My lawyer told me stories of one dictator warring on another, of war spreading to their families. Old stories from far before his time. From the sound of it, the dictators no longer served the State, even then. Only themselves."
"Like Greek gods" he sad. He heard the gap: Mirelly-Lyra's box had not translated his remark. "Powerful and quarrelsome," he amplified. "Mortals did well to bow when the gods passed and otherwise try not to get caught in the wheels."
He glimpsed details of scenery as they flashed past. Green-andbrown hills. Groves of dwarf trees. He looked for birds, but saw none. They went over a sharp crest, and Corbell's stomach dropped away.
The car sped down toward what even Peerssa would have called a city.
It showed black outlined in red, with the red sun almost behind it. There had been a geodesic dome. A piece of the frame, a dozen linked hexagons, lacy-thin, still stood along one city border. But the city itself retained the dome shape. In the center of a polar coordinate grid of streets sat an enormous cube with bulging sides: the transportation nexus. Spires and glass slabs sloped away from it; the tips of the tallest buildings defined the shape of the lost dome.
A tall glass slab near the center had fallen against the great cube, where, bent in the middle, it leaned for support like a drunk against a hree friend. Otherwise this city, Four City, was almost undamaged. One City had largely been ruins. Perhaps Four City was younger than One City; perhaps its dome had protected it from the elements longer.
Green dwarf forest and green-and-gold grassland, the vegetation ran downslope to surround the city on three sides. It stopped sharply at a nearly straight borderline that ran past the city's far edge. Beyond that line, a five-to-ten-mile width of barren borderland stretched to meet the bright blue of ocean.
Strange, Corbell thought. Then it came to him that Four City must have been built before the world grew hot and the oceans receded. It was that old, anyway. But something else was strange about Four City. It had not spread out along the shore. What must once have been a curved line of beach was bare of buildings. No roads joined it to the city. Corbell, peering, made out regularly spaced black dots that might have been "phone booths."
He asked, "Do you know this city well?" Play tour director. Where's your private jail, Mirelly-Lira?
She said, "Yes."
He dropped it. "From here we go to the west caost of-"
"I know. My machines watched your landing."
He had almost grown used to the car's reckless speed, but when they swooped into the city his composure self-destructed. The streets had teeth: big chunks of fallen masonry, jagged sheets of glass. The car swerved around them, tilted forty-five degrees and more to take corners, straightened and tilted again, while Corbell strangled the padded bar.
The Norn studied him with shrewd old eyes. "You're badly frightened. I wonder what your people used for transport."
"Phone booths," he said at random. "For long-distance travel we used dirigibles, lighter-than-air craft."
"You traveled so slowly?"
Sweating, he said, "We weren't in a hurry. We lived a long time." For an instant he considered telling her the truth. Get it over with. Her deal could work for him. They would use her medicines to make him young. Young Corbell would search out the dictators' immortality while frail old Mirelly-Lyra waited it out in a rocking chair. It made good sense.
But Mirelly-Lyra was crazy.
The car swerved violently, ducked under something huge and solid. Corbell looked back. Embedded in the street like a Titan's spear was a girder of Z-shaped cross section. It was as long as the average Four City skyscraper was tall.
The car slowed and eased to a stop beneath the great rectangular face of an office building. Corbell let his death grip relax. The old woman was prodding him with the cane, gesturing him out. He got out. She followed.
The design of windows on the face of the building was not rectangular; the panes (largely missing) were laid out like a pattern in stained glass. And there were curlicues above the great glass doors. Corbell, still shaking in the aftermath of terror, pulled himself together. He needed to remember these; they might be an address. Two commas crossed, an S reversed, an hourglass on its side and pushed inward from the ends, and a crooked pi.
Two sets of doors dropped into the floor to let them through, then slid back up.
Mirelly-Lyra took them through a lobby padded in cloud-rug, then through a corridor lined with handleless doors. "The lifting boxes don't work," she explained. They climbed stairs: three flights, with pauses to rest. They were both panting when Mirelly-Lyra turned down a hallway.
Corbell's fingers worked steadily at a button on his undersuit.
He'd been wearing it since Don Juan took off. 11e'd washed it several hundred times. He twisted and twisted at the button. One thick flexible "thread" joined it to the fabric. It would have to part all at once.
More doors without handles. Mirelly-Lyra stopped beside the sixth door. She pressed something in her hand against the center of the door. As the door swung open she put the unseen thing back in a pocket and gestured. Corbell passed through ahead of her. He dropped the button as his fingers brushed the jamb.
It was the first big risk he'd taken. He had no choice. He had to be able to re-enter this place.
Mirelly-Lyra kept her eyes on Corbell as the door closed behind her. It closed on the button. . . and she didn't notice. Corbell was looking around him, everywhere but at the door.
Desk covered with widgetry; cloud-rug; "phone booth"; picture window. The offices were mass produced too. There were minor differences. The "phone-booth" door was transparent. The picture window was intact, and rain had not ruined the desk or the rug.
Corbell's pressure suit and helmet had been dumped on the desk. He picked up the helmet in his bound hands. He called, "Peerssa! This is Corbell for himself calling Peerssa for the State."
There was no answer.
"Peerssa, please answer. This is Corbell calling Peerssa and Don Juan."
Nothing. Not a whisper. And Mirelly-Lyra was watching.
"My ship may be around the other side of the planet," he told her. But Peerssa set up relays! "Or the autopilot may still be holding an equatorial orbit." But he wasn't, he'd changed it! Where was Peerssa?
Then he remembered. Mirelly-Lyra had altered the subway system. Wherever Corbell had come out, wherever he was now, it wasn't where Peerssa had aimed his instruments. As far as Peerssa was concerned, Corbell had never emerged from the subway system.
I will wait until I am sure you are dead, Peerssa had said. Then I will search other systems for the State.
He would have to bluff. "If he's still in equatorial orbit, we'll have to call from my landing craft." He had to explain equatorial orbits to her by drawing in the dust on the desk. Then she understood.
She said, "We must use the tunnel cars. Take your pressure Suit. Mine is in the terminal."
The "phone booth" was too small. Mirelly-Lyra clearly did not trust Corbell that close to her. She held him covered while she drew a symbol in the dust: the crooked pi. "Push this key four times," she said. "Then wait for me. You cannot outrun my cane."
He nodded. She watched him through the door. He paused to note that four of the eight symbols on the keyboard matched the four he'd seen over the entrance.
He pushed the crooked pi four times.
Zap, he was elsewhere. The world beyond the door snapped into another shape. Vast empty space, rings of couches humping from the floor: Here was another intercontinental subway terminal. Corbell fumbled in the belt pouch of his pressure suit, found a circle shape. His hands were trembling violently. Clear plastic disk: right. With both hands he guided it into the coin slot. He stabbed at the compressed hourglass symbol, 4 '1 -1 -4.
Nothing at all happened. The "phone booth" in the Four City Police Station must be out of order.
Mirelly-Lyra Zeelashisthar stepped into view from another booth and looked about her, eyes narrowed and jaw thrust forward. She saw him, still in the booth with the door closed.
He jabbed frantically at the crossed commas. Remorse, terror, guilt, death-wish flashed in his brain and were gone, and so was the light. In blackness he rammed his shoulder against the door and ran blindly out into.
Corridors . . . corridors with pale-green walls and glowing-white ceilings. Wide doors with no knobs, only small plates of golden metal that might have been electromagnetic key plates. He turned right, left, right, and stopped, face to a wall, sucking air. Fatigue soaked into his legs like an acid solvent.
Would she know how to trace his "call"? He couldn't know. He ran.
A bigger door at the end of the corridor dropped open to reveal stairs. One long ifight ran diagonally between a sheer wall and the tinted glass-mosaic face of the building, with doors at landings along the ffight. He froze in fear. If she was out there, she'd see him!
Then he remembered. They'd passed a building with this pattern on its face. From the outside it was a mirror.
He was (he counted) three stories up. He still didn't know what kind of place this was; but it must be some kind of~public service facility.
All right. By the time she got here, if she ran as he'd been running, the old lady would be exhausted. She'd want to go down. So did he, and she'd guess that. He went up. At the fourth story the door dropped for him, then closed as he passed it. He climbed another ifight, then looked back and saw footprints in the dust.
He stopped, resting, listening.
No sound.
He walked backward down the stairs, stepping in his own footprints as best he could. When the fourth-floor door dropped, he threw his helmet through, then his pressure suit. Then he jumped for
it.
He'd left a pair of sloppy footprints, but no other tracks. And now he was on cloud-rug. He stooped to brush away two dusty footprints, picked up his suit and helmet and staggered on.
He couldn't seem to get enough air.
CHAPTER 5 STEALING YOUTH
I
He staggered through clean, geometric, empty, sound-deadening corridors. Doors did not drop for him. Twice he tried holding his plastic disk against what he thought were entrance plates. It was all he could think of, and it didn't work. Whatever this place was, he-or the dead man Corbell had robbed-was not authorized to pass these doors.
The pressure suit became too heavy for him. He dropped it.
He talked to the helmet, but it didn't answer. Where the hell was Peerssa?
Corbell had freed Peerssa from all orders past and future. Corbell had gone unprotected into an unknown environment; had later dropped out of communication. Jaybee CORBELL Mark II: missing, presumed dead. By now Peerssa could be rounding the sun on his way to some nearby star. Searching for the State.
Peerssa's interstellar laser beam could have burned the old woman down as she crossed a street. But Corbell's computer had abandoned him. . and Corbell hurled the helmet viciously into the cloud-rug, but not as hard as he wanted, because his hands were still bound. The blind faceplate stared after him as he went on.
His legs were starting to cramp.
The clean air was turning musty with the old smell of something truly dead when Corbell came at last to an open door. He thought the mechanism had failed. . . and then he saw why. A small hole had been burned through the gold plate.
Beyond the doorway was cruder damage and a richer smell.
It had been a surgery, he guessed. At least, that looked like an operating table with machinery suspended above it, and the machinery included scalpels on jointed arms.
There were crumbled brown skeletons. One, naked, lay in a pooi of dust on the table. Two others sprawled against a wall. Their stained and damaged uniforms were in better shape than the bones within. The cloth bore charred slashes that continued into the bones, as if men had been hacked by a white-hot sword. These men had been man-sized, Corbell's size.
The wall behind the desk had a hole in it big enough to drive a car through. Bombs?
Corbell heaved himself up on the table with the skeleton. He rubbed the bandages against a scalpel edge . . . and behold! His wrists were free.
Now he moved to the great gap in the wall. He was getting his breath back, but his heartbeat was fast and fluttery. What he wanted most was a chance to lie down and rest. . . until he looked down into the vault.
It was two stories high and windowless. To the left, a thick circle of metal almost the height of the wall, with a stylized ship's wheel set in it. It looked for all the world like a bank-vault door. There were guard posts: glass cubicles set just below the ceiling, and in the cubicles were skeletons armed with things like spotlights with rifle butts.
A bank vault seemed out of place in a hospital.
There were shelves on all three walls, floor to ceiling. The few items still on the shelves were not gold bars. They were bottles. The floor, ten feet below Corbell, was covered with broken glass.
There was a hall-melted metal thing, an animated dishwasher very like the machine that had attacked Corbell and Peerssa as burglars. Other machinery looked intact. There was an instrument console that might have been (given the hospital motif) diagnostic equipment. There was a matched pair of transparent "phone booths," glass cylinders with rounded tops. Corbell saw these and lusted.
The invaders had brought a ladder. He climbed down carefully, treating himself as fragile. Four skeletons at the bpttom showed that the invaders had not had things all their own way. He stepped carefully among the bones. As a hospital the place made a good crypt- better than most, in fact. Cool. Clean. No insects, no scavengers, no fungus.
But it wasn't death Corbell was running from. It was a silver cane and a change more humiliating than death.
The lights were still on in the vault. Indicator lights glowed on the console. With luck the booths would work, too. He stepped into one and looked for a dial.
No dial, just a button set in a slender post. No choice about where he was going. Corbell wondered if the Norn would be waiting at the other end. He made himself push the button anyway.
Nothing happened.
He cursed luridly, pushed out of the booth and tried the other. The second booth didn't even have a door, and there was fine dust floating in it. What the hell?
What was this place? The drugs on the shelves must have been incredibly valuable. Four human guards and a metal killer, a single door that looked like it would stand off an atomic attack, an instantelsewhere booth with only one terminal and another booth you couldn't get out of. . . an invading army wiffing to go up against all that, with bombs. . . and suddenly he knew where he must be.
It was a double jolt.
Those shelves must have held dictator immortality. And they were bare.
Everything fitted. Of course you'd store geriatric drugs in a hospital. The booths must lead directly to dictator strongholds-and even they could only appear in the closed booth. If the man in the booth wore the right face, someone outside could dial him into the booth that had a door. If not, he was a sitting duck for the laser weapons.
And the vault door might well stand an atomic attack. But thieves had come through a wall-and maybe they'd used atomics too. Did Mirelly-Lyra know about this place? She must. She'd have kept looking until she found it.
And so would Corbell, and she knew it: The Norn herself had told him about dictator immortality. He had to get out of here.
Exhaustion had become an agony. He would climb the ladder if he must, if he could, but he tried the vault door first. And it was open! All of his strength andweight were just enough to swing it wide. The invaders must have left by the door they could not enter.
So did he, very gratefully. The line of "phone booths" was on this floor. He had walked a zigzag path from there; he might have trouble finding his way back- He saw the booths as he rounded a corner. And he saw MirellyLyra Zeelashisthar, holding her cane like a gun and squinting at something in her other hand. Just before he ducked back he saw her look up at the ceiling with her teeth bared.
It wasn't him she was tracing. It was his pressure-suit helmet. Peerssa, good-bye. Corbell counted to thirty, then stuck his nose around the corner. She wasn't there. He tiptoed through the cloudrug to the next intersection and peered around it. She wasn't there either, and he crossed the intersection at a leap and was in the nearest booth with the disk in his hand.
Mirelly-Lyra would not have liked the way he was smiling.
Two commas crossed; an S reversed; an hourglass on its side and pushed inward from the ends; a crooked p1. The corridors vanished. In blackness he thumbed the door open and stepped out into blackness. A gust of warm, damp wind whipped at him, and at the same time he saw dim light: a slender, hot-pink crescent with the horns down, at eye level.
He stood still while his eyes adjusted. A world took form around him.
He was on a flat roof, looking into a solar eclipse. They must be fairly common these days, with both Sol and Jupiter occluding so much of the sky. But the effect was beautiful, a hot-pink ring lighting sea and city with red dusk. He wished he could stay.
Mire!ly-Lyra must be finding his pressure-suit helmet about now.
There were stairs. He would have been happier knowing how tall the building was, but he didn't. He had to walk all the way to the bottom-and he was reassured to recognize the building that housed Mirelly-Lyra's office. He paused for a precious moment of rest, then climbed back up three flights. Next question: Had the Nom noticed that the office door wasn't closed?
The sixth door was open a crack, blocked by a fallen button. The door resisted his weight, then gave slowly, let him in.
They must have turned these offices out like popcorn boxes, he thought. Did it connect to the exploded bedroom? He had bet his life on it. He stepped into the "phone booth" and looked for the intercorn panel.
Five buttons? He pushed the top one.
Through the glass door he saw salt dunes running downslope to a distant line of brilliant blue. He was in one of the seashore booths. He pushed the second button.
Back in the office, he pushed number three.
In red-tinged darkness he saw a triangular floor plan, walls and roof exploded outward. A dark doughnut shape, coiled just where he would have stepped on it, raised a white face, questioningly.
He shouted, "Yeeehaa!"
"Meep?"
He jabbed the fourth button down. The startled cat-tail vanished.
Sunken tub, shower. . . He thought of hot water and comfort and sleep, and the hell with it. Would the old woman set her private zerotime "jail" next to a Turkish bath? Why not? But he pushed the bottom button anyway, to see what there was to see.
Thoughts of sleep returned. His knees sagged. His muscles and bones seemed to be melting. But he saw. Ovens and cupboards to left and right. A long dining table, floating, and lines of floating chairs. The hooded Norn at the far end, and the silver cane foreshortened, end-on. Behind her, shards of a picture window, and a bundle of thick cables running over the sill.
He stabbed two buttons and kicked out at the door.
II
He was trying to remember something. It was urgent.
See now, I hit an intercom button, then the door button, then kick out. Or the other way around? Intercom, door, kick out. Didn't wait-couldn't wait-never thought so fast in my life.
Pressure on his ankles. He thrashed a bit, got his elbows under him to lift his head. The door of the "phone booth" was trying to lift under his ankles. Beyond, the great red sun was almost whole again, a chunk still missing behind black Jupiter. Closer: A desk floated above cloud-rug.
He smiled and closed his eyes.
It was seconds or minutes before he stirred himself. The sun was still cut by Jupiter. He stood on the edge of the door while he looked for something to wedge it. He'd got out by the skin of his teeth. With the silver cane pushing him down into unconsciousness, he'd hit the intercom button to take him to the office, the button to open the door, then got his legs across the door to wedge it. So far so good, but- Assume the Morn was still guarding her zero-time device and her
drug supply. He hadn't seen the marvelous machine, he couldn't even guess what it looked like, but what else could the cables be for? It must be there, and now Mirelly-Lyra knew he was after her drugs. By now she would know that the intercom to the office wasn't working. She would assume Corbell had blocked the door open.
He couldn't let the door close. She'd be out of it an instant later, right on his heels.
Corbell began to panic. He'd barred her from the general "phonebooth" system by barring her from the office. She couldn't use that. She couldn't come after him in the car; they'd left it here, just outside the entrance. So . . . yeah. Her fastest route to him was by intercom to the beach. Jog down to someone else's intercom booth, thence to someone else's office, dial for this building. By now she could be trotting down from the roof. And he still hadn't found anything to block the door!
He stripped off his undersuit and wedged it in the door. It was cool for a moment, until the sweat dried on him. Now he was naked-and ashamed; what he saw when he looked down was not a self to be proud of. But who would see him but Mirelly-Lyra? The old woman was probably in no better shape.
His personal possessions had dwindled to an ancient, withered body (stolen) and a single plastic credit card disk (also stolen). He took them down three ifights of stairs and out.
The car was where they had left it.
It wouldn't start. He looked for a key or a key slot. If the Norn had taken the key he would have to walk. He found a slot, empty, and said a bad word before he noticed its size. . .
The plastic disk fit it perfectly.
The cars must be public taxis. That was convenient. Now, if the cars' destination codes resembled the booths', all he had to do was punch for the police station. And get a gun!
As he reached for the keyboard his hands started to shake. Then
other muscles were twitching, and suddenly he was in convulsions. Strange noises came from his mouth. In fury and~ despair Corbell realized that the felon's corpse had finally failed him; he was dying, and the timing was wrong, WRONG!
Please, no! Not till the battle's over.
He locked his hands together and forced them at the keyboard. He punched the compressed hourglass, tried again and missed, again and hit, had to stop for a minute. Neck muscles locked and twisted his head backward, agonizingly, and he saw a car coming around the gently curved drive like a homing missile.
The convulsions were getting worse. He stabbed at the hourglass key again, and again, and. . . He didn't know how often he'd hit it. When the car began to move he let the convulsions have their way.
Mental agony. Unconsciousness. Now convulsions. Maybe he ought to be compiling a list of what the silver cane wouldn't do.
It wouldn't stop a bubble-car. The convulsions eased. Presently he could turn his head. Mirelly-Lyra was far behind him, out of her car, still firing. His motion carried her around the curve of the drive.
He tried to relax. Random muscles locked and released in his legs, his back, his neck, his eyelids. He wasn't just feeling the aftereffects of the silver cane. He had been through too much nightmare. He was too old for this kind of thing. He had always been too old to play Monster and Villagers through a maze of cityscape with an armed madwoman behind him.
"Come on, calm down," he whispered. "It's all over. Unless. .
Unless there was a tracking device in Mirelly-Lyra's dashboard. Or in her cane.
He would still get there ahead of her. Allow, say, one minute to search the police station for a gun. Then cut his losses, get out via the booths, dial at random and keep running.
Oops! The booths didn't work. He had tried to dial the police station earlier.
The car tilted far over, rounded a corner and was on one of the radial streets. Corbell watched the rear, his chin propped on the back of the seat. It was less unnerving than watching rubble come at him.
He saw the edge of the hexagonal dome go past him. The street ended. He was crossing sand. Corbell turned to see barren salt dunes flowing past him. Far ahead, the blue-and-white line of ocean came toward him.
The car ran straight toward frothing white breakers, crossed them and headed out to sea at something like ninety miles per hour.
III
Corbell's voice was a rusty, querulous whine. He didn't like it. It was interfering with his search.
It said, "All right, Corbell! You won the argument. If your medicines were better you wouldn't have tried to steal mine. Now let's talk!"
It wasn't much of a search. He had hoped that Mirelly-Lyra might have stored food in her car. But he'd opened the glove compartment, and he'd looked under the seats, and where else was there? Slit the upholstery?
Corbell was hungry.
"You'll find the talking switch on the far right of the panel. Just push it upward. Corbell?"
Sure. And then you'll track me down and- But Corbell was tempted. He could ask her about food. He could ask her how to turn off the receiver.
The car zipped over the waves toward whatever destination its idiot brain had read from Corbell's spastic directions. Beneath the edges of a thick gray-black cloud deck, the sun and crescent Jupiter had drifted apart along the horizon. The sun was lower now, its underside flattened.
Something lifted out of the red sunglare. He thought it was a botthe-nosed dolphin until its size registered. It was halfway to the horizon, and lifting like a blimp released! Its head tilted just a bit, and it looked him over while it slowly settled back into the frothing red sea.
A dolphin the size of a whale. So we killed the whales off after all, he thought. And later there was an ecological niche. .
"I must guess you're hearing me, Corbell. I'm tracking you toward the southernmost continent, toward what used to be the Boys' capital city. You can't lose me from your path because you can't leave your car. Talk to me."
It seemed she was tracking him anyway. He flipped the switch up and said, "Is there any food aboard this car?"
"Hello, Corbell. If you try to steal my drugs again you will kill yourself. I've placed traps."
"Then I won't."
"Then we will be searching in separate places.~ I give you a year to find the dictator immortality. I wish I could give more, but you know my condition. If you will find the drug, I will become your woman. Otherwise I wifi kill you."
He laughed. "A difficult choice."
"You have not seen me when I was beautiful. I am the only woman for you, Corbell. There are no others left."
"Don't count on too much. Peerssa says I'm low on sex urge." That upset her. "Have you never desired women, Corbell?"
"I was married for twenty-two years."
"What is married?"
"Mated. Under contract."
"Was there sex? Did you enjoy it?"
Suddenly Corbel missed Mirabelle terribly. He mourned her, not because she was dead, but because she was gone. And her other half went on and on, through a world grown more and more hallucinatory. . . . If only he could have talked it over with Mirabelle!
"In sex and in all ways, our life was purest ecstasy, as is usual in marriage," Corbell said with a ifippancy he did not feel. "I'm sorry I brought it up."
"I had to know."
Just to stick a pin in her, he said, "Has it ever occurred to you that I might not want the dictator immortality? Maybe I'm content to grow old gracefully."
"You tried to steal my drugs."
"You've got me there."
"There is no grace to growing old. One year, Corbell."
"Hey, don't hang up. Have you any idea where I'm headed? I don't even know where we were."
"There is a continent that covers the South Pole. You are aimed there. As for where we were, there is a continent whose long tip points at the southernmost continent. We were nearly at the tip. I suspect your target to be the city of-" And for a moment her own voice broke through, before his resumed: "Sarash-Zillish, the capital of Earth's last civilization."
Departing Cape Horn for Antarctica, he thought. Where in Antarctica?
"What destination did you type?"
He risked telling her. "I was trying to get to the police station. What with the way my muscles were jumping around, I really don't know what I hit."
"Could you have struck the key more than four times? Five would send you to World Police Headquarters in Sarash-Zillish."
"Maybe." He laughed. "Well, it got me away from you."
"One year, Corbell."
In a year he could be dead, though in fact he felt pretty good. The aches, the exhaustion, the twitchies were going away. But the hunger had attained a fine cutting edge. "In an hour I'll be dead of starvation. Is there any food in this car?"
"What do I eat?"
"When you reach Sarash-Zilhish, go to the park." She gave him an address for the keyboard of his taxi. "The park is untended now, but any fruits you find are edible, and most of the animals can be eaten if you can catch them."
"Okay."
"You will not find dictator immortality there. There were never adults in Sarash-Zillish."
"Hey, Mirelly-Lyra. How long have you been looking?"
"Perhaps ten years of my life."
He was startled. "I got the impression you'd been at it for a century or so."
"I was unlucky. When the Children revived me from zero-time, they told me they would search out the dictator immortality f or me. I had no choice but to believe them, but they lied."
"There was a vault in the hospital-"
She laughed. "There is a vault in every hospital in every city that remains on Earth. I have searched them all. What vaults haven't been rifled contain nothing but poisons. The medicines have decayed with time and wet heat."
"Tell me more. What did you learn about this dictator immortality after you landed, before they locked you up?"
"Almost nothing. Only that it was there."
"Tell me. Tell me all the wrong answers so I don't have to waste my time on them."
IV
The Children had been waiting when Mirehly-Lyra descended from her spacecraft. Her first guess was that they must be the result of a State breeding program. Dignified, self-possessed, articulate, they displayed an adult wisdom she took for supernormal intelligence. Later she realized that it was the result of lifetimes of experience.
She had never seen their like.
They had never seen hers.
There were adults in the world, but they were a separate breed. She never met any, but she gathered that there were no more than a few thousand of them-all dictator class by courtesy, all using the dictator immortality. They kept themselves apart from the billions of children.
Children. Boys and Girls together, integrated. She thought nothing of it then. Later she remembered.
The Children tried her by her own law, for treason. She gained the impression that the proceedings were a farce for their amusement. Perhaps that was paranoia. They were punctilious; they did not mock her; they did not deviate from laws seventy thousand years old. For her part, Mirelly-Lyra kept her dignity at all times, as she was at pains to inform Corbell.
They sentenced her to the zero-time jail.
"Didn't you ever hear anything about the interstellar colonies?"
"No, nothing."
"It figures. They must have broken away from the State long before you landed. That's probably why they fired on you. Not because you were Mirelly-Lyra, but because you were from Earth."
There was a silence. Then, "I never understood that. Are you saying that the State broke apart?"
"Yeah. It took a hell of a long time, that's all. The State was a water-monopoly empire." Corbell was talking half to himself now. "They tend to last forever, unless something comes in from outside and breaks them up. But there wasn't anything outside the State. The collapse had to wait till the State made its own barbarians."
Hesitantly Mirelly-Lyra said, "You talk as if you have known many kinds of State."
"I predate the State. I was a corpsicle, a frozen dead man. When the State was a century or so old, they . . . turned a condemned criminal into Jerome Corbell."
"Oh." Pause. "Then maybe you know more than I do. How could the State break apart?"
"Look at it this way. First there was the State expanding through the solar system. Later, much later, there were a lot of copies of the State, one for each star, all belonging to one big State run from Earth. Then. . . well, I'm guessing. I think it was children's immortality.
"You made a big thing out of the advantages of making elevenyear-olds immortal. Okay, fine. What if the other States didn't accept that? Look at how different your children's State would be! The other States probably claimed they were the original State. That makes the solar system State heretics-its citizens, unbehievers."
"What would happen then? Would they stop talking to each other?"
Corbell laughed. "Sure. Right after the war. Right after both sides tried to exterminate each other and failed. That's got to be the way it happened. It's inevitable."
"Why?"
"It just is."
"Then," she said slowly, "that's what happened to. .
"What?"
"When they took me out of zero-time there was more than one State on Earth. Maybe that was inevitable, too. Let me tell you."
The Children led Mirelly-Lyra to the peak of a squat silver pyramid. Widgets of silver and clear plastic floated around her: threedimensional television transmitters, and weapons that affected the mind and will. They turned off the pyramid; its mirror-colored sides became black iron. They put her in an elevator and sent her down.
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