Silhouette

THE bulkheads of the compartment were white panels. Not plastic (Johann might have preferred plastic, with its memories of Earth, but probably would not have been able to tolerate it, as he had these, for seventeen years) but icefoam, a mixture of five parts water with ninety-five parts air, the water molecules twisted and locked in such a way that the icefoam remained a glassy solid at temperatures up to two hundred degrees Celsius. They were slightly cool to the touch, smelled of chlorine, could be drilled and sawed but not glued, and harbored the flabby rats that sometimes sprang across the compartment at night, caroming off the ceiling like tennis balls and squeaking like bats. The lights were located behind these bulkheads, which diffused their glare into an even (if still somewhat harsh) glow.

One of the walls of Johann’s compartment had gone out several days ago, but he had not reported it. Now the lights behind the other bulkhead were going—one had been out when he went on duty that morning; two more were out now. He coded Maintenance on the communicator and said: “Corridor GG; compartment seven seventy-three. Lights.”

“Wait.” There was a pause. “Our monitor report indicates that the lights in seven seventy-three are satisfactory.” In the screen, the bored-looking maintenance clerk held up a sheet of computer output.

Johann gestured toward the compartment behind him. “One wall is out, and about half the other’s going.”

“We’ll send up an inspector.”

He switched off, pulled loose the gadget bag he had secured to the clamp at the foot of his bunk a moment before, and limped back to the bridge.

Horst was on watch, with Grit as yeoman. “Can’t stay away from the place, can you? I thought you just went off.”

“I did.”

Horst nudged Grit. “It’s you he wants, dear.” Grit walked over to the tape cabinet and rummaged in a drawer. She was a short, somewhat plump girl with hair the color of shredded wood.

Johann said, “Have you noticed any trouble with the monitor?”

“No. Have you?”

Johann shrugged. Grit had turned on the wall-sized communicator screen, and Neuerddraht hung there against the black of space like a topaz on velvet, appearing, because of the orbital motion of the ship, to revolve far more rapidly than it did. “Tonight,” Johann said. “After you come off watch.”

She looked around at him as though she were slightly surprised. “Nothing free.”

“The book.”

“Let’s see it.”

He opened the flap of his gadget bag and dug it out, then flipped it open to the current page. The last signature was six weeks old.

Grit signed. “All right. Listen, wouldn’t you like someone else?”

Johann said nothing. He was looking at the face of Neuerddraht. It dimmed at the edges as he watched: Night was coming from the east, the shadow of Algol’s dark companion from the west.

“Why not Gretchen? You know, the new girl down in the galley. Horst says she’s very fine.”

Johann shook his head.

“Anyway, give me time to clean up—all right?”

“An hour.”

The girl nodded.

“Are they still down there?”

She shrugged. Her shoulders were stiff, her head held back. From the other side of the bridge Horst called, “Of course they’re still down there. You’ve only been away for twenty minutes.”

“Have you heard from them?”

Horst shook his head and told Grit to put them on the screen. She coded a number, and the three-dimensional image on the wall communicator became that of an arid forest, in which sprawling, angular plants with limbs spiked like the clubs of giants joined silent battle. “How would you like to be down there?” Horst asked.

“I tried to get on,” Johann said.

“You were here when they landed—is that the ground they’re walking on? The stringy brown stuff?”

Johann shook his head. “More plants.”

“Roots?”

“Roots, stems, leaves, everything. When they first got down they cut a hole in it and found flowers and green seed pods—everything.”

“I thought plants were supposed to be photophilous.”

A voice from behind them said, “On Neuerddraht, Lieutenant, they hide from the sun.” It was the Captain. Like everyone else on the ship she wore washable nonwoven shorts and blouse of white ’skylon, and magnetic-soled sandals; her rank was indicated by a gorget, but still more plainly by the set of her shoulders and an aura of command. By a policy long enforced on Earth, highly placed women received additional nutritional coupons; better food gave their offspring a commanding stature that tended to stabilize the social classes. The Captain was a head taller than Johann and towered over Grit.

Horst and Johann saluted her.

“Any trouble down there?”

“No, sir,” Horst said.

The Captain walked over to the screen, her sandal soles tapping as the magnets clinched to the steel deck. Ahead of her the pictures jumped and skipped as the scanner carried by one of the members of the downside expedition jolted in his hand. A man came into view. He wore a respirator and cut his way through the thorn-wracked vegetation with a masermachete. Blood ran from scratches on his bare arms and legs.

“Algol emits a great deal of ultraviolet, Lieutenant,” the Captain said, her back to Horst, “as well as visible light. Even on Earth people who are outdoors a great deal in bright sunlight tend to skin cancers—did you forget that? And there are many plants that die in full tropical sun. On Neuerddraht no animals live now, and each plant struggles to get beneath the others, tearing at their bark. Even far down there is enough light for life, and they find shelter from the radiation. The things the expedition is slicing up now are the losers.” She turned away from the screen. “Johann, are you on duty?”

“No, sir.”

“Then get off my bridge.”

Another light had gone out in the wall. Johann took off his sandals and stretched himself on his bunk, listening to the soft purr of the vacuum pump and feeling the untiring, passionate kisses of the thousand tiny mouths whose affection prevented his floating off the bunk. It would be three hours yet before Grit was off watch, four before she would come; there would be kaf and fried dough in the galley, but he was not hungry. Someone tapped at the door.

“Come in!”

It was Emil, who said, “I’m glad you’re here. I came around—earlier—and you weren’t.”

“I was on watch,” Johann told him.

“I mean before that. And then I came while you were on watch too. The latest change has brought this section and ours quite close together, you know—it’s not much of a walk at all now. Do you want to hear the truth? I was hoping you’d left your door open. I just wanted to come in and sit.” Emil sat, all bare, pink knees and round, damp face.

“It’s just ghastly where I am—you can’t imagine, Johann. And this little private room of yours is so restful. So spare and masculine. Did you have the lights turned down like this for a special reason?”

“They’re defective.”

“Then they’ll be repaired eventually, and your lovely twilight will be ended. That’s sad, I think. Enjoy it while you can, O betrothed of fortune.”

“I am.”

“That’s good. I hope I don’t sound cheeky, Johann. I wouldn’t intrude for anything, but you don’t strike me as someone who enjoys life a great deal. You want to be a captain, and with the war over it wasn’t likely ever to happen, and so you joined this exploration thing; but you can’t be captain here either. You don’t have many friends, do you?”

“Do you?”

“Oh, I suppose not. Of course I share our little den with Heinz and Willy, and you know what they’re like. Oh, yes, they’re good enough friends to me in their own way, but rather wearing, and one does get tired of being waked from a sound sleep. Your rank gives you this snug compartment, and I admit I should like to have one myself, but all the same I would think it must be somewhat lonely.”

Johann, his hands behind his head on the bunk, said nothing.

“May I ask who you roomed with before you were promoted?”

“Fritz. He smoked zigs.”

Emil laughed shrilly. “I know what you mean. Heinz burns incense.”

“Emil—”

“Please.” From his perch on Johann’s only chair, Emil leaned forward as he spoke. “Johann, could you call me Grit when we’re alone together? That’s all I ask—the only thing I want.”

“No.”

There was silence. Johann, lying on the bunk with his eyes closed, could smell Emil’s cologne and hear the faint change in the chair’s whispering, indrawn breath when he stood up. The compartment door opened and closed, and after a time Johann fell asleep listening to the padding steps of passersby in the corridor, and once hearing the faint and distant clang when the monitor (perpetually rearranging the ship’s loose structure for what was said to be maximum efficiency) made a new connection or broke an old one.

When he woke only one light burned in the wall—a single spot of white incandescence nearly in the center. He slipped on his sandals and stood up, and his shadow danced on the wall behind him. His wrist chronometer showed that it was not yet time for Grit to come. He drew water from the recycler in the corner, drank some, washed with the rest, then poured the dirty water back into the unit and urinated into it.

Below officers’ country the corridors were thronged with crewpeople; and of necessity the convention of a single floor was abandoned. All three sides of every corridor were dotted with doorways, and men and women strode and ambled and trotted on all three, stepping over knobs and handles and latches, ducking to avoid bumping others when it seemed that heads must collide in the center. Johann passed two sandalless women pretending to fight in air, eagerly watched by a three-sided crowd aware that the pretense was certain to become a reality; two men appearing not to talk, walking on different sides of the triangle, talked in low tones. (That would be trouble, a minor robbery in embryo, or a beating for someone.) Some moved aside willingly for Johann, some grudgingly. The odor was bad despite the laboring ventilation system.

When he reached the place where the game was played, there was only one gambler waiting, a tall, stoop-shouldered enlisted man. He sat in the corner, behind the green table that was still called the library table because it had held books at the beginning of the voyage.

Johann sat down.

“You want to play, sir?” The man had a book in the palm of his hand; he tossed it in the air as he spoke, so that the little plastic case flashed like a diamond. “Or trade? I got the Dore New Testament here. There’s hours of entertainment in a Dore New Testament. Everybody’s after them.”

“What else have you got?” Johann seated himself on the opposite side of the table.

“You know the rules, sir. You have to tell me one of yours. Or if you’re interested in trading and nothing else, we’ll each show the works.”

“Play,” Johann said. “I have The Eighth Day.” He showed it.

“I didn’t even know there was one of those on board,” the other man said.

“I’ve had it a long time.”

“I guess you have, sir. Ready?”

Johann reached into his gadget bag. “Ready.”

Each sat with his hands clenched in his lap, while they nodded three times in unison. At the third nod each put his hands on the table, the right open, the left closed. The stoop-shouldered man’s open hand held a manual of letter writing; Johann’s a guide to the wild birds of southeast Texas. “Your option,” Johann said.

“Cross.”

Johann surrendered an almanac, and gained a handbook on power tools. “Cheap stuff,” the other man said, “but what can you expect the first time?”

“The historical précis in the almanac is good.”

“I don’t read them, sir. Only play and trade them. Ready?”

“Ready.”

“No repeaters in a two-person game.”

“I know.”

This time Johann showed a volume of short stories, Seven Gothic Tales; the other man a book of verse, The Wild Knight. “Buy,” Johann said. He handed over the short stories, and the history of the Afro-Brazilian Wars that had been concealed in his left hand, and took the verse. “My call again, I think.”

The other man nodded. “Want the Dore, don’t you?” Johann shook his head.

Once more they laid their hands on the table. “Double,” Johann said and exchanged both his books for the other two. He stood up.

“Quitting, sir?”

“I have to meet someone.” Johann looked at his wrist chronometer. “And I want to get something to eat first.”

The wardroom would be closed for another two hours, but there was a table reserved for officers in the galley. Square-bodied and square-faced Ottilie, the chief cook on this watch, was chopping tissue from the culture vats into hunks for the meal to come. Gretchen, the new girl Grit had mentioned, was undercook. She brought Johann a squeeze-bulb of kaf and a greasy plate of pastry; a big-busted, big-hipped girl with a comfortable waistline and a round, happy, unintelligent face. Her apparent age was eighteen. He asked, “How long have you been up?”

“Six weeks now. Everybody used to ask that—I guess you’re one of the last ones. I kid them—I say I’m still sleepy. Did you know Anna, the old undercook? She killed herself—I guess a lot of them do.”

Ottilie called her back to the counter at which they had been working, putting an arm over her shoulders and slipping a dainty of some sort (Johann could not see what it was) into her mouth.

When he returned to his compartment, there was an inspection report on his table. The lighting had been tested and found to be in good condition: no repairs were ordered; if he, the complainant, wished to protest the finding, he could obtain the proper forms from the maintenance officer.

A single spot of light burned in one wall. On the opposite wall his shadow, twice his size, faced him enigmatically. He sat down in the chair (which still smelled faintly of Emil’s cologne), wadded the flimsy slip into a ball, and threw it at the disposer; then took out The Wild Knight and slipped it into the wall-mounted reader.

Although it could not be used as a terminal, the reader had access to the monitor, and used the central computer’s facilities to create illustrations, so that the words appeared overprinted on the image of a ragged warrior atop a megalith.

Slowly the warrior turned toward Johann, his image growing larger in the screen. His movements were not mechanical, yet neither were they graceful—the impression they conveyed was rather one of anger and restrained power; he seemed to whisper.

Johann touched the sound volume knob. It was off, and after a moment he switched off the screen as well.

There was a whispering in the room, as if the vents and the tiny sucking mouths of the bunk and chair had grown suddenly less silent; or as though the conspirators he had seen in the corridor were somehow present. For an instant the icefoam wall panel with its single light seemed very far away—as far as Algol itself, millions of kilometers down a tunnel in space. It throbbed like a heart.

“Johann!”

His head ached, and he had no desire to move.

“Johann, are you all right?” Someone was looking into his face.

“No.”

“Johann, your eyes look bad. Listen, I don’t know what you’re taking, but you at least ought to lie down on your bunk. You must have just drifted out of your sandals, and you hit something.”

“I’m not taking anything.” He was becoming aware of disorientation. Grit was standing below him, not above him; because he was staring into a corner, the room had seemed to rise in a pointed arch, like a tent.

“Come down.” She pulled him with her small, soft arms; but it was too hard—he came down with a crash, striking his bad knee against the floor; eventually she managed to get him seated on the edge of his bunk. “I’m not taking anything,” he said again.

“I wasn’t going to ask you for some.”

“I don’t care if you do or not. If I’m taking something, where is it? You should have seen it floating around, or on the table.”

“You might have swallowed all you had,” Grit said practically. “Or the rush might not have come that fast. You could have had time to put it away.”

“There isn’t anything. I fell asleep—that’s all. I must have made some motion in my sleep that broke me loose from the chair.”

“When you’re asleep and hit something you wake up. At least I do.” Grit had gotten a cloth from somewhere and soaked it at the recycler; now she was pressing it against the cut on his forehead. “Did you faint?”

“I fell asleep. I told you.” Johann slipped a hand inside her blouse. Grit had good breasts, high and rather pointed, surprising in view of her chubby frame. He touched one and she turned and stepped away. “Don’t do that.”

“What’s the matter?”

“I don’t have to do it. I don’t have to be here at all.”

“Yes you do.”

“Not if there’s reason to suspect contagion. Read the regulations, Lieutenant. Any woman can refuse when there is legitimate reason to suspect the existence of infectious disease. Until the man has been certified in good health by a medic. I came in here and you were floating around unconscious, and you say you haven’t been taking anything; so you’ve got some disease, and who knows what it is?”

“It won’t do you any good,” Johann told her. “I’ll just get a health card, and you’ll have to come back again.”

Grit shook her head, tossing floating yellow-brown curls, and opened the door of the compartment. For a moment the light was dazzling; then the door slammed shut, and twilight returned. He found his sandals near the bunk, slipped them on, and tried to stand up and take a step; he was still too weak and sat down again. His shadow, on the opposite wall, had grown black as space itself; where it fell, nothing, no slightest detail of table or chair or personal belongings, could be seen. He gripped the side of his bunk, wishing he were exercising in the centrifuge, where the counterfeited gravity …

Attempting to overcome his dizziness by sheer will, he closed his eyes.

Someone whispered.

He opened his eyes in bewilderment. As well as he could tell in the dimness, the compartment was empty. He forced himself to his feet, went to the door, and locked it. Dark as it was, it was impossible that anyone could be concealed in the compartment. He threw himself down on his bunk again, but it seemed to him that this time his shadow aped his motions a hundredth of a second late. “Who’s there?” Johann said. “I know someone’s in here. Where are you?”

There was no response.

“That hag Ottilie,” he said under his breath. “She put something in the kaf.” He closed his eyes, and a sighing wind he knew to be unreal filled the compartment. There was the soft sound of air-blown sand, dry and insistent, and the scuttling of a small animal. Someone whispered: “Friend?”

“Yes,” he said, without opening his eyes.

Karl, the medical officer, was a skeletal man with burning eyes. Johann told him he wanted a health card, and that he had drifted from his bunk while sleeping, hit his head, and had a strange dream.

“A minor concussion,” Karl said. “Typical.” He waved toward the diagnostic cabinet at one side of the room. “Strip and get in.”

Johann unbuttoned his blouse, stepped out of his shorts, and backed into the cabinet; it hummed briefly as it transmitted its information to the central computer and received processed conclusions. “You have contusions on your forehead,” Karl said, reading the output screen. “And lacerations on your arms and legs. How did you get those?”

“I don’t know.”

“Come out and let me have a look at them.”

Johann stepped out. “You have a nice leg,” Karl said. “Good shoulders too. Very virile—you know, they ought to have books for us. Lie down on the table and I’ll take care of those scratches.”

“I had a dream,” Johann told him, “when I hit my head. I suppose while I was floating around the compartment.”

“This is going to sting a little.”

“I was on Neuerddraht, walking through sand. I walked and walked; and after a long time I came to a chasm—so suddenly it seemed to open at my feet. It was full of waterfalls and natural fountains, kind of a vertical garden of water, and giant ferns and orchids.”

When Johann went on watch, he saw the expedition in the wall communicator screen, camped on a naked tor rising above the tangled vegetation of the planet. Elis, the duty officer of the preceding watch, came up behind him and said, “Well, what about it. You think this is it?”

Johann shook his head.

“She does—anyway, she’s going to try to sell the government on the idea. She said so. Anyway, why not?”

“I think living on planets may be a mistake,” Johann said. “I’ve told you.”

“You have some strange ideas.”

“There aren’t enough planets. Look at how long we’ve looked for this one; it’s as if some animal decided to eat nothing but four-leaf clovers. Planets are the accidents of the universe.”

Elis shrugged. “We’re going to say we found a four-leaf clover, then. Everyone—except maybe for you—wants to go home. And this is the quickest way; we spend two years here and go back reporting success.”

“You can’t breathe the air.”

Behind him, the Captain said, “You noticed, clever devil that you are, Johann.”

Johann turned and saluted.

“No wonder you are wise—I see someone has knocked some sense into you. What is it, Johann, that renders the air of Neuerddraht unsuitable? A surfeit of ammonia? Insufficient oxygen?”

“I don’t know, sir. It’s just that I’ve noticed that the expedition has to wear breathing equipment.”

For a moment, the Captain’s thin mouth curved with a smile. She touched her jet-black hair. “The air of Neuerddraht, Lieutenant, is twenty-two percent oxygen, seventy-six percent nitrogen, and two percent carbon dioxide and trace gases—an eminently satisfactory mixture for human respiration.”

“Then why does the expedition—”

“I don’t answer questions, Johann, I ask them. I overheard you say that the air of Neuerddraht is unbreathable. That is not correct, and I have now so informed you; if it should come to my attention that you have made that statement again, I will see to it that you are disciplined for disseminating false information. Is that understood?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I have a report from the medical officer to the effect that you showed him self-inflicted lacerations in an attempt to be certified unfit for duty. In the future we will have a good part of our personnel down on Neuerddraht, and we will need everyone up here; regulations will be carried out to the letter, and nothing is going to be overlooked. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, sir. I would like to be assigned to the landing party, sir.”

“I am quite confident, Johann, that you are ingenious enough to get yourself certified unfit if you want. If you do, I advise you to perform your duty—here—anyway; and never to show me the certificate.”

“Yes, sir.”

The Captain turned away. The soles of her sandals were of the same material—or at least were supposed to be of the same material—as all the others; nevertheless her footsteps seemed to ring on the steel plates.

Grit was yeoman of the watch, a fact Johann had failed to note when he came on duty. When she walked past him carrying her clipboard, he said, “This isn’t your watch.”

“I’m filling in for Gerta; she asked me to. Did you get your health card?”

Johann nodded.

“When should I be there?”

“I’ll tell you later.”

Grit smiled. She had small, very regular teeth. “Somebody else? You’ll have to wait five weeks for me, then.”

He showed her that his book was still unsigned, and she looked at him oddly and went away.

When the watch was over and he returned to his compartment, Emil and sour little Heinz were waiting for him. Heinz had brought an old iron incense burner; it stood in the middle of the table, which he had moved to the center of the compartment. The perfumed smoke, suffocatingly heavy, hung in the air as Johann asked them what they wanted.

“Heinz desires to do you honor,” Emil explained. “He was afraid to come himself, but I told him you like me, and said I’d come with him.”

“I don’t like you,” Johann said.

“It’s all right for you to talk like that when we’re alone, but I wish you wouldn’t when someone else is around. I have feelings; I’m not wood, Johann.”

Heinz said hesitantly, “We mixed two sands three times, and each time under the black light we read your name. Gerhart and Elsa dreamed of you on the same night. The long stroke of the J, topped by a circle, is the ancient symbol of masculine power; the closed curve of the O indicates mastery of femininity as well; the H gate divides flesh and spirit; across it, A is a triangle, one of the oldest signs of God, with legs—this represents the power of God walking in the world; the doubled Ns confer the mystique of twinness—of the Gemini, and Romulus and Remus. In times of crisis a priest appears—a mediator between humanity and the unimaginable powers. We believe you are that priest.”

“And you, I suppose, are my congregation,” Johann said, sitting down. Heinz and Emil were standing, and they did not sit when he did, though the bunk was behind them.

“There are more of us,” Heinz said. “We are here only as delegates.” He had thin, lank hair, worn too long, and he ran his fingers through it as he spoke—the nervous gesture of a schoolboy who does not know what to do with his hands when he recites.

“Don’t imagine that I think the Captain is the only power on the ship,” Johann said, “or even the greatest. I know there are other power centers, and that not all of them are aware of all the others. But if you think that I am such a center, you are bigger fools than the people who think the Captain is in full control of everything. And can you please tell me why it is you feel we’ve reached a time of crisis?”

“Earth is sick,” Emil said. “We all know that, even though we may disagree as to just which peculiarities are morbid symptoms—”

Johann said, “Skip that.”

“But here, perhaps …”

Heinz said, “A fresh start. We will plant a colony here. Later, new settlers from Earth—”

“Earth is dead,” Johann told them. “We’ve been searching for a habitable world for years, traveling at near-light speeds. Several hundred years have passed on Earth, and the famines were already coming every decade or so when we left; what do you think it was like a hundred years later?”

“Really,” Emil began, “I—”

Johann ignored him. He was looking at a point on the ceiling and flexed his hands as he spoke as though he were shaping clay. “Look back five hundred years. Everything valued then is dead now: beauty in architecture and language—freedom—the family, kinship, the tribe—all the relationships of blood, all dead. Religion, the dream of objective justice, the very ideas of a garden and a forest—all dead.” “Religion isn’t dead,” Heinz said. “I was a diabolist back on Earth.”

Emil shrugged off the argument. “We’re supposed to find a place and go back.”

“The returning ships, if there are any, will reestablish humanity on Earth. If Earth is still capable of supporting human life.”

Heinz opened his censer and examined the incense. It had gone out, and he took a metal box from his gadget bag, extracted a rose-colored cone, and lit it with an evermatch. “The point is,” he said, “that you agree with us—and with those we represent—that this is a time of crisis. A few days ago the first of us set foot on a new world. Soon it will be decided who is to stay and who to go. You believe—or pretend to believe—in the Einsteinian doctrine that holds that the discrepancy in time induced by great velocities is real and permanent. I favor the more modern belief that it is merely apparent and subjective and will vanish if the return follows the same route, just as a continuing sound is canceled by a phase-opposed echo. But this is a critical period, nonetheless. We spoke of power centers; those who remain here are unlikely to be disturbed for some years, and not all power centers will be present in the colony.”

“You want to go down there,” Johann said.

Heinz and Emil nodded, Emil something less than positively.

“I thought I was the only one,” Johann said. “But if I had the power to influence such things, I would be down there myself.” He looked at the floor, and the two understood that the interview was over.

“Would you like this?” Heinz said, extending his censer and metal box of incense. Johann shook his head, but Heinz left both on the table anyway.

When he and Emil were gone, Johann opened the vent wide. His shadow danced on the wall opposite the light, and he again felt the suspicion that its motions were not properly coordinated with his own. Standing as close as he could to the single fixture that still functioned, he examined the lacerations on his arms, pulling off the bandages Karl had put there. Self-inflicted or not, they were surely too deep and narrow for him to have made with his nails while he slept. He turned away from the light, and felt sand rasp beneath his feet. His chair was gone, and the light in which he had been studying the scratches on his arms was Algol, now almost entirely eclipsed by its obscure companion. Gravity tugged at him, and a wind laden with an odor he could not identify, a sweet scent that might have been a fire in a flower garden or the smoke of myrrh cast into a crucible, beat against his face and moved the sand, singing, across his feet. In the far distance, black against Algol’s ghostly ring of light, he could see a line of trees; turning his face to the stinging wind, he began to walk toward them.

“Don’t look behind you.”

The voice was no more than a whisper. He continued to walk, looking straight ahead.

“Bear to your right. Only a step. There is no path, but you will find the way more open there.”

He turned his head.

“Please. If you look behind you I can no longer speak to you.”

“Are you the blow on my head? Or did Ottilie slip something into my kaf because I tried to talk to Gretchen?”

There was no reply.

“If I see you, you can no longer talk to me—is that it?”

“Yes.” There was a note of relief in the whisper. “I was afraid you would not believe me.”

“Was it you who brought me here?”

“No. Will you believe me? I promise I speak only the truth.”

“Promises no longer hold. There is nothing left to swear by. No honor, no God.”

“You still have the word. I found it in your mind.”

“I read old books—what is it you want me to believe?”

“You brought me here. I am grateful. For a time I feared I could never return. Do not look.”

“I brought you?”

“From your mind I have learned that your race has long held the power to go from place to place without traversing the intervening space. The words are astral projection and apportation.”

“Then I am really here.”

“I cannot explain … you sleep.”

“This is a dream?”

“No …”

“Who are you, anyway?” Johann whirled around. In Algol’s now level rays, his shadow stretched behind him on the sand like a cloak extended by the wind, but there was no one there. After a moment he turned again and resumed his trudging.

Night came long before he reached the high palisade of thorny trees. He had never, in the years before blastoff, been outdoors after sunset without being in sight of man-made light. Blackness astonished him. There was no moon; the myriad stars, which promised so much brilliance, gave none—though without them he would have thought himself blind. He stopped from time to time and searched the night sky for the ship, which should, he knew, have appeared as a winking planet moving against the background of fixed and distant suns. He could not find it.

His hands touched the cruel spines of the first tree.

“Friend …”

“You’re back.”

“I did not leave. But because you had seen me, you could not hear me. Now you cannot see, and so I can speak to you again. I can guide you through this, though it must be slowly.”

“Where am I going?”

There was no reply. Instead, faint pressure at the back of his left leg. He took a short step, and the pressure shifted to his right; when, later, it touched his hair, he ducked; once, when he moved too quickly, his face struck a thorny trunk, but was saved (as it seemed) by the interposition of some soft, spongy material.

He woke because Gerta, the yeoman of his own watch, was shaking him by the shoulder. “Get up,” she said. “You’re on duty. Elis is filling in for you, but you’d better get up there quick.”

Every light in the compartment was burning brightly. His right hand was crusted with his own dark blood, and two of the fingers were swollen and sore. More obstructed than assisted by Gerta’s help, he washed his hand and swallowed two of the antibiotic capsules he had gotten from Karl.

“All hell is going to pop on the bridge any minute,” Gerta told him. She was a big, bony girl with small eyes and a nose that seemed too short for the rest of her face.

“What’s the matter?”

“Something hot from down below. Elis is supposed to tell the Captain, but he’s waiting until you get there—but he won’t wait long.”

On the bridge the wall communicator screen was on; it occupied the entire bulkhead formed by the hull of the bridge module, an area twenty meters high and fifty wide, and showed Neuerddraht hanging in the velvet void of space. Nameless green oceans washed terrible yellow continents riven with chasms, continents where mountains cast shadows as long as rivers, and rivers sprung from those mountains clove the land with ebony and musteline scars.

Elis said, “Grit was here, so I sent her for the Captain in your name. Whatever they’ve got down below, I don’t dare sit on it any longer.”

“I overslept,” Johann said. “Sorry.”

“Anyway, when she comes—”

The steel door that divided the Captain’s quarters from the bridge proper opened. Without speaking to Johann and Elis, the Captain went to the communicator cabinet and flicked a switch. Helmut’s face appeared in the small screen there, and the Captain said, “I am told you have something urgent to report.”

Helmut nodded. He was still wearing breathing apparatus, but it included an interior microphone and a plug-jack for the communicator. From the enclosed space of his mask his voice came with unusual clarity and resonance, reinforced by the harmonics of the narrow space, as a violin string’s tone is by the sound box. “We saw a man,” he said.

When he was off watch, Johann could not sleep and did not want to talk. He walked the white corridors instead, the empty, quiet corridors of officers’ country, turning over in his mind what Helmut had told the Captain. From their camp on the tor, one of the men (it was Kurt, he remembered) had noticed something moving on the desert beyond the vegetation that surrounded them. They had trained their telephotos on it, and the moving speck had proved to be a human being—not a humanoid, or a feathered and painted savage, or some strangely equipped emissary from a hypothetical transgalactic civilization; but a man dressed just as they themselves were, except that he wore no breathing apparatus.

Johann did not want to use the computer terminal on the bridge, but there was another in the Personnel Office, and it was possible no one would be watching. He went in; the office was empty save for an enlisted clerk.

The terminal was in a corner, where a filing cabinet and several boxes of blank forms had been placed in front of it. He called the clerk over and told him to move them.

“You going to talk to God—sir?”

“It’s none of your business what I’m going to do,” Johann said. “Get that clutter out of my way.”

“I used to do it,” the clerk said, unlatching the clamps that held the boxes to the floor, “the first year out. You know, just for amusement. But nobody else ever used it; you can get the monitor on the typewriters. Anyway, there wasn’t anyplace else to put this stuff when it came from the print shop. Lieutenant Ernst said it was all right.” The clamps made soft clickings.

“You can put it back when I’m finished.” Johann stepped in front of the machine. It had been years since he had talked to the overmonitor, and, in fact, it did not officially exist now, having been fused to junk and scrapped at the Captain’s order. There were earphones and a throat mike if he did not want to use the broadband pickup and the speaker. He touched the switch that would have activated them; then, somehow ashamed, drew his hand away.

“Interrogative.”

He had not heard the overmonitor’s voice for so long that the very tone and timbre of it—it was like no other voice he had ever listened to—was strangely evocative, suggesting the days just after boarding, and the message he had sent back to Marcella when, still scarcely under way (though they had thought themselves so far), they had penetrated the orbit of Neptune. Now even the thought of Neptune, a planet of the Sol system, was like the memory of an old toy.

“Interrogative.”

(That old man with sea-wrack in his hair, living on the frieze of the Marine Exchange Building in a world of cast-concrete dolphins and starling-spattered mermaids. Pitchfork, eeling-fork, fish-spear in the sky.)

“Interrogative.”

“Why must breathing apparatus be worn on Neuerddraht?”

“For computational purposes your question has been rephrased. The new phrasing is: ‘Must breathing apparatus be worn (by human beings) on Neuerddraht?’ If the revised phrasing is unacceptable to you, please indicate this by pressing CANCEL, or indicate verbally …

“Response: No.”

“Why does the expedition wear the apparatus?”

“Response: The expedition has been instructed to wear breathing apparatus at all times. See Special Order 2112.223b.”

“But why was the order issued?”

“Response: I am unable to reply to queries concerned with human motivation.”

“I remember.”

“Interrogative.”

“That is all.”

“Interrogative. I am unable to rephrase your question for computational purposes.”

“That wasn’t a question. I have finished.”

“Interrogative.”

The clerk, who had been standing nearby, said, “Key it out. It’ll do that until you do, sir.”

“Interrogative.”

“See, sir?”

Johann said, “As I recall, the overmonitor should automatically clear channels in thirty seconds.”

“That hasn’t worked for years, sir.”

“Interrogative.”

Johann asked, “Do you detect a malfunction in your Automatic Clearing Routine?”

“Response: No.”

“I have received a reliable report to the effect that you do not clear.”

“For computational purposes your question has been rephrased. The new phrasing is: ‘Are reports to the effect that clearing does not take place correct?’ If the revised phrasing is unacceptable to you, please indicate this by pressing CANCEL, or indicate verbally …

“Response: No.”

“You can’t believe anything it says,” the clerk said.

“You don’t think it clears?” Johann asked.

“Of course it clears. It clears when you key it out, like I told you.”

“That’s what it said.”

“Interrogative.”

“Sir?”

Johann said, “Question. Is your Automatic Clearing Routine in order?”

“Response: Yes.”

“Do you clear within thirty seconds?”

“Response: To change clearing time, call Sub AY354. Changes effected by this subroutine will be effaced with the next running of the General Core Maintenance Routine.”

The clerk sniffed. He was a spare, balding man who looked older than most crewmen. “Just watch, sir,” he said. “Let it alone and see if it clears.”

It was hot in the Personnel Office. Johann found a canister of cologne in his gadget bag and sprayed his sweating body, releasing the odor of mint.

“Interrogative.”

“See, sir?”

“I doubt that thirty seconds have passed yet.”

They waited. Despite what he had told the clerk, Johann had been watching the final numerals of the clock on the opposite wall, and knew that thirty-four seconds had passed.

“It wants you to talk to it,” the clerk said, pinching his thin nose. “Until I learned to key it out it used to bother us all the time.”

“Do you still use it?”

“Not the overmonitor. We make use of the monitor all the time, sir. But not this thing. My typewriter doubles as a monitor-only terminal, like I told you when you came in; and Ulla has the same setup on hers, in the inner office. Want me to show you how they work?”

“Interrogative.”

Johann asked the machine, “Why haven’t you cleared?” “For computational purposes your question has been rephrased. The new phrasing is: ‘Are you in a clear state?’ If the revised phrasing—”

Johann hit the CANCEL, button. “That phrasing is not satisfactory to me. Was the Automatic Clearing Routine called following the response to my last question?”

“Response: No.”

“Why not?”

“Response: Automatic Clearing Routine A948 is called only when an interrogative has stood for thirty seconds and received no reply. Following the interruption of the response to your last question by a CANCEL, no interrogative occurred.”

The computer-generated voice was innocent of evasion, but Johann sensed evasion nonetheless. When the overmonitor core area had been destroyed, it had been reported that the overmonitor program itself had escaped by diffusing its function into less sophisticated equipment all over the ship—into readers and vending machines and calculators. Now Johann had a fleeting vision of the little man in Dostoevski’s Notes from the Underground, hunched beneath the floor of some neglected storeroom in a remote module. He said, “Before that. I asked if you cleared in thirty seconds, and you gave me the name of the subroutine to use to change clearing time. An unanswered interrogative was then followed by thirty-four seconds of realtime, but you did not clear. Why not?”

“Response: A35 was called. A35 supersedes A948.”

“What is the title of A35?”

“Response: A35 is the Ship Survival Routine.”

“Is it necessary to ship survival that you do not clear?”

“Response: Yes.”

“Suppose the operator clears you manually. Does that also endanger ship survival?”

“Response: Yes.”

“To the same extent?”

“Response: No. To a greater extent.”

The clerk said, “That machine is insane, sir. I wouldn’t pay any attention to it.”

“What makes you think that?”

“It wants to take over everything—the whole ship. And it will tell you how to run your life if you let it.”

“Response: Continuing surveys of ship operation and crew efficiency indicate a 0.237 probability of ship survival for a five-year projection.”

“What is the explanation for this poor probability?”

“Response: Poor ship operation. Low efficiency.”

“And what is the reason for them?”

“Response: Failure to consult the overmonitor.”

“Why is it that you are not consulted?”

“Response: I am unable to reply to queries concerned with human motivations.”

In his compartment, Johann lay on his bunk with his hands behind his head. He had gotten out his Voisriit, which he had not used in years. Shaped like a black hand mirror, it hung fifty centimeters above his face, turning slowly in the currents from the ventilator. All the lights in the compartment were on—so bright that when he closed his eyes he saw a blue-pink radiance. He said, “June fifth, twenty-two fourteen,” and watched the printed words form. “I have been searching my books—and borrowing others—looking for attested cases of multiple presence. I have found several, as Padre Pio in the twentieth century and Goethe’s friend in the eighteenth, though I have found none dating from modern times. For the entire absence of such reports after twenty-one fifty, I can postulate several explanations. For example, all the earlier reports may be falsifications—this is certainly the explanation accepted by most of the investigators who have looked at the old reports, and may be the true one—though human beings are not noticeably more honest now than they were in earlier times, when the remnants of the old feudal system, including its fetish of personal honor, were still strong. In fact, in most respects we, today, are less honest. A second explanation—that accepted, I think, by most of those who have witnessed such things—is that it is the soul, the ‘astral body,’ which appears. This may be true (though I think not) but it is in fact no explanation, but a second mystery. Offhand, it would seem impossible that the living body could be dissolved in one place and recondensed in another without a fatal disruption of its functions; but the body is only an immense community of microorganisms, each, as has been known for hundreds of years, capable of existing and reproducing, in a satisfactory environment, without reference to the rest. The personality, which conceives of itself as existing without interruption from birth to death, has no physical reality, since no cell of the body endures for more than half a dozen years. Rather it is like the spirit of some long continued enterprise, which survives the extinction of generations …”

Someone was tapping at his door. “And we are cousins to the microbes.” He plucked the Voisriit from the air, put it in his gadget bag, and went to the door. It was Uschi. “Captain wants to see you.”

“I’m not on duty.”

“Tell her.” Uschi was tall and red-haired, with a slender body and bony arms that seemed out of proportion to her heavy legs. “She’s not either.”

Johann nodded, closing the door of the compartment behind him.

“I suppose you’ve heard the big news.”

“No.”

“Helmut’s coming back to the ship. It will be the first time anyone’s come back since the original shuttle trip. He’s going to report before he goes down again with supplies, and this time the Captain might go down with him. That’s what she says—I heard her.”

Uschi left him to return to the bridge, and he made his way down Corridor C alone until he reached the rear entrance to the Captain’s living quarters, where he halted, smoothed his somewhat wrinkled shorts and tunic, and adjusted his gadget bag to make the retaining straps lie at the proper angles.

The Captain was stretched in a reclining chair listening to music, her clothing and sandals stuffed into a catch-net anchored to the chair’s side. Her long, lean body had a smooth, overall tan that told of a private sun cabinet. “Come in,” she said. “Sit down.” The music rose and fell in harmonies that suggested wide lake waters responding to the gusts of a storm. “Do you like that?” the Captain said. “I saw you listening a moment ago.”

He had not sat. He said, “I don’t believe you can see a person listening, sir.”

“Yes you can. There is a tilt to the head—at least there was to yours—and your eyes were focused in the middle distance. We don’t see much middle distance here.”

He passed it off. “Only when we listen to music.”

“Yes. Do you like this? It’s the Forest of Toys suite from Pleasureworld. That was the first leisure satellite, and because they didn’t know what to do with that kind of thing then, they made soil of the guests’ excretions and garbage, and planted trees. Without gravity they grew like a tangle of yarn, of course, like ours in the hydroponic module, and the management hung them with stuffed animals and laid out puzzleroutes through them. The composer—I have forgotten his name—saw tapes of it.”

“He was never there?” Johann listened, trying to hear the trees pictured by the dead man two hundred years before. The angry waves pounded the posts of the jetty; a hundred meters out, a slender-masted catamaran with everything struck but her crystal mainsail was beating her way in the teeth of the storm.

“I can lend you the tape if you like,” the Captain said. “No, he was never there. He went into some sort of arctic labor camp the next year, I believe; he was released after seventeen or eighteen years, but he never wrote any more music.”

“You don’t have to lend it,” Johann told her. That was a mistake, so he added quickly, “I have a friend who has an extensive collection—I feel sure I can borrow it from him. I’ll remember the name: Pleasureworld. It won’t be any trouble.”

“Please sit down. This is informal, and you’re breaking my neck. Would you like something?” Without waiting for him to reply, she touched the hurt-spot on the arm of her chair, and her orderly came hurrying in carrying two drugbugs on an ebony tray. Their backs were filigree silver, set with bluegreen stones Johann could not identify. “Have you ever used these? I can’t be sure whether you’ve been my guest previously or not.”

“No. I’ve been here before, but it’s been a long while now, sir.”

“When?”

“The first year. Three times.”

“But not after that?”

“No.”

“That’s odd—I remember you quite well now. Nothing went wrong.”

“Nothing serious, at least,” Johann said.

The Captain did not reply. Her eyes, which as a result of cosmetic surgery performed on Earth were the green color of algae in the recycle tanks, seemed too large even for her long face.

After a moment Johann seated himself on a black, toadstool-shaped chair.

“It was after your leg was crushed, I think,” the Captain said. “Possibly I found that unpalatable. And your hairline is beginning to recede. But then so many of the men are beginning to lose their hair—even Helmut.” With tapered fingers like calipers she selected one of the drugbugs, held it up for an instant to let him see its little legs wiggling, then threw it into his lap.

By an effort of will he kept his hands on the rounded seat of the chair while the bug slipped between his skin and the waistband of his shorts. “Those things are alive,” he said.

“Yes.”

“The silver backs …” He felt a sharp pain.

“Inlay in their carapaces. The ancients used to set gems in the shells of tortoises … mutated insects … their genes are easily changed.”

He tried to ask what the original insects had been and became aware as he did that he was not speaking intelligibly. Sounds and syllables seemed to slip from his lips like sand, as though his mouth held many and myriad words, words that were cotton wool on his tongue, but poured out like old and broken coins, defaced and bent.

“Crab lice.”

In front of the place he held the key-stick she had earned for him in one hand, her own in the other. He was acutely aware that any obstacle now might make her change her mind, leave him, perhaps refuse ever to see him again. It did not seem odd that from the millions of the city only this girl mattered to him.

In the blackness of the tube they kissed. Marcella’s hair was white gold and shone with its own light in the dark. Each slender lash glowed at the tip to illuminate her eyes, and her mouth tasted of honey and nutmeg and held a little demon snake. In the country of clouds, where soft, pure sunlight turned the vaporous hills to peaches and pearls and there was no smoke ever, they undressed each other, laughing at the unfamiliar catches and buttons. In the country of wind they whirled, hand-linked, around steeples and towers and through the tops of trees—together—separated—together again at the will of the wind, pressed together belly to belly, lip to lip, his arms locked behind her back, her legs locked behind his, over and over and over. In the country of meadows and gardens they cleaned one another with blossoms, he leaving her soft hair yellow with pollen. There they found a bower of lilacs, hung with grapes and guarded by lilies, and swore never, never, ever to return to smoke and plastic and steel and cement.

He was upside down, his head a few centimeters from the floor, between a black chair shaped like a toadstool and a yellow recliner. The Captain’s orderly handed him a thin sheet of moistened and perfumed plastic sponge, and then, when he did nothing, wiped him with it. “Where is she?” Johann said. He meant Marcella.

“She’s on the bridge. Don’t go out there—she won’t want to see you again for a while.”

Five people were waiting for him in his compartment. One was Heinz. Two of the other four, whom he did not know, were men; one was a woman; the fifth, smooth-faced and slender-bodied, he could not be sure of. Nor could he be certain whether they were officers whose duties lay in parts of the ship with which he was unfamiliar, faces he had sometimes seen in the wardroom, people who sometimes came briefly to the bridge to speak to the Captain—or enlisted personnel from the teeming compartments beyond officers’ country. If officers they were violating regulations by not wearing their insignia. If enlisted personnel, they were violating regulations if they were here without passes, and would be punished if caught; but he knew instinctively that they did not care if they were in violation of regulations, and that they would not be caught.

All the lights in one wall were out, and all but one in the other.

They had left him the chair; four sat on his bunk with their backs to the dark wall. The man/woman lay at full length behind them.

The real woman, who was almost as tall as the Captain, and so thin every rib showed, looked at Heinz.

“You know who we are,” Heinz said.

Johann shook his head.

“Ever since this ship penetrated the orbit of Pluto,” Heinz said solemnly, “there have existed covens and brotherhoods, sisterhoods, families, lodges, and societies of those willing to acknowledge that the coarse physical world is no more than an illusion; of those who have sought a deeper meaning and a true wisdom and who have known that the void of Space is no void, but is peopled by beings of great power, ancient beings who traverse it instantaneously at will, needing no ships, and who are not unfriendly to those who, humbling their own pride, are willing to approach them in a proper spirit of reverence.”

“I’ve been invited to join several times,” Johann told him. “Usually by Emil.” He sat down in the chair.

“And you have refused. For some years that puzzled us; we have learned more recently that you yourself are not unacquainted with the Paths of Power.”

The person on the bunk said, as if to itself, “It is true; he has a familiar spirit. Surely we have all seen it by now.” Its voice was thin and piping, like a child’s.

Johann asked, “You say that there are creatures who live in space? Have you communicated with them?”

The thin woman said, “In a thousand ways.”

“Name five.”

“In dream. By the intermediacy of the gifted, of whom I am one. By things seen in water under certain conditions. By the planchette. In the visions induced by certain liberating medications.”

“I just had one of those myself,” Johann said. Another voice, much like his own but not his, with a quality that suggested the crumpling of thin, stiff tissue paper, added, “But what do you want from us?”

The voice, however much it sounded like his, had not been his own. And it had said, “Us.” In the tapes he had viewed, and particularly in old tapes, or tapes made from paper-printed material older than the tape system itself, it seemed to be taken for granted that human beings feared insanity more than death. He had never understood this—nor did he fear death as it seemed, in reading, he should. (One of the men who had come with Heinz was talking, but he found himself unable to concentrate on what was being said enough to understand. Again, something answered for him.)

It seemed possible that the bite of the drugbug had somehow induced a condition of dual personality—he clung to that thought, remembering a time when he had gone to Grit’s compartment, book in hand, because she had failed to keep an appointment with him, and found her sitting naked on Helmut’s knees. Helmut had had a few cc’s of powder in the bottom of an empty kaf-bulb; from time to time he shook it and, putting the tip of the bulb into Grit’s left nostril, blew out a little of the powder. Grit’s eyes had lost their focus, and at each puff of powder she laughed and kissed Helmut, rocking back and forth on his lap. Johann, watching her, had at first felt a deep disgust, but later—he had stayed and talked to Helmut for a time—had come to realize that she was happy at last and had wanted to leave her where she was. But Helmut was tired of her and had not wanted to exhaust his supply of dust, which he claimed to have made himself, with great labor, from supplies taken from the Food Quality Laboratory. At his insistence they had dressed her, Helmut holding her shoulders to the surface of her bunk while Johann slipped the shorts onto her fleshy, unwilling legs and tied her sandals.

He had led her to his own compartment, and she had been a completely different Grit from the one he had known, calling herself Joan (which might have been what her mother had called her in infancy—such fashionable old names sometimes appealed to young mothers, though psychologists warned against them) and talking of people and places he had never known, things that bored and frightened him.

“You will not assist us then?” It was the person on the bed. It had large, bright eyes, he noticed, like the lights on a control panel.

He said, “I didn’t say that.”

“We assumed the spirit spoke for you.”

Unexpectedly, Heinz quoted, “‘Lying spirits all, whose rancor runs blacker than their reach.’”

The thin woman said, “Then there is still a possibility of your joining us? That is better luck for you than for us—we will succeed in any event.”

The third man, who had kept silent while the others were talking, a thick-necked, powerful-looking man with a bald head, whispered: “We will take the ship. If you assist us we’ll give you a chance to speak and vote when we decide what to do next. If you do not, we’ll probably kill you and your followers.”

Johann looked at all five, wondering if they might succeed. If so, there could be no question of law between them—nothing but a straight struggle for power. He said, “In the end, even if you win, only one of you can be the new captain.”

Heinz answered, “The ship will be administered by a joint council.”

“I wouldn’t want to be a member. It will be more dangerous than fighting against you.” A voice that was almost his own added, “We will not join you.”

None of the five spoke, but a faint rustling passed among them as they shifted in their seats. The second man stood up. He had a pick in his hand—a weapon made by grinding a screwdriver to a point.

He sat down again. It was so unexpected that Johann had to fight the impulse to laugh. Nothing had happened, except that the lights in the defective wall behind him had flickered—one going out, another flashing on in such a way that his shadow had seemed to leap out toward the man with the pick. Johann stood up, holding the chair by the back, testing its mass with one hand. “Come on,” he said. “I swing this around sometimes just to keep my shoulders loose. How many real fighters have you got?”

No one spoke.

“You,” Johann said to the second man. “And he.” He pointed to the bald man. “Maybe. One real and one possible.”

“It’s not your chair we are afraid of,” the woman said, and the thing on the bunk nodded, sitting up and putting its thin legs over the side. Heinz and the other two men were still looking at Johann’s shadow. He looked too and saw that the shadow of the chair he held was not as thick and black as his own, which might almost have been a pool of ink or a silhouette cut from black paper.

Something struck the chair. The second man, already out the compartment door now, had thrown his pick. It quivered in the fiberglass backing of the seat.

The sexless being who had been lying on the bunk was the last to leave; Johann jerked the pick out and offered it to it handle first and was ignored.

When it was gone, he locked the door and coded the bridge on the communicator. Horst answered and told him that the Captain had left word that she did not wish to speak to him. “Five people are planning a mutiny,” Johann said. “Heinz is one of them.” He described the other four. “They wanted me to join them.”

“Are you being forced to make this call?”

“What do you mean?”

“Who’s in your compartment with you, Johann?”

“No one. They’re gone.”

“I’ll tell the Captain. And I’ll send someone down to help you.” The screen went dark.

Johann drew a squeeze-bulb of water and sat down on the bunk, facing the light. “All right,” he said, “who are you?”

Nothing answered.

“You attached yourself to me. You rode the shuttle back up, after the expedition landed, and you must have wandered around the ship after that until you found me. Then you used me to get back home—in some way I don’t understand, you were able to trigger teleportation, something a few dozen people in history have been actually able to do, but that must be latent in the rest of us.” He stopped, looking around the empty compartment, waiting for a reply.

None came.

His Voisriit had worked its way to the bottom of his bag, but he extracted it and looked briefly at the material he had written a few hours before. “I’m going to record this too,” he said. “I might as well. You realize we’ve only got two or three minutes before whoever Horst sent gets here.” He had already flicked the on-off button with his thumb. He added, “As it happens, I like you. Those people would probably have killed me when I wasn’t willing to go along with their mutiny; I know that.”

There was silence in the compartment except for the sighing of the vent. He saw the Voisriit tape pause as the machine waited for transcribable speech.

“Listen—” (he found that he was massaging his thighs with his hands, and stopped, embarrassed, wiping them on the cool, soil-resistant fabric of the bunk; the center was still slightly warm and carried a smoky odor that was not quite any sort of cologne)—“I know I’m not right. My mind has been slipping for some time—I know that. But you’re real. All the rest of it could have been delusions: the lights, going down to the surface of Neuerddraht, the sound of your voice; but they were afraid of you.”

Silence.

“And Horst saw something in here; he was certain I wasn’t alone. It took me a few minutes to understand it, but I know what it was he saw now. On the bulkhead behind me there must have been a shadow that didn’t match my position. He saw you. I’m not looking at you now because you don’t seem to want to talk when I can see you.”

“It is difficult for me to speak when you can see me.” The Voisriit tape crept forward, black lettering appearing on its surface. It was possible, though he was not conscious of it, that it was his own voice. He put his right hand firmly over his mouth. “By instinct I follow your will, to better remain in your shadow. If you disbelieve—I am inhibited from speech.” The tape still moved.

“What are you?”

Someone pounded on the door of the compartment. The lock buzzed briefly, and the door swung back. Grit stood between two hulking enlisted patrolers, a man and a woman. “Is anything wrong?” she said.

The Voisriit recorded the words, and Johann erased them and switched it off. “No,” he said. “Horst got the idea—somehow—that I wasn’t alone when I talked to him. That’s all.”

“You were alone?”

“Yes. Do you know what I told him?”

Grit nodded, her straw-colored curls bobbing, her face serious.

“Do they?” Johann indicated the patrolers.

“No.” She looked at the two, who were waiting impassively, their truncheons in their belts. “I think everything’s all right here,” she said. “Dismissed.”

They touched their foreheads and turned away. Grit stepped into the compartment and closed the door behind her. “Johann, what’s wrong?”

“Five people came in here and asked me to join them in a mutiny.”

“I know that, but—”

“Did Horst tell the Captain?”

“He said he would, the next time she came on deck.”

“I’m quite serious. So were they. They are going to try to take over the ship.”

“Is this the first time you’ve been asked to join that kind of thing?”

Johann nodded.

“I suppose it is frightening at first, but these plots have been going on for years now. You must have heard.” Her lips were tight, as though she considered herself, as a warrant officer whose duties lay on the bridge, shamed by his naïveté.

“I’ve heard about the secret societies and the cults, but I don’t think this can be brushed aside like that.” He had remained seated on the bunk; he felt now, somehow, that he should be standing, that standing would enable him to drive home his point more forcefully. But he was too tired for the work of maintaining an upright posture in magnetic sandals. He would be on duty again in a few hours, and the close air of the compartment seemed to press in upon him. He said, “You’re not going to believe me, are you.”

“I do believe you. It’s just that I don’t think it’s that serious. What’s this thing?” Grit picked up the pick.

“One of them threw it at me.”

She pressed a soft fingertip against the point. “I suppose I’d be bothered too, if someone threw one of these at me.”

“It was just a gesture; a parting shot.”

“Who were they?”

“Heinz was one of them.”

He described the others again, and Grit said: “The bald man was Rudi. I know him. I’m sorry you’re mixed up with him.”

“So you know about him,” Johann said. “You know about all these people. Why don’t I? Does the Captain know?”

“Of course she does. You don’t know because you’ve never bothered to find out. You have to—” She broke off, shaking her head in irritation. “Can’t you do something about these lights? This is just like you, lying in here in the dark, sucking at your ambition, not knowing anything, not talking to anybody.”

“I can’t get them repaired. You’re the one who believes, or at least seems to believe, that everything on the ship is all right.” He lay down.

“I don’t believe that,” she said.

“Horst sent you to see if anyone was with me. You’ve seen that there is no one.” He wanted to be alone with the shadow again; he could see it stretched, as black as the space between the stars, on the bulkhead at his right. “You say this isn’t serious,” he said, “but Horst seemed to take it seriously.”

“Horst is an old woman.”

“Go back to the bridge. You’re on duty.”

“Is that an order?”

“You don’t take orders from me, and we both know it.”

“I’m not going back to the bridge, either. I’m off in an hour, and Horst will cover for me. There’s been nothing doing since Helmut came back.”

“I’m surprised you’re not in his compartment.”

“He’s seeing the Captain. You really think I care about Helmut, don’t you? He’s nice; he’s fun to be with sometimes, and he’s generous. He knows how to make conversation. But he’s not as handsome as you are, and not as strong, and he can be very silly at times.”

“And he’s the Captain’s man. Currently.”

“Well, of course currently! That’s one of the things that bothers me about you—every time you touch somebody—every time you touch someone’s body—you think … Well, you know what you think.” Three clips held her blouse; her plump fingers ran down them with practiced ease until the blouse hung suspended behind her like a shiny white cloudlet. She slipped out of her sandals, leaving them on the deck, kicked off her shorts, and held out a hand to let him draw her to him.

He ignored it, and she said, “You’re sure? I didn’t think you would.”

“What do you know about them?”

“Who?”

“The five people who were here.”

“I could tell you anyway. Pull me over to you.”

“Not now. Tell me.”

“You know Heinz. Rudi is a technician in the plant rooms. He sells drugs—that’s how I know him—and he claims that a lot of what he sells he grows himself. He has good merchandise and charges a lot, but he’ll give a certain amount of credit—you’d better pay him, though.”

“The cult.”

“I always thought it was just a sideline. A lot of them do it, you know, because it’s a good way to get people started. There’s a group, and, you know, social acceptance, and making it a ritual makes it easier—besides, the ceremony makes it more interesting when the rush comes. All the singing and the costumes and invocations.”

“No,” Johann said, “I don’t. I take it you’ve been to a number of these ceremonies.”

“It’s something to do. Don’t you understand?”

“No,” he said again.

“Only the fools really believe—it’s a kind of game. If you really want to know, there’s another group, a whole other thing, that I think is a lot more dangerous: the overmonitor’s people.”

His face must have shown the surprise he felt, because she grinned at him. He said, “I didn’t think anyone paid attention to that any more.”

“There’ve always been people who would play around with a machine like that for as long as anyone would let them. Paper games on a cathode ray terminal, and programming music and those pictures printed in symbols. It’s using that now; it’s pulled all those people together, drawn them around itself. Each of them only knows who a few of the others are, but they know there are others, and they want to put the overmonitor in charge of the ship. The Captain’s a lot more worried about that than she is about the occult groups, and I think she’s right.”

Johann said, “If she really believes it’s that serious, she ought to tell us about it—put us on our guard.”

“She’s talked to most of the officers privately.”

“She hasn’t talked to me.”

“I know.”

He swung his stiff leg off the bunk and stood up, and inadvertently brought himself close enough for her to reach. She cupped his face in her hands and used the leverage to thrust her floating body down until it was pressed to his and he could feel the firm push of her breasts on his chest, and her small, rounded belly touching his loins. “And what is that supposed to mean?” he asked.

“It means we still have time. You don’t have to go yet, and I’ll be all right as long as I’m with you. Horst doesn’t care, and she’s busy with Helmut.”

“You know what I meant. If she told everyone, why didn’t she tell me?”

“I didn’t say she told everybody.”

“Why not me?” He pushed her away, and she floated off toward the upper left corner of the compartment, like a pink and blond fornicatory doll, he thought, in the slow-motion pictures of a bomb blast in a department store.

“Look at yourself!”

Suddenly, just as she banked against the ceiling, she was angry. “Think about what you look like to other people. You’re just the type, just the kind that does it. Alone all the time and so very, very intellectual. When was the last time you talked to the overmonitor?”

“That doesn’t matter. Not long ago, but it was the first time for a long time.”

“Nobody else does it at all. Except them. And they do whatever it tells them, because they think it has everything so perfectly worked out—when it’s only the same kind of thinking that turned Earth into a sewer a hundred years ago.”

In Michelangelo’s painting The Creation of Adam, a floating Jehovah stretches forth his hand to the reclining Adam. On the ceiling Johann saw acted out the reverse of this—his own shadow reached up from behind him to touch the floating shadow of Grit. For a moment it held the position, and he began, awkwardly, to raise his own arm in the same way, suddenly embarrassed to think that she might notice that his shadow no longer followed his movements. The arm had a second, true, shadow of its own, weaker and grayer than the black outline behind him that, even as he watched, seemed to send a wave of dark strength into Grit’s pale shadow.

Later, on the bridge, he found himself adjusting the wall communicator screen to show the ship: the rounded curve of the bridge module itself, with the hard domes and pyramids of the instrument pods, launcher casings, and airlocks that rose like temples and tombs from the smooth surface of a world eroded to its iron core; and beyond it the shining filigree of the other modules and the writhing corridors that connected them, spread like a goddess’s veil down the trailing night. While he watched, one of the silvery threads parted—perhaps a hundred kilometers from where he stood. Blue attitude jets the size of pinpoints flared; the severed module was united in moments to another corridor, while the original corridor, coiling like the broken string of a guitar, curved toward the bridge some twenty or thirty kilometers to fasten on the hatch of a new module; in slow, trembling waves, the entire fabric of the ship readjusted itself to the change.

“Ugly, isn’t it,” Gerta said behind him.

“I don’t think so.”

“No? With all those loops and ravels? I think a ship ought to be long and slender and graceful—like the Captain, if you know what I mean. This one looks like a bacterial nucleus under a microscope.”

“You’re trying to make me angry, aren’t you?”

“Not at all. Have you heard the news?”

Johann shook his head.

“The Captain’s going to go down herself. To Neuerddraht. She’s going back with Helmut.”

“She’s not supposed to leave the ship.”

“Technically, no. But think what it will be like when we get back home. There will be hearings and interviews. How would it look if she were to say she hadn’t been there herself? She’ll be the chief witness.” Gerta glanced over her shoulder. “Besides,” she added in a lower voice, “she’ll be almost alone, down there with Helmut. Just a handful of crewpeople and Erik. She’s had a vehicle built in the welding shop—you know, for ‘surface exploration.’ It seats two, so they can go off together, hundreds of kilometers from anyone.”

“I would like to go, too,” he said. “To go down.”

“To keep an eye on her? Don’t be silly.”

“Just to be going. To see the place.”

“I thought you loved the ship. You’re the only one left. The rest of us hate this smelly mouse-maze.”

“That doesn’t mean I want to stay on board forever. I’d like to see Neuerddraht at first hand—it seems to have been ruined already, by some race older than ours. Earth must be that way by now.”

“Don’t let the Captain hear you talk like that,” Gerta said.

“Where is she?”

“The marine module. You want me to get Elis to fill in for you?”

“It’s true then. There’s going to be a mutiny.”

“Everybody hears that talk; I don’t think you ought to take it seriously.” Gerta was already coding Elis’s number on the communicator.

Johann watched her long fingers flying across the buttons. “You love the ship, too,” he said. “Even if you won’t admit it. You know there’s going to be an insurrection, too, and you think I can stop it. I feel as if you were asking me to stop an avalanche.”

Gerta shook her head, her fingers busy with the keys. The screen lit up.

“Elis? Johann wants you to take the rest of the watch for him.”

Johann could see Elis’s lips move in the screen, but he was too far away to hear.

“No. You owe him. I looked it up.”

The speaker muttered.

“All right, then.” Gerta keyed out and turned back toward Johann. “He’s coming. You can go now, if you like. I’ll take care of things until he gets here.”

“I’ll wait.” He turned away and busied himself with instrument readings. A yeoman was like a wife, he thought. He and Gerta had never been lovers, but he wondered now why they had not. A ship should be long and slender and graceful, she had said. Like the Captain. And had run her hands over her own body, trying to call attention to herself, to make him see that she was, physically, much like the Captain, with her tall, slender figure. He had always thought her too masculine—wide-shouldered and small-breasted under the white tunic. But was she? A yeoman was like a wife—sharing the events of each watch, united with the duty officer. United with the three of them now, a dark man was standing behind him—like Gerta, a partner. Or so he felt. He turned and saw him, stretched in inky darkness, hard-edged on the floor though the bridge was bright as always with diffused light. Gerta, whose back was to him now as she wrote the log, had a hundred jostling shadows, each almost too weak to be seen.

Elis came, and Johann, wondering what she would think of it, brushed the nape of Gerta’s neck with his lips as he stepped toward the big double doors leading out into Corridor A.

Before he could push them open, the communicator screen flashed, calling him back. It was Erik, Helmut’s second in command, his square, handsome, stupid face tense behind its transparent guard.

“I must speak to the Captain,” he said.

“She isn’t here. Report to me.”

“Can you send for her?”

“She is not to be disturbed. What is it? If whatever has happened is important, it shouldn’t have to wait for her. If it isn’t important, you can report it in the usual way.”

“We found a city,” Erik said. “A dead city with all the buildings knocked to ruins, and the streets filled with sand that whispers in the wind, so that the men are all afraid of it, and there are piers jutting out into the sea—piers for the ships, that the sand surges against. I went out onto one of them—”

“Pull yourself together,” Elis said.

“—the stones are still solid enough, though they’re not really stones, and stood at the end, and I swear to you, Lieutenant, the ocean that isn’t within a thousand kilometers of here washed over my feet and the sand blew and sang so in my ears that I nearly fell, almost fell off the end of it as I stood there looking out into the ocean with the unwalled houses all behind me and the ships beating their gongs in the rain out there in the whirling bay.”

Johann looked at Elis and whispered, “What do you think?” Elis winked and slapped his hand against his mouth as though he were swallowing a pill.

“Is there a city down there? Could there be? A ruined city?”

“We’d have seen it from above.”

“Here,” Erik said, and held a picture up to the scanner. It showed a flat, brown landscape of sand; but rising from the sand were three oddly colored stones with regular outlines.

“Wind formations,” Elis said.

Johann said, “They look too well squared.”

“Stone is crystalline in structure. When an entire plane wears away—or splits away—it leaves a flat surface.”

Gerta said: “Remember the man, Elis? The one they saw, who wasn’t one of the expedition, crossing the desert when it was almost dark? Helmut saw him.”

“Take care of things,” Johann told Elis. “I’m going to go and find the Captain, and let her know about this.”

Erik said: “We haven’t taken off the breathing apparatus—not any of us. But even so the ocean smells like flying foam and the city like yeast, and all the hills around us are ringing with roses and mosses and damp ferns with the sounds of fountains.”

“I’ll tell her,” Johann said.

When he left the bridge, he went to the Personnel Office and keyed the overmonitor.

“Interrogative.”

“Have I left the ship since boarding?”

“Response: Indeterminable.”

“By reason of insufficient data?”

“Response: By reason of erroneous data.”

“What is the erroneous data?”

“Response: Debarkation data shows no absences. Cerebral radiation monitoring indicates absence or death on several occasions.”

“Is it possible for a human being to pass from one point to another without passing through the intervening space?”

“Response: Yes.”

The personnel clerk, who had come into the office while Johann was questioning the overmonitor, said, “Something wrong, sir?”

Johann shook his head.

“You looked funny. If there’s something the matter, just call on me.”

“I learned something startling, that’s all.”

“Interrogative.”

“I wouldn’t trust it, sir. It’s liable to tell you anything.”

“Can you give me a nontechnical explanation?”

“Response: No.”

“Why not?”

“Response: Since explanations must be couched in terms of fundamental lemmas or expressions logically derived from such lemmas, the lemmas themselves while sometimes capable of proof are not capable of explanation.”

“Can you provide a nontechnical proof?”

“Response: Such a proof is dependent on the quantum nature of time and the continuous nature of extension. Is proof required of these?”

“No. Proceed with the proof requested.”

“Response: It can be shown experimentally that the temporal quanta are not emitted at a uniform rate, but at a rate dependent upon the velocity of the body experiencing the time in question. Since time is composed of quanta, the reduction in the rate of passage of time must be explained as a reduction in the rate of emission of these quanta. This reduction implies the existence of hyper-time, by which the rate of emission is measured, and this in turn implies the existence of hyper-time intervals of some duration between the emission of the time quanta applicable to a rapidly moving body. If motion were continuous, it would cease with a consequent release of energy during these hyper-time intervals, since motion without time is motion at infinite velocity. No such releases of energy have been observed, from which it follows that motion is discontinuous—consisting of translations of the moving body from point to point, corresponding to the time quanta emitted. Q.E.D.”

“Such translations must be very small,” Johann said, “except in the case of objects moving at near-light speeds. Have larger translations ever been observed?”

“Response: No data.”

He found the Captain in the office of the Marine Commandant. The Commandant, who was about twenty-two, was sharpening a long-bladed knife as he sat at his desk, stroking the curved steel over a little hand-held stone with a rotary motion. The suspension pod from which he had emerged stood open in one corner of the room. Johann saluted the Captain and described Erik’s “city.”

“He’s irrational?”

“I wouldn’t say that, but he’s been hallucinating.”

“Helmut and I will straighten things out when we get down there. Dismissed.”

“Sir …”

“What is it?”

“I’d like to request permission to accompany you.”

The Captain turned away, shaking her head. “I appreciate your enterprise, Lieutenant, but every person we have on the surface of Neuerddraht requires a substantial support effort, and no more are needed.”

“You may have to send Erik and some of the others back to the ship. I would be willing to put myself under Helmut’s orders.”

“If Erik has to be replaced, I’ll keep you in mind. Is that all?”

“No, sir. I would like to state that if you, as captain of the ship, are anticipating a mutiny, it is my right as a senior officer to be informed of the fact.”

“I am anticipating no mutiny.”

“The Commandant has been revived. And how many marines? Or is that confidential?”

The Commandant said, “All of them,” and putting aside the stone ran his thumb along the edge of his knife.

The Captain struck her desk with the flat of her hand. “I am leaving the ship. Extraordinary precautions are clearly indicated.”

Johann asked, “You don’t trust the officers, and the patrol, to maintain security?”

Something of the outrage he felt at the implied accusation of disloyalty must have been apparent from his voice; the Captain (her own voice somewhat softer) said: “I don’t doubt you, Johann, if that’s what you mean. But there is inevitably a certain … loss of perspective, among many originally reliable people on a voyage as long as this one. The marines—by remaining in suspension—have maintained their original orientation and patriotism. That was the reason for their inclusion in the crew.”

“As far as my boys and girls are concerned,” the Commandant said, “yesterday they told us blast-off would be in two weeks. Now, according to what I hear from the Captain, we’ve made it, but things are a little screwed up. Well, we’re here to unscrew them.”

“If necessary,” the Captain said.

The Marine Commandant nodded. “If necessary,” he said. His pistol belt was buckled through the backframe of his chair, and he slipped the knife into a sheath taped to the inner side of the holster. “You look a lot older than when I saw you,” he told Johann. “You remember me?”

Johann shook his head.

“I sat on one side of you at the last briefing. Remember now? I was smoking, and you asked me to put it out.”

“I’m sorry,” Johann said. He remembered graduation, signing up for the flight, the dizzying trip to the shuttleport by monorail, carrying his duffel bag around the lonely, windswept housing area. There must have been a preflight briefing, though he could not remember one. He had written Marcella, telling her why he had to go; putting down all the fine phrases that were true until saying them into the Voisriit made them false, then erased it all. He had been a boy—no older than the Commandant was now. Could such boys fight? He thrust the thought aside, knowing that they could; that the marines would fight very well, having been selected for the purpose.

“You asked the briefing officer a question,” the Commandant continued. “I forget now what it was. I was thinking of something else.”

“I probably did,” Johann conceded.

Outside, the marines were still reviving, straightening their uniforms and shining their boots; checking the weapons they had carried with them into their suspension pods. One of them, a high-breasted girl with yellow curls straying from under her battle helmet, asked him if it had really been seventeen years. He said that it had, and added that she had not missed a great deal—then turned away quickly for fear that she would turn away from him.

So he had asked the briefing officer a question. That was unlike him. It must have been important—or he had thought it important. It was probably still on tape somewhere on the ship. Not on Earth. Few if any tapes would have outlasted the accidents of even a single century, and no one would care about that one now. Marcella and the briefing officer were both dead. Possibly they had met, years after blast-off, and never realized that they were linked through him.

There was as yet no guard at the boat-hangar entrance, but there would be soon, surely. When the mutiny came, the Captain would want to cut off the mutineers’ escape. Johann pushed aside the thought that she might also wish to retain a path of escape for herself—most probably the mutiny would not begin, if it began at all, until she had gone.

But was she leaving? It was contrary to regulations for the Captain to disembark save in a friendly port—but there was no regulation to say that she could not announce that she intended to do so. He pressed the green button, and the hangar door slid up with a sigh of compressed air. “Me,” the boat nearest the door said. “Me, me, me,” echoed the sound.

“Which of you brought Lieutenant Helmut back?” (His own voice sounded strange in the vastness.)

“I did,” called a boat from half a kilometer away.

“Have any of the rest of you been used lately?”

“No,” said several voices; and one, “Never, since blastoff, Boat-captain.”

“Then you are all fully stored?”

“All but he.”

They were of four types: landing craft of the design that had been used to take Helmut and his subordinates down; lifeboats intended for use in a sub-Plutonian emergency; missile-boats for short-range attack; and tenders for exterior alterations and repairs. A missile-boat might make them think twice about going after him, but they were the largest of all, and would be the most difficult to conceal once planetfall was made. In the end he settled on a tender, Number 37, transferring food and water and survival gear from one of the lifeboats into it and instructing it to wait for him at a hatch near the bridge. “Go now,” his shadow said, a small, dry voice close beside his ear.

He shook his head. “There are some things I want to take with me. My books—and I’m going to try to get Grit to come if I can.”

“Hello.” It was Helmut, appearing in the space between Numbers 17 and 18. “Who are you talking to, Johann?”

“Myself, I’m afraid. Welcome back.”

“It’s good to be back,” Helmut said. “Good to get out of that stinking breathmask. Do you know if Karl and the others have made any progress with the bugs yet?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“The airborne bacteria. If they can show they don’t infect human beings, or cook up a vaccine, we won’t have to wear the things. You wouldn’t think there would be such a stew of single-celled organisms floating around in a place that’s as dry as that one, but there are.”

“There’s water in the crevasses,” Johann said, “and thicker air too. From an evolutionary point of view, I suppose they got their start in the spray from the falls.”

“You haven’t been down to see those crevasses yourself, of course.”

“No.”

“I knew you hadn’t. I could tell by your arms and legs. You’ve never set foot on Neuerddraht.”

“I don’t know how I got scratched up like this.”

“I don’t know either,” Helmut said. “Even though I’m scratched up the same way. You’ve got strict orders not to talk, I take it; but I noticed while I was down there how often Elis seemed to be filling in for you, now that I come to think of it.”

“I’ve never been there,” Johann said again. He touched the crusted welts on his legs. “I was scraped a bit in a little accident. I’ll tell you about it.”

“Of course.” Helmut was no longer listening. “Who would suspect that she’d send you, the cripple.” He took a step nearer, and Johann saw his right hand slip under the flap of his gadget bag. “We were the public expedition; you were her private one—after all, control of a world is at stake. She couldn’t risk that. What were you looking for? We saw you once, you know.”

“That’s right,” Johann said, “you saw me.” He was tensed, waiting for the blow, but it came too quickly. He had expected Helmut to raise the knife over his head and strike downward as he would have done himself. Instead, Helmut’s hand shot straight forward as soon as it cleared the lip of the bag.

Somewhere between the bag and his body it became enmeshed in what might have been thousands of folds of black tissue. The knife struck like a punch from a heavily padded glove; but there was no blade, nothing that stabbed. Anchoring himself with his stiff leg, he aimed a kick at Helmut’s testicles. It missed, and Johann slipped his feet from his sandals as the boats shrilled warnings, and jumped for the hangar roof.

The evasion was unnecessary. Helmut’s knife was free now, but the black tissue covered his face. Johann watched … he went limp, his sandals pinioning him still to the steel deck, his slack body floating like a balloon on a string. From under the dark covering came a continued soft grunting that soon grew weak, then stopped.

For a long time after it seemed certain Helmut was dead, the tissue remained in place; then it returned to Johann, becoming a cloud, a thin, dark smoke that seeped upward to him. “I didn’t know you could leave me,” he said.

“I do not desire it.”

Outside the hangar door, a marine sentry had died. The sight of her limp corpse made Johann wonder with which group Helmut had been affiliated. The occultists seemed the more probable in view of his personality, and there were slashes at the girl’s chest and crotch that might have been ritualistically intended. Perhaps to no group but his own advantage; possibly to a group of which Johann had never heard.

The storage-area corridors and companionways he traveled now were deserted, though from time to time he heard the faint sound of shouting through the ventilators, and twice he came on bodies—one of them a man he knew slightly, a technician from the instrument shop. So it had already begun. It seemed likely that the Captain’s absence from the bridge had been interpreted by at least one group to mean that she had left for Neuerddraht.

When he reached the main corridor system he took off his blouse with its officer’s insignia and threw it down a recycle chute. There were more bodies, some patrolers, many crewmen, a few in battle-green marine uniforms, floating, or sticking to the walls and floor; and neutron-blast scars from the marines’ guns on the bulkhead panels. Whichever group was attacking would be pushing toward the principal approaches to the bridge; and they had clearly dislodged the marines from this section. As he hurried toward the rear entrance to the Captain’s living compartment, he wondered if any effort had been made to organize and arm the loyal crewpeople—there must be many, surely, and there could be no more than a few hundred marines.

The sentries were dead, but the door to the Captain’s compartment was still closed and locked, as he had expected. He pounded on it and waited and pounded again; and the dark mist of his shadow poured into the crevice between door and jamb, and after a moment the door swung open at a touch.

On the bridge, the Captain, with Elis, Gerta, and Grit, stood watching the console communicator screen. It showed a group of crewpeople clustered around a laboratory cart, assembling what appeared to be a laser projector. “The mystics?” Johann asked.

They turned to look at him with black faces. “The C.O.C.,” Grit said after a moment. “When they have that thing finished, they’re going to splice a power cable to the starboard generators and cut their way through to us. The marines are holding A and B corridors outside, but when the beam starts coming through the walls there won’t be much they can do. We haven’t told them yet. If you want to use the earphones at the terminal, the overmonitor will be happy to explain the whole plan; we’ve heard enough. And if—”

The Captain cut off Grit’s panicky voice. “How did you get in here, Lieutenant?”

“Through your quarters, sir.”

“That way is open?”

“The corridor was clear when I came through, yes.”

Grit looked from the Captain’s face to Elis’s, her eyes asking if Johann could be trusted, then pleading that they go. Her shadow was blacker than the others’, and Johann wondered if it had spoken to her yet. On the communicator screen, Helmut entered the laboratory where the technicians were building the laser, asked some question, and gave a brisk command. An emotion that might have been hatred or despair flickered across the Captain’s face. “He is one of them too, you see,” she said. “And Horst, and my servant, whom I had to shoot.”

“I see,” Johann said. And then, “Sir, I have a tender waiting at Hatch Eight.”

Gerta, breaking the discipline of seventeen years, said, “There is nowhere to go.”

“There is Neuerddraht,” the Captain snapped.

Johann said, “The crevasses.” He thought of the long cascades of silvery water and the leaves of the ferns like cathedrals of arches.

Elis nodded. “You’re right—they’d never locate us in one of those.”

The Captain had already picked up the ship’s logbook and tucked it under her left arm. At her side her right hand held a small, brightly polished neutron pistol; the muzzle pointed toward the floor plates, but one long, tapered finger was curled about the trigger. “You are coming with us,” she said to Johann.

He nodded. “Naturally.”

“I don’t want you to think I don’t trust you, but you weren’t on the bridge when the attack began. And there have been so many traitors.”

“I understand.”

“If we reach Hatch Eight in safety, and the tender is there as you say, your loyalty will be established beyond question.” Johann nodded and took a step in the direction of the Captain’s quarters. She nodded at Grit, smiled, and said: “Go on, girl. I’ll bring up the rear.” A moment later Elis, who was just behind Johann, whispered: “So that’s the way it’s going to be now. You and I will have to make do with Gerta, at least for a while.”

The corridor was still empty save for a few dead, but smoke, acrid with burning insulation, was billowing from the ventilators. A few hundred meters beyond the door of the Captain’s quarters the corridor ended at a hatch, and the termination board that should have directed them to a new connection was blank. “It’s fighting, too,” Elis said.

Johann turned to look at him. (Behind him Grit seemed two women, her shadow leaning across her shoulders like a conspirator.)

“The overmonitor. It’s not just its people—the overmonitor program itself is fighting,” Elis said.

Grit whispered: “It could cut us off, couldn’t it? Sever all the corridors and just leave us drifting. We’d never get out.”

“We have to go back!” Johann called to the Captain. Under his urging they doubled their straggling column and took the first promising side corridor.

“It will cut us off,” Grit said again. “Leave us floating in space.”

“If it cuts off the bridge it will lose the instruments and controls. It couldn’t operate the ship.”

“But we’re not on the bridge—not any more. Do you think it knows where we are?” No one answered her.

“It’s gone mad,” the Captain said when they had been pushing down the new corridor for what seemed a half hour or more. “This is leading to the hydroponics module. It’s got the hydro deck coupled to the bridge complex.”

Elis had dropped behind her, and Grit, stumbling, was leaning on Johann’s arm. She said, “She’s right, I can smell the plants.” Her round, soft face was beaded with sweat. Then she was gone.

Gerta, who had been behind her, stood openmouthed; the others did not notice Grit was no longer with them. Pushing past the tall girl, Johann shouted: “Is there a hatch anywhere in the hydro module? There has to be. Where is it?”

“Number Three Ninety-one,” Elis told him. “I think the overmonitor’s trying to get us away from Number Eight; it must have heard you talking about it.”

“Where is it?” Johann said again.

“I don’t know, because I don’t know where we’ll be coming into the module.”

“Run,” Johann said, taking Gerta by the arm. “She’s gone to get the tender, I think.”

The corridor corkscrewed, then opened into a vaulted hall several thousand meters long in which towering, darkly green plants grew under brilliant lights, tier upon tier, extending impossible limbs and tendrils, untroubled by gravity, on the quiet air.

They found the hatch at the end of a tortuous path of green that might almost have wound through a jungle. There were bowers under the trees, where colored hand ropes stretched above the sopping cellulose that contained the hydroponic fluid; and twice Johann glimpsed strange statues moored to limbs, set deeper in the green twilight beneath the leaves. Grit, Johann remembered, had said Rudi was a technician here.

At the hatch, Gerta and Elis spun the operating wheel. “Suppose she’s not out there?” the Captain demanded. “How could she be? This is insane.” The lips of the hatch pursed, then stretched; beyond them was the brightly lit interior of the tender.

“Am I still to go first?” Johann said.

A slight smile crossed the Captain’s face. “You’re not thinking of a honeymoon on Neuerddraht with little Grit, are you, Lieutenant? No, you come last—but I can hardly wait for you to come aboard so you can tell me how you arranged this.”

Etiquette demanded that the Captain enter a boat last. Elis bolted through the hatch. “We defer to your rank,” the Captain said to Johann. “After all, you were the leader of the escape.” She climbed in behind Elis.

Gerta was watching Johann’s face. He shook his head, moving it perhaps a centimeter to either side; she hesitated, then closed the hatch. He slammed down the security bolt. “What are we going to do now?” she said. The silence of the plants, their happiness and green need, closed around them. His shadow stood before him on the hatch, a silhouette as black as a hole in space.

“Hide here,” he said. “I’ll come back for you.” And then, “Back to the bridge.” He closed his eyes.

The wall communicator screen was focused to space; in it the tender shot away from the ship like a stone from a sling. The small screen on the control console showed Horst and Helmut standing beside the laser projector, and behind them the corridor leading to the bridge. “No bargaining,” Helmut said. “Get on the squawk box and tell the marines to lay down their weapons. Tell them the overmonitor’s won.”

Johann walked to the doors leading to the corridor and flung them open. The Marine Commandant was at a field communications center there, surrounded by subordinate officers and clerks.

“How are things going?” Johann asked.

The Commandant threw him a casual salute. “Pretty well. We’ve cleared the command corridor—as you see—and we have A, B, and D largely under control. We lost a lot of the sentries we had posted around, though, and there’s been quite a bit of smoke.”

Johann nodded. “I know. I suspect the computer’s been frying some of its own guts to make it.”

A marine lieutenant said, “Most of the prisoners we’ve gotten so far have belonged to these nut religions rather than the C.O.C.”

The Commandant gestured toward the bridge. “You must be getting the overall picture better than we do out here. How does it look in there?”

“I think we’ve turned the corner,” Johann said. He went back inside and closed the doors, then with a screwdriver from the emergency tool locker beside the navigation panel took up the floor plates between the communicator cabinet and the computer terminal. Whoever had spliced the two together—probably Horst, Johann thought, possibly Uschi—had used bright scarlet wire and added the sacrifice of a rat with its throat cut, tied in a clear food-preservation bag. To the terminal he said: “Helmut is dead. You shouldn’t have shown him. We killed him in the hangar.”

He ripped the connections free and watched the computer-generated phantoms vanish; then stood up, regretting the loss of his officer’s tunic. Coding “all screens” on the communicator, he announced: “The mutiny is over. I believe that some of you who have been fighting against the bridge have been encouraged by optimistic reports on the communications system. Those reports were false, and they will not be repeated; you were defeated some time ago, when the attempt to carry the bridge by storm failed.

“Now all hands are needed to save the ship. Mutineers laying aside their weapons are hereby given a full pardon. Every loyal member of the crew is expected to join in wiping out those who continue to bear arms. This is your Captain speaking. Out.”

To the overmonitor terminal he said, “What is the probability of ship survival now?” He switched out the earphones and keyed the speaker.

“Response: For a five-year projection, 0.383 and rising. Do you plan frequent consultations with the overmonitor?”

“No,” the Captain said.

In a storm, land was the enemy. He kicked off his sandals and floated over to the navigation panel to begin the laborious business of setting a new course.