One Million Tomorrows
Author: Bob Shaw
Date: 1970-01-02 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Science Fiction; Fiction; Fantasy
Description: In the 22nd Century, no one had to die of old age: an immortality drug was available to all. Its only drawback was the side-effect that ended a man's sex drive, so most men waited till their youth was fading before they took the final step and became "cools." But Will Carewe became the first man to test a new variety of the drug, one without any side effects at all. The limitless future, a million tomorrows, stretched before him with golden hope until a series of "accidents" made him realize that someone was trying to murder him. As an immortal Carewe had an infinitely greater stake in remaini
Publisher: Ace Books

Will Carewe had a good job, a beautiful wife, and the prospect of immortality lay before him. But ... if he were to take the shot to become immortal, he'd be giving up his virility. And would, Athene, lovely Athene with the sensuous body, want to stay married to a man like that?

But suddenly that problem was solved: a new variety of the drug had been developed, one that would leave him a fully functioning man. Carewe rejoiced in his luck, took the shot, and ...

And suddenly his life, which had seemed so rosy just yesterday, was developing into a nightmare. Athene became distrustful of him, friends shied away, and someone seemed to be trying to kill him.

He was the biggest target on Earth: the immortal man who'd given up nothing for it. Nothing, perhaps, except his life.

BOB SHAW is 38 years old, married to the vivacious Sadie; they have three children. He has been a columnist and science correspondent for the main North Ireland newspaper, a structural engineer, aircraft designer, taxi driver and public relations man. He sold his first science fiction stories when he was 20, "but I didn't like the stuff I was producing and devoted a few years to studying the inhabitants of the third planet of Sol before turning to writing again."

ONE MILLION TOMORROWS is his fifth novel, including two earlier Ace Science Fiction Specials, THE TWO-TIMERS and THE PALACE OF ETERNITY.

ONE MILLION TOMORROWS

BOB SHAW

ACE BOOKS

A Division of Charter Communications Inc.

1120 Avenue of the Americas

New York, N.Y. 10036

one million tomorrows

Copyright ©, 1970, by Bob Shaw

A somewhat different magazine version of this novel

appeared in Amazing Stories; that version copyright ©,

1970 by Ultimate Publishing Co., Inc.

An Ace Book. All Rights Reserved.

Printed in U.S.A.

I

In the early part of the morning Carewe sat quietly at his desk, doing absolutely nothing. He was not experiencing the physical effect of a hangover—the oxygen and ascorbic acid bomb he had swallowed before breakfast was taking care of that—but a faint tension, the ghost of a tremor flickering in his nerves, told him Nature was not so easily cheated. In an obscure way he felt he would have been happier serving penance with a raging headache and nausea.

I’m forty years old and can’t take it so well any more, he thought. One of these days I’ll have to tie off. Instinctively he touched the bristles on his upper lip and chin. They were five millimeters long—fashionable for a funkie of his age—and had an almost metallic resistance to the pressure of his fingers, rows of little toggle switches which brought pleasure/pain/reassurance when he pushed them over. Don’t die off, he repeated the catch phrase to himself, tie off.

He looked out through the transparent wall of his office. Beyond the glittering trapezoids of the city, the Rockies shone with a whiteness which pulsed in tune with his heartbeats. There should have been more snow that morning but the weather control teams had got in first, and the sky above the icy palisades was strangely alive. Sunlight heaved and shifted on the intangible membranes of control fields made visible by the ice particles they contained. To Carewe’s depressed gaze the sky was a vista of overworked gray gut. He turned his head away and was trying to concentrate on a sheaf of compcards when the telepres chimed its soft note. The head of Hyron Barenboim, president of Farma Incorporated, floated at the set’s projection focus.

“Are you there, Willy?” The insubstantial eyes quested blindly. “I want to see you.”

“Right here, Hy.” Carewe pushed the compcards out of sight before he opened the vision circuits—they should have been dealt ginwo days earlier. “What can I do for you?”

Barenboim’s eyes steadied on Carewe’s face and he smiled. “Not over the beam, Willy. Come into my office in five minutes. That is, if you can get away.”

“I can, of course.”

“Good boy. I’ve got something I want to discuss with you—in private.” Barenboim’s hairless face faded into the air leaving Carewe prey to vague alarms. The president had seemed friendly—Carewe had never found him otherwise, in spite of what most Farma employees said about the man—but he had given a distinct impression of having something on his mind. And Carewe disliked personal contact with old cools, even on a purely social basis. The age of one hundred years was the barrier in his mind—below that a cool could still be regarded as an ordinary human being. But when it came to dealing with someone like Barenboim, who was five years past his two hundredth birthday …

Carewe got to his feet uneasily. He mirrored the outer wall of the office, straightened his tunic and examined himself. Tall, wide-shouldered without being particularly athletic, with straight black hair and a pale, slightly desperate face on which dark bristles sketched a signoral beard—he looked presentable enough, if not exactly the ideal picture of an accountant. Why then did he dread talking to cools like Barenboim and the vice-president, Manny Pleeth? Because it’s time you were going cool, an inner voice told him. It’s time for you to tie off and you don’t like to be reminded. You’re a real funkie, Willy, and I’m not using the word as a corruption of functional, but the way the cools use it. Funkiel

Stroking his bristles the wrong way, jabbing them painfully into his flesh, Carewe hurried out of the office and into the reception area. He made his way through the waist-high admin machines, nodding throughtfully at Marianne Toner as she tended her electronic charges, and went into to the short corridor leading to Barenboim’s suite. The inner door’s round black eye blinked at him once, in recognition, and the polished wood slid aside. He stepped through into the big sunny suite which was always filled with the smell of coffee. Barenboim, working with papers on his blue-and-red desk, smiled and waved Carewe into a chair.

“Just relax for a moment, son. Manny will be with us in a few seconds—I want him to be in on this too.”

“Thanks, Hy.” Suppressing his curiosity, Carewe sat down and studied his employer. Barenboim was a medium-sized man with a flat, sloping forehead, pronounced eyebrow ridges and an upturned, flaring nose. In contrast to the almost simian cast of the upper part of his face, his mouth and chin were small and delicate. His white hands, busy arranging papers and comp-cards, were hairless and slightly puffy. Unlike many cools of his age, he made a point of always being a few months ahead of fashion. He looks forty, but he’s two centuries old, Carewe thought. He’s entitled to address me as son—by his standards I’m pre-adolescent. He touched his bristles again and Barenboim’s eyes flickered in their grottoes of bone. Carewe knew that his reflexive action had been noted and interpreted in the light of two hundred years of storeperience. He also understood that by making the movement of his eyes perceptible Barenboim was telling he knew what he was thinking, and wanted him to know that he knew. … Carewe felt the pressure mounting within his skull and he shifted uncomfortably, looked out the wall. A snowstorm was still being digested in the troubled gray air. He watched the Valkyrian struggle until the door to the connecting office announced that Vice-President Pleeth was coming in.

In his six months with Farma, Carewe had seen Manny Pleeth only a few times, usually at a distance. He was a sixty-year-old cool who, judging by his boyish appearance, had tied off around the age of twenty. His face, like that of any other cool, was beardless and looked as though it had been scrubbed with pumice stone to remove even the last traces of down. The skin was a uniform glowing pink from hairline to throat, a color which extended into the whites of his pale blue eyes. Carewe was forcibly reminded of the comic book characters he had seen in history of literature programs—a cartoonist would have rendered Pleeth’s nose with a single hooked stroke, the lipless mouth with a small up-curving line representing taut amusement over some unknowable, unguessable thought lurking behind the plastic-smooth forehead.

Pleeth wore an amber-colored tunic and hose, unadorned except for a cigar-like ornament of ciselé gold hanging from his neck. He nodded at Carewe, the curve of his mouth changing radius fractionally, and took up his position beside Barenboim, sitting down apparently on empty air but supported by the Queen Vic magnetic chair built into the seat of his hose.

“Well, here we are,” Barenboim said immediately, pushing his papers to one side and fixing Carewe with a solemn, friendly stare. “How long have you been with Farma, Willy?”

“Six months.”

“Six months—and would it surprise you if I told you that Manny and I have been watching you very closely during your time with us?”

“Ah … I do know you keep in close contact with the whole operation,” Carewe fenced.

“That’s true, but in your case we’ve been taking a special interest. A personal interest, Willy, because we like you. And the reason we like you is that you have a very rare quality—common sense.”

“Oh?” Carewe looked closely at the two men, seeking guidance; but Barenboim’s face was unreadable as ever, and Pleeth rocked gently on his invisible chair, his eyes pale fiat disks, mouth smiling tightly as he considered secret triumphs.

“Yes,” Barenboim continued. “Common sense, horse sense, plain savvy—call it what you will, but no business can prosper without it. I tell you, Willy, I get some bright boys coming to me for jobs, and I send them away because they’re too bright, educated to the point where they’re never lost for somebody else’s words. They’re like computers which do a million calculations a second and at the end of it all send a newborn babe a power bill for a thousand dollars. Know what I mean?”

“I’ve met some like that.” Carewe laughed compliantly.

“So have I—too many of them—but you’re not like that. Which is why I’ve brought you along so fast, Willy. You’ve been here six months and already you’re monitoring costs for the whole of biopoiesis division. In case you’re in any doubt about it—that’s very fast. Other men have been with me four, five years and are still out on the floor.”

“I do appreciate all you’ve done for me, Hy.” Carewe’s curiosity intensified. He knew he was a reasonably good cost accountant—could it be that some freak interaction of personalities, working out in his favor, was going to catapult him to top-management status years ahead of time?

Barenboim looked at Pleeth, who was toying with his gold cigar, and then back at Carewe. “Now that I’ve made the position clear—will you permit me to ask you a very personal question? Do you feel that I have that right?”

“Of course, Hy.” Carewe swallowed. “Ask away.”

“Fine. Here it is then. You are forty years old, Willy, and you’re still a functional male—when are you planning to tie off?”

The question hit Carewe with savage force, devastating in both its unexpectedness and the way in which it stabbed straight to the core of the anxiety about his marriage which had been building up for over five years, ever since that first gray hair had appeared on Athene’s temple. He felt his cheeks warm up as he struggled for words.

“I … I hadn’t set a firm date, Hy. Athene and I have talked a lot about it, naturally, but we both feel there’s plenty of time.”

“Plenty of time! You surprise me, Willy. You’re forty years old. The sterols don’t wait for any man, and you know as well as I do that the build-up of arterial plaque is the one physiological process that the bio-stats can’t reverse.”

“There are anticoagulants,” Carewe said quickly, with as little conscious thought as a fighter fending off a blow.

Barenboim looked unimpressed but, obviously deciding on a different tack, he picked up a compcard and slipped it into a reader. “This is your personnel file, Willy. I see that”—he peered into the hand-sized screen —“your wife is still registered with the State Health Board as a mortal. And, according to the record, she’s thirty-six. Why has she delayed so long?”

“It’s difficult for me.” Carewe took a deep breath. “Athene is a funny girl in some ways. She … She …”

“She refused to fix until you had done it too. The same situation crops up more often than you’d think among couples who are trying one-to-one marriages. It isn’t too surprising in a way, but …” Two centuries of sadness showed themselves in Barenboim’s smile. “Just between us, Willy—how long can you let it go on?”

“I … As a matter of fact, Hy, we’re ten years married next week.” Carewe listened to his own voice with amazement, wondering what enormities were going to emerge. “I had privately made up my mind that Athene and I should have a second honeymoon to mark the anniversary. Then I was going to tie off.”

Wonderment and gratitude showed on Barenboim’s face as he glanced at Pleeth, who nodded and bounced, a pink caricature of satisfaction. “You don’t know how pleased I am that you’ve made your decision, Willy. I didn’t want to put any kind of pressure on you. I wanted you to act as a completely free human being.”

What’s happening to me? Carewe fought to keep from touching his bristles as the thought became a cold flame in his mind I wasn’t planning to tie off next month.

Barenboim said kindly. “You’re no fool. Up till now this conversation has had absolutely no point— and you’re sitting there wondering why I asked you in here. Right?”

Carewe nodded abstractedly. I can’t tie off, he thought. Athene loves me, but I’d lose her in a year.

“Well, here is the point.” Barenboim’s words, shaped and projected with the mastery of three normal life-spans, were taut with sudden excitement, and Carewe found himself filled with an icy premonition. How would you like to become the first man in the history of the human race to become immortal—and still remain a functional male?”

Explosion of images, unrelated words, concepts, desires, fears. Carewe’s mind went on a trip across multiple infinities, black stars wheeling above silver seas.

“I see I’ve hit you pretty hard, Willy. Take a moment to get used to the idea.” Barenboim leaned back contentedly, interlacing his white fingers.

“But it can’t be done,” Carewe said. “Everybody knows …”

“You’re like the rest of us, Willy. You can’t accept the realization that Wogan’s Hypothesis is just what it claims to be—a hypothesis. It’s a very neat, very elegant philosophical notion that an immortal being must be unable to reproduce its kind … that where a biostatic compound comes into existence, whether by accident or design, Nature will apply the brake of male sterility to preserve the ecological balance

“But wasn’t he being presumptuous, Willy? Wasn’t he elevating a local phenomenon to the level of a universal …”

“Have you got it?” Carewe interrupted harshly, his mind clouded with the knowledge that every pharmaceutical house in the world had been in reckless, squandering pursuit of a spermatid-tolerant biostat for more thon. Howo centuries—without success.

“We’ve got it,” Pleeth whispered, speaking for the first time, the pink curvatures of his face glowing with inhuman certainty. “All we need now is a billion-dollar guinea pig—and that’s you, Willy.”

II

“I’ll need a complete rundown on what’s involved,” Carewe said, in spite of the fact that he had already made his decision. Athene had never looked more attractive, but lately he had begun to notice in her face the first faint reminders that it was time to stop playing the game of walking-around-in-small-circles-and-pretending-it-isn’t-wearing-your-shoes-out-just-the-same. We enjoy a weekend of purple-glowing noons, and when its last minutes run through our fingers we haven’t the honesty to weep. “Next weekend will be just as good,” we say, pretending that next weekend will be the same weekend repeated, that our personal calendar with its cycles of weeks, months and seasons is a true map of time. But time is a straight black arrow….

“Of course, my boy,” Barenboim said. “The first thing I must impress on you is that we have to preserve utter secrecy. Or am I teaching my grandmother to suck eggs?” He fixed Carewe with a look of rueful respect, paying homage to his accountant’s hard-headedness. “I imagine you could tell me how much Farma could suffer if another concern got wind of this before we were ready.”

“Secrecy is absolutely vital,” Carewe agreed, his mind still filled with images of Athene’s face. “Does that mean my wife and I would have to drop out of sight?”

“No! Quite the reverse. Nothing would attract the attention of a commercial spy more quickly than your leaving here and appearing, say, in our Randal’s Creek laboratories. Manny and I feel it would be best for you and Athene to go on with your normal lives as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening. You can have routine medical checks right here in this office without anybody knowing.”

“You mean, pretend I haven’t tied off?”

Barenboim studied the powdery skin of his right hand. “No. Pretend you have tied off—such an ugly phrase, don’t you think? Remember, there is no tying off involved. You will remain a functional male, but it would be safer if you began using depilatories on your face and in general acted reasonably cool.”

“Oh.” Carewe was surprised at the strength of the negative reaction he felt. He had had the stupendous good luck to be offered immortality with no strings attached—ten minutes ago such an event was an impossible, yearning dream—yet here he was about to quibble over a trivality like showing off the outward sign of his virility. “Naturally I’ll agree to anything you say, Hy, but if the new drug is all you say it is wouldn’t it be better if I pretended not to have taken a shot?”

“In other circumstances, yes. But I daresay most of your friends know about the little hangup you and your wife have over the shots. Mmmph?”

“I guess they do.”

“So they’re going to think it’s strange if Athene suddenly goes immortal while you apparently remain as you are—and you know how hard it is to disguise the fact that a woman has taken her shot.”

Carewe nodded, remembering that women were nature’s true immortals. A side-effect of the biostatic drug on the female system was perfect regulation of production of the oestradiol steroid, creating a glow of almost aggressive good health similar to that which occurs in the early weeks of an ideal pregnancy. He pictured Athene in that condition of Olympian well-being, permanently, and cursed himself for having hesitated.

“I see you’re way ahead of me, Hy. I suppose you want to talk to my wife about this?”

“Definitely not. I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting your wife previously and even though her psychofile shows she’s the type who can keep a secret, it would be better if I didn’t meet her just yet. There mustn’t be even the slightest change in the routine of your domestic life. Follow?”

“You want me to explain everything to her myself?”

“That’s it. I leave it to you to make her see how important secrecy is.” Barenboim glanced at Pleeth. “I think we can put that much trust in young Willy, here. What do you say, Manny?”

“I would say so.” Pleeth nodded and bounced, the pink-stained whites of his eyes gleaming in the morning light. The gold cigar glittered on his chest.

Barenboim clicked his tongue approvingly. “There you are. One thing we would want you to do is spend
a few days being checked over at Randal’s Creek right
after you take the shot, but we can easily contrive something in the biopoiesis laboratory which will require a visit from the costing monitor. There’ll be no security risk.”

Carewe tried a casual smile. “This is a tremendous technical breakthrough, Hy. How much can you tell… ?”

“Nothing. Taboo. The less you know about the research side the better. We designate the new drug E.80, but even that is more information than you require.”

“Well,” Carewe said carefully, “can you tell me if there’s any real danger in this test?”

“Only the very slight risk of disappointment—we haven’t had a full-scale test before—but I think you’d be able to survive the unlikely event of a disappontment, Willy. We don’t expect you to do this for nothing.”

“I didn’t mean to

“It’s all right.” Barenboim waved a puffy hand. “You’re quite right to wonder what’s in it for you. If I see that one of my men is careless about his own money I ask myself what he’ll be like with mine. Know what I mean?”

The up-curve of Pleeth’s mouth became more pronounced and, taking the cue, Carewe smiled in appreciation. “I like that.”

“Here’s something you’ll like even more. As you know, we’ve introduced quite a few new cost control techniques lately. My chief accountant is due for his twenty-year rotation to a lower grade in three years, but in view of all the recent procedural innovations he is prepared to step down a little earlier. His job could be yours in less than a year.”

Carewe swallowed. “But Walton’s a suberb accountant. I wouldn’t like to push him …”

“Nonsense! Walton’s been with me for over eighty years, and I can tell you he’s looking forward to rotating down and then battling his way back up again. He’s done it three times already—loves it!”

“Does he?” Carewe put aside the thought that under the rotation system he too would eventually have to relinquish the executive status. He could feel the golden centuries rolling out before him like a lush, endless carpet.

His visit to the president’s suite would have been widely noted among the staff, so Carewe resisted the impulse to quit work early and break his news to Athene. Business as usual, he told himself, and sat imprisoned at his desk while his mind drifted in heady breezes of speculation. It was late afternoon before he remembered he had promised Athene to get in sharp at five to help with the preparations for a modest party she was giving. He glanced at his wrist and the dial tattooed on the skin, rearranging its pigmentation molecules in accordance with the standard time signals broadcast, told him he had less than thirty minutes in which to reach home.

Marianne Toner looked up from her desk on the admin computer as he came out of his office. “Leaving early, Willy?”

“A little—we’re having a party this evening and I’ve got to weigh in.”

“Come over to my place and we’ll have a real party,” Marianne said smiling, yet seriously. “Just the two of us.” She was a tall, slightly heavy brunette with a voluptuous broad-hipped figure and disappointed eyes. Her apparent age was about twenty-five.

“Just the two of us?” Carewe parried. “I didn’t realize you were so conventional at heart.”

“Not conventional—greedy. How about it, Willy?”

“Where’s your maidenly modesty, woman?” He moved towards the door. “It’s getting so a man isn’t safe in his own office.”

Marianne shrugged. “You needn’t worry—I’m leaving next week.”

“Sorry to hear that. Where for?”

“Swifts.”

“Oh!” Carewe knew that Swifts was a computer bureau with non-mixed staff, all female.

“Yes—oh! It’s probably all for the best, anyway.”

“Have to run, Marianne. See you in the morning.” Carewe hurried out to the elevator burdened with an obscure guilt. Swifts was well-known for the activity of its Priapic Club, and the fact that Marianne was going there indicated she was giving up the endless struggle to attract funkies. He guessed she would be happier; but there was pain in the thought of Marianne’s canethighed, child-hungry figure submitting to the straps of a plastic priapus.

The air outside the Farma block was cold for late spring, although the abortive snowstorm of the morning had been successfully dumped in the Rockies. Carewe adjusted the thermostat in his belt and hurried past the security man, still feeling depressed about Marianne Toner. E.80 has to be a success, he thought. For all our sakes.

He had turned towards his bullet when a tiny movement on the ground at the edge of the parking lot registered on his peripheral vision. At first he was unable to find what had attracted his attention, then he picked out the shape of a large frog completely covered with dust and cinders. Its throat was pumping steadily. He stepped over it, went to his bullet and got in quickly. The rush-hour queue would already be forming at the entrance to the Three Springs tube and he had no time to spare if he wanted to reach home early. He spun up the engine, accelerated out onto the highway and headed south. A mile from the Farma block he braked abruptly and, muttering with self-disgust, turned back. Others were leaving the building when he got back to it and headlights were blazing in the vehicle park, but he found the frog in the same place, still pulsing defiantly.

“Come on, boy,” he said, scooping up the cold gritty body. “Anybody could lose his sense of direction after six months’ sleep.” He waited for a break in the traffic, then crossed the highway and threw the frog into the dark waters of the reservoir which lapped the road. A steady stream of bullets and roadcars was moving past him now and he had trouble getting back to his own vehicle. Wondering if anybody in the security kiosk had been watching his performance, he forced his bullet out into the traffic flow, but the few lost minutes had been critical. It took him another ten to reach the Three Springs tube and he groaned as he saw the line of bullets at its entrance.

Dusk was gathering by the time he reached the breech. The roboloader photographed his registration plate and slid the bullet into the tube, leaving the chassis behind on a moving belt which carried it towards the north-bound et for use by an arriving vehicle. Carewe tried to relax as his machine passed through the sphincter valve. With tons of air pressure behind him he would cover the hundred miles to Three Springs in twenty minutes, but there would be another queue for chassis at the northern end and he was going to be an hour late reaching home.

He debated calling Athene on the carphone to explain what was happening, then decided against it. There was far too much to talk about.

Athene Carewe was tall and black-haired, with a snaky, hipless body which she could coil like a whip in relaxation or straighten like a steel blade in anger. Her features were regular except for a slight droop of the left eyelid—the result of a childhood accident—which sometimes made her look supercilious, sometimes conspiratorial. When Carewe entered the middle-bracket geodesic bubble he was buying on a one-century mortgage gage, she had already retracted the interior walls in preparation for the party. She was dressed in a light-necklace which clothed her in the fire of jewels and lake-reflected sun.

“You ’re late, ” she said, without preamble. “Hello. ” “Sorry—I got held up. Hello. ”

“I had to put the walls away myself. Why didn ’t you call me from the office? ”

“I said I was sorry. Besides, the hold-up happened after I left the office. ”

“Oh? ”

Carewe hesitated, wondering if he should risk annoying her further by mentioning the frog. One-to-one marriages were rare in a society in which nubile females outnumbered functional males by a factor of eight. By signing an agreement not to tie off for several years he should have made a multiple marriage, the combined dowry from which would have been a fortune. One of the unwritten laws of his relationship with Athene was that she was not required to be subdued or appear grateful, and when she felt like having a row it was always the genuine article. Carewe particularly wanted to avoid a quarrel so he produced a lie about an accident near the tube entrance.

“Anybody killed? ” she asked moodily, setting out ashtrays.

“No. It wasn’t a serious accident. Just blocked the road for a while. ” He crossed to the kitchen and poured himself a glass of fortified milk. “How many are coming tonight? ”

“A dozen or so. ”

“Anybody I know? ”

“Don ’t be funny, Will—you know them all. ”

“Does that mean May will be here with her latest pet ram? ”

Athene set the last ashtray down with a loud double click. “You’re the one who always criticizes people for beingld-fashioned and conventional.”

“Do I?” Carewe swallowed some milk. “Then I shouldn’t, because I just can’t get used to seeing a succession of thirteen-year-old-boys practically having it off with May in the middle of my living space.”

“You want her yourself? She’d be more than willing.”

“That’s enough of that.” He caught Athene as she was passing and pulled her close to him, discovering she was wearing no solid clothing beneath the light-necklace’s shimmering brilliance. “Hey, what would you do if you had a power failure?”

“I dare say I’d manage to keep warm.” She melted into him, suddenly.

“I’ll bet you would.” Carewe steadied his breathing. “I’m not going to let you get any older, Athene. It wouldn’t be right.”

“You’re going to kill me!” Her voice was flippant, but he felt the lean body harden under his fingers.

“No—I’ve ordered our shots from Farina. I’ll get a good mark-off, too, seeing as how I work for the …”

Athene broke away from him. “Nothing has changed, Will. I’m not going to fix and watch you get older and older …”

“It’s all right, darling; we both fix at the same time. Me first if you like.”

“Oh!” Her brown eyes were clouded with doubt and he knew she was looking into the future, asking herself the questions whose answers they knew only too well. What happens to love’s sweet dream when the groom becomes impotent? How long can a union of souls survive atrophy of the testes? “You’ve made up your mind?”

“Yes.” He saw the color had left her face, and felt a pang of guilt over the clumsy way in which he had approached the subject. “But there’s nothing to worry about—Farma has developed a new kind of biostat, and I’m going to be the first to use it.”

“A new drug?”

“Yes—one which leaves the male function unimpaired.”

He was totally unprepared for the open-banded blow she swung, and it caught him full on the mouth. “What the …?”

“I told you what would happen the next time you tried anything like that.” Athene stared at him in disgust, her left eye almost closed; the lid throbbing steadily. “Get away from me, Will.”

Carewe tasted blood and knew his lips were swelling. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“What did you think you were doing? You’ve done a few things, Will—there was the time you tried to trick me into fixing when I was on Illusogen, and the time you got my mother to come up here and work on me —but this is the clumsiest effort yet. Get it into your head that I don’t fix until you do.”

“But this isn’t a trick! They really have…

She interrupted him with one ugly word which hurt like another blow, and walked away. The beginnings of a bleak fury stirred in his stomach, clenching his muscles. “Athene. Is that what a one-to-one marriage is all about?”

“Yes!” Her voice was savage. “Believe it or not, Will, this is what it’s all about. There’s more to it than you walking about in bristles and codpiece saying, ‘I’m sorry girls, I’d like to do you a good turn but noblesse oblige forces me to preserve all my purity for my wife!’ You really enjoy playing a part, but …”

“Go on,” he prompted. “You’re in the tube now—let it bullet.”

“Our kind of marriage is supposed to be based on absolute trust, but you don’t know the meaning of the word. You’ve put off fixing till you’re right into the thrombosis-risk age because you’re convinced I couldn’t live without being screwed three or four times a week. In fact, you’re staking your life on it.”

Carewe gaped. “That’s the most slanted, emotional …” “Am I right or wrong?”

He closed his mouth abruptly. Athene’s outburst had been a melange of bad temper, fear and the antiquated notions about human relationships which were peculiarly her own, but all the things she had said—including the remarks about himself—were absolutely true. And in that instant, because he loved her, he hated her. He swallowed the rest of his milk in one gulp, hoping vaguely that the calcium it contained would help relax his nerves. It was no surprise to him that his anger continued to build up. Only Athene could have turned what ought to have been a supremely happy moment of their lives into yet another shattered evening, another of the bitter episodes which occurred so regularly. It was as though the interplay of their emotions set up an unstable field which had to reverse its polarity from time to time, or destroy them both.

“Listen,” he said hopelessly, “we’ve got to talk about this.”

“You can talk if you like, but I don’t have to listen,” Athene smiled sweetly. “Make yourself useful, darling. Set out some of the new self-chilling glasses I bought last week.”

“The breakthrough was bound to come sometime. Think of the research effort that’s been poured into it for two hundred years.”

Athene nodded. “It was worth it, though. Just imagine—never having to mess around with ice cu again.”

“I’m talking about Farma’s new drug,” he said doggedly, depressingly aware that when Athene decided to be light-hearted and elusive she was at her most intractable. “It really exists, Athene.”

“And bring out the hors d’oeuvres.”

“You,” he announced, “are one smug, stupid bitch.” “You’re another.” Athene pushed him towards the kitchen area. “The glasses please, Will.”

“You want glasses?” Carewe found himself trembling as he gave in to a childish impulse. He strode to the kitchen, lifted one of the ice-cold self-chillers out of its insulating box and hurried back. Athene was thoughtfully surveying the arrangements. He pushed the glass through the shimmering colors which clothed her, hard against her midriff, and felt her muscles writhe in shock. She sprang back from him, the glass whirred along the floor and at that precise moment the first guest of the evening arrived.

“That looks like fun,” Hermione Snedden said from the doorway. “May I play too? Please, please, please?”

“It’s strictly for married couples,” Athene breathed, her eyes stabbing into Carewe’s. “But come in and have a drink.”

“I never need to be coaxed.” There were no really fat immortals—the invariance of cell replication patterns saw to that—but Hermione was naturally majestic. She flowed across the room in crimson trailing silks, arms carried almost at shoulder height, and arrived at the bar. While inspecting the array of bottles, she took something from her purse and set it on the counter.

“Yes, have a drink, Hermione,” Carewe said. He went behind the bar and almost groaned aloud when he saw the object she had put down was a solid-image sign projector. That meant they were going to play Excerpts. “Or are you just browsing?”

“I’m wearing red,” she said archly, “so give me a red drink. Anything at all.”

“Right.” Carewe impassively selected an anonymous but dangerous-looking bottle, souvenir of a forgotten vacation, and poured a generous measure.

“What’s been going on with you two, Will?” Hermione leaned across the counter.

“Who said anything was going on?”

“I can tell. That handsome face of yours is slightly granite-hewn tonight. A touch of the old Ozymandias.”

He sighed. It had started already. Athene’s friends tended to be interested in books, and that was why they liked playing Excerpts. He suspected they went out of their way to sprinkle their conversation with literary allusions when speaking to him, Carewe, who had never succeeded in fihing a book, had no idea what Ozymandias meant.

“I do the Ozymandias thing on purpose,” he said. “It’s something I’m trying out. Excuse me a moment.” He went across to Athene. “Come into the kitchen and let’s get ourselves straightened out before anybody else arrives.”

“Will,” she assured him, “there just isn’t that much time in this or any other evening. Now stay out of my way.” She walked away quickly before Carewe could speak. He stood -alone in the kitchen while a slow, glacial resentment engulfed his soul and he could hear the rush of blood circulating in his own body. Athene had to be punished for the easy ruthlessness with which she turned their relationship into a weapon to cut him down any time it pleased her. For doing that she had to be hurt—but how? An idea was stirring far back in his mind when he heard other guests arriving in the main living area. He forced himself to relax and strolled out to greet them, smiling with lips which still throbbed from Athene’s blow.

Six people had arrived in a group which included May Rattray and a lumbering blond boy of about fourteen, who was introduced to Carewe as Vert. The women receded in a chattering swarm, making communal adjustments to their radiances, colors and perfumes, leaving Carewe temporarily alone with Vert. The boy surveyed Carewe with a noticeable lack of interest.

“That’s an unusual name you’ve got,” Carewe said. “French for green, isn’t it? Are your parents … ?”

“It’s Trev turned backwards,” the boy interrupted. His fuzz-covered face was fleetingly truculent. “I was named Trev, but why should your mother be allowed to pick your name for you? A man should be allowed to pick out any name he wants.”

“I agree—but instead of choosing any name you took the one your mother gave you and turned …” Carewe paused, realizing he was heading into deep psychological waters. “How about a drink, Vert?”

“I don’t need liquor,” Vert said. “Why don’t you just go ahead and have one yourself.”

“Thanks,” Carewe said feelingly. He went to the bar and under the pretext of tidying it up stayed behind the counter, taking long swigs from a self-chiller full of Scotch. The prospect of an evening of Excerpts interspersed with conversations with Vert was one he could not face unaided. By the time the women returned he was halfway down his second tall glass of neat spirit, and was beginning to feel equal to the occasion. Equal to Athene too, for that matter—he had decided how to make her pay, and pay dearly. Four more guests arrived and he kept himself busy setting up drinks. Two of the new arrivals were male cools he knew to be not much older than himself—Bart Barton and Vic Navarro—and Carewe courted them assiduously, trying to create an anti-Excerpts faction. He had just got a reasonably healthy discussion going on the subject of bullet design when Athene took the center of the floor.

“I see we all have our projectors,” she said in an incongruous master-of-cereonies voice, “so let’s get on with the game. There’s a mystery prize for the best flash of the evening, but remember we want strictly informal, happening-type Excerpts—anybody found quoting published sources will have to pay a forfeit.” There was a low cheer and the dhome swirled with fragmented colors as the guests began adjusting their projectors. Glowing, apparently solid letters and words swarmed in the air. Carewe groaned and sat down behind the bar as Athene leveled her own projector.

“I’ll go first,” she announced, “just to get things moving.” She activated the little instrument and brilliant green lettering appeared, hovering a few paces in front
of her. WHAT’S THE POINT IN SPEAKING FRENCH IF EVERYBODY KNOWS WHAT YOU’RE SAYING? Carewe stared suspiciously at the guests, most of whom were giving appreciative laughs, then examined the words again. Their significance still escaped him. Athene had more than once explained that Excerpts was the art of taking a phrase or sentence out of mundane context of conversation or correspondence, presenting it as a literary entity in its own right, and thereby creating a fantastic counter-context in the mind of the reader. Verbal holography, she had called it, completing his bafflement. Since the game had become fashionable a year earlier he had done his best to avoid it.

“Very good, Athene,” a woman’s voice said in the dimness, “but how about this?” New words appeared in the air, hovering near the roof of the dhome: ALL I KNOW IS WHAT I READ IN THE ENCYCLOPEDIAS.

Two more signs flashed up almost immediately, one in red, the other in topaz: WASN’T THAT TOUGH ABOUT ROMEO AND JULIET? and WE KEEP THAT ROOM BRICKED UP SPECIALLY FOR YOU.

Carewe regarded them stoically over the rim of his glass, then decided to fight back. He took a full bottle of liquor in each hand and moved around the guests filling glasses to the brim and urging people to drink up. Within a few minutes the quantity of neat spirit he had taken combined with his tiredness, hunger and the flashing images of words to project him into a world of spatial incoherence. RADIUS IS THE ONLY WORD THAT MEANS RADIUS, a shimmering sign told him as he sat down amid a vaguely seen group on the floor. OFF-HAND, another one asked him, WOULD YOU SAY I HAVE ANY RESEMBLANCE TO AN OTTER? He took another long drink and tried to tune in on a low conversation close by.

“… most of my wives want me to quit work and live at home on the dowries. They say my working all day makes them tired.”

“Sounds like a sort of couvade in reverse, with them pretending to have labor pains.”

“Yeah, but I’m waiting till they break out in psychosomatic paychecks.”

Carewe blocked the conversation out again and looked around to see what Athene was doing. AIN’T IT HELL? an electric blue sign demanded, HERE IT IS CHRISTMAS AND US OUT HERE CHASING A STAR. He saw Athene sitting alone, silhouetted in the light from the kitchen area. She was laughing delightedly at an Excerpt, apparently undisturbed by the scene they had had earlier. m> All right, he thought, if that’s the way … A sign got in the way, scrambling his mind. PEOPLE SHOULDN’T HAVE TO VISIT PEOPLE AT CHRISTMAS-PEOPLE SHOULD VISIT THEM. He closed his eyes but jerked them open at an extra-loud shout of laughter. THINK HOW MUCH SOONER THE WEST WOULD HAVE BEEN WON IF WAGON WHEELS HAD GONE ROUND THE RIGHT WAY.

“Hold on,” Carewe said irritably to someone near him. “What does that mean?”

“It’s a reference to the movies we see at the Historical … Oh, you aren’t in that, are you?” Vic Navarro said.

“No.”

“Well, in old-style movies the action of the camera shutter often caused a strobe effect so that the spokes of wagon wheels seemed to be turning the wrong way.”

“And that’s what everybody’s laughing at?”

“Will, old son!” Navarro clapped him on the shoulder. “Have another drink.”

Carewe did as he was told and beyond the private, friendly universe in his glass the colored signs shivered and swam and swooped until they ran together in his consciousness … FILL ME IN ON GOD … WELL, HERE I GO FOR MY RATION OF BOOT POLISH … ARE YOU TRYING TO MAKE A NONENTITY OUT OF ME? … THAT’S THE ONE I SHOT THE SPIDER WITH . . I DON’T MIND BEING POLITE IF iT SAVES ME MONEY … “As far as I’m concerned,” somebody was saying, “immortality came too late because we have no pioneers like the Wrights who can be preserved beyond their natural spans to appreciate what they started …” IN A SYRUP-WADING SEQUENCE AT THE MOMENT … HE PROBABLY DIED IN SELF-DEFENSE DEATH IS NATURE’S WAY OF TELLING US TO SLOW DOWN…

“Just a minute!” Carewe snorted painfully into his drink. “That last one is funny. Doesn’t that disqualify it or something?”

“Good old Will,” Navarro whispered.

“If you’re allowed to put up funny ones, I’m going to play too.” Carewe said recklessly, looking around for a projector. May Rattray and Vert were grappling determinedly behind him, obviously having lost interest in the game. Carewe took May’s projector, studied the keyboard for a moment and began composing an Excerpt. He floated the words across the smoky air of the dhome: DEATH STOPS BAD BREATH INSTANTLY.

“That’s too much like the last one,” Hermione Snedden said, looming redly on his left. “Besides, you just made it up.”

“I didn’t!” Carewe was triumphant. “I heard it on a tridi show.”

“That rules it out then.”

“Don’t waste your breath, Hermione,” Athene called. “Will d7;t enjoy a game unless he is breaking the rules.”

“Thank you, my darling,” Carewe said with an exaggerated salaam in her direction. You and I play another game, he thought savagely, and I’m going to break the rules in that too.

In the morning, with the defeated ghost of a hangover tremoring along his nerves, he felt ashamed of his performance at Athene’s party—but his determination to hurt her had not lessened.

III

The two hypodermic guns were in a black case, nested in traditional purple velvet, and one of them had red adhesive tape wrapped around the barrel. Hyron Barenboim tapped the marked cylinder with a finely manicured finger.

“This is yours, Willy,” he said soberly. “We put the shot in an absolutely standard gun so there’d be no hint of anything unusual for anyone to pick up afterwards. Take the tape off when you’ve used it.”

Carewe nodded. “I see.” He closed the case with a snap and slipped it into his pouch.

“Well, that’s that. Now, you’re going to be away in the mountains for three days on your … ah … second honeymoon, and I’ve arranged things so that when you get back there’ll be a request from the chief of the biopoiesis lab for you to check some procedures at Randal’s Creek in person. I’d say we have everything neatly tied up, wouldn’t your Barenboim leaned back in the big chair and his stomach rounded upwards through the pleats of his blouse. His hairless face, behind two centuries of composure, was smooth and inscrutable as that of a ceramic Buddha.

“It all looks good to me, Hy.”

“It ought to—you’re a very lucky boy, Willy. What did your wife think when you told her?”

“She just couldn’t believe it.” Carewe laughed, making it sound as natural as possible. It was four days since he had tried breaking the news to Athene and from that moment they had both been trapped in a fast-hardening amber of bitterness, unable to move closer to each other, unable to communicate…. His own attitude was childish, Carewe knew, but he wanted to punish Athene for having bared his soul, to make her pay for the crime of knowing him better than he knew himself. And, by the inexorable illogic of marital in-fighting, the only way he should do it was by proving her wrong—even though she was right. He was not going to tell Athene about the development of E.80, knowing he could later justify his action to her on grounds of the need for utter secrecy.

“All right, Willy. I’m leaving everything to you now—you’d better go over to your office and not communicate with me again for the time being. Either Manny or I will talk to you when you get back.”

Carewe stood up. “I haven’t thanked you …”

“There’s no need, Willy, no need at all. Have a good trip.” Barenboim was still smiling when the door of the suite slid across to shut him from view. Carewe went back to his office and locked the door. He sat down at his desk, took the black case from his pouch, set it in front of him and began inspecting the hinges. They were designed to allow the lid to spring open a full right angle from the base, but by carefully bending the alloy around them with a screwdriver he succeeded in altering their geometry so that the lid opened through a smaller angle. Satisfied with his work, he stripped the red tape from the gun containing the E.80 and placed it in the outermost niche.

The blue waters of Lake Orkney vapored gently in the afternoon sunshine. Stepping down from the vertijet, Carewe breathed deeply as he surveyed the snowy slopes, the toy-like pines and the bright pastel curvatures of the Orkney Regal hotel in the distance. Because of the cold front affecting most of the western states, the jet’s address system had announced proudly, the resort manager had gone to the expense of calling in the Weather Control Bureau to set up a lenticular field over the lake. Looking upwards into the empty blueness—which, in spite of the absence of spatial referents, gave the impression of curious distortion—Carewe felt as though he were inside an antique glass snowstorm ornament.

He turned to Athene as they walked into the airport building among a group of passengers. “What do they call those old glass balls with miniature snowflakes in them?”

“I don’t know if they have a special name. Olga Hickey has several in her collection and she calls them snow motiles, but I think motile is an adjective.” Athene, too, was looking around the valley with interest and her tones were the most relaxed he had heard her use since the night they had quarreled. Her color was high and she was wearing a new cerise coat which, he suddenly realized, was similar to the one she had worn on their honeymoon ten years earlier. Was this a signal?

“I managed to get the same room,” he said impulsively, discarding his intention to let it come as a later surprise.

Her eyebrows arched slightly. “But how did you remember? Oh, I suppose the hotel was able to look up the room number for you.”

“No. I remembered it myself.”

“Really?”

“The way I remember everything about those two weeks.” He caught Athene’s arm and turned her to face him. Several women brushed past them impatiently.

“Oh, Will,” she breathed. “I’m sorry. Those things I said …”

Her words were food and drink to him. “Forget it,” he replied, gorging himself. “Everything you said was true, anyway.”

“But I had no right.”

“You had. We’re really married, you and I—remember?”

She came to him with open mouth and he sealed it with his own, breathing her breath, while other passengers swept past them. Athene was the first to break free, but she held his arm as they moved into the building amid watchful, appraising faces. There was not as-other funkie in sight, he discovered. The scattering of people in the arrivals area were either cools, who watched with practiced disinterest, or women with tautly amused eyes.

“What’s happened to me?” he whispered. “I’m behaving like a teen-age ram.”

“It’s all right, darling.”

“Yeah, but what an exhibition! Let’s get to the hotel.” During the ride down to the lake shore on the old-style cable car Carewe wondered if it was possible for a man of his age to be overcome with sheer contentment. This was why one-to-one marriages had survived and still had meaning, even at the end of the 22nd Century. The simple fact, often heard but now fully understood for the first time, was that a relationship could yield only as much as one put into it. He sucked sunlight into his lungs, and allowed his hand to trace the rectangular outline of the small flat case in his pouch as he tried to come to terms with the realities of immortality. One shot each and—with care—Athene and he need not die. He searched within himself for some trace of the exultation which ought to accompany the thought, but there was a strange blackness. It was all a question of relativity. Born into the starving India of two centuries earlier he would have accepted a life expectancy of twenty-seven years, and been overjoyed if some benign power had unexpectedly guaranteed him seventy. Born into the complacent bitch society of the 22nd Century he regarded indefinitely prolonged life as a birthright, a social benefit different only in degree from something like industrial injury payments. It was said that the race’s creative genius had stultified —certainly no intellectual giants had been nurtured on lavish allotments of time—but perhaps there had also been an attenuation of the emotions, the colors of life running thin in the ichors of eternity.

He glanced sideways at Athene and renewed his reasons for wanting to live forever. At thirty-six she was on a peak of superb good health, a peak which the biostats would convert to an endless plateau. Sitting gazing through the cable car’s windows with rapt attention, she absorbed all his senses until there seemed to be an entire universe called Athene. Once, when she smiled at some secret memory, a chance attitude of her head showed him the inner surfaces of her teeth, and they were translucent in the sunlight. He noted, catalogued and filed the discovery, like an observer of the outer universe recording the appearance of a nova. It came to him that Athene looked her age, looked thirty-six, yet she also seemed exactly as she had been when they were married ten years earlier—which was impossible. What then were the precise physical changes? Striving to be clinical, he noted a slight thinning of the cheeks, the beginnings of a fatty deposit on the inside of the upper eyelid which in time would develop a yellowish tinge. Abruptly Carewe reached a decision. His plan had been that they would take the shots on the last evening of their stay at Lake Orkney, but the delay suddnly seemed intolerable. He could not permit Athene to age by even one more hour.

#8220;Stop it, Will,” she said.

“Stop what?”

“Staring at me like that in public.” Her cheeks reddened slightly.

“I don’t mind if people see me.”

“Neither do I, but it does something to me—so stop it.”

“You’re the boss,” he said in pretended huffiness. She took his hand and held it during the rest of the swaying, jolting ride down to the lakeside. He was briefly tempted to sacrifice his own self-gratification and the perfection of the moment by making a fresh attempt to convince her of the reality of E.80 and all it meant, but the feeling passed. This vacation was going to be the best of their lives, and he was still hungry for the Athene who would exist, albeit ever so briefly, when she believed he had proved his faith in the non-physical aspect of their love. The game would have to go on until they were on the point of returning to Three Springs.

The boisterous air from the lake invaded Carewe’s lungs as he stepped down from the car and helped Athene to alight. They elected to walk the short distance to the hotel, sending their baggage ahead on the guest pick-up. Athene talked easily and happily during the walk, but Carewe’s mind was wholly occupied, filled with a sense of imminence, now that the crucial event was so close. Supposing E.80 was not all that Barenboim claimed it to be? Supposing he really was about to tie off? He went through the formalities of checking in without being aware of what he was doing, and made two mistakes in following the direction arrows which, activated by the nearness of his key, illuminated the way to their suite. Ten minutes later, in the still familiar bedroom with its view of diamond-sewn waters, he took the hypodermic case out of his pouch and opened it. Athene was hanging her clothes in a closet, but she heard the faint sound and turned to face him. Shadows of a million tomorrows played across her face.

“You don’t have to,” she said, her eyes absorbing the fact that the case held two identical guns with their seals intact.

“This is the time, Athene. The best time.”

“You’re certain, Will?” She hesitated. “We have no children.”

“We don’t need them.” He held the case out to her. “Besides, I took a pill last week and it might be months before I could be a father again—and I don’t want to wait months. This is the time. Right now.”

She nodded sadly and began to undress. Sensing the rightness of it, Carewe set the case aside and took off his own clothes. He kissed Athene once, almost coldly, and offered her the case again. She picked the outermost gun, as he had known she would, and broke the seal. He held out his wrist. She pressed the gun to the blue deltas which glowed beneath his skin. There was a sharp hiss and tn waters,ny cloud of vapor passing into his tissues produced a fleeting sensation of coldness. He took the other gun and fired its charge into Athene’s wrist.

She’s safe, he thought later as they lay entwined on the satin-cool divan. But how can I tell her I was cheating?

IV

In the dreams his body was made of glass and he was precipitated from one dangerous sequence of events to another: serving with Fauve teams in Africa or Southern Asia, sweating it out on the fourth Venus expedition, trawling for manganese nodules on the bed of the Pacific. Many kinds of destruction threatened his fragile limbs and torso—bullets, bombs, falls, the blind thrust of massive crankshafts which could grind him to sparkling dust …

And Carewe would wake up feeling cold and lonely, unable to find reassurance in the nearness of his wife. He understood the significance of the dreams, but it made them no less- terrible. Before the development of biostats, a tutor had once told him, a population of human beings and a population of glass figurines had entirely different kinds of life expectancy .graphs. In the case of the figurines a fraction would get broken every year, until gradually none was left; with the humans, most of them would be around until their late fifties—and then the population would rapidly disappear. The advent of biostatic drugs meant that a human could look forward to an indefinitely prolonged life, but not to careless immortality. A being which had the potential for indefinitely prolonged life was “‘immortal”—but smash that being into a mountainside at thrice the speed of sound and he is dead. All we have done, the tutor concluded, is to join the ranks of the figurines.

The magnitude of the responsibility for preserving his own life dismayed Carewe. To die at the age of forty in an airplane or high-speed automobile crash would be bad if it meant losing thirty years of life, but when a possible thousand years were involved, it was unthinkable. Standing looking out at the darkness of the lake, he achieved a little more insight into what the contemporary philosopher Osman called “the bitch society,” meaning a world population in which the historic male traits had effectively vanished. War had been abolished, if one discounted the limited operations of the Fauve teams, but more than two centuries after the first Moon landing Mars and Venus were virtually unexplored. The small number of funkies prepare to undertake such ventures received little backing from administrations of cools—and already Carewe could appreciate why, even though he had not been uncoupled from the biological flywheel of masculinity. The future weighs heavily, he thought. That’s all it is.

And the problems of the immediate future were the most pressing. Dawn was overpainting the fainter stars, which meant that in a few hours they would be on their way back to Three Springs—and he had not been able to tell Athene the truth about his E.80 shot. The three days at Lake Orkney had been the best in ten years of marriage. He and Athene were matched opposing mirrors, and by his apparent act of faith in her he had created a lustrous image of himself which was blazing back and forth between them. (Love, Osman had said, is approval e other partner’s good taste.) Now he was faced with the prospect of turning Athene’s mirror aside, deflecting the precious fire into a cold void from which—by the laws of emotional thermodynamics—it could never be recovered.

There was a purely physical aspect to his dilemma. Her belief that he had severed the sexual link seemed to have had a profound aphrodisiac effect on Athene. As if trying permanently to burn out her own desires she had, for three days, engaged him in an almost continual bout of sexual activity, refusing even to fall asleep unless he was in her as they nested, her buttocks to his groin, like spoons. But three days was about the maximum period for which Carewe should continue to display masculinity. The post-biostatic production of androgens was known to last that long in some cases, but within a matter of hours he would have to simulate loss of sexuality or tell Athene the whole story.

To make matters worse, his own attitude kept fluctuating from minute to minute, depriving him of firm ground on which to make a stand. At times there appeared to be no problem at all—Athene would certainly be overjoyed to learn they were the first couple in the world to have been granted endless life and endless love—but at other times he accepted the facts of the enclosed universe which was his marriage. In that involute continuum getting something for nothing was not impossible, merely unforgivable. He had deliberately allowed Athene to believe in his faith in the essential, asexual component of their love, he had traded on the deception, used the emotional funds which had been forthcoming. Now it was time to confess—and he was afraid.

Tired and depressed in the grainy light of dawn, he decided to take the only avenue of escape available to him. On returning to work he was scheduled to fly to Randal’s Creek for a medical check on the efficacy of E.80, and there was a faint possibility that the drug was a failure. He felt perfectly normal but—incredibly, the idea was almost attractive—perhaps he really had tied off, perhaps he had genuinely cooled it. With that possibility in mind, the logical thing to do was to remain silent until Farma’s physiologists made a definite pronouncement.

Shivering slightly, possibly with relief, Carewe got back into bed.

Strictly speaking there had been no need for it, but in the morning he had adjusted the cutters on his magnetic razor and shaved off his five-millimeter bristles. Now, as he boarded the southbound vertijet flight, his chin and upper lip felt naked and exposed. The flight systems manager, who would once have been known as the pilot, was a symphony of honey and tan in her tailored uniform. Carewe smiled tentatively at her as he paused to hold his credisk against the scanner in the forward hatch. She gave him an impersonal smile in return, and already her eyes were on the passengers behind him.

He sat down, stroking the skin of his face, and staring disconsolately through a window until the aircraft made its tiny run and take-off. It rose vertically for over a thousand meters until it had cleared the insubstantial walls of the noise abatement screenfield, then darted southwards parallel with the irregular white peaks of the Rockies. Far below, the evenly spaced townships of the western states glittered in their ganglia of roads and tubeways, giving Carewe a welme sense of reassurance and belonging.

The world population was no smaller than at the end of the Twentieth Century, but it was no larger either, and there had been two centuries in which to shake down and find optimum solutions to the problems. Life in a society of glass figurines tended to be both dull and safe, but with the personal responsibility of immortality riding on one’s shoulders safety was the prime consideration. No sane person ever took a risk, knowingly. The aircraft in which Carewe was traveling to Randal’s Creek had three entirely independent means of staying aloft, but he was taut with apprehension.

What would I do, he wondered, if there was even a slight crash and I had to look at a dead body?

The Randal’s Creek laboratory was eighty kilometers south of Pueblo, discreetly tucked into the juncture of two mountain valleys. It was served by a fused-earth road which, although good enough for roadcars, was unsuitable for bullets because of their higher centers of gravity. Most of the staff of eighty lived in Pueblo and its environs, and traveled on the shuttle copter operated by Farma.

Carewe reached the Pueblo field in mid-morning and found there were only three other men, all cools, sharing the copter’s large saloon with him. Remembering Barenboim’s injunction to keep up appearances of normalcy, be made a point of speaking to the others during the brief flight. By asking several questions about the location of the biopoiesis lab and admin block he managed to get across the information that he was an accountant on his way to Randal’s Creek to examine costing procedures. The other men had apparent ages in the early thirties, and something in their manner suggested to Carewe their real ages were not much greater. They lacked Barenboim’s glacial implacability. It occurred to Carewe that when the news about E.80 became public the old-style immortals, especially those who had newly tied off, were likely to feel resentment. On the other hand, some aspects of the cool philosophy might be vindicated as never before. Even in pre-historic ages a small percentage of men had sufficient time to tire of the basic reproductive procedures—what strange byways might such a person be exploring in his two hundredth year of undiminished potency? The disturbing idea that asexual immortality could have its advantages was stirring yet again in Carewe’s mind as the copter crossed the brow of a pine-clad hill and eased itself downwards to the silvery domes of the Farma laboratories.

He hurried across to the main entrance, noting that the air was appreciably warmer in Colorado than further north in the Three Springs area, and stepped into one of a line of booths which spanned the reception area. There was a barely perceptible pause while the company computer, a thousand kilometers away, checked his identity, approved of his presence and used a microwave link to open the booth’s inner door, allowing him to enter the building’s main concourse.

“Mr. Barenboim wishes you to join him in his office on Level D as soon as you have paid your compliments to Mr. Abercrombie, the divisional accountant,” the machine told him.

“Understood,” he said, mildly surprised. Barenboim rarely visited Randal’s Creek, he knew, but then E.80 was the most important project that Farma or any other g manufacturer had ever undertaken. He found the divisional accountant’s office and spent almost an hour talking shop and pinning down the exact nature of the accounting difficulties he was required to straighten out. It soon became apparent that the problem was less one of procedure than of relationships between the department and Barenboim. Abercrombie, a plump cool with watchful, watery eyes, seemed well aware of the situation and he treated Carewe with reserve, as though he could be dealing with Barenboim’s axeman. The reaction amused Carewe, who found it the first foretaste of what it would be like to have top executive status and power, but at the same time it made him feel slightly apologetic. He got away from Abercrombie as quickly as possible and made his way to Level D.

Barenboim’s suite was smaller and slightly less luxurious than the one at Farma’s headquarters. The inner door’s round black eye blinked its recognition of Carewe and the polished wood slid aside. He went through into the familiar aroma of coffee with which Barenboim was always surrounded when he was working.

“Willy, Willy!” Barenboim, who had been seated at a free-form blue-and-red desk, crossed the office and shook Carewe’s hand. His eyes flashed from the depths of their bony grottoes. “It’s good to see you.”

“Nice to see you again, Hy!”

“This is marvelous,” Barenboim said as he returned to his seat, waving Carewe into another.

“Ah … yes.” It isn’t all that marvelous, Carewe thought; I’ve only been away a few days. It occurred to him, for the first time, that Barenboim was making a real effort to behave like a funkie or, at least, to act un-cool; and he was reminded that their relationship was entirely artificial, based on nothing more than circumstances and expediency.

“Well, how did it go? Good trip?”

“Very pleasant—Lake Orkney is beautiful this time of the year.”

Barenboim’s face was momentarily impatient. “I wasn’t inquiring about the scenery. How’s your libido? Still got it?”

“You bet.” Carewe laughed. “And then some.”

“That’s fine. I see you’ve shaved.”

“I thought it would be best.”

“Probably, but you’d better use a depilatory instead. Your chin has a distinct blue tinge which makes you look less cool than ever.”

Carewe felt a pang of pleasure, but was careful not to conceal it. That bitch who flies the plane, he thought. She must have been blind. “I’ll pick up one today,” he said.

“No you don’t, young Willy. There must be no hint anybody anywhere that you have used anything but an absolutely standard biostat. How would it look if a supposed cool was seen buying a depilatory?”

“Sorry.”

“It’s all right, Willy—but this is the kind of thing we have to watch out for. I’ll give you something before you leave.” Barenboim inspected the puffy, floury skin of his hands. “Now take your clothes off.”

“Huh?”

Barenboim smoothed each of his eyebrows delicately with a single fingertip. “We need tissue samples from various sites on your body for checks on the all replication functions and, of course, it will be necessary to carry out a sperm count.”

“I see—but I thought the checks would be done by one of your biochemists.”

“Making the results available to the entire laboratory staff? No thanks. Manny Pleeth is a better practical biochemist than I, but he’s busy up north, so I’ll check you out myself. Don’t worry about it, Willy—the door’s locked and I do have some years of experience.”

“Of course, Hy. I wasn’t thinking.” Carewe stood up and, with an uneasy suspicion that something was beginning to go terribly wrong, removed his clothes.

He had been waiting at the Three Springs airport for over thirty minutes before it occurred to him that Athene might not be coming to pick him up. It was mid-afternoon and the passenger building was almost deserted. Carewe went into a communication booth, stated his home number and stared impatiently at the screen, waiting for Athene to answer. It was the first time in ten years of marriage that she had failed to meet him on his return from a trip. But, he reassured himself, it was pure coincidence that it was also the first time that, as far as Athene knew, he was returning as a cool. The screen selected colors from its electronic palette and assembled them into a two-dimensional picture of his wife’s face.

“Hello, Athene.” He waited for her reaction to seeing him.

“Will,” she said listlessly.

“I’ve been waiting at the airport for over half an hour—I thought you were picking me up.”

“I forgot.”

“Oh.” It may have been an effect of the two-dimensional image, but for a moment Athene’s face seemed to be that of a hostile stranger. “Well, I’m here now reminding you. Are you coming for me or not?”

She shrugged. “Whatever you like.”

“If it’s too much trouble for you,” Carewe said distantly, “I’ll rent a bullet here at the airport.”

“All right. See you.” The image dissolved, became a swarm of colored fireflies which fled into gray infinities. Carewe touched the smoothness of his chin and a great surge of emotion boiled up through him. It was a few seconds before he was able to identify it as … sadness. Athene was perhaps the only person he knew who was completely honest in all her dealings with people, who without embarrassment or compunction would reverse a statement she had made perhaps minutes earlier provided the words reflected a change in her inner being. He had known her to buy an expensive vase and smash it the same day; she would persuade him to vacation in a resort of her choice and on the minute of arriving, if it turned out not what she expected, would refuse to stay. And on another level, would she work on Carewe’s feeling for years, swearing that her love for him would be unchanged by his going cool—and then, within a week, treat him with open contempt?

The answer, he knew, was yes.

If Athene discovered that Carewe minus sex equaled nothing there would be no dissimulation on her part. Instantly, with an appearance of cruel ease, she would come right out with it, and begin making other arrangements. In all his thoughts about going cool he had used the figure of one year as a likely upper limit for the continuance of the marriage, but he had always known that the term might be a month or a week. I’ve got to tell her, he screamed inwardly. I’ve got to get back there right now and tell my wife the truth about E.80.

Carew shouldered his way out of the booth and ran towards the vehicle pool. All the way home, as tons of air pressure hurled him along the tube, he rehearsed what he was going to say. Barenboim’s tests had confirmed that E.80 was successful, that he was both immortal and male. So his marriage with Athene was going to have a fresh start and no foreseeable end. So he was going to tell her the truth, demonstrate the truth with all the forces of his loins. We’re going to have children. The thought stilled the trembling of his fingers. As soon as the effect of my last pill wears off, we’re going to have children …

The dhome’s windows were opaqued black as Carewe parked his rented bullet on the surrounding apron. He let himself in through the main door and found the interior was in near-darkness, the only light coming from star shapes projected on the roof. The partitions had all been retracted and at first he thought Athene had gone out, then he saw her lying on a couch staring upwards at the wheeling constellations. He crossed to the environment console and cleared the windows, filling the dhome with sunlight.

“I’m back,” he announced unnecessarily. “I got here as quickly as I could.”

Athene did not move. “That’s really something, Will—being neutered hasn’t slowed you down at all. That’s great.” The words were delivered with a cold savagery which appalled Carewe.

“I’ve got to talk to you, Athene—there’s something you don’t know.”

“The217;s something you don’t know, lover. Catch!” She threw a small glittering object towards him and he snatched it out of the air. It was a silver disc with a red spot in the center of one face.

“I don’t get it,” he said slowly. “This looks like a pregnancy telltale.”

“That’s exactly what it is. Getting neutered hasn’t affected your eyesight either.”

“But I still don’t see … Whose is it?”

“It’s mine, of course.” Athene sat up and faced him, her left eyelid drooping. “I licked it this morning and it turned that pretty color.”

“You aren’t making any sense. You couldn’t be pregnant because it’s less than a month since I took my last pill and …” Carewe stopped speaking as a cold perspiration prickled out on his forehead.

“Now you’ve got it.” Athene’s eye was almost closed and her face was a priestess-mask of calm fury. “You were right about me all along, Will. It seems I just can’t live without regular ess-blank-ex—you hadn’t been away two days before I had another man in your bed. Or should I say, another man had me in your bed?”

“I don’t believe you,” he said weakly. “You’re telling me a lie, Athene.”

“Really? Watch this.” She picked up another silver disk from a side table and, with the air of a magician performing a trick, placed it on her tongue. Her eyes were filled with cool amusement as she withdrew the telltale and held it out for him to see. The side which had been in contact with her tongue had a deep red spot on the center. “Now what do you say?”

“Here’s what I say.” The surroundings of the room receded to stellar distances as he listened to his own lifeless mouth telling Athene what he thought of her, using every obscene word he could muster, until they became meaningless with repetition.

Athene smiled mockingly. “A good performance, Will—but verbal rape is no substitute for the real thing.”

Carewe inspected his hands. Each finger was making stiff little movements on its own, independent of the others. “Who was it?”

“Why?”

“I want to know. Who is the father?”

“What are you planning to do—make him take it back?”

“Tell me right now.” Carewe swallowed noisily. “You’d better tell me right now.”

“You bore me, Will.” Athene closed her eyes. “Please away.”

“All right,” he said, after an arctic eon had crept by. “I’ll go away—because if I don’t I might kill you.” Even to his own ears the words sounded futile and ineffectual.

Athene was still lying on the couch, smiling peacefully, as he walked back out to his bullet and drove away.

V

“My wife is pregnant,” Carewe said carefully and took a sip of his coffee, watching to see what reaction his words would inspire.

Barenboim and Pleeth formed a little tableau behind the blue-and-red desk, a re-creation of the morning on which Carewe had first visited the president’s suite. The older man’s hands were pressed together to form a steeple over which his deep-set eyes stared thoughtfully; Pleeth bounded complacently on his invisible QueenVic chair, his pink-stained eyes gleaming and his mouth forming a tight, up-curved arc of satisfaction.

“Are you certain about this, Willy?” Barenboim’s voice was perfectly controlled.

“Positive. She checked with two telltales.”

“And is the pregnancy a new one?”

“Within the last week.” Carewe spoke steadily, determined not to reveal any of his inner feelings to Barenboim’s two-centuries-old eyes.

“Well, I would say this is it then—the ultimate proof that E.80 is everything we hoped it was. What do you say, Manny?”

Pleeth stroked the gold cigar-like ornament on his chest and the radius of his mouth tightened in triumph. “Agreed, agreed,” he said. “This is what we’ve been waiting for.” The two men eyed each other in satisfaction, communicating without words in a way that only cools with many years behind them could do.

“What happens now?” Carewe intruded. “A public announcement?”

“No!” Barenboim leaned across the desk. “Not at this stage. Secrecy is more important than ever until we get the formula for E.80 covered by patent.”

“I see.”

“Also—I hope you won’t mind my saying this, Willy—it would be advisable to wait and see that the pregnancy goes the full term and that the child is perfect.”

“No, I don’t mind you saying that, Hy.”

“Good boy.” Barenboim leaned back in his chair. “Manny! What are we thing of? Here we are discussing nothing but the business aspects, and completely forgetting to congratulate young Willy on his achievement.”

Pleeth beamed happily, but remained silent, the scrubbed pink of his boyish face deepening.

Carewe took a deep breath. “I don’t want any congratulations, Hy. As a matter of fact Athene and I have split up. For a trial period, that is.”

“Oh?” Barenboim’s eyebrows drew together in a calculated display of concern. “This seems an odd time to separate.”

“It’s been brewing up for a year or more,” Carewe lied, remembering how he had stormed out of his dhome within seconds of Athene’s verbal blow. “And with a baby coming we decided this might be our last chance, our best chance, to find out exactly where we stand with each other. I hope it won’t hurt your plans.”

“Not at all, Willy. But what are you planning to do now?”

“Well, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about. I know I’m important to the E.80 trials—a billion-dollar guinea pig, Manny called me—but I thought I’d like to go abroad for a while.”

Barenboim looked unperturbed. “That can be arranged easily enough. Farma has offices in quite a few cities across the world—but I don’t need to tell you that, Willy. Where were you thinking of?”

“I wasn’t thinking of a city job.” Carewe shifted uneasily on his chair. “Does Farma still have field contracts with the Fauve teams?”

Barenboim glanced at Pleeth before he replied. “We do. Not as many as we used to, but we still supply and administer biostats in quite a few theaters.”

“That’s what I want to do, Hy.” Carewe spoke quickly, anxious to state his case before he was interrupted. “I know that under the circumstances I have no right to place myself in physical danger—but I’ve got this urge to get away from things for a while. I’d like to volunteer for work on a Fauve team.” He waited for Barenboim’s refusal but, incredibly, the president was nodding thoughtfully, the suspicion of a smile touching his lips.

“So you want to cool a few Fauves? They sometimes kill themselves, you know, rather than submit—think you could face that?”

“I think so.”

“As you say, Willy, there’s a certain amount of risk from the organization’s point of view.” Barenboim again glanced at Pleeth. “But on the other hand, it would get you off stage for a few months—which may not be a bad idea at this time. Once we begin filing patent applications the security situation is going to get even trickier. What do you think, Manny?”

Pleeth considered his unguessable triumphs. “There’s a lot in that, but I wonder if young Willy knows exactly what he’s letting himself in for. Perhaps the worst possible violation of a human being is to force immortality on him against his will.”

“Nonsense!” Barenboim’s voice had a harsh edge to it. “I’m convinced Willy can face up to a few months on a Fauve team. Take it in your stride, won’t you, boy?”

Carewe hesitated, then he remembered Athene and knew he had to travel far and fast in case he should be weak enough or crazy enough to forgive her. “I can face it,” he said bitterly.

An hour later he was riding the dropshaft down to ground level with an official transfer to the Farma contingent of a Fauve team in his pouch. It was a few minutes after quitting time and the building’s reception area was still crowded. Carewe looked curiously at the passing technicians and office workers, wondering why the fact that he was going to Africa in the morning should make everybody else look slightly strange. This isn’t real, he thought. I got out too easily …

“Ho there, Willy,” a voice said close to his ear. “What’s this I hear about you breaking out of the nursery? It isn’t true, is it? Tell me it isn’t true.”

Carewe turned and saw the bristled face of Ron Ritchie, a tall blond funkie in his early twenties, who was a junior sales coordinator in the biopoiesis division.

“It’s true enough,” he said reluctantly. “I got restless.”

Ritchie twitched his nose and smiled. “I’m proud of you, boy. Other guys your age who’ve just tied off start reading philosophy, but you kick up your heels and head for Brazil.”

“Africa.”

“I knew it was somewhere like that. Let’s have a drink and a drag to mark the occasion.”

“I …” Carewe hesitated, for the first time truly understanding that he had no wife and no home around which to build his evening. “I’ve been drinking too much lately—thought of cutting down on it.”

“Spheres to that.” Ritchie put his arm across Carewe’s shoulders. “Do you realize I might never see you again? That’s bound to be worth a glass or two to one of us.”

“I guess it is.” Carewe had always considered he had nothing in common with Ritchie, but the alternative was killing the evening alone. Earlier he had half-expected Barenboim to invite him to dinner or to spend a few hours discussing his severance from the office—after all, he was an important part of the biggest thing Farma had ever done—but the formalities had been completed with magical swiftness, and Barenboim and Pleeth had hurried away t keep an appointment. Going to Africa had been entirely his own idea, but somehow he felt exactly as though an unknown person had put the skids under him. “Now that you mention it, I could use a drink.”

“Good man.” Ritchie rubbed his hands together and showed his narrow dental arch in a grin. “Where’ll we go?”

“The Beaumont,” Carewe said, thinking of its tobacco-colored walls, deep chairs and ten-year-old whiskey.

“Double spheres to that. Come on—I’ll drive you somewhere worthwhile.” Ritchie caught the end of his own codpiece, aimed it theatrically at the doorway and hurried after it as though being drawn onwards by an invisible force. His thin but muscular legs took him across the reception area in a few strides, to the accompaniment of laughter from a group of girls who were emerging from a side corridor. Marianne Toner was among them.

“I haven’t had a chance to tell you, Marianne,” Carewe said. “This is my last day here. …”

“Mine too,” she interrupted, her eyes fixed on the disappearing figure of Ritchie. “Goodbye, Willy.”

She turned away disinterestedly and Carewe’s hand flew to the smooth bristle-free skin of his face. He stared after her for a few seconds, outraged, then hurried to the door in pursuit of Ritchie. The younger man lived close by in Three Springs and so drove a low-slung roadcar which Carewe found strange in comparison to the comfort of his more staid bullet. He slumped in the passenger seat beside Ritchie and stared moodily through the side window during the short ride into town. Marianne Toner had shocked him with her sudden inability to see him as a human being. The question was—would he feel so annoyed if he really were a cool? Athene was his wife, but in a way he had almost expected her transformation; Marianne was nothing more to him than a woman who used to signal her availability, but in an obscure way he had been convinced his appearing to have tied off would have made little difference in their friendship.

“Here we are,” Ritchie said as the car swung into a parking lot.

“Here we are where?”

“Astarte’s Temple.”

“Drive on,” Carewe snapped. “I never had much interest in brothels when I was a funkie, and …”

“Relax, Will.” Ritchie switched off the turbine. “You don’t have to go upstairs, and you don’t object to me making a little money, do you?”

The feeling that he was being manipulated, steered like a sheep, returned to Carewe but he got out of the car and walked to the entrance of the temple. A slim girl clad in the brilliance from a blue-and-violet light necklace approached them carrying a cash receiver. She looked at Carewe’s smoothly shaven chin, lost interest immediately and turned to Ritchie, who took a hundred-newdollar bill from ouch and dropped it into the receiver.

“Astarte invites you to enter,” she whispered, and ushered them into the huge bar which occupied the building’s entire ground floor.

“I don’t get it,” Carewe said. “I thought the whole point of these places was that the girls paid you.”

Ritchie sighed heavily. “Are all accountants so dreamy? Of course the girls pay you, but the house has to make its percentage too. The hundred bucks admission charge keeps the place exclusive and pays the overheads—besides, somebody like me can still make a profit from the tributes from the girls “

“Oh! How much tribute do they pay you?”

Ritchie gave an elaborately casual shrug as he made his way through the crowded varicolored dimness towards the bar. “Twenty newdollars per satisfaction.”

“Now I see where the house makes its profit,” Carewe said wryly.

“What are you hinting at, cool fool?” Ritchie demanded. “You think I won’t get that hundred back again? Just you wait and see, cool fool. What are you drinking?”

“Whiskey.”

Ritchie reached the mirrored counter and pressed his credisk against a barkeep’s eye. “One Scotch, one potch,” he said into the grill. Two frosted glasses slid out, one of them rimmed with oyster-pink radiance to indicate that it contained more than alcohol. Carewe lifted the inert glass and sipped the bland spirit, taking stock of his surroundings. Most of the people around him were funkies of varying ages. Girls of the house, clad in light necklaces, moved among their tables and booths like columns of frozen flame. There were a few cools present, all of them, Carewe was relieved to notice, wearing conventional clothing and engaged in normal seeming conversation with their companions.

“Relax, Willy.” Ritchie appeared to have read Carewe’s thoughts. “This is a straight house—nobody’s going to proposition you.”

Carewe’s doubts about spending a whole evening with Ritchie suddenly intensified. “I’m not a great believer in the social necessity for taboos,” he said conversationally, “but has nobody ever told you that nonfunctional males have strong aversion to being categorized as potential homosexuals?”

“Sorry, professor. What did I say?”

“Why should any man proposition me?”

“I said I was sorry.” Ritchie swallowed most of his drink and grinned. “Don’t get all heated up, cool fool—I just think all taboos should be broken. It’s the only intelligent way to live.”

“All taboos?”

“Yup.”

“You’re positive?”

“Of course.” Ritchie set his glass down. “Let’s have another drink.”

“Have this one—I’ve hardly touched it.” Carewe pulled the top of Ritchie’s hose out from his stomach, emptied his glass into the pouch he had created, and let the elasticized material snap back.

“What the … ?” The words seemed to tear Ritchie’s throat. “What are you doing?”

“Breaking the taboo against pouring one’s drink down other people’s hose—I want to live intelligently, too.”

“You’re crazy!” Ritchie glanced at the stain spreading down his thin legs and looked up in growing rage, clenching his fists. “I’ll pulp you for that.”

“If you even try it,” Carewe said seriously, “I promise you’ll forfeit all of that hundred newdollars you paid to get in here.”

“The boys were right about you.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning you’re as queer as a two-dollar watch, that’s what.” Ritchie thrust his face close to Carewe’s. “We all know why Barenboim’s been pushing you along so fast, Willy. Where did the two of you go while you were supposed to be down at Pueblo?”

Carewe, who had never hurt another being in the whole of his adult life, drove his fist into Ritchie’s throat. The blow was inexpertly delivered but the taller man fell to his knees, squawking as he struggled to breathe. A squad of burly women in leather helmets materialized out of the swirling dimness, gripped Carewe’s arms and ran him out of the bar. In the entrance hall he was held motionless for an instant in front of a scanner, while the house computer memorized his appearance for blacklisting, then he was escorted down the steps and released. Men going into the temple made speculative jokes about the reasons for a cool being thrown out of a brothel, but Carewe felt no embarrassment. He had needed to hit somebody for a long time and he was grateful to Ritchie for making it so easy. Echoes of the blow tingled through his right hand and arm like electric currents, and he almost felt at peace about Athene.

It was not until much later, when he had swallowed more whiskey than was good for him, that he began to worry about the way in which Ritchie, a comparative stranger, had been able to speak knowingly about his “secret” relationship with Barenboim. Both Barenboim and Pleeth had done their utmost to insure that no hint of Carewe’s connection with E.80 should leak out. Had something gone wrong?

Perilous centuries stretched ahead of Carewe as he fell asleep and once again,n te dreams, his body was made of glass.

VI

Above the airport the morning sky was filled with eye-pulsing brilliance and clear except for the huge column of mist which surrounded the main noise-abatement tubefield. The comparatively warm air of ground level was leaking into the tube through imperfections in the field and rising fast, turning it into an insubstantial jet engine which exhausted into the upper atmosphere. Carewe, who had arrived early, watched several aircraft taxi into the base of the cloudy pillar, rise vertically and vanish. He tried to see them spew out the top as they set course, but the brightness of the sky hurt his eyes and he was forced to give up.

Getting to the airport early had been a mistake, he realized. The liquor he had drunk the night before had withdrawn its transient benefits, leaving him feeling listless and a bit queasy despite the usual oxygen-ascorbic acid bomb he’d taken. There was too much time to think about the immediate future. There was a possibility he could see action with a Fauve team that very afternoon. The thought shocked him afresh every time it recurred, and he stared at the distant peaks of the Rockies with a mixture of nostalgia and resentment. I don’t want to go to Africa, he thought. And most of all I don’t want to come in contact with any Fauves. How did it happen? His anger against Athene suddenly returned.

He walked towards a row of communication booths, swearing bitterly under his breath, then remembered he had nothing to say to her. On the practical, domestic level he might have informed her he was leaving the country, except for the fact that the Farma computer would automatically let her know when it was making the new credit arrangements occasioned by his move. On the emotional level he wanted to say: “See what you’ve done? You’ve driven me to Africa where I might get killed by a Fauve.” But even that childish catharsis was denied him, partly by his pride and partly by his knowledge that the person he wanted to address, the old Athene, no longer existed. There was nothing to be gained by talking to the hard-eyed stranger who now inhabited Athene’s body. It came to Carewe that he had been very proud of his old-fashioned, freakish one-to-one marriage—the union which had survived his supposed impotence by a matter of hours. Even the manner in which she had broken the news to him told its own story. She had shown no signs of regret, or of anything, but her contempt for the neuter object who had once been her husband. Within a matter of hours! A few stinking …

Carewe became aware that people in the departure area were staring at him. He relaxed his grip on his traveling case and forced himself to smile at a pink-clad woman who was sitting nearby with a small baby on her lap. She gazed at him without responding until he turned away and went to a cofftea machine. He dialed a bulb of the hot liquid and sipped it abstractedly until his flight was called, then went and stood on the slideway with the other eastbound passengers. The first movement of the strip, reminder that his journey had begun, brought a new surge of panic. Carewe forced himself to relax and breathe steadily until aboard the aircraft, where concern about his own safety on the flight could occupy his mind.

In his forty yeas, he had made perhaps a thousand trips on commercial aircraft; and he could not recall one in which he had failed to detect some minute but potentially lethal flaw in the machine or its equipment. It could be a faint smell of scorched insulation, a trace of wetness at the seams of a wing tank, or an unusual harmonic in an engine note—things a professional flier might be too blasé to notice, but which were only too obvious to the alert senses of an intelligent amateur. In this case he was not happy about the pressure bottle which in the event of a crash would cause a huge plastic balloon to spring from the back of the seat in front of Carewe and cushion him in pneumatic safety. The bottle looked slightly out of line with its nozzle, suggesting that the seal could be strained and its gas escaped.

He was on the verge of asking the flight steward how often the pressure bottles were tested when a woman sat down beside him. She was dressed in pink and was unsuccessfully trying to disconnect the shoulder straps of a carrycrib which held a baby. Carewe recognized the woman who had been sitting near him in the departure area.

“Permit me,” he said with deliberately historical courtesy. He worked the edge of one of the crib’s plastic snap-on covers free of the strap’s spring clip and it disengaged easily.

“Thanks.” The woman lifted the silent infant out of the crib and settled it in her lap. Carewe collapsed the crib, slid it under the seat for her and leaned back, wondering if he should point out that the strap’s clip seemed dangerously weak. He decided against it—the woman appeared distrustful, if not actually hostile towards him—but his mind dwelt on the curious feel of the stainless steel fitting. The metal was almost paper-thin at one point, as if—a disquieting thought heaved in a lower level of his mind—as if it had been in use for a very long time. Modern steels could withstand many decades of wear before …

He pushed his hair back from his forehead, using the movement to mask a sideways glance at the woman’s face. Her pale, regular features looked composed and normal, and he relaxed a little, almost ashamed of what he had been thinking When perfected biostats had become available two centuries earlier the government had been quick to pinpoint the one major possibility for their abuse. The penalties for illegally administering a biostat to a minor were so severe that the practice was virtually unknown, but in the early days there had been a rash of unpleasantly bizarre cases. The most prevalent and most difficult to stamp out had been biostat abuses carried out by parents on their own children. Doting mothers, often those who were ill-equipped for an indefinitely prolonged future, tried to bring time to a standstill by immortalizing their children at an early age. Once the invariant factor was introduced into its cell replication mechanism a child’s physical development was arrested. Mental growth was affected too because convolution of the brain, necessary for the increase in surface area of the cerebral cortex, could no longer occur. A child frozen forever at the age of three might become exceptionally bright, even learned, but denied access to the higher mental functions he remained essentially a child.

Commercially motivated drug abuses had also occurred, one of the most famous being that of St. John Searle, the boy soprano whose parents had fixed him at the age of eleven for no reason other than that he was their sole source of income. That, and a number of child actors who remained suspiciously infantile, had ushered in tough legislation and tight control of biostat production and distribution. The only examples of the drug being lawfully administered to a minor were in the rare cases of incurable disease. With the invariancy factor introduced into his system a sick child was rescued from early death, but there was a moral problem in that his illness became a permanent, unchanging condition. Even where subsequent medical advances made a cure available to mortals, the ailing immortal child remained as he was because his body-image had been crystallized for all time.

Another problem had been misappropriation of biostats. During the first feverish production race, when fortunes were made overnight in the attempt to pull all the world’s sick back from the brink of death, people had been found immortalizing household pets. Since then provision had been made for limited veterinary use of biostats, but horse racing and other activities in which an animal’s true age played an important part had undergone upheavals. Thanks to the state of abundant well-being induced by a biostat in any normally healthy organism there had been a fad for the meat of immortal cattle, sheep and pigs which had never entirely vanished, even in the late 22nd century. …

Sensing he was being stared at, Carewe turned his head. The baby on the woman’s lap had pushed the folds of its wrap aside and brilliance from the aircraft’s ports illuminated the pink, doll-like face. Two ocean-blue eyes—wise, yet imprisoned in permanent psychosis by an infantile inability to distinguish between ego and the outside world—gazed humorously at Carewe. He shrank away instinctively as the baby reached towards him with a dimpled hand. Suddenly aware of his reaction, the woman pressed the baby to her breast. Her eyes fastened on Carewe’s, momentarily challenging, then slid away to contemplate the private horizons of a universe to which all men were strangers.

Six months old, he thought in a kind of mindless panic. The child appeared six months old but in fact it could be the same age as himself. He listened to the burgeoning whine of the aircraft’s engines for a few seconds then stood up hastily and went aft looking for a vacant seat. The only one available was beside the flight steward’s station. Carewe dropped into it and sat tapping his front teeth with a fingernail.

“Got to you, did she?” The steward spoke sympathetically.

“Who?”

The steward nodded forward. “Mrs. Denier—the Flying Dutchwoman. Sometimes I think we ought to charge her double fare.”

“You know her?”

“Everybody who works the Lisbon run knows Mrs. Denier.”

“She’s a frequent traveler?” Carewe tried to sound only mildly interested.

“Not frequent, but regular. Every spring. They say she and her husband and kid were in an accident on this route years ago—the husband got himself killed.”

̶Oh!” Carewe decided he did not want to learn any more. He took a deep breath of plastic-smelling air and stared out the window as the aircraft began to move.

“She did ten years corrective for fixing the kid, and since then we get her every spring without fail.”

“Quite a story.”

“They say she’s trying to re-live the past or get herself killed the same way, but I don’t believe it. She’s probably got business on the other side. Women don’t grieve that long.”

The aircraft reached the center of the tubefield and the engine note climbed. This was the phase Carewe detested most—when the ship was beginning its vertical climb and there was neither reaction time nor airspeed to save them if the engines failed. He tried to take his mind off flying. “Sony,” he said. “The engines.”

“I said women don’t mope around that long.”

“How long?”

“Lowest estimate I ever heard was thirty years. Could you believe it?”

Carewe shook his head, thinking of the worn clip on the child’s carrycrib. The fastening could not have pared down so far in thirty years. As the aircraft lurched unevenly into the air he gripped the arms of his seat and wondered if this was going to be the year in which Mrs. Denier got her wish.

VII

It was late afternoon when the Unations shuttle from Kinshasa, whistling northeastwards in near-ballistic flight, overflew the scattered township of Nouvelle Anvers and curved towards a forest clearing.

On the commercial flight down from Lisbon earlier in the day, Carewe had kept a hopeful eye on the scattered trees and shrubs which gave the northern savannah its pastoral appearance. He had only the vaguest notion as to where the Fauve team, for which Farma held the supply contract, was based—and had it been somewhere in the park-like savannah the next few months could be reasonable, almost pleasant. But the character of the landscape had gradually changed; and now the shuttle was hurtling over an evergreen forest which looked as though it could swallow humanity in general, and Carewe in particular, without a trace. His mood of despair and self-recrimination deepened. The whole crazy, melodramatic idea of joining a Fauve team should have been discarded that first gray morning after he had broken with Athene. Fauve service was carried out on a purely voluntary basis, and his backing out would have affected Athene even less than his original decision to go. It was typical of his character that he should be compliant in situations which demanded resolution, and illogically rigid when commonsense told him to bend with the wind.

As the shuttle banked through the slumbrous yellow air he glimpsed a curiously localized rainstorm a few miles to the north just enough time to search the upper sky and detect the insubstantial tautness of weather control fields before the tree-line surged upwards and blocked his view. The shuttle landed in the clearing’s confines and its engines burbled into silence. He unbuckled his safety harness, stood up and followed the shuttle’s four other passengers, all bearded and uncommunative funkies, to the exit. They stepped down onto the flattened grass and were driven away in a waiting bushcar towards a break in the trees, leaving Carewe feeling utterly lost. He was peering uncertainly through the hatch, tasting the humid alien air, when the pilot emerged from the nose compartment. She was a sturdy blonde in a blue Unations field uniform, who eyed Carewe with a wry sympathy for which he was profoundly grateful.

He jerked his head at the palisade of trees. “Can you direct me to the nearest civilization?”

“What outfit are you? Farma?” She sounded Australian or English.

“Farma,” he confirmed, reassured at hearing the name of the company in the unfamiliar environment.

“Don’t worry, they’ll be along presently; I brought them some supplies. You might as well relax till the truck gets here. The humidity around here wrings you out in no time.” She glanced at Carewe’s hairless chin, then pulled off her shirt to reveal a faintly muscular but very feminine torso. “I’ll be back in Lapland next week, so I’m going to take the free vitamin D while I can.” She threw the shirt across a seat and sat down on the shuttle’s steps, breathing deeply as if to give her breasts maximum exposure to the sun.

Carewe’s heart thudded steadily—he had not foreseen all the side-effects of masquerading as a cool. World fashion was in one of its cyclic swings away from female nudity, but to a large extent women disregarded the old sexual conventions when in the company of non-functional males.

“I’ll stay back here,” he said. “I blister easily.” He sat down again, astonished at the persuasiveness of the feelings aroused in him by a not particularly attractive girl. The interior of the shuttle grew warmer and he closed his eyes. He could feel a sense of guilt about having deceived the girl—and that must have been the catalyst….

The sound of the truck’s door slamming awoke him an indeterminate time later. He went to the hatch and stepped down onto flattened grass where the pilot was fully clothed again and talking quietly to a small man who had the thick sloping shoulders of a weightlifter. The new arrival carried a paunch which strained the thin material of his Unation field uniform and his graying hair was sparse, but a corona of silver bristles on his jowls proclaimed he was still functional.

“I’m Felix Parma, transport manager,” he boomed up at Carewe in a Scots accent. “Sorry I’m late. The computer said you’d be here, but I guess I overslept. Rough night, last night.”

“It’s all right.” Carewe stepped down and shook the proffered hand, acutely aware of Parma’s quizzical blue eyes scanning his face. The older man exuded a sw soupy odor of perspiration, but—Carewe felt a flicker of resentment—it was because of him the girl had put her shirt on again. “Were you working late last night?”

“I’ll say.” Parma did a speeded-up mime to show he had been drinking, and grinned. Carewe noticed the veining on his button nose. “D’you take a drop yourself?”

“It’s been known to happen. On rare occasions.” Carewe felt the beginnings of affection for the physically decrepit funkie who had driven out of the unknown and spoken to him in the kind of language he understood. He was baffled as to why Parma should have let himself go so far without tying off, but in all important respects he could visualize the man as a friend.

“Ever been to Africa before?”

“No.”

“Then this is a rare occasion, William. Wouldn’t you say?”

“Rare as they come.” Why did Athene do it? he wondered.

“We’ll have a drink,” Parma announced with the air of a man resolving weighty deliberations. “Give me a hand with these boxes.”

Carewe helped him carry several alloy-clad containers from the shuttle’s cargo hatch to the truck, while the pilot sat on the passenger steps and combed her hair. He wondered if that could be for Parma’s benefit too—in a world in which nubile females so greatly outnumbered functional males he had seen more unlikely matches. When the boxes were all transferred Parma waved a casual goodbye to the girl and leaped into the driver’s seat.

“Let’s go, William,” he muttered. “That’s a handsome lass, but we’re wasting good drinking time.” He threw the truck into drive and they went dipping and swaying across the clearing. Looking back for a last glimpse of the pilot, Carewe again noticed the strangely restricted rainstorm several miles off, a cloud column of dusty grays and ominous purples standing against the settling sun like the aftermath of a hell-bomb.

He touched Parma’s arm and pointed. “What’s going on over there?”

“That’s the operation, William.” The truck lurched into an already-shadowy lane cut through impassive trees. “That’s where we’re working.”

“I don’t get it. I saw weather control fields as I was coming in, but … It must cost a fortune to siphon that stuff in from the Atlantic.”

“It’s worth it, William. That rainstorm’s centered right on the Fauve village. Been there three weeks. Officially it’s part of the humidity reduction program for this part of Africa, but that’s not the real reason it’s there.”

“Tweeks constantly?” Carewe felt a vague dismay. “What’s it doing to the people underneath?”

“Making them good and wet.” Parma laughed and spat through the side window.

“And sick.”

“And sick,” Parma agreed readily. “If you’d ever done this kind of work before you’d have a strong preference for rounding up sick Fauves instead of healthy ones. That’s the whole point.”

“There ought to be a better way.”

“There is—gas. Or dust. Either would be neater and quicker and cheaper, but we’re all snarled up by the Helsinki Convention. You know, William, you can get killed by a Fauve and nobody will say a word; but if you even graze one of them with a flechette you’re in trouble.” Parma switched on the headlights to counteract the swiftly gathering darkness ahead, and the surrounding trees seemed to close up their ranks. “Have you ever seen a dead man?”

“Of course not,” Carewe said quickly. “The rain demoralizes these people, I guess.”

“That’s it. A bunch of, them decide to break away from the tribe and go Fauve. They build their own village and do a bit of old-fashioned marauding. Everything goes well for a while, then the normal sensible immortals in the area get sick of it and complain to us—but we don’t charge straight in and wrestle with them. Not any more. The first thing our hairy-chested Fauves notice is that it has got hellish wet all of a sudden—and a few weeks of solid rain in the middle of the season starts them thinking they’ve offended somebody upstairs. After that it’s usually fairly easy to persuade them to come in and join the bitch society.”

Carewe glanced at Parma’s profile, that of a latter-day Hemingway. “Whose side are you really on?”

“I’m not on the side of the Fauves, and that’s for sure. I don’t mind them opting for a short life and a gay one, full of blood and sperm and sweat and all that stuff, but they shouldn’t kill other people, William. That’s very wrong—wrong enough to justify undermining their faith that summer follows winter.”

Lights began to appear at the distant end of the arrow-straight road. “At least,” Carewe said, “the Helsinki Convention didn’t foresee weather control as a weapon.”

“Didn’t it?” Parma laughed again. “If you ask me, the only reason it hasn’t been proscribed is that it’s the only weapon in constant, world-wide use in the present day. Ever read about the riots in Cuba during the three-year drought last century? It’s been kept quiet, but I’d say the States had weather control even then, and used it.”

“But you said …”

“In the present day. All you need is enough resources to provide you with bigger control fields and computers good enough to figure out the interactions, and you’re all set to fight a war the quiet way, the bitchy way. Ruin a country’s harvest, cause floods, make it so hot and humid that folks who part their hair on the right start killing folks who part their hair on the left. That’s really making war, William. ”

“I’m still not sure which side you’re on. ”

“It doesn’t matter—I do the work. Parma of Farma they call me. ”

The lights ahead expanded abruptly as the truck reached another clearing ringed with prefabricated buildings of varying sizes. Parma pulled up outside the end chalet of a double row which formed a miniature street terminated by dark trees.

“This is yours, ” he said. “We just got it put together this afternoon and the services haven’t been installed, but you can throw your bag in for now. The boys will finish it while we’re over at the Unations club. ”

Carewe hesitated. “I’d like to freshen up. ”

“At the club, William. We’re wasting drinking time. ”

Carewe got out, opened the chalet’s single door and put his bag inside the resin-smelling darkness. Only twenty-four hours earlier he had been setting out with Ritchie for an unfamiliar, bachelors’ evening of drinking, and he hoped the pattern would not repeat itself too closely. What is Athene doing right now, this very instant? He went back to the truck, feeling lonely again, and was driven across the clearing to a comparatively large geodome which housed the club. The circular interior with its central bar had the unmistakable atmosphere of a company-owned recreational facility. Folding tables and chairs were grouped on the springy, sectioned floor and a notice board carried an assortment of papers, some obviously official, some enthusiastically embellished by an amateur artist, talking of forthcoming entertainments. The building was warm, but Carewe shivered. When he returned from the washroom Parma was seated at a table, two half-liter glasses of beer in front of him.

“This is all they serve before eight,” he explained. “It’s supposed to discourage people like me from making beasts of themselves too early in the evening.” He lifted his glass and drained it with a defiant flourish. “Not only is that attitude undemocratic, it’s downright naive.”

Carewe sipped his beer. It was cool, with a pleasant grainy flavor, and on impulse he emulated Parma, blinking as the tingling fluid smarted his throat.

“I like your style with a pint,” Parma said, using the old fluid measure which had become a drinkers’ shibboleth. “Order up.”

Carewe got two more glasses from the human bartender, a bored-looking cool who served the drinks with a conspicuous clumsiness which was probably intended to show he had another more important job during the day. Not many men were in the club, but looking around Carewe saw a higher proportion of cools than he had expected. He recalled that Parma had made no reference to his apparently being a cool, had treated him with impartial male heartiness which had been balm to his ego. He wondered briefly if really having tied off would have made the change in his office friends easier to take.

“You get more cools in this line of business than I expected,” he said, setting the glasses down. “What are they doing? Sublimating?”

“Don’t ask me,” Parma said disinterestedly. “I just do the work.”

He swallowed half his drink, his veined nose butting determinedly through the froth, and Carewe felt his liking for the older man grow stronger. Sitting down, he tackled his own half-liter, which somehow appeared more formidable than the first. Later in the evening the beers looked even bigger but, magically, raising one to his lips was sufficient to dispose of it. Carewe, who was not a practiced beer drinker, marveled inwardly at his newfound power as the circular room gradually filled, became thunderous with voices, began to tilt and swing around him. Faces became two-dimensional masks, irrelevant, then he and Parma were outside staggering through gemmy darkness. Carewe had no idea where his chalet was but Parma guided him to the door. He shook hands and plodded away into the night without speaking.

Carewe opened the door, suddenly anxious to lie down, and flicked the light switch. The interior remained black and his drowned memory told him that engineers were supposed to have finished installing the services during the evening. His one earlier glimpse of the chalet had shown an environment control panel directly opposite the door. Carewe walked sightlessly towards it with both hands extended and felt the smooth plastic of the master switch under his fingers. It moved easily and the chalet filled with light—then he saw that the control panel’s saefty cover was not in place.

He stared blankly for a pounding moment at the array of high voltage terminals into which, but for a, freakish piece of luck, he would have thrust his fingers. Unable to feel surprise or anger, he walked slowly to the bed and lay down.

Sleep came quickly, but in the dreams his frail glass body was in peril from great machines whose blindly thrusting crankshafts could have ground him to sparkling dust.

VIII

The morning sun drove spikes of light through Carewe’s eyelids. He sat up painfully, with hammering temples, and made his way into the chalet’s tiny lavatory. His instinct on emerging was to lie down again, but Parma had said something about seeing the team coordinator first thing in the morning and officially signing on. He opened his bag, took out a pack of the oxygen-ascorbic acid bombs he used to stave off the effects of hangovers, and quickly swallowed one. Its gelatin casing caused it to lodge uncomfortably somewhere in the upper part of his chest, and he was going for a glass of water when the environment control panel caught his eye.

The bared terminals shone with quiet menace. Frowning, Carewe looked around and discovered the panel’s safety cover lying on a chair. Memories wavered dimly. Last night he had blundered across the chalet and by pure good fortune had avoided shoving his fingers into the high-voltage wiring. His forehead prickled with perspiration, then he sorted at his own stupidity—without the cover in place the master switch could not be thrown and no power would have been available.

But the chalet’s lights were on. The switch had moved easily.

Pressing his temples to ease the insistent pounding, he went closer to the panel and peered into the interior. The linkage which prevents the master switch from operating until it was engaged by a spigot on the cover was twisted and obviously ineffective. Somebody tried to kill me—the thought spumed through his mind on the instant—and it’s all Athene’s fault. His common sense reasserted itself a moment later and he felt the vast, resentful anger of an immortal whose life has been placed in jeopardy by another’s carelessness. The service engineer concerned was going to roast for this.

By the time Carewe had thrown his soiled clothing into the dispose-all and dressed in a fresh tunic and hose, his headache was clearing. He went out into morning light which stabbed into his eyes from all directions, as though the sky were ringed with suns. The air was warm and the heavy perfume of unfamiliar flowers invaded his lungs. He walked along the short street into the circular open space which was deserted except for two men in Unations blues lounging in the shade of an awning. Parma’s truck was still parked outside the geodome of the club. Carewe was about to ask one of the men for directions when he noticed the Unations symbol on another dome at the opposite rim of the clearing.

Inside it he found a female clerk at a long reception counter, beyond which stood the familiar cabinets of a computer terminal. Frosty plastic screens formed small private offices around the perimeter of the dome.

“May I help you?” The girl sounded sleepy, and only mildly interested.

“I’m with the Farma contingent—Carewe’s the name.” “Yes?”

“I want to see the engineer who installed the services in my chalet yesterday.” He shielded his depilated chin from her questioning gaze.

“Have you a complaint?”

“Yes. His criminal negligence almost got me electrocuted.”

“I’m sorry, but the engineer left on the first shuttle this morning.”

“Then can you give me his name? I want to report the man to someone.”

“To whom?”

“I don’t know—anybody who can get him into trouble.”

“You’d better talk to Mr. Kendy, the coordinator.” The girl spoke disapprovingly, as though Carewe were breaking some unwritten law. She beckoned to him and led the way to one of the offices, where he found a young-looking cool with crewed blond hair seated at a desk. Kendy was very muscular for a cool and his pink skin glowed with health. He shook hands with a firm, friendly grip, listened attentively to Carewe’s story and made notes.

“I’ll follow this up, of course,” he promised. “Now, Mr. Carewe, it’s quite late in the morning—are you ready to go to work for us?”

“That’s what I’m here for.” Carewe’s lips felt like dead flesh as he smiled. “But to tell the truth, I’m not too sure what I can do. I juit came out here …”

“Don’t apologize—the Beau Geste syndrome is what keeps us in business to a large extent.” Kendy folded a sheet of notepaper and used a corner of it to pick his front teeth, which were square and very white. “You’re a representative of Farma, so you can help us by administering your firm’s biostat. E.12, isn’t it?”

“But I’m an accountant.”

“That side of things is handled in New York,” Kendy said impassively, but with a trace of irony.

“I know, but I thought … maybe …”

“And I don’t need any assistance in running this office.”

“I didn’t mean …” Carewe steadied his thoughts. “When will the actual roundup start?”

“It already has. The people we’re dealing with are a displaced offshoot of the old Malawi tribe and they’re more resistant to our weather magic than most.” Kendy scribbled his name on a printed form and handed it across his desk. “Take this to the stores dome and they’ll kit you out. The idea is that we’ll keep the rain going right till the end of the operation and work under cover of the ground mist. And this”—Kendy set a blue form beside the first one—“will get you an automatic.”

“A gun?”

“Yes. Hypodermic variety, in case you’ve got scruples about violence. It isn’t practical to use individual shots for mass immortalization.”

The two-seat floater that Carewe had picked up at the Unations transport pool rode easily over the rough track leading to the rainstorm which brooded on the northern horizon. He guided the little machine self-consciously, almost ashamed at having discovered in himself a sense of adventure. At this time on an ordinary day he would have been sitting at his desk in the Farma headquarters, pretending to monitor computerized accounting procedures, bn fact merely counting off the minutes to lunchtime. Now here he was clad in Unations blues, driving an unfamiliar vehicle along a road he had never traveled before, with the African sun beating down through the alien forests.

Carewe rediscovered the truth that his physical arrival in a strange place was an unimportant event—the real significance lay in his psychological spiritual arrival. The latter was always delayed, sometimes by a matter of days or even weeks, by the fact that while he was in the company of other people he could never truly be himself, and therefore was barred from reacting to the new environment. As a young trainee, he had once gone to a three-week seminar in Polar City and had spent the whole period in a kind of numb dismay over his inability to feel any sense of strangeness. But on the very last day, freed of the lecture program and the insistent company of his fellow accountants, he had wandered clear of the city and walked more than a mile into the ancient icescapes. On the exact instant of rounding a blindingly white hummock, thus losing optical contact with civilization, he, Will Carewe, had discovered himself to be in Antarctica as if dropped there by a sorcery which had plucked him from his normal life a split-second earlier. Its timeless, inimical beauty had paralyzed him, stilling his breath, filling his eyes with visions which would never fade.

A similar intellectual revelation was sweeping over him as, suddenly alone, he jockeyed the floater past clumps of brilliantly colored rubiaceae shrubs whose calyx-lobes filled the air with a silent visual clamor. Danger and excitement, new experiences lay ahead; and if the immediate future could hold so much challenge— what of his million tomorrows? This sense of having been gripped by Life, of being imbued with its rainbow-colored essences, could not compensate for the events which had led up to it, but he was alive. Aware that he was undergoing an emotional reaction equivalent to one of the occasional flashes of elation which are a part of normal mourning, Carewe tried to damp down his psychic temperature, but he was whistling discordantly as the track suddenly dipped towards a fairly wide river. Its waters appeared brown and sullen, probably as a result of the sustained deluge the weather control team had created in the vicinity.

He slowed the vehicle a little to avoid throwing up too much mud and aimed its nose at the track’s continuation on the opposite bank. The floater waltzed confidently across the fast-moving water, then—in midstream—its engine cut. There were no preliminary warnings such as a drop in power or a change of turbine note—just a complete and instantaneous shutdown. The floater hit the water with a hissing explosion as the hot metal of the engine was submerged, and three seconds later Carewe was sitting in a dark brown plastic bubble at the bottom of the river.

He screamed for help.

An indeterminate time later he became aware that shouting was not going to be enough. He closed his mouth with effort. The emergency cushion field had prevented him being thrown against the control panel, and the superb engineering of the floater’s cabin saw to it that no water was coming in—but if he continued to sit there he would suffocate. He unlocked the door and pushed it. Nothing happened and, suddenly afraid the frame had been distorted by the impact, he drove his shoulder against the tough plastic. Water spattered momentarily against his ankle, but the door remained immovable, held by the outside pressure. The problem was t hualize the interior and exterior pressures by admitting water, but after Carewe had exhausted himself by repeatedly shouldering the door the floor of the cabin was scarcely damp. He thought of screaming again, then came a grim acceptance of the fact that his cherished million tomorrows lay in nobody’s hands but his own.

No water was coming into the cabin; yet during the previous drive he had been plentifully supplied with air—which meant the intakes must have sealed themselves on contact with the water. A possible weak spot? With some difficulty he pulled the trim panel from the roof, exposing plastic pipes snaking away from a multiple fitting which obviously passed through the vehicle’s outer skin. He seized the pipes and wrenched them downwards. They stretched slightly under the strain, but remained in place. Losing control of himself again, he attacked the ventilation system, clawing and twisting it with all his strength until a steely tightness in his chest told him he had almost depleted the cabin’s supply of air. The plastic pipes, engineered to Unations specifications, showed no evidence of damage or weakening.

Carewe fell back in his seat, his lungs pumping like an archaic engine, shocked by the raucous animal-sound of his own struggle for breath. Could this really be the … ? His eyes focused on a tiny switch on a flange of the ventilator intake fitting. He reached up, moved it with one fingertip—and water gouted from the ventilator grills.

It took all his self-control to remain motionless until the cabin was almost filled. The air remaining in the narrow space between the lapping water and the roof was virtually unbreathable when he tried the door again, but this time it opened with relative ease. He pushed himself clear of the vehicle, surfaced and swam to the bank. A strong current carried him downstream some distance, but he was able to scramble onto dry ground without difficulty and make his way back to the track. The clay-colored water, translating gravitation into a seemingly horizontal movement, slid swiftly and silently over the spot where the floater must have lain, covering all trace of it. Had he not noticed the manual override control on the ventilator he would still be down there—and nobody would even have thought of looking for him until nightfall. …

Carewe found he was on the northern bank of the river, with the columnar rainstorm looming high on the horizon. The lightweight plastic armor issued to him at the base was at the bottom of the river, but he had the hypodermic gun securely put away in his pouch. He decided to complete his journey on foot, in spite of the fact that he had a very good excuse for turning back. A second murder attempt within twenty-four hours, an inner voice said, would be enough to discourage anybody. He dismissed the idea automatically as he began to walk in squelching shoes, but it returned without any undertones of emotion, as a purely logical proposition. All Unations equipment was engineered to the finest specifications that 22nd Century technology could meet—what were the odds against an accidental engine failure at the single potentially lethal point on his journey? And what astronomical level did those odds reach if one compounded them with the unusual circumstances of the missing safety cover on his chalet’s environment controller?

But nobody at the camp had any reason to kill him— before last night none of them had ever seen him. Carewe filled his lungs with golden light, suddenly aware that his new clothing had shed er water and he was almost dry, if a little grubby looking. He pulled the tunic’s solar screen over his head to shut off the growing heat of the day, and began to walk more quickly. The rainstorm rose higher and higher until he could hear it as an ominous hissing and growling which disturbed the morning air. Somewhere up above, at the limits of the stratosphere, men and machines were at work manipulating the elements and, through them, the minds of other men. The concept dismayed Carewe, who understood what was happening and was part of it. What had it done to the people in the Malawi village, he wondered, when they discovered the sky itself had turned against them?

Mists began to writhe across the track ahead of him, and he saw the outlines of men and vehicles. The storm now filled his whole vision with roiling grayness and cold tendrils of moist air touched his face, while the fierce heat of the sun played on his back. The air was filled with imminence; the whole of creation was unnatural, a scene lit by floodlights, while the stage managers in their sub-orbital flight controlled the effects. Carewe zipped his tunic tighter around his throat.

“What’s your name?” The man’s voice came from the open door of a parked trailer.

“Carevve. I’m with Farma.” Carewe fumbled for his identification.

“It’s all right. Go ahead—Mr. Storch’s expecting you.” “Thanks.”

“You’ll find him about a kilo down the track.” The speaker put his beard-shadowed face out into daylight, and surveyed Carewe curiously. “Where’s your transport?”

“Back there—I had some trouble. Can you give me a ride?”

“Sorry. No vehicles beyond this point.” The man disappeared immediately.

Carewe shrugged and kept on walking. Within a minute visibility had dropped to fifty paces and the rain was spattering around him, but the solar screen deflected it, maintaining him in a cocoon of dryness. After five minutes of plodding through red mud he neared a group of about thirty men in pale green armor. One of them detached himself and came towards Carewe. He was a thickset funkie with patient, quizzical eyes and a sunburned face which managed to be handsome in spite of a nose which had been crushed sideways and a white scar which interrupted the line of the upper lip.

“I’m Dewey Storch,” he said, holding out his hand. “They told me you had arrived, but where’s your armor?”

Carewe shook the offered hand. “It’s in my floater.” “

You’ll have to go back for it. Didn’t they tell …” “

I can’t. It’s at the bottom of that river back there—the floater sank right in the middle of it.”

“How do you mean sank?” Storch&8217;s brown eyes scanned Carewe’s face.

“I mean it in the usual sense of going straight to the bottom.” Carewe began to feel impatient. “The engine cut on me and I was lucky to get out.”

Storch shook his head slightly. “I still don’t get it. You say the engine cut on the river—but didn’t the flotation balloons inflate?”

“Flotation balloons?” Carewe’s jaw sagged. “There was no sign of them—she went to the bottom like a stone.” He fell silent, trying to assimilate the fresh information. If an emergency system had failed to operate at the time of the freakish engine failure, the odds against it being accidental were thrust into a new order of magnitude.

“This will need looking into,” Storch said. “They must have given you a vehicle that was partly stripped for maintenance. That kind of failure just shouldn’t happen.”

“That’s what I was thinking,” Carewe replied heavily. “I nearly didn’t get out.”

Storch examined him with a concern Carewe found gratifying. “I won’t ask you to come into the village with us today. If you walk back to the trailer you can get …”

“I’d prefer to go with you.” Carewe needed to get his baptism over with, but he wanted even more—and for no reason he could pinpoint—to make a good impression on Storch. Perhaps it was something as pathetic as a desire to show that beneath the exterior of a cool he was still a “man.”

“We’re short-handed, Mr. Carewe, but I couldn’t allow you to take that much of a risk.”

“It’ll be entirely my own responsibility.”

Storch hesitated. “All right, but stay well to the rear and don’t come forward till I signal. Got it?”

“Right.”

The group moved off down the trail. From the desultory conversation Carewe learned that the Malawi settlement was not really a village, but a scattering of dwellings in clumps of up to a dozen which spread over perhaps four square kilometers. The sub-unit which lay just ahead was the first to be tackled in the operation, and there was no telling what sort of reception the team would get. Preliminary reports indicated the Malawi had no firearms, although nobody was sure how reliable the information was.

When the first of the thatched huts came in sight the group fanned out and blended into the foliage. Carewe got the impression they were not amateurs like himself. He moved in behind a tree, self-consciously, feeling like a kid playing cowboys, and waited for something to happen. There was silence except for the constant blurry voice of the rain.

Suddenly he saw the Unations men ruing, their green armor glinting like the body segments of giant insects. They raced through the slow-churning mists, closing in on the huts. Carewe’s heart began to pound unpleasantly as a faint scream reached him. It was followed by hoarse shouts and more screams which quickly reached a crescendo, then a return to comparative calm. Storch’s blocky figure appeared, waved to Carewe and vanished back among the huts.

Carewe ran forward reluctantly and reached the dwellings. The armored men had rounded up a group of about twelve dispirited-looking tribesmen. Most of the natives were kneeling in the mud, but several were struggling and being held with difficulty. Women and children were watching from the entrances of the huts, and from these came occasional ululating sobs. One of the kneeling men had an ugly gash on his scalp, from which crimson deltas mingled with rain coursed down his back. Looking at the blood, Carewe felt a slow stealthy retraction of his testicles. He was gripped by a cold repugnance for what the Unations men were doing.

“This is our anthropologist, Dr. Willis,” Storch said beside him “Go around with him and administer a shot to any man he judges to be sixteen or over.”

“Sixteen! That’s the official limit?”

“Yes. Why?”

“It seems early to be …”

“We’re dealing with Fauves, Mr. Carewe. Fauves. Don’t get notions about depriving anybody of the butterfly touch of first love, or anything like that. At sixteen some of these people ought to be worn out.”

“It still seems early,” Carewe said stubbornly, glancing sideways at Willis, who was a cool with white eyebrows like gull’s wings.

“I know what’s on your mind, Mr. Carewe,” Willis said. “But we are dealing with men who have rejected all the values of our society. That’s their privilege, of course—we don’t relish forcing immortality on anybody. But, by the same token, we will not permit them to inflict death on others.”

“This isn’t the time or the place for an indoctrination talk,” Storch put in crisply. “I advised you to go back to the camp and rest, Mr. Carewe. If you aren’t up to the work you’re only wasting your own time and that of everybody else. Now, are you going to administer those shots and let me move on to the next part of the village, or do I have to stay here and do it myself?”

“I’ll do it,” Carewe mumbled, opening his pouch. “I’m sorry—perhaps I’m shaken up a little.”

“It’s_ all right.” Storch made a signal and four men joined him. The splinter group quickly moved away among the huts.

“Start with those three.” Willis pointed at the natives who were under restraint. Two of them quieted instantly, but the third redoubled his efforts to break free. He wn his early twenties and his arms were massive, with a slight varicosity of the biceps which told of long hours of punishing work. The two men holding him were almost lifted off their feet as they executed a grotesque, slithering dance in the mud. Carewe lunged forward with the hypodermic gun at the ready. The native, his face contracted with fear and hatred, threw himself backwards so violently that the two armored men went down with him.

“What are you waiting for?” one of them snarled disgustedly.

“Sorry.” Carewe ran around them, came up behind the native and fired the gun into the corded neck. The native went limp. A few seconds later the Unations men released him tentatively, and got to their feet. Carewe worked his way around the others, relieved at the submissive way in which they held out their wrists for the shots, yet despising them for it at the same time. He kept his eye on the first man he had treated and saw him walk dejectedly to the door of a hut, where a tall young woman took him in her arms. She brushed away some of the mud clinging to the vest which was all that covered his torso, like a mother fussing over a child. Her eyes, shining in the dimness under the hut’s eaves, opened and closed slowly, twin heliographs flashing Carewe messages at whose meaning he could only guess. I gave up too soon on Athene: the thought exploded in his head like a grenade. I ought to get back to her.

“That takes care of this lot,” one of the armored men said, wiping sweat and rain from his stubbled face. “Let’s get out of here.”

Carewe’s mind was filled with thoughts of Athene. “How about the women?”

“We don’t bother with them—they usually come into one of the Unations treatment centers as volunteers. It’s up to them.”

“Oh.” Carewe put the hypodermic gun in his pouch. “They don’t count.”

“Nobody said they don’t count. They never go raiding, that’s all.”

“Everybody acts so fairly,” Carewe commented. He watched the others get ready to move off in the direction Storch and the advance party had taken. “Just a moment, please. I want to speak to the first man we treated.”

“I wouldn’t recommend it, new boy.”

Carewe felt the action was inadvisable too, but in his mind the native who had fought so hard against the shot represented himself. The black Carewe had not received E.80 into his bloodstream and tissues, however, so Carewe had all the advantages. He picked his way through the staring men and children in the central clearing and went to the hut where the mud-splattered native was standing with bowed head. The woman moved into the darkness of the but as he approached.

“Do you speak English?” he said uncertainly.

The man raised his head and his eyes locked with Carewe’s like pi Unatliding into sockets, a silent interface of hostility, then he turned his face to the wall.

“I’m sorry,” Carewe said inadequately. He was turning to rejoin the Unations team when the woman emerged from the hut in a blur of frightening speed. She closed with him, her hand glinting with steel, then backed away. Carewe stared into her triumphant face for a long moment before looking down at the knife protruding from his chest.

He was kneeling in the mud, still shaking his head in disbelief, when the Unations team came back for him.

IX

“It was a very old knife,” Dewey Storch commented. “That’s what saved you.”

Carewe stared soberly at the ceiling of the trailer in which he was lying. “How am I?”

“You’ll survive. The blade had been honed down till it was more like a thin spike—not the most efficient of weapons.”

“I’m not complaining.” Feeling no pain, Carewe tried to sit up in the narrow bed.

“Take it easy,” Storch said, firmly pushing him down. “Your right lung got punctured, and the medic has collapsed it.”

“Collapsed it! Does that mean…?”

“It’s a temporary thing. Gives the lung a rest, that’s all.” Storch looked over his shoulder at someone beyond Carewe’s field of vision. “Isn’t that right, Doc?”

“Absolutely,” a man’s voice said. “There’s no need for alarm, Mr. Carewe. Your lung bled internally for a while, but we’ve put a stop to that and drained off the blood. All that’s necessary now is to give the lung a rest.”

“I see.” Carewe felt ill at the thought of one of his lungs lying limply inside his chest. He turned his senses inwards as he breathed and realized, for the first time in his life, that the process of taking in air began not with the lungs but with the muscles of his rib cage. The ribs rose, expanding the organic bags attached to them and causing vacuum-seeking air to rush in through the nose and mouth—except that in his case only one lung was operational. Half-expecting to feel starved for air, he concentrated on breathing steadily while he was carried out of the trailer on a stretcher and put in an ambulance.

Back at the base, he was carried into a medium-sized dome which served as a medical center. There were three other beds in the single ward, but they were unoccupied, and the afternoon air was filled with a buzzing peacefulness. A female nurse visited him every thirty minutes, and a medic called Dr. Redding looked in twice to see how Carewe was and told him he would be shipped out the following day. Both treats filth a kindly efficiency, which served only to make him feel depressed and inadequate. Fauve teams throughout the world were notoriously short of help and rarely turned away an able-bodied volunteer, but all along he had felt that the old hands regarded themselves as a cadre of professionals who occasionally had to humor well-meaning amateurs. The Beau Geste syndrome, Kendy had called it. Carewe had no idea who Beau Geste was, but he had a feeling the morning’s exploit would cause some hilarity in the Unations club’s huge circular bar when night came. He allowed himself to drift off to sleep, hoping he would dream of Athene and the warm secure past….

In the evening, when white moths were thudding at the windows, he had a succession of visitors which included Kendy, Storch, Parma and some faces dimly remembered from his beer-sodden induction. Parma was the only one who expressed what appeared to be genuine regret at Carewe’s scheduled departure, his silver-stubbled face solemn as he offered to smuggle in some beer from the club for a farewell celebration. Carewe refused gratefully, and when the old funkie had gone asked the nurse for a sedative. He swallowed the banded capsule and stared stoically at the ceiling, waiting for it to take effect.

Much later he awoke with a conviction that something was wrong. He glanced at his wrist and stared for a moment at the blank skin before remembering that the Nouvelle Anvers region was too far from a grid transmitter for his watch to work. A footstep sounded beside the bed. A swarthy young man in medical whites was holding out a glass of water and a pale blue pill.

“Sorry to disturb you, Mr. Carewe,” the stranger said in a low voice. “It’s time for your GP booster.”

“What’s it for?” Carewe demanded drowsily.

“Dr. Redding doesn’t take any chances with wounds—it isn’t considered healthy in this part of the world.”

“Well, I suppose I …” Carewe raised himself on one elbow and took the glass of water. He accepted the pill without further comment and was raising it to his mouth when he noticed that the stranger’s fingernails were rimmed with dirt. He brought his eyes to a bleary focus in the wan light and saw the network of ingrained grime on the back of the man’s hand.

“Just a minute,” he said, struggling to shake off the effects of the sedative, “are you sure Dr. Redding wants me to take this?”

“Positive.”

“Suppose I refuse?”

“Listen, Mr. Carewe”—the words carried an undertone of urgency—“do us both a favor—just take your medication, huh?”

“I’ll take it after I’ve seen Dr. Redding.” Carewe tried to study the stranger’s face but his head and shoulders were above the cone of light from the bedside lamp.

“All right, Mr. Carewe—I don̵t want to fight with you.”

The man held out his hand and Carewe dropped the pill into the palm. An instant later he was smashed downwards under the weight of the white-clad body and a powerful hand was pressed over his mouth. The pill clicked and ground against his teeth. Filled with an icy certainty that if the pill got onto his tongue his life would be ended, Carewe tried to throw the attacker off, but his knees were trapped in the bedding. The hard hand clamped his nostrils, depriving him of air, which meant he could hold out for only a matter of seconds. As his vision reddened, Carewe became aware of a smooth object in his left hand—the glass of water. Holding it by the base he thrust upwards at the dimly seen face. Water cascaded down his arm as the glass shattered, and suddenly he could breathe again. The stranger scrambled away, moaning, holding his lacerated cheek together with one hand and producing a knife with the other. Carewe frantically threw the bedclothes off and rolled out of bed on the opposite side, hit the floor and kept on going in the direction of the doorway, with pursuing footfalls close behind. Something was slapping around inside his chest like a piece of wet leather. One part of his mind made the sickening discovery that it was the collapsed lung, but the main focus of attention was on escaping before he got a knife thrust in his back. He exploded through the swing door, saw another leading to the general office and shouldered it out of his way. The office was empty. He snatched a black wooden carving from the top of a desk and turned to defend himself, but the stranger had vanished. The only sound was the unsynchronized slapping of the swing doors. He ventured out into the entrance hall just as a white-clad figure appeared in the black rectangle of the outer door. Carewe raised his improvised club, but the newcomer was the female nurse who had attended him earlier.

“You shouldn’t be out of bed, Mr. Carewe,” she said, eyeing the carving suspiciously. “What’s going on here?”

“Somebody tried to murder me,” he said hopelessly.

“You’ve had a nightmare—now go back to bed.”

“I was wide awake at the time.” He handed her the carving. “Didn’t you see anybody run out of the building a minute ago? Why weren’t you here, anyway?”

“I saw nobody running from the building—and if you must know I was out because I got a call to say there’d been an accident in the communications room.”

“And had there been?”

“No.”

“That proves it then.” Carewe was triumphant. “Proves what?”

“That somebody lured you out of the way so they could get at me.”

“Mr. Carewe,” the nurse said tiredly, pushing him towards the ward, “all that proves is that Felix , Parma or some of the others got stoned tonight again. They’re probably staggering around in the dark out there thinking up ways to make nuisances g a miemselves. Now will you please go back to bed.”

“All right.” Carewe got another idea. “Have a look at this.” He led the way to his disheveled bed and searched it. The blue pill was gone and the broken glass lying on the floor showed no trace of blood. He examined his left sleeve and found a single spot of redness bleached into near-invisibility by the water which had poured down his arm.

“There’s a spot of blood,” he said significantly.

“And there’s another.” The nurse pointed at his side, where a crimson stain was appearing through the material of his pajamas. “You’ve opened the wound, and now I’ll have to put a new dressing on it.”

Carewe took a deep breath, and then decided to save it until he could see Kendy, the Unations coordinator, in the morning.

“I know I must have seen this on your compcard, but I’ve forgotten the details,” Kendy said. “Tell me, Mr. Carewe—what is your actual age?”

“I’m forty.”

“Oh! You tied off quite recently then.”

The phrase “tied off” jarred with Carewe and he almost told Kendy not to use it—then he realized what was in the other’s mind. It was well-known that very old cools, afraid of death yet tired of life, sometimes were literally overwhelmed by the deathwish. Without conscious volition, they became walking disaster areas where mishap followed mishap until the inevitable fatality occurred.

“Quite recently,” Carewe said. “I’m not accident prone, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

“It was just a thought.” Kendy surveyed the little ward with distaste, obviously anxious to get away and attend to more important matters. His pink healthy skin was almost luminous in the morning sunlight slanting through the window. “There was the business in your chalet, then the trouble with the floater on the river, and …”

“I’m not accident prone, and I have every intention of staying alive,” Carewe interrupted.

“As I said, it was just a thought.”

“I appreciate that, but my definition of an accident does not include poisoning and stabbing.”

“We recovered the floater from the river,” Kendy said with a frown, apparently unwilling to discuss the attempted murder allegation.

“Yes?”

“A pin was missing from the height sensor linkage. When it fellout the sensor thought the vehicle was parked or grounded, and naturally it shut off the power.”

“Naturally.”

“Well, at least it had to be accidental—there’s no way I can think of to make a pin like that fall out at a predetermined point on a journey.”

Carewe traced patterns on the bed sheets with one fingertip. “I’m not familiar with the design of your floaters, but I imagine that when one is passing over a river this height sensor linkage gets doused with water.”

“It’s bound to.”

“Suppose someone had removed the original pin and replaced it with one made of, say, gordonite?”

“What’s gordonite?”

It’s an alloy which dissolves almost instantaneously on contact with water.”

Kendy sighed theatrically. “We’re back to the mysterious plot against your life. You’re suggesting there’s a would-be murderer in the base.”

“Wrong!” Carewe felt his anger returning. “Yesterday I was suggesting that, now I’m telling you.”

“I’ve made a check on the personnel from every contingent—there’s nobody in the base who has a new gash on his face.” Kendy got to his feet.

“And how about that little fringe of land surrounding the base? Africa, I think you call it.”

Kendy smiled. “I like your sense of humor, Mr. Carewe. There’s a very old British joke in which King Darius meets David at breakfast the morning after he had thrown him into the lions’ den. The king says `Did you sleep well?’ and David says, ‘No—as a matter of fact I was troubled by lions,’ and the king sniffs and says, ‘All I can say is, you must have brought them with you.”

Carewe smiled uncertainly. “That’s a joke?”

“It baffled me for a long time, too. Then—I’m a student of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century literature, by the way—I discovered the king’s final remark was the traditional one made by English landladies when a boarder complained of fleas in his bed.”

“It still isn’t much of a joke. I was going to ask you what Beau Geste means, but now I don’t think I’ll bother.”

“The point I was making is that if someone really is trying to kill you, it’s nothing to do with this Unations base—you must have set yourself up before you came here.”

Carewe opened his outh to argue, but was unable to think of anything worth saying. He watched Kendy’s broad-shouldered figure vanish through the doorway and tried to find a pattern in the events of the past few days. The only overall conclusions he could reach was that his whole life had gone to hell almost from the moment he had heard of E.80. Barenboim and Pleeth had both been worried about the possibility of commercial espionage. The elaborate secrecy precautions surrounding his arrangement with them perhaps had not been as effective as they had hoped--when he’d poured a drink over Ron Ritchie the salesman had been able to make insinuations about his relationship with Barenboim. But, supposing powerful and ruthless competitors had picked up a whisper about E.80, what form would their espionage take? Would they not try to abduct Carewe alive for interrogation and study? How much could they learn from his dead body? And would they also be interested in Athene?

Carewe thumbed the buzzer which summoned the nurse. “When am I being shipped out of here?” he asked when she arrived.

“Dr. Redding has arranged for a vertijet with stretcher accommodation to pick you up this evening. You’ll be flying direct to Lisbon.” Her tone revealed she had not forgiven him for the disruption of her previous night’s routine.

“I see—and it was arranged through the normal channels, was it? Everybody knows when and how I’m going?”

“Not everybody,” she said coldly. “Most people wouldn’t take the trouble to find out.”

Carewe waved dismissal. “That’s all. I’ll call you if I get attacked again.”

“Don’t bother.”

When she had gone he took the oral communicator from his bedside table and told it he wanted to speak to Farma’s transport boss. There was a delay of a few seconds before the connection was made.

“Parma of Farma.” Parma’s Scots accented voice sounded slightly wary. “Who wants me?”

“This is Will Carewe.” Carewe glanced at the ward door and made certain it was closed. “Where are you now, Felix?”

“I’m at the club having a liter of breakfast?’

“Will you be meeting a shuttle flight this morning?”

“Yeah—in about fifty minutes from now, if I get there in time.”

“You’re going to be on time, and I’m going with you.”

“But I thought …” Parma’s voice faded out in puzzlement.

“This is important to me, Felix. Can you go to my chalet, collect my bag, then bring your truck over here in about five minutes?” Carewe poured all the urgency he could into the words. “Without telling anybody what you’re doing?”

“I guess so, Willy. What’s the trouble?”

“I’ll tell you later—just get here.”

Carewe put the communicator back and eased himself out of bed. A search of the nearby locker failed to reveal any outdoor clothing He stood at the window and watched until he saw Parma’s truck nosing its way across the central clearing. Giving it time to draw up to the building’s main entrance, he walked quickly to the door of the ward and went out. As he neared the outer door his pendulous right lung picked up the rhythm of the movement and began to bounce gently against his ribs. He walked steadily onwards, got outside without being seen and climbed up into the waiting truck. In spite of his relief, he was illogically resentful of the fact that nobody had noticed his exit.

“Don’t get me wrong,” Parma said, his breath filling the cabin with the smell of beer. “I enjoy a bit of sport as much as anybody, especially in a Godforsaken hole like this, but shouldn’t you be staying in bed?”

“Let’s get out of here,” Carewe said, anxiously watching the hospital door.

“All right, but I don’t like it, Willy.” Parma let the clutch pedal up violently and the truck spun its wheels in the dust before whining its way across the central clearing with protesting suspension and structure. “And I’ll tell you right now that this isn’t the best getaway car in the world.”

“It’ll do.” Carewe scanned the base for signs that this unorthodox departure had attracted attention. The base was sleepy under the pressure of sunlight, and the only men visible were two in Unations blue lounging in the shade of an awning. They could have been the two he had seen in exactly the same place on the previous morning. Neither of them turned his head as the truck went past trailing a turbulent wake of dust and dry leaves.

“By the way, what have you done?” Parma asked as the vehicle swung into the trail and the walls of trees closed in, reducing the light.

“Nothing. Nothing at all.”

“I see.” Parma sounded perplexed. “The reason I ask is that I like to know in advance when I’m buying into trouble.”

“I’m sorry, Felix.” Carewe suddenly appreciated the extent to which he had imposed on a very brief acquaintanceship. “I wasn’t trying to duck out of giving you an explanation. The fact is I really have done nothing—unless you count disobeying doctor’s orders.”

“Why are you so Goddam anxious to meet the shuttle?”

“I’m not just meeting it—I’m leaving on it.” Carewe paused. “Doght think that could be arranged?”

“It’s hot in here,” Parma said glumly. “I should have brought a couple of bulbs.”

“How about it?” Carewe persisted.

“This puts me on the spot, Willy. I work for Farma too—and a transport manager isn’t supposed to smuggle people around with his cargo.”

“I don’t want to be smuggled. Just put me down on your waybill or whatever it is you have.”

Parma sighed and the smell of beer mingled with his perspiration became almost overpowering. “What have you got against the afternoon flight Dr. Redding has laid on for you?”

“Nothing—that’s why I don’t want to travel on it.”

“Huh?” Parma swore as the truck hit a pothole and lurched to one side. He wrestled it back into the center of the trail.

“Somebody at the base is trying to kill me, and they might go as far as planting a bomb on the aircraft.”

Parma laughed outright, his silvery bristles rearranging themselves on his red-veined cheeks. “You great tumshie—that’s Glaswegian for turnip, by the way— who’d want to kill you?”

“That’s what I’d like to know.”

“Willy, the only people around here who have anything against you are those ex-Fauves you cooled yesterday, and they can’t even get near the base.” Parma chuckled delightedly.

Carewe controlled his irritation over the fact that matters of life or death for him produced nothing but amusement and skepticism in others. “This started before I went on the expedition,” he said. “And last night a man came into the ward and tried to knife me.”

“A dream. Natural enough after what happened during the day.”

“It wasn’t a dream. I was attacked.” Carewe described his attacker in detail, becoming aware as he did so that his lung was picking up the jouncing rhythm of the truck and nuzzling against his ribs. “Do you mind driving a little slower? I’m resonating again.”

“Sure.” Parma slowed the truck and glanced sympathetically at Carewe’s chest. “You must be real determined to get out of here. I don’t know anybody who fits the description you gave, but I guess he could have slipped in from outside.”

“That’s what I thought—now, how about the shuttle? Are you going to put me on it?”

Parma kneaded his red button nose for a moment. “I like your style with a pint, Willy, but if it wasn’t for that …”

“Thanks, Felix—now where’s my bag?” Carewe crawled into the back of the truck and took off his pajamas. The dressings on his ribs looked reassuringly small and secure. He struggled into his clothes and had just returned to the passenger seat when the thunder of vertically directed jet engines drowned the whine of Parma’s truck. A silvery aircraft drifted across their field of view, pulled its nose up and sank out of sight behind the trees.

“There’s your shuttle—and it’s early,” Parma commented.

“I didn’t realize it was so noisy.”

“All VTOL jobs are noisy. It’s inherent in the design, but you’re used to hearing them going up and down inside tubefields.” Parma sniffed heartily. “They don’t bother with refinement like that out here.”

“What about the pilot? Is there likely to be any difficulty over me?”

“Shouldn’t think so.” Parma glanced at his watch. It was an old-fashioned radium model but, Carewe acknowledged ruefully, it worked in regions where his radio tattoo could not. “I would say that’s Colleen Bourgou. When she’s in this part of the world she always flies in ahead of schedule to catch the sun. And I’ve got to know her pretty well.”

“Is that the girl who brought me out here?”

“That’s right—I’d forgotten that.” Parma nudged Carewe’s side. “You noticed her, eh?”

“Yes.” Carewe thought back, remembering the tawny-haired girl who had so casually removed her shirt in front of him. He had experienced a guilty excitement then, but it had been slight compared to the pang of uncomplicated lust the thought of her naked torso inspired in him now. They were right about E.80, he told himself, I haven’t cooled at all. A few minutes later the truck emerged into the brightness of the airfield. The pilot, who already was sitting on the forward steps, slipped into her shirt with a tan-flashing movement like that of a jungle animal.

“There she is,” Parma breathed, and—making his first direct reference to Carewe’s apparent status—added, “You had thirty or forty good years in you, Willy. Don’t you have any regrets?”

“A few,” Carewe said, “but maybe not the sort you think.”

X

“Good morning, Colleen,” Parma shouted. “Don’t stop your sunbath on my account.”

The pilot peered up into the truck’s cabin, narrowing her eyes against the abundance of light. “I’m stopping it on my account—the sooner you take your shot the better it’ll be for everybody, Felix.”

“Charming,” Parma said in a hurt voice. “That’s the thanks I get for preserving myself in readiness.”

“Did you say preserving or pickling?”

“You’re too sharp for me this morning.” Parma climbed down from the truck and Carewe joined him. “You’ve met Willy Carewe, haven’t your

“Yes.” The pilot glanced at Carewe and he noticed that the pupils of her eyes, reflecting the direct sunlight, shone like gold coins.

“I want you to give him a ride back to Kinshasa this trip. He has to go home in a hurry.”

“Oh? Short stay.”

“Willy got a Fauve knife in his ribs,” Parma explained quickly. “He shouldn’t even be on his feet but, as I said, he has reasons for leaving in a hurry.”

The pilot looked at Carewe with new interest, but her voice was doubtful. “I don’t mind altering the waybill if you say so, but I’m not operating an air ambulance. Suppose he collapses on the flight?”

“A husky big fella like that? I’ll tell you something for nothing, Colleen—this young man …”

“Is quite capable of speaking for himself,” Carewe cut in. “I assure you I won’t collapse, faint or do anything stupid on the flight. Are you going to take me or not?”

“Temper, temper.” Colleen looked at Carewe again, and he thought he detected a hint of bafflement in her expression. “All right—get aboard when you’re ready.”

“Thanks.” Noting the girl’s expression Carewe felt his masculine ego stir hopefully—was it possible that the outward trappings of a cool were not enough to disguise his virility? He sat down on the truck’s running board, and nursed the growing stiffness in his ribs while Parma and the girl unloaded supplies from the aircraft’s cargo hatch. He had been hoping for an immediate takeoff but they waited for almost an hour while other vehicles rolled up, received or dispatched boxes and disappeared back into the trees. Most of the drivers seemed friendly with the pilot and from their conversation he deduced they represented a range of contractors to the Unations project—weather control, provisions, ground transport, structural engineering, and the other services required to maintain a technological community in a remote area. Some of the men went inside the aircraft to smoke and talk to the pilot, and Carewe saw them glancing curiously at him. He fretted at the delay and the way in which he had not been able to make a clean, abrupt departure as planned. Any of the men coming and going between the base and the aircraft could be an agent of the hidden power which was trying to snuff out his life….

An unusually loud burst of laughter from within the aircraft caused him to jump to his feet and he made the humiliating discovery that he was jealous. On the strength of a few minutes of spurious intimacy and one speculative glance he had built up a fantasy in which he had a special claim on Colleen Bourgou. The logic was that of a fairytale in which a princess, having subliminally recognized a prince behind the outward shape of a frog, is automatically linked to him for life. He snorted in self-disgust. You really enjoy playing a part, Athene had told him, but there’s more to it than you walking about in bristles and codpiece …. But that had been before she had thrown everything in her sermon about one-to-one marriages to the winds. Athene had forfeited the right to pass judgment on his foibles. He neared the forward hatch of the aircraft and looked in. Colleen was laughing easily and uninhibitedly at something, and her eyes meeting his were more than ever like discs of newly-minted gold. He smiled back, with calculated wistfulness, and returned to his seat on the truck.

In spite of her free-and-easy attitude, Colleen appeared very meticulous about checking the items of incoming and outgoing payload on her clipboard. The activity around the aircraft gradually diminished until

Parma’s truck was the only one left. While Colleen was
checking the cargo hatch fastenings Carewe said his goodbyes to Parma.

“Thanks for everything,” he said. “As soon as I find out what in hell’s going on in my life I’ll get in touch and explain it to you.”

“I’d be interested to hear that, Willy. Look after yourself.”

Carewe shook hands, climbed on board and strapped himself into one of the forward passenger seats, just behind and to one side of the pilot’s station. He was disproportionately pleased to have it confirmed that there would be no other passengers on the flight.

“Here we go,” Colleen said, sealing the forward door and buckling herself in. She activated the control systems with a flashy expertise, fired the turbine starter cartridges and eased the aircraft upwards. When they had cleared tree level she put the nose down slightly and took off in an ascending swoop which did peculiar things to the emptiness inside Carewe’s ribs. He clutched his chest and held on.

“Sorry,” she said, glancing back. “Did that hurt?”

“Not really—but I’ve got a collapsed lung that’s so sensitive to acceleration it could stand in as an inertial guidance system.”

“How did you get that?”

“It wasn’t easy.” He described the stabbing incident without consciously slanting it to make himself appear heroic.

“Too bad,” she said sympathetically, “but I still don’t see why you were so eager to get away from the base.”

Carewe hesitated. “Somebody else tried to kill me, somebody in the base.” He waited—but the expected laughter did not come. Colleen was frowning and he wondered how he could ever have considered her only fairly attractive.

“Have you any idea who or why?”

“Ah …no.” Something far back in his mind associated the menace to his life with the fact that he had taken a shot of E.80, but the only person to whom he could confide his worries on that score was Barenboim.

She shivered deliciously. “It all sounds very mysterious and exciting.”

“Mysterious it is,” Carewe replied, “but I can’t see what porpoise, I mean purpose … porpoise … spoke to me on the dolphin …”

“Are you feeling all right?” Colleen turned in her seat. “Your straightness has gone … redly.”

He stared at her in horror. There was something terribly wrong about the gold coins of her eyes. … No, not the eyes themselves—the spacing of them. There had been a ghastly reversal, and now her eyes were separated by the circumference of the universe minus the width of the bridge of her nose, which left them still on her face but billions of lightyears apart….

“Not slowly,” she cried. “Unbreathe!”

“Your eyes—the non-Einsteinian simultaneity of blinking.”

Colleen’s hands were startled birds. “We don’t disrequire negative upness.”

White winds howling, gravity pushing … pushing? Carewe blinked and focused his eyes on the other passenger seats. They were changing position relative to each other, but this time it was real and metal arms were clamped around his body. His single lung pumped like a heart. He looked downwards at the dance of distant treetops, then up again. The shuttle aircraft was flying steadily onwards, a gaping rectangular hole in its belly, far above him now and growing smaller. Around him the other seats rose and sank in response to air currents, or twisted in slow turns, dangling unused straps. Cold clean air seared his nostrils.

“Don’t be afraid,” Colleen called and he saw her larger pilot’s seat drifting close by, fringed with hoses, wires and levers. “The world is pear-shaped and the tip will meet us rotationally “

“What … what happened?” he shouted numbly, clinging to the arms of his seat. A river glinted flatly in the west, and he thought he could see a haze of smoke on the nearer bank. The treetops were close now and rearing up to meet him with daunting speed. “What hit us?”

“Calculation equals chaos,” Colleen replied, her voice almost lost in the uprush of air.

“Look out,” he warned, “we’re almost down.” He examined the armrests of his seat and found a small vertically mounted thumb-joystick set in a recess. Memories of a thousand carefully-scanned flight safety booklets returned to him. Pushing the stick downwards would increase the porosity of the invisible forcefield canopy supporting the seat, and increase the rate of descent. Allowing it to spring upwards would intensify the field, and moving the stick laterally would distort the canopy in such a way that the seat would follow the direction indicated.

Carewe flinched as he fell below tree level and an irregular leafy valley surged up around him. He dimly heard other seats crashing through foliage but all his attention was concentrated on the tiny and seemingly irrelevant thumb movements which were supposed to steer him to safety. A smaller tree speared up at him. He pushed the joystick to the right, aiming for a patch of dimness, but the response was sluggish and the seat slanted down through the tree’s branches. It bounced and shuddered and slowed, while twigs lashed at his face—then he was on the ground, miraculously seated upright. The sound of other seats tumbling through foliage was loud. He hit the release button, the seat’s metal claws curled back into their sockets and he stepped clear.

“Hello there!”

He looked upwards and saw that Colleen’s seat was perched at an angle in the lower branches of a broad tree. She was about eight meters up, but appeared to be smiling.

“Hold on,” he called. “I’ll climb up to you.”

“It’s all right. No calculating, no chaos.” Colleen released herself from the seat and stepped off into thin air. She hurtled downwards, legs rotating lazily and tawny hair streaming, and smashed into a slump of shrubbery.

Carewe ran across the uneven ground and parted the shrub with shaking hands. She was unconscious and a single rivulet of blood, gleaming like lacquer, crossed her forehead. He raised one of her eyelids and touched the eyeball with a fingertip. The eye remained passive, indicating to Carewe’s limited medical understanding that she was deeply unconscious, perhaps concussed. He explored her limp body with his hands and, finding no broken bones, lifted Colleen out of the shrub and put her down on mossy ground.

Sinking to his knees beside her, he surveyed the scratches on his own body and tried to come to terms with reality again. The only explanation he could conceive was that a fast-acting hallucinogen had been released into the shuttle’s air system by a timing device. It had not been Illusogen or any of the other approved commercial drugs, but one specifically designed to interfere with a person’s spatial awareness and orientation—a lethal property in the context of an aircraft in flight. It appeared to have hit Carewe first, perhaps because his single lung was working at close to maximum capacity, and to have left his system earlier for the same reason. Colleen had been given sufficient advance warning to ler her blast them out of the aircraft, but the efts had still been with her when they landed, hence her attempt to walk on air.

Murder bid number four, he thought. And the person responsible had been ruthless enough to try sending an innocent woman to her death as part of the same package. His helpless, smoldering anger returned in full force. A combination of circumstances had saved his life again—but his luck could not hold out forever ….

A new thought obtruded. He was assuming the latest attempt had failed, but was it possible that he was as good as dead already? The shuttle had flown steadily southwest with mechanical insoucience. Perhaps its engines—drawing moisture from the air and converting it to fuel—would carry it far out across the Atlantic. In that case there was nothing that Carewe knew of to guide a rescue party to the spot where he and Colleen had come down. He was stranded possibly a hundred kilometers from the nearest settlement, in the sort of terrain in which a man would be lucky if he covered ten kilometers a day. With an injured woman to care for his progress could be cut to a fraction of that.

The throb of winged insects in the heavy air took on a malicious note and grew louder in Carewe’s ears, making constructive thought difficult. He pressed his hands to his temples. The river he had glimpsed during the paradrop, presumably the Congo, lay to the west—and there had been a faint smudge of smoke which might indicate a village. He looked down at Colleen and patted her face hopefully, but it remained inert as wax, almost a stranger’s now that her personality was no longer on the features. A feeling of having just arrived in Africa, of having been plucked out of Three Springs only a few seconds earlier came back to him. The continent’s shocking strangeness began in the unfamiliar mosses beneath his knees and radiated for thousands of kilometers in every direction, compounding mystery with hostility. And he, Will Carewe, was not equipped to cope. He had no rights in Africa, not even the right to live, therefore he had no obligations. The mood of resignation lasted for some seconds, then was replaced by the abiding anger which was becoming a permanent feature of his mental makeup.

He slid his hands under Colleen’s body, lifted her carefully, and began walking west towards the river. There was perhaps an hour until sunset—no possibility of reaching the river before dark—but he had a compulsion to be on the move. Within a matter of minutes he was drenched with sweat and his working lung felt as though on the point of bursting. Progress was even slower than he had imagined. The forest floor had variations in height of many meters, and where undergrowth and vines failed to block the way the sheer impossibility of climbing steep slopes forced him to make a detour. He kept going doggedly, learning not to set Colleen down during rest periods but to support her against tree trunks and thus avoid the punishing task of having to lift her all over again. The continuous background sounds of monkeys and birds sometimes faded to an echo of happenings in another universe.

By the time darkness was assembling its watchful forces among the tree lanes his legs were becoming incapable of supporting any weight. With his breath coming in roaring gasps, he looked round for an approximation of shelter. Colleen stirred sleepily in his arms and moaned. He set her down, almost collapsing in the process, and watched for further signs of returning consciousness. She moaned again, shivered and moved her arms aimlessly. Her eyes, pary open, were crescents of white and the shivering grew more violent.

“Colleen,” he said urgently, “can you hear me?”

“I … I’m cold.” Her voice was that of a small child.

“Don’t worry. I’ll …” He took off his tunic, draped it over her and surveyed the darkening diorama of the forest. The air was cooling rapidly and the only available materials were grass and leaves. He gathered armfuls of long grass, mixed with the broadest leaves, and piled them on her legs and up over the tunic. By the time he had finished the darkness was virtually complete and it was his turn to shiver. He slid himself under the tunic, disturbing the covering of vegetation as little as possible, and took Colleen in his arms. She moved against him with an easy, natural movement, one of her legs creeping over his, and the warmth returned to his body. He lay perfectly still, closed his eyes and tried to relax. Minutes, perhaps hours, slipped by as he sailed the shallows of the ocean sleep. During his periods of consciousness the brilliant lanterns of the stars were not above, but ahead—he was pinned to the foremost point on a runaway world, plunging dangerously through a crowded galaxy. Eventually he became aware that Colleen was awake.

“Will Carewe?” she said.

“Yes.” He made his voice calm. “You’re going to be all right.”

“What happened? I’ve got the craziest memories.”

“I’m afraid I involved you in my own particular mess.” He told her his theory of how the incident had begun and added a summary of the subsequent events.

“And now you’re trying to carry me all the way to the Congo River?”

“Well, you aren’t all that heavy—we probably covered two kilometers.” He realized she had not withdrawn the leg which was lapped over his, and that her breasts were firm in their pressure against his side.

She chuckled warmly in the darkness. “You’re hopeless, Will Carewe. Didn’t you …?”

“Didn’t I what?”

“Oh, nothing. Do you think we have much hope of reaching civilization on foot?”

“I don’t know,” he said ruefully. “I was hoping you could tell me that.”

Colleen waited a full minute before she replied. “I can tell you one thing.”

“What is it?”

“That you aren’t a cool.”

“Oh!considered arguing, but his body was offering her the most basic evidence of all. “Are you angry?” “Should I be?”

“Well, I watched you sunbathing when we arrived.”

“I don’t think that’s the reason you drag about—besides, I had an idea even then. Have you fooled many women?”

“Lots,” he assured her.

“They can’t have been real women, Will.” The words were accompanied by a gentle persuasive thrust of her loins which nothing in the world could have prevented him returning. Her mouth met his eagerly, and from her lips he drank a heady brew of warmth and reassurance. Reassurance, mind asked body, was that a good enough reason? He tried to stem the tide long enough to consider the reasons against the giving acceptance of the moment. Athene? She had changed the rules of the game. Colleen herself? He touched the dried blood on her forehead.

“You’ve been hurt,” he whispered. “Is this fair?”

“I’m an immortal, and immortals heal fast.” Her breath was hot on the roof of his mouth. “Besides, we may never get out of here.”

“All right,” he said, rolling over her, transferring his weight to the pliant platform of her hips. “We both win.”

In the dawn, when they had helped each other to dress, Carewe took Colleen’s arm and began moving towards the west, but she pulled back.

“Not that way,” she said, “we’ve got to get back to where we landed.”

“What good will that do?”

“The aircraft seats are standard Unations models for bush operations—there’s a radio beacon in each one, and it starts broadcasting as soon as a seat is ejected.”

Carewe caught her by the shoulders. “You mean we aren’t lost?”

“Did I say we were?”

“Last night you said we might never get out of here,” he accused.

Colleen gave an elaborate shrug. “We might have been bitten by poisonous snakes.”

“You little …” He shook her, trying not to grin. “Why didn’t you tell me that last night?”

“Well …”

“Was I being a bit steely and noble?”

She laughed and threw her arms around his waist. “Don’t be ashamed of it, Will—you play the part too well. You can tell your wife you were tricked by an unscrupulous bush pilot.”

“What makes you think I have a wife?”

“You have, haven’t you?”

“I am married. One-to-one. Does it matter?”

Colleen hesitated, and before she could answer there was a sound of aircraft in the east. “We’d better hurry—they’ll be looking for us, and there’ll be questions.”

“I guess so.” Carewe frowned. The prospect of rescue meant an immediate return to problems which had grown even more complex. His plan for a speedy and inconspicuous return to Three Springs could hardly have gone further wrong. The loss of an aircraft was going to focus a lot of attention on Carewe, advertising his whereabouts to the occult hunters and perhaps imperiling the secrecy of E.80.

“What’s wrong, Will?” Colleen’s eyes sought his. “Was it so terrible for you?”

“It was wonderful,” he said earnestly, “but this mysterious and exciting life of mine gets more complicated by the minute. The reason I jumped the shuttle in the first place was that I wanted to get home quickly.”

“You mean, if you have to hang around in Kinshasa you might get killed?”

“There’s even more to it than that, but I can’t explain.”

“Let’s go then.” Colleen unwrapped her arms and began to walk. “I’ve got friends in Kinshasa—they’ll get the formalities out of the way in a hurry and let you keep moving.”

“Formalities!” Carewe started after her. “How often do you lose an aircraft anyway?”

“The aircraft isn’t lost,” she said scornfully. “What do you think autoland systems are for? The shuttle would have landed at Kinshasa yesterday. Not as neatly as I would have done it, but still in one piece.”

“And full of hallucinogenic gas?”

“I doubt it. The environment control system completely renews the air in the cabin every four minutes.”

“Does it?” He helped Colleen over a break in the ground. “The people who are gunning for me haven’t left much solid evidence so far. If the gas container was made of a self-consuming plastic there’d be nothing…. But why did we abandon ship?”

“I’ll blame it on a system failure— should take them about two days to sort that one out.”

“I wish I was mechanical,” he said in wonderment.

“Think of all the fun you’d miss,” Colleen replied wickedly. She moved ahead of him again, easily, the muscles on her sturdy yet shapely legs firming at every step. They took their bearings from the sound of the helicopter and reached the area where they had para-dropped in roughly fifteen minutes. Carewe’s clothes were soaked with dew flung by whipping leaves when they reached the first of the empty aircraft seats. It was lying on its side at the base of a tree. The helicopter hovered patiently above the canopy of foliage which dipped and swayed in the downdraft.

“Where’s my seat?” Colleen said.

Carewe looked around for a moment and pointed up at the seat, still caught at an angle in the branches of the tree. “There you are. Or were.”

She whistled. “You mean I just stepped off from there?”

“Yup. You scared the pants off me.”

“Well, you must admit it’s a new twist. I’ll tell the other girls what to do next time they fly this route.”

Carewe had difficulty in forcing a smile. Colleen was beginning to talk like all the frustrated women he had known, the sort who often ended up joining Priapic Clubs—yet she had seemed so different. The change, hesuddenly realized, had begun when she asked if he was married. He watched with concern as she climbed the tree and swung lithely out to where the seat was perched. She took something from it, raised it to her mouth and he heard her voice faintly above the sound of the copter. A minute later she was back on the ground, tucking her blue shirt into the waistband of her skirt.

“They’re dropping a couple of baskets for us.” Her voice was casual.

“Colleen,” he said quickly, “this might be the last chance we’ll have to talk privately.”

“Could be.”

He caught both her hands. “I’ve been married for ten years, and last night was the first time I broke the contract. The only time.” She tried to pull her hands away but he held on. “But I’m not sure if I have a wife anymore. Something happened. I can’t tell you what it was—but my being in Africa trying to look like a cool and trying to keep from getting murdered are all part of it.”

“Why are you telling me all this?”

“Because I don’t want you to think I’m scuttling off to a cozy home and a cozy wife after a casual bit of fun. I’m not a casual person.”

“But why are you telling me thatdiv heig>

“Because you’re important to me. I could love you, Colleen.”

Her eyes challenged his. “You think so?”

“I know so.” His words saddened him because they were almost, but not quite, true. He was grateful to Colleen, and gratitude which could not be properly expressed transmuted itself to guilt. “Look, if I find out I no longer have a wife …”

“Don’t say it, Will.” She gave him a wry smile. “Don’t get too noble.”

He released her hands and, by instinctive agreement, they stepped away from each other as two cages came blindly down through the trees from the waiting helicopter.

XI

It was not until he was high above the Atlantic on a west-bound subspacer that Carewe began to relax. Rather than delay his movements by going through the channels to arrange Farma credit, he used his own disk to pay for the flight from Kinshasa to Lisbon, and for the jump from there to Seattle. There had been one uneasy moment in Lisbon when he heard that the flight was going to set him back more than a thousand newdollars—he had an idea his drawing account would not be able to cope. The computer network gave its assent, however, and he remembered the value of the newdollar was exceptionally high in comparison to the escudo that month.

One of the side effects of immortality had been the necessity to redesign the world’s monetary systems. Even without the consequent increase in productivity, the median income for a consumer unit in the U.S.—estimated at $5,000.00 in the mid-20th century and projected at a conservative growth rate of 2.5 percent— would have risen to more than eight million dollars a year in three centuries. The advent of biostats, leading to optimum use of brainpower and resources, had pushed the annual increase in productivity to the region of ten percent and incomes of a billion dollars a year began to be forecast. To prevent the dollar becoming a meaningless unit, its value was redefined as a fixed fraction of the gross national product, calculated on a monthly basis. The other countries of the world adopted similar measures by international agreement and a Unations monetary reservoir was created to absorb disparities among the currencies of various countries.

The subspaoer was biting down into denser levels of air when Carewe, slumped in his seat, made an odd discovery. He had flown something like five thousand miles without once imagining an imminent failure in the aircraft. The possible dangers of aviation were nothing compared with his experiences on the ground during the previous two days—and he had survived those. He had been placed in situations where his life depended on his own efforts, and had been equal to them. The thought filled him with a dull astonishment which still lingered when he got off the skycraft at Seattle. Thanks to the time gain of the east-west flight it was only late afternoon, and he was able to pick up a commuter flight which got him into Three Springs by dusk.

The pastel-colored buildings were darkening, their mirrored windows and view-walls reflecting the copper-and-green sky. The world looked hearteningly familiar once again, and Carewe’s sense of being in danger lessened in intensity. All he needed now was the knowledge that Athene was at home waiting for him, and the African interlude would fade like a dream. He picked up his bullet at the airport garage and drove home slowly. The dhome was in darkness, as he had known it would be, but not until he saw it did he admit his secret hope that Athene would have returned. He let himself in and turned on the lights. She had tidied up carefully before leaving and the interior looked as though it had never been lived in. The air felt sterile.

How did I let it happen? Carewe was appalled at his own stupidity, at his crass mismanagement of the circumstances. With the cloud of E.80 curling safely through his veins, he should have called Barenboim and let him convince Athene of the truth. What he had done was to sacrifice his marriage to protect Farma’s investment—and the sacrifice had been needless because other people appeared to know about E.80, or at least to suspect something. Carewe was tired, and his operative lung was pumping hard as though he had been running, but he decided to go to Athene and put things right again. If necessary he would take her to see Barenboim—but there was a simpler more pleasurable way of proving to her that he was still a functional male….

He crossed to the communicator, gave it the number of the commune in which Katrina Targett—Athene’s mother—lived, then canceled the call before the connection was completed. The commune was less than fifteen kilometers away and he could drive there in a few minutes. It was more than two years since he had been there but he was able to punch the building’s combined communications and grid number into the bullet’s wayfinder and let it call out the route to him as he drove. Full darkness had fallen by the time he pulled up outside the two-story structure, which was of a standard pattern issued to women who wanted to live together on a group basis. It had separate apartments to cater for closely knit mother-and-child relationships and for short-term pairings with itinerant males, but the other aspects of life were largely communal. Carewe disliked the place, mainly—he suspected—because his own mother had continued to live in an individual unit after his father had drifted on to new liaisons.

He found the outer door open and went through it into a rectangular atrium where a slim brunette, apparently in her mid-twenties, was tending a flower garden. She looked as though she might have been Athene’s mother, but Carewe, whose memory for faces was poor, could not be certain.

“Madam Targett?” He went closer. “Are you Athene’s mother?”

She looked up with a smile which did not quite hide the coolness appearing in her gaze as she noticed his hairless chin. “No.”

“I’m sorry. I thought you looked…”

“Like one of the family?” Her voice was deep and warm. “I am. I’m Athene’s grandmother. Who are you?” “Will Carewe. I didn’t realize…”

“Oh, we go back four generations here. There’s a lot of old-fashioned family loyalty among the Targetts.” The woman dropped a seed into the moist earth, turned a hand-held biotrophic projector on it and watched critically while a shoot snaked out of the ground, spread leaves and blossomed.

“That’s…nice,” Carewe said awkwardly. He had always been repelled by the idea of children remaining emotionally fixated on their mothers who themselves were children bound to their own mothers, and so on. Some communes had eight generations of women, reminding him of an endless series of nesting dolls. “The family unit can still be important.”

“Yes.” The woman., who had not introduced herself by name, switched off her projector. She knelt to examine the new flower, hissed with annoyance and pulled it out of the soil. She threw the flower down on the earth where its pale roots waved feebly, like thread-worms. “I made it too tall. When I don’t concentrate I make them too tall.”

“Sorry.” Carewe watched the blindly seeking roots as the woman moved a control on her projector and turned it on the flower again. It blackened and dissolved, returning its constituents to the soil. “Takes all the work and waiting out of gardening, doesn’t it?”

“If you don’t approve, Will—and I can tell you don’t —you should come right out with it.”

“Who said I don’t approve?” Carewe laughed unconvincingly, looking at the stained soil, somehow reminded of the frog he had rescued from death in the Farma parking lot.

The woman sniffed. “Well? Where’s Athene?”

“That’s what I wanted to ask you.”

“How should I know, Will? She left here yesterday right after she got your call.” The woman stood up and peered into Carewe’s face. “You mean she isn’t …”

“I was in Africa yesterday,” he said harshly. “I didn’t call anybody.”

“Then where is she?”

Carewe hardly heard the words, but the question pursued him the whole way back to his home.

A careful search of the dhome yielded nothing in the way of clues—he could not even decide if Athene had visited the place on the previous day. There were no recorded messages, no notes. Nothing. Suddenly short of breath again, he hurried to the communicator and gave it the number of the Farma headquarters. A three-dimensional cartoon of a traditional female secretary appeared at the set’s projection focus.

“I am sorry, caller,” she said in a perky voice, “but it is past normal business hours and the staff of the Faot.Corporation has ceased work for the day. They will be at your service tomorrow morning again promptly at nine-thirty.”

“I have urgent company business with Mr. Barenboim.”

“I will assist you as much as possible. Have you a priority code?”

Carewe gave the intentionally complex coding which was memorized by all of Farma’s senior staff for use in making emergency contacts. The secretary, a vision in the mind of the Farma computer, nodded thoughtfully. “Mr. Barenboim can be reached at the home of Mr. Emmanuel Pleeth until approximately midnight. Shall I connect you?” She faded away, disappointed, into a luminous haze as Carewe switched off. His first impulse had been to call Barenboim, but if Athene’s apparent disappearance had anything to do with the E.80 project he wanted to move as carefully as possible. Communicator link-ups were difficult to tap, but he had no doubt it could be done.

He went back out to his bullet, walking quickly with his newly learned and slightly uncoordinated gait which allowed him to move at a fair speed without the inert lung swinging against his ribs. His knees felt rubbery, a reminder that he had eaten practically nothing in two days. Never having visited Pleeth’s home, he had only the vaguest idea where it was, but the bullet’s way-finder got an address and instructed him on the best way to get there. Half an hour later he swung through the gates of a compact estate about ten kilometers to the north of Three Springs. The house was a low sprawling structure of genuine stone. Warm light spilled from its windows across terraced lawns. The lushness of the vegetation and the unseasonal warmth of the night breeze told of an environmental control system extending over the entire estate. Getting out of his bullet, Carewe looked around him in wonderment, inhaling the scented air. A vice-president of Farma was bound to be in a high-income bracket, but Carewe had not realized just how well the tautly-smiling Pleeth could live. He crossed a patio and was about to reach the main entrance when the door opened. Barenboim hurried out, his hands outstretched towards Carewe, while Pleeth’s pink enigmatic face watched from the doorway.

“Willy! My dear boy!” Barenboim’s eyes sent messages of anxiety from within their bony grottoes. “What are you doing here?”

“I have to talk to you, Hy.” Carewe noted Barenboim’s display of solicitude, understood the other man was making it obvious for his benefit, but was unable to doubleguess the two-centuries-old cool any further.

“Please do—come in and sit down.” Barenboim gripped his arm and led him in as Pleeth moved silently ahead. “I got wind you had been injured and hospitalized in Africa, then there was something about your having disappeared. We were worried.” They entered a large book-lined room in which pools of soft light shone richly on wooden furniture. A small world-globe sat on the central table. Carewe allowed himself to be installed in an easy chair before a convincingly real log fire.

haven’t disappeared,” he said. “But my wife has.*

“A woman can’t disappear these days, Willy. They always leave a clear trail of credit transactions in the …”

“This is serious,” Carewe snapped, discovering to his surprise that the awe which Barenboim used to inspire in him had completely vanished.

“Of course, Willy. I didn’t mean to …” Barenboim glanced at Pleeth, who was standing in a corner of the room listening intently. “Perhaps you’d better tell me what’s been going on.”

“Somebody’s been trying to kill me—and now Athene has disappeared.” Carewe paused to examine Barenboim’s face, then went on to outline the events of the past two days.

“I see,” Barenboim said when he had finished. “And you think it is something to do with the E.80 project?” “What do you think?”

Barenboim’s face was a mask of concern. “I’m sorry to say it, Willy, but I’m inclined to agree with you. This is exactly the sort of thing we’ve been doing our best to avoid.”

“But …” Carewe had been hoping to have his theory dismissed. “If somebody has abducted Athene, what would they do with her?”

Barenboim went to a sideboard and poured a drink. “If you’ve got any ideas about them harming her—forget it. The sort of studies a researcher in biostatics would be interested in all involve maintaining the subject in perfect health.”

“What sort of things?”

“Is Scotch all right?” Barenboim handed the drink to Carewe. “Manny here could give you a better rundown than I, but basically they would want to assure themselves of the normal development of the fetus. That’s pretty important—ever hear of thalidomide?”

“Ah… no.”

“Then there’s the question of heredity. Suppose the child is male—will its cell structure and replication mechanisms be those of a mortal or an immortal? Suppose the male offspring of an E.80 immortal, a functioning male, turned out to be non-functional males?”

“I can’t see that it would change things very much,” Carewe said impatiently.

“Perhaps not, but I’m merely trying to give you some idea of why a rival organization would be interested in studying your wife. These are things we want to know too. The important point is that she will be perfectly safe until we can locate her and get her back.”

“Right!” Carewe swallowed his drink and stood up. “I’ll contact the police immediately.”

“I don’t think you should do that,” Barenboim said, and Pleeth moved restlessly in s corner.

“Why not?”

“I’ll be frank about our position, Willy. You’re too hard-headed for me to be anything else and hope to get away with it. If the police are brought in at this stage the whole world will know about E.80 by tomorrow morning. We want to give it to the world but not in such a way that all our rivals will be able to reap the benefits of our…”

“In the meantime thousands of men are tying off every day,” Carewe cut in angrily, thinking of the tribesmen he had forcibly emasculated.

Barenboim shrugged. “It’s better than dying off—but you didn’t let me finish, Willy. You’re entitled to go to the police—and I wouldn’t dream of trying to stop you, in spite of what it would mean to Farma—but I have an alternative to put to you.”

“I’m listening.”

“In my opinion, a really good private agency could find your wife quicker than a horde of well-meaning but noisy police officers, and that way both you and Farma would be better off. I know the right man to undertake the work and I’m prepared to call him this Minute. All I ask is that you give me one week to try it my way. After that, if there are no results, you can bring in the police. What do you say, Willy?”

“Well.” Looking at Barenboim’s eager, concerned face, Carewe’s conviction that he was being manipulated returned to him briefly, but he had to recognize the force of the arguments. “Are you sure you man’s the best?”

“The very best—and I’ll call him right now.”

“There’s no communicator terminal in this room,” Pleeth put in, speaking for the first time. “You can use the set in the main lounge. Through here.”

“That’s the trouble with trad architecture—it’s all appearance and no convenience,” Barenboim sighed. “Pour yourself another drink while we make the call, Willy. I’m sure the host won’t mind. Will you, Manny?”

When the two men had left the room Carewe took another drink, savoring its malty warmth. He walked to the table and examined the globe of the world. It was small, about the size of an orange, cupped inside a complex gimbal arrangement surmounted by a lens system, and the arrangement of the land masses was all wrong. He looked at it more closely and saw that everything was reversed, as if seen in a mirror. The surface of the globe was grayed with thousands upon thousands of place names, all of them far too small to be read with the naked eye. Carewe examined the base of the globe’s stand and discovered two rows of buttons with the legends “Latitude” and “Longitude.” Impressed with the beautiful engineering of the device, he touched a larger red button. The globe swung to pre-set coordinates and the lens system blazed with light.

Carewe ooked up at the portion now being projected onto the ceiling of the room, taking a sip of his drink as he did so, but the liquor seemed to lose its taste as he saw that the African township of Nouvelle Anvers was in the center of the brightly glowing map. For some reason, Barenboim and Pleeth had been studying the small area of the continent in which Carewe had come so close to losing his life.

He switched off the projector and returned to his seat, anxious to appear at ease before his employers returned to the room.

XII

Carewe, who had never knowingly seen a private detective before, studied Theodore Gwynne with interest. He was a small, quick man who appeared to have cooled around the age of fifty. His eyes were alert, and he had a brain which seemed to race all the time, obsessively, with the object of producing witty comments on everything that was said. Carewe could see him seizing on even the most banal remark and worrying it like a terrier until he had torn off an aphoristic shred. Every conversational exchange among the four men in Pleeth’s library ended with one of Gwynne’s epigrams, delivered in a low voice and accompanied by a very white smile. Carewe had initial doubts about the little man’s qualifications, but he noticed that Barenboim spoke to him with some deference and listened attentively to every word of Gwynne’s replies.

“As I see it, Theo, we’re giving you two jobs to take care of at once,” Barenboim was saying thoughtfully, pressing his puffy hands together to form a steeple.

“Two jobs, but you’d get a hell of a shock if I sent in two bills.” Gwynne’s teeth flashed briefly. “Sorry, Hy—go on.”

Barenboim smiled tolerantly. “We’re asking you to find Willy’s wife. Then there’s the question of Willy himself—he’s convinced someone has been trying to kill him.”

“That’s bad.” Gwynne sent Carewe a sympathetic glance. “There’s only one thing more depressing than somebody trying to kill you, and that’s somebody succeeding.”

Carewe nodded in sage agreement. He had noticed the way in which Barenboim had made clear his reservations about the reality of the threat to his life. One part of his mind was annoyed at not being able to convince anybody that he was a murder target; but the log fire was warming his feet, the Scotch he had drunk was warming his stomach, and a delicious relaxation had spread through him, turning his weariness into a sensual pleasure.

“There’s no problem,” he said sleepily. “I want to work closely with Theo while he’s locating my wife. He’ll be able to look after my health at the same time, I presume.”

“Dr. Gwynne, I presume.” Gwynne rubbed his hands. “I’ll be able to put in an additional bill for medical services.”

“That reminds me, Willy—you’re still convalescing,” Barenboim said. “Have you seen a doctor here yet?”

“Not yet. I’m getting used to operating on one cylinder.”

“Well, it sounds pretty serious to me. I’ll send a company medical officer out to see you.”

“Don’t bother, Hy.” Carewe’s newfound distrust of hospitals flared up. “I’ll see my own doctor in the morning.”

“All right. Have him debit Farma.”

“Thanks, Hy.” Carewe caught himself on the verge of drifting into sleep. “I’d better get on home.”

“There’s no need for that.” Pleeth, who had been perched with uncharacteristic stillness on his invisible QueenVic chair, spoke with an odd intensity, as he fingered the cigar-like gold ornament on his chest. “The least I can do is offer you a bed.”

Carewe shook his head. “I’d prefer to get back to my own place—that’s where Athene would expect to find me.” He stood up and, after making sure that Gwynne had his home number, made his way out to his bullet. By the time he got home his legs were buckling slightly at every step and he fell asleep on the instant of lying down.

In the morning he awoke to find that his fears for Athene’s safety, so easily dispelled by Barenboim’s arguments on the previous evening, had returned in full force. According to the president’s logic nobody had any reason to harm Athene, but by the same logic nobody had any reason to harm Carewe. Yet he had come close to death three times in one twenty-four hour period. Although not hungry, he took a light breakfast of eggs and citrus juice, then went to the communicator and called Dr. Westi’s office. He arranged for an appointment for ten o’clock and filled in the intervening time by renewing his facial depilatory and finding fresh clothes.

Dr. Westi’s office was on the eighth floor of the Three Springs medical arts building. Carewe arrived there a little early but the cybersec admitted him right away. Westi, a scholarly-looking man who apparently had not cooled until he was over sixty, waved him into a chair.

“Good morning, Will,” he said amiably. “Having adjustment problems?”

“How do you mean?”

“I see from your compcard that you and Athene have just been registered as immortals with the State Health Board. I thought perhaps …”

“Oh, I see what you mean. No, sex isn’t rearing its ugly head—but can you do anything for a collapsed lung?” Carewe explained what had happened to him as best he could without going into the reasons for his abrupt departure from the Uations field hospital.

“I suppose I should be grateful to you, young Will,” Westi said, eyeing Carewe speculatively. “In nearly eighty years of practice this is my first opportunity to treat a stab wound. Take off your tunic while I see what they’ve been doing to you.” He activated a desk-mounted computer terminal and asked it for details of the treatment Carewe had been given during his African hospitalization. After a barely perceptible delay, the instrument slid out a tongue of paper which Westi examined with interest. He set it aside and removed the dressing from Carewe’s chest. Carewe avoided looking downwards as the doctor’s warm dry fingers touched the area of the wound.

“This looks all right,” Westi said finally, his voice shaded with doubt. “Exactly how long is it since you took your shot, Willy?”

Carewe did some mental arithmetic. “Ten days.” “I see. And who supplied the gun?”

“I work for Farma,” Carewe said, keeping his voice level in spite of his stirrings of apprehension, “so naturally…”

“Farma E.12, was it?”

“Of course—why do you ask?”

“Nothing important. The rate of healing was perhaps a little slower than I’d have expected for an immortal. Probably there were complicating factors. Now sit here while I check up on that lung.” Westi put a holoviewer against Carewe’s ribs and examined the right lung. Carewe, appalled at the idea of accidentally catching a glimpse of his own interior, kept his eyes closed. “That looks healthy enough. I think we can put it to work again.”

“What do you have to do? Pump it up?”

“Nothing so drastic.” Westi smiled. “I’m going to inject some adhesive into your thorax and re-attach the lung to your ribs. You won’t feel a thing.”

Carewe nodded glumly, and tried fixing his thoughts on Athene’s face.

Creeping downwards from zenith, the sun changed shape as it crossed the invisible boundaries of the weather control zones. Like an amoeba, a drop of oil moving on glass, it distorted, elongated, split into bloody tears and coalesced. The fading forces of winter, defeated by orbital geometries, glowered from the north but were held in check. Carewe walked aimlessly in his garden, trying to adjust to the new tempo of events. Since the first morning he had been called to Barenboim’s suite the days had been uneven flickers of light and darkness, slipping past him at supernatural speed. Now, suddenly, he was trapped in a temporal amber, waiting for Gwynne’s call. He walked the length of the garden several times, toying with the idea of doing something with the hummocks of Martian lichen which were getting out of control, but unable to give serious consideration to anything so trivial.

“There you are, Willy,” came a man’s voice from the next garden. “Where have you been lately?”

Carewe turned and saw the sun-browned face of Bunny Costello looking over the fence. “Africa,” he said, vainly wishing he had detected Costello’s presence in time to avoid contact. His neighbor was the oldest man he knew, even older than Barenboim—he had been born in the earlier half of the Twentieth Century and the development of biostats had come just in time to save him from the grave.

“Africa, eh?” Costello snorted in disbelief. “Mrs. Carewe with you?”

“What have you heard, Bunny?”

“Heard? What about?”

Carewe sighed heavily. “About Athene and me. What have you heard?”

“Not a thing. Besides, I don’t repeat gossip—I’m all in favor of old-fashioned marriage, Willy boy.”

So they know, Carewe thought. “Why don’t you try it?”

“Really?” Carewe began to move away.

“Cruel, Willy. Very cruel. I was married, you know.” “Yeah—but I can’t remember her face. Or even her name.

The afternoon air was suddenly cool on Carewe’s forehead. “That’s some memory you’ve got there, Bunny.”

“It’s as good as anybody else’s—goes back about a hundred years.”

“But I know men who can remember twice that far back.” What’s the point? Carewe wondered. What use is your million tomorrows if you can’t hold on to them?

“Continuity is everything,” Costello said, shielding his eyes from the sun. “Memories have to be reinforced, you know. I kept a diary for some time, and photographs but I lost them. Traveled a bit too, and lost continuity.

Do you keep a diary, Willy?” “No..

“Start. All I need is one clue. One clue and I’d win back fifty years, but I was in South America during the Unification and nobody can find my records.”

“How about hypnosis?”

“No good. The cellular imprints have gone. They get swamped out eventually, even in mortals, and I guess the biostats speed up the process.” Costello smiled ruefully. “Aging and remembering might be the same thing, Willy boy. And if you stop aging …”

It took Carewe a long time to break free of Costello and get back to the privacy of his dhome. He took a shower, then made some cofftea, but the depression which had come over him while talking to the old cool refused to disperse. Could it be that there would come a day, perhaps only a hundred years in the future, on which he would have to check his diary to remember the color of Athene’s hair? Without absolute continuance of the personality was there such a thing as immortality? Or did it simply mean that his deathless body would be inhabited by a series of strangers, each fading imperceptibly into the next as the biological slates were wiped clean?

Acting on the spur of the moment, he searched drawers and closets until he found a fresh notebook. At the top of the first page he wrote 28 April 2176. He studied the blank white sheet, tapping the pen against his teeth, but was unable to decide on what to say or how to say it. Flowing confidence beginning, “Dear Diary”? Or should he be cryptic—“Wife pregnant today, father unknown”—and hope the Carewe of a century later would be able to reconstruct the fragments?

He threw the notebook aside, went to the communicator and instructed it to check itself. All circuits were operable. Dissatisfied and tense, he walked around the dhome breathing deeply and steadily to test the action of his right lung. It appeared to be working well and there was no discomfort from the punctures Dr. Westi had made in his chest. He was ready to do anything if
only Gwynne would call. The thought came that it could take Gwynne several days even to pick up a lead, and he groaned aloud. If this was a sample of immortality…

The call came a little after nine o’clock. Carewe had at length drifted into a restless sleep and he sat up in darkness, the chime of the communicator fading in his ears. There was a moment of disorientation as he saw the glowing image of Gwynne’s head drifting at the set’s projection focus, then it all came back. He lurched across to the communicator, shivering, and told it he was accepting the call.

Gwynne’s blindly questing eyes came to life. “There you are, Will. Did I wake you up?”

“Sort of. I’m feeling a bit rough.”

“You look like you’ve been shot at.” Gwynne’s face contorted into a theatrical scowl. “Who said ‘Fire at Will’? Come on, speak up—who said it?”

“Have you any news of my wife?” Carewe said stolidly, wondering what miracles of competence the little man had achieved in the past to win Barenboim’s esteem.

Gwynne instantly looked contrite. “No hard news, but I’ve got a strong lead.”

“What sort of a lead?”

“Well, I started with that call your wife received— the one that was supposed to have come from you. It was made from a public comset in the Three Springs civic services block.”

“That gets us nowhere, doesn’t it?”

“In this line of business getting nowhere often means getting somewhere. There aren’t any drug manufacturing concerns in the Three Springs area apart from Farma—correct?”

“That’s right.”

“So I contacted a few friends on the computer staffs of the credit clearing houses—confidentially, of course—and I found that a character by the name of Solly Hyman had been in town for one day. Hyman comes from Seattle and he does casual work for an agency called the Soper Bureau.”

“These names don’t mean a thing to me.”

“Probably not—but I happen to know that Soper is retained by a firm called NorAmBio.”

“I’m with you now.” Carewe felt the hair on his temples stir slightly as his heart began to pound. NorAmBio was a middle-sized pharmaceuticals company heavily committed to biostatic production and research.

Gwynne’s teeth flashed white. “There’s more. Last year NorAmBio’s engineering subsidiary acquired a , slightly shaky outfit called Frictionfree Bearings in Idaho Falls. The plant’s been lying idle for months but I hear there’s been some unusual activity there in the last day or two—or should I say the last night or two?”

“You mean …?”

“I can’t be positive, Will.”

“But you think my wife is there!”

Gwynne shrugged. “We’ll soon know for sure—I’m going down there right now. I thought you’d like to have a progress report.”

“I’m going with you,” Carewe announced.

Gwynne hesitated, his large-jawed face clouded with doubt. “I wouldn’t be too happy about that. It might be a little dangerous—and I’m the one who’s getting paid to take the risks.”

“Forget it,” Carewe snapped. “Just tell me where you are and I’ll be right there.”

A few minutes later, just as he was leaving the house, the communicator chimed again. He turned back impatiently, half-expecting to see Gwynne, but the topaz light which presaged an intercontinental non-visual message was winking. When he accepted the call a printed message appeared at the projection focus. The dateline showed it was from the Unations base near Nouvelle Anvers, and the message read:

FURTHER EXAMINATION OF THE FLOATER WHICH SANK HAS REVEALED TRACES OF GORDONITE ON THE HEIGHT SENSOR LINKAGE. I OWE YOU AN APOLOGYwed E MATTER WILL NOW BE INVESTIGATED FULLY. BE CAREFUL. DEWEY STORCH.

Carewe nodded with satisfaction and made a photocopy of the message to show to Gwynne and Barenboim. Later, as he was hurtling towards Three Springs, it occurred to him that it was a little crazy for a glass figurine to feel pleased at having discovered definite proof that somebody was trying to smash him in pieces.

XIII

“You know the best way to embarrass somebody?” Gwynne turned sideways in the front seat of his bullet. Behind his head the lights of an isolated Idaho community, dimmed by the plastic wall of the tubeway, streamed past like an irregular burst of tracer.

“No.” Carewe would have preferred to remain quiet and think about Athene, but when borne along by the pneumatic peristalsis of the tubeway there was not even the task of steering to occupy Gwynne.

“You do what I’m doing now.”

“Which is?” Carewe examined the little man’s face, which stared back at him intently.

“Don’t you notice it?”

“You mean you’re staring at me?”

“Not at you.” Gwynne moved his face a little closer. “I’m staring at your mouth. If you want to embarrass somebody, stare at his mouth while he’s talking.”

“Thanks.” Carewe said heavily. “I’m sure that information will be of increasing value to me as I progress through life.”

“Think nothing of it; my brain’s full of stuff like that. One of the advantages of being well-read.”

Carewe frowned. People kept mentioning literature to him and, as far as he could remember, all or most of them were cools. Was that how they passed their time? He settled back in his seat and tried to relax, but the immediate future was filled with unsettling obscurity and he found himself driven to talk to Gwynne.

“You really do read books?” he asked reluctantly.

“Of course, Willy boy. Don’t you?”

“No. I watch Osman on tridi sometime,” Carewe said defensively.

“That upstart!” Gwynne sneered. “Didn’t he once say that to lead was to be blind to the necessity of following?”

“I don’t know.”

“He didfenynne assured him. “As a philosopher that man is just pitiful. Take Bradley now …”

“Perhaps,” Carewe put in quickly, “you could tell me who or what Beau Geste was.”

Gwynne shook his head. “I don’t read much fiction. I think he was an upper crust Englishman who got mixed up in a family scandal and ran away to join a tough military outfit in the desert. Probably the old French Foreign Legion.”

Carewe nodded—that tied in with Kendy’s comment on his arrival in Africa. “What sort of stuff do you read?”

“Anything, nearly. History, biography, science …”

Carewe thought of old Costello’s words. “But how much do you actually remember?”

“Ah!” Gwynne said significantly. “That isn’t the point. When you’ve read a book on any subject, even if you subsequently forget every word, you’re left with a different kind of ignorance.”

“How’s that?”

“It isn’t too easy to explain—I’d say it’s because you’re aware of how much you don’t know.”

Carewe lapsed into silence. Was that sufficient raison d’etre for an immortal—increasing his awareness of his own ignorance, creating a negative image of knowledge? Could it be equated with a growth of wisdom? Or was Gwynne’s different kind of ignorance also subject to the erasures of time? Bunny Costello had the sad disappointed face of a man who had seen a lot of life but failed to benefit from the experience.

The bullet decelerated gently, passed through a series of sphincters and slid into the breach of the Idaho Falls terminal. There was a minimal delay while a roboloader set the vehicle on a chassis, and as soon as the drive transmission had engaged Gwynne headed south. Traffic was light and they made good time to the outskirts of the old city where factory buildings loomed along desolate streets. Blue-green lighting washed over featureless walls and bled into the sky, screening the stars. Carewe felt a stirring of almost pleasurable excitement—the taste of danger was still too new and foreign to be palatable, but it would satisfy the ennui which had been growing in him all day. And he might see Athene again, within a matter of minutes. He took a deep breath, suddenly detected a harshly acid tang of perspiration and glanced at Gwynne. The investigator’s forehead was dewed with sweat as he brought the bullet to a standstill in a short cul-de-sac. Carewe vaguely associated the unfamiliar smell as being associated with nervous stress, and he was both surprised and concerned.

“How’re you feeling, Theodore?” he said casually.

“Comme ci, comme ca, mostly comme ca. This is routine stuff in my line of business.” Gwynne touched his beaded forehead. “I must get the heater in this thing adjusted.Are you ready to go?”

Carewe nodded. “Is this the place?”

“We’re close to it. Best go the rest of the way on foot.” Gwynne opened a compartment and took out a small flashlight. It seemed to Carewe that the smell in the vehicle grew even stronger. He opened the bullet’s door quickly and got out, snatching the cool night air into his lungs.

“I think the Frictionfree place is along here.” Gwynne pointed down the cul-de-sac to where the street lighting faded into darkness.

Carewe was unable to see any signs; to his eyes the buildings all looked anonymous. “You know this area?”

“I got the location from a map.” Gwynne crossed the street and walked cautiously towards the black trapezium of a doorway, with Carewe close behind him feeling strange and self-conscious. He had an abrupt and utter conviction that there was nobody in the silent factory building, and that he had been tricked into taking part in a ridiculous game. He was about to voice his doubts when a snarling gray shape emerged from the doorway and sprang directly at them. Gwynne leaped to one side, pointing his flashlight defensively, then swore as he realized they had disturbed a cat. Carewe stared thoughtfully after the fleeing animal. The part of his mind which jealously guarded his safety night and day was telling him there was something wrong somewhere.

“Ever see one of these things?” Gwynne opened his pouch and held out a slim cylinder which appeared to taper off into a door key. There was just enough light in the street for Carewe to see that the teeth of the key were moving restlessly, like the stubby feet of a caterpillar. He shook his head abstractedly, his mind searching for the cause of its subconscious unease. Gwynne slid the key-like artifact into the lock of a small door which formed part of the main gate. The door opened at once, releasing a gust of stale warm air. Gwynne motioned for Crewe to pass through into the utter blackness beyond.

Carewe hesitated. “This seems like a hell of a place to bring someone you want to study. How good is your information, Theo?”

“Very good. Remember we’re going in the back way—through shops and stores. The office section at the front is bound to be more habitable.”

“But the whole place feels so dead.”

“Scared of the dark, Willy boy?” Gwynne carefully switched on his flashlight, pushed it through the doorway and went inside. Carewe followed, studying the little man by stray reflections his spotlight drew from the metal sides of what appeared to be storage bins. On arriving at the factory Gwynne had suddenly become nervous—so nervous that the cat outside had terrified him for an instant. Carewe paused in mid-stride. During his moment of panic Gwynne had pointed his flashlight at the cat, instinctively and defensively, as though he was handling a weapon. When he was switching the flash on he had done so carefully—with the sort of respect one gives a weapon. And now he was walking with a crab-like gait which would have appeared natural man carrying a pistol, but which seemed odd for a person holding a flashlight.

Carewe stood still and let the other man draw away from him a little. Was he becoming paranoid in his thinking? There was no doubt that somebody had tried to kill him while he was in Africa, but if Gwynne joined in on the game it could only mean…

“Where are you, Willy?” Gwynne turned and shone his light back the way he had come.

“Right here,” Carewe said, as his eyes dazzled painfully. The pressure of light left his face. He looked down and saw the spot of white brilliance trembling on his chest. I’m a fool, he thought, but he leaped aside anyway—just as a spear of ruby-colored energy blazed from Gwynne’s hand.

Shocked and blinded, Carewe kept moving at top speed with his arms raised to protect his face. He collided with a column, fell to his knees and his hands touched metal steps. Groping for a handrail, he ran silently upwards, guessing he would arrive on the catwalk which he had noticed spanning the storage bins. At the top he threw himself flat and lay blinking furiously in the darkness while varicolored after-images slowly faded from his vision. When his eyes had recovered he found the building was in darkness again except for a strangely localized red glow close to ground level. As he watched the glow deepened to a cherry color, then faded away, and he realized it had been coming from a piece of machinery which had been struck by Gwynne’s laser burst. The thought of what would have happened to him had he not jumped aside in time brought a tingle of perspiration to his brow.

A spot of white light appeared below, danced briefly across metal walls and vanished. Carewe lay still, assessing his chances. Gwynne had the only weapon and it was a highly potent one, but to aim it efficiently he had first to throw a spot of incoherent light on his target. In doing that he was forced to advertise his position, but it was a very minor disadvantage. Had Carewe been the one with the laser he would be feeling relatively at ease. The light flickered again, in a different direction, and he pressed his face closer to the checkered metal of the catwalk.

As the seconds dragged past Carewe was forced to an inescapable conclusion. If he continued to lie motionless and wait to be found…he would die before the night was over. Several times he rejected the idea of trying to attack Gwynne, but always it returned with a slow insistence which seemed almost more menacing than the laser itself. Finally he raised his face from the metal and discovered he could see a faint pattern of skylights in the roof above him. Testing his vision, he scanned his surroundings. There was a faint greenish radiance from the overhead transparencies—refracted street lighting from outside—which had not been noticeable until his eyes had adapted to the conditions. Gradually he picked up the confused outline of machines and storage bins, dimly laced together with the fainter traces of catwalks, handrails, beams and snaking pipes. Was there anything in the bins which might be used as a weapon?

Carewe waited until another tentative flash of light came from below. It was closer this time, but he used the splintered reflections to peer into the bin which yawned only a few inches from his side. It appeared to be about two meters deep and was about half filled with what looked like glistening fist-sized bubbles. Even when the illumination from Gwynne’s flash had faded, Carewe could see the bubbles glinting like faint stars. He stared down at them in momentary bafflement, then a phrase from his earlier conversation with Gwynne filtered up into his consciousness. “… outfit called Frictionfree Bearings.” Bearings! The bubbles below him were actually spheres of solid metal.

Filled with a sudden defiant hopefulness, he moved closer to the edge of the bin. A ballbearing the size of an orange could make a respectable weapon. He gripped a handrail standard with his left hand and reached down into the bin, stretching with his right until he touched the cool spheres. His fingers closed around one but it instantly slid out of his grasp. He tried again, taking a firmer grip, and the bearing shot away just as before. It struck others with a loud multiple click and, immediately, the flashlight probed up from below, limning the handrail above him with frosty light.

Carewe realized he had made an appalling mistake.

The bearings he had been planning to use as weapons were not simple spheres of steel. Conventional bearings had been ousted decades earlier by the modern type whose surfaces, composed of radially polarized molecules, had virtually no index of friction. Unless they were laterally restrained any attempt to put pressure on one of them resulted in the ball shooting away like a squeezed pip. For many engineering applications they were superb, but they were not suited for use as hand-held missiles. And there was nothing else available.

Holding his breath, Carewe slid his fingers under another bearing, hooked them to form a shallow basket and brought it upwards. He was forced to shift his weight as his hand came level with his face and the massive bearing darted away like a live thing straining to rejoin its fellows. It clattered into the bin and the ruby sword of the laser slashed through the handrail, showering Carewe’s back with droplets of white-hot metal. He clenched his teeth and tried again. This time he brought the bearing up in one continuous movement, just as Gwynne appeared at the head of the stairs. Carewe swung the bearing sideways, moaning with despair as it evaded his grip and bounded along the catwalk.

Taken by surprise, Gwynne pointed his light at the bearing as it rushed towards him seemingly gathering speed. Carewe launched himself after it. The flashlight shone blindingly in his face for an instant, then he thudded into Gwynne. He tried to bear the little investigator down, but Gwynne fought back with desperate strength and they caromed from rail to rail down the length of the catwalk. Carewe was whimpering with panic, aware that Gwynne still had the flash in his hand. He felt his opponent strive to turn the weapon against him and every muscle in his body exploded with undirected energy.

Gwynne and he went high over the railings, and downwards into one of the storage bins. For a moment Carewe thought he had plunged into cold water, then he realized he was in a bin full of very small bearings. Completely inimical to friction, the tiny metal spheres offered less support than water, and he went to the bottom immediately. The bearings invaded his mouth like ferocious insects. He could feel them clicking eagerly against his teeth and pouring down into his stomach, metallic lemmings driven by gravity to seek the lowest level of any container in which they found themselves. They were indiffereered l the fact that the containers now presented to them were Carewe’s lungs and stomach.

Closing his mouth, he forced himself to stand up straight and his face emerged into air. He spewed bearings from his lips, but his mouth was barely above the surface and a fresh wave of them lapped over his lower jaw, filling his mouth with their steely swarming presence. Any attempt to spit them out would merely have resulted in another influx. He swallowed convulsively and, breathing through closed teeth, made his way to the side of the bin. There was a handrail standard close by. He caught it gratefully, dragged himself up onto the catwalk and lay vomiting. It was not until the last of the metallic spawn had been driven from his stomach that he remembered Gwynne. The investigator was a head smaller than Carewe, and would not have been able to get his face above the surface. Carewe looked down into the bin, but its contents were motionless.

Either Gwynne had … he sought for a word … drowned, or he was still alive on the bottom. The thought of deliberately putting his head under the silver “liquid” filled Carewe with dread, but it was possible that Gwynne could survive for quite a long time on air filtering through the bearings, and to leave him there would have been unthinkable. He was sliding his legs over the side of the bin when a transformation took place in the bin. The flat silvery surface glowed with a beautiful crimson light which came from within. It was as if the millions of steel balls had been transmuted to garnets and illuminated by a momentary blaze of sunlight.

The light died abruptly and Carewe froze in the act of lowering himself into the bin. Gwynne must have triggered off his laser. An accident? In the center of the bin another glow appeared, but this one was localized and its color was that of incandescent metal. Carewe felt the heat on his face, then his nostrils caught the smell of searing steel—and of something else.

He crawled away, choking, and reached the narrow stair which led to the ground. At the bottom he became aware that his hose and shoes had bearings in them, making walking a painful exercise. He sat down, removed his shoes and spilled the steel balls from them, listening abstractedly as they scuttled away to freedom down imperceptible gradients in the factory floor. Gwynne was dead! Instead of the million tomorrows which Osman claimed was every man’s natural birthright he had nothing, was nothing. He was no longer a man, an investigator, an enemy. He no longer existed. The pain and bafflement of an immortal confronted with mortality made Carewe’s breathing difficult. He shook his head, swearing bitterly into the impassive darkness, then with determined practicality began to cleanse himself of the remaining bearings. It was necessary to strip off all his clothes and turn them inside out. While he worked he found further steel balls under his tongue and lodged in the back of his nose. He snorted and spat, then noticed a peculiar sensation in his eyes. When he pressed the surrounding skin other bearings oozed from the sockets and slid down his cheeks.

Ten minutes had passed before he had dressed again and found his way to the door where he and Gwynne had entered the plant. He went to Gwynne’s bullet, remembered he had no ignition key and walked on through the sterile streets, trying to remember the route by which he had come. The events of the night had left his brain numb, but some conclusions were inescapable.

The information about Athene having been traced to Idaho Falls had been a fabrication, an elaborate ruse to get him out of the Three Springs area and make him “vanish.” Gwynne had been Barenboim’s man—which suggested that the president of Farma, having given Carewe a new kind of immortality, had then instigated a series of attempts on his life. But why? What possible reason could … ?

A fresh thought occurred to Carewe, pushing the analysis of Barenboim’s motives into the back of his mind. If Barenboim wanted him killed, then the whole story about the machinations of a rival drug concern was also untrue—and that meant Athene could easily be dead.

It also meant that if she was still alive, Barenboim was the man who knew where.

XIV

The police station was in complete darkness.

Carewe, whose sketchy knowledge of police operations came from occasional tridi programs, was taken by surprise. He knew that crime was comparatively rare in the wealthy and well-adjusted bitch society, but it had not occurred to him that policemen worked normal office hours. His feet burned from the hour-long search which had brought him to the station, and his chest was hurting. A suspicion that some of the bearings had found their way into his lungs kept nagging at him, but he did his best to forget the prospects of further surgery. There would be time to worry about that later.

He went up the steps into the station’s shadowy entrance and pounded on the door. His fists made discouragingly little sound on the reinforced plastic. He was turning away in disgust when he noticed a communicator screen in one corner of the porch. Beneath it was a local code and the legend: IN CASE OF AFTER-HOURS EMERGENCY, CALL THIS NUMBER. Feeling scarcely mollified, he punched in the number and waited for the screen to energize. It flashed colors for a second, then a flat image of a heavy-eyed man in police grays appeared.

“What’s the trouble?” the policeman asked sleepily.

Carewe hesitated, wondering where to start. “My wife has been kidnapped and one of the men who did it has been killed.”

“Really?” The policeman sounded unimpressed. “I’d better advise you that the commset you’re facing automatically records retinal patterns and we make a practice of tracing and prosecuting hoaxters.”

“Do I look like a hoaxter?”

The officer eyed Carewe noncommittally. “Where and when was all this supposed to happen?”

“Listen,” Carewe said angrily, “I’m reporting a serious crime and I don’t propose to stand all night on this lousy porch while doing it”

“Can’t do much for you unless we get some details, friend.”

“All right. The kidnapping took place three days ago up north in Three Springs. The man died tonight right here in Idaho Falls, at the Frictionfree Bearings plant.”

The policeman’s eyes widened abruptly. “You were in the Frictionfree place tonight?”

“Yes, but …”

“What’s your name?”

“Will Carewe. Do you mind telling me what’s so special about…”

“Stay right where you are until an officer reaches you, Mr. Carewe. Remember we have your retinal patterns.” The commset blanked out, leaving Carewe feeling bewildered. He sat down on the uppermost step and stared down the lonely, unfamiliar street. The radioactivated tattoo watch on his wrist told him that, incredibly, the time was only a little past two in the morning.

He was opening his pouch to look for a cigarette when the sound of a helicopter reached his ears. Half-expecting it to herald the arrival of the police, he got to his feet and peered into the sky, but the machine was too large to be a personnel carrier. It churned across the city at low altitude, its rotors punishing the night air, shaking the ground Blue lights flashed along the length of its fuselage, chilling Carewe with sudden premonition. He looked south, back the way he had come on foot, and saw a shifting red glow on the horizon. The helicopter was a firefighting machine—and he had a glum certainty about where it was going. Gwynne’s personally created inferno must have burned through the storage bin and allowed red hot bearings to scatter through the plant. Or—another possibility—the little investigator had preset an incendiary device with the intention of destroying the evidence of the murder.

Carewe was still staring at the bloody smudge in the south when a police car whispered to a halt beside him. A tall, thinly-built funkie in his mid-forties got out. His face was long and sallow, with dark eyes which scowled at Carewe over an incongruously red nose.

“Prefect McKelvey,” he growled, loping up the steps to open the station door. “Is your name Carewer

“Yes. This all started with the disappearance of …”

“Don’t say anything, yet.” McKelvey went inside, switching on lights, and entered a ground-floor office. He sat at a desk and motioned Carewe into a chair opposite. “I hereby notify you that this conversation is being recorded.”

“That’s good.” Carewe looked around vainly for a microphone or camera. “There are plenty of things I want to go on record with.”

McKelvey’s face grew longer. “Let’s get started then. You admit having been in the Frictionfree Bearings plant tonight?”

“Yes, but …”

“When did you get there and when did you leave?”

“I left about an hour ago, say one-fifteen, and I was there about twenty minutes—but that’s not the point. I’m here to report the abduction of my wife.”

“And I am investigating a case of suspected arson,” McKelvey countered.

“That’s tough,” Carewe said firmly, “because I’m not going to discuss trivialities like that fire until you take some action about my wife.”

McKelvey sighed and examined each of his fingernails in turn. “You keep talking about your wife,” he said reluctantly. “Does that mean … ?”

“A one-to-one marriage.” Carewe saw the prefect’s eyes take in his beardless chin, but he had discovered it was no longer important to him whether people thought he was a cool or functional. “And she didn’t walk out because I’m an immortal—somebody took her.”

“Any idea why?”

“Yes.” Carewe took a deep breath and thought, I hope this costs Barenboim a billion. “The firm I work for has developed a new kind of biostat, one which leaves the male function unimpaired.”

“What?”

“The name of the drug is Farma E.80, and I was the first man to try it out.” Carewe decided to censor some of the more painful details about his break with Athene and the deceptions he had fostered. “My wife has since become pregnant—and this makes her an object of considerable interest to certain parties.”

“Just a minute.” McKelvey had become animated. “Do you know what you’re saying?”

“I believe so.”

McKelvey opened a drawer in his desk and looked at something inside it for a moment. “You were telling the truth,” he said wonderingly. His eyes were filled with a kind of greedy reverence. “Go ahead, Mr. Carewe.

Carewe told the whole story, dealing with the attempts on his life in Africa, the confirmatory message from Storch, Barenboim’s introduction of Gwynne, and the events leading up to the investigator’s death. The prefect kept glancing at the device concealed in his desk and nodding his head.

it’s a fascinating story,” he said when Carewe had run out of breath. “You were peaking a bit here and there on the polygraph, but I guess you’re emotionally snarled up in the thing, so it’s my opinion you were telling the truth all the way through.”

“Thanks. What are you going to do now?”

“Only trouble is—your story doesn’t hang together. Why should this Barenboim want to kill you or abduct your wife?”

“How should I know why?” Carewe was indignant. “Can’t you proceed on the facts? It’s obvious that Barenboim tried to have me murdered.”

“Not all that obvious. Barenboim might have employed Gwynne in good faith.”

“But …”

“There’s a lot of money tied up in this thing. A lot of power. Somebody else could have got at Gwynne.” McKelvey stroked the bristles on his chin, rasping them audibly in the quietness of the office.

“In the name of Christ,” Carewe said bitterly. “Now I see why Barenboim told me not to bother going to the police.”

McKelvey shrugged. “We’ll have to get hold of Gwynne’s remains. That will establish a death, and if there’s anything left of the laser it will help show felonious intent.”

“How long will that take?”

“From what I’ve heard about the extent of the fire— a day or two.”

“A day or two! What about my wife?”

McKelvey reached for his computer terminal. “Please try to see this from my viewpoint. The only evidence you have pointing to your wife’s abduction is an unsupported statement from her grandmother to the effect that she was supposed to have received a faked call from you. I’m going to put a tracer on your wife and if it hasn’t produced any results by, say, tomorrow night, then we’ll have something to go on.”

“I can’t wait that long—I could be dead tomorrow night,” Carewe stated flatly. “Or don’t you believe that somebody’s trying to kill me?”

McKelvey made an unsuccessful attempt to look like a patient man. “Mr. Carewe—I personally accept that somebody is gunning for you, but as a prefect of the police I can act only on formal evidence. Give me a chance to get some, will you?” He activated the terminal and told it to produce dossiers on Gwynne, Barenboim and the Farma Corporation. When he had finished he went to a wall dispenser and came back with two vaporing cups of cofftea.

“Thanks,” Carewe said ungraciously. He sipped the hot liquid.

The prefect grinned confidentially. “While we’re waiting—is this new biostat the real thing? I mean …”

“I know what you mean. I’m still able, but I’ll be damned if I’ll give you any formal evidence.”

“That won’t be necessary.” McKelvey laughed nervously. “You know, I almost tied off last year. Just think …” The computer terminal chimed and spat out a compcard. McKelvey put it into a reader. “This is our file on the Farma Corporation.” He studied it for a moment, manipulating the controls, and his brow gradually knotted in a frown.

“Something wrong?” Carewe prompted.

“Don’t know. You didn’t say anything about that outfit you work for being short of cash.”

“That’s impossible. I’m in accounting and I should know.”

“It’s down here,” McKelvey said doggedly. “According to the file, Farma’s profits have been slipping for three years and this year there’s a projected trading loss of over eight million newdollars.”

“You’re interpreting wrongly,” Carewe assured him. “Give me the reader.”

The prefect looked doubtful. “Information obtained from the computer override network is confidential to the police—but you’ve done me a personal favor coming here.” He stared at Carewe warily and passed the instrument to him. Carewe held it to his eyes and a sense of unreality crept over him as he realized the prefect had made no mistake.

The molecular level of the compcard he was examining gave a concise analysis of Farma’s financial structure, division by division. Carewe’s own section, the biopoieses division, and one other looked as though they might barely break even in the current year; but the others were heading for disaster. He was going swiftly down the debit columns, trying to grasp the overall picture of Farma’s finances, when one item arrested his gaze. Capital expenditure, maintenance and plant depreciation, Drumheller Laboratory—N$1,650,000.00. He checked back and discovered a smaller capital expenditure charged to the same item in the previous year, but nothing at all in the year before that. There was no mention of the Drumheller Laboratory anywhere in the credit columns. He spun the controls, burrowing deeper into the secrets locked in the card’s coded molecules, but McKelvey snatched the reader from his hands.

“That’s enough,” the prefect snapped. “What were you going after?”

“Nothing—I get fascinated by figures.” He decided to keep to himself the information that Barenboim had poured more than two million newdollars into a laboratory which, apparently, had never earned one cent to justify its upkeep. That was significant enough, considering all the circumstances, but the real snapper lay in the fact that the very existence of a Drumheller Laboratory had been kept secret from even the most informed Farma employees. Carewe had a coldly exultant certainty that he now knew where the development work on E.8ad been carried out.

And that meant he also knew where he could find Athene.

XV

It was dawn when Carewe finally left the police station. Obeying McKelvey’s instructions, he took a public bullet direct to Three Springs, then went shopping. Aware that the prefect was likely to have a computer trace on him, he bought some items of food using his credisk. As soon as he had established that he was back in his home community he got down to the serious part of his shopping, the part for which it was necessary to use cash.

Firearms had not been on sale to the public in the North American continent for well over a century—the bitch society had no use for them—but he was not prepared to tackle Barenboim’s Drumheller stronghold without some kind of weapon. He walked aimlessly around several stores before noticing one which specialized in camping equipment, where he bought a traditionally styled woodsman’s knife, a lightweight axe and a satchel. Carrying his purchases self-consciously, he took a taxi out to his dhome, again paying by credit to demonstrate to McKelvey that he was properly domiciled.

The dhome was exactly as he had left it, filled with depressing silence, and there were no recorded messages for him on the commset. He ate a light meal, then put the knife and axe into the satchel. As an afterthought he added several candy bars and his binoculars. It was still mid-morning and Drumheller was only two hours’ drive to the north, across the former Canadian border, so there was time to satisfy his craving for sleep. He lay down on a couch and forced himself to relax, wondering if he was being too optimistic in thinking he would lose consciousness when his mind was so crammed with …

He was awakened by the brilliance of late afternoon sunlight on his face. Shivering slightly, he went to the commset and used its directory bank to get a code for the Drumheller civic services block. When he had recorded the number, he called the monitor of the industrial rating office. After a few seconds the head of a plump young funkie appeared at the set’s projection focus.

“I’m Will Carewe, costing monitor for the Farma Corporation,” he said crisply. “What is your name, please?”

“Spinetti.” The young man looked annoyed at Carewe’s tone.

“Well, I’ve got some bad news for you, Mr. Spinetti. One of the machines you are supposed to be monitoring has sent us a completely ridiculous rating estimate on our Drumheller property. My employer is losing patience with this sort of thing, and he has instructed me to …”

“Just a minute,” Spinetti cut in, his face darkening. “Why don’t you get your facts straight before you start sounding off? I happen to be very familiar with my programs, and I know that Farma has no property in this area.”

“Must I spell out evey detail?” Carewe sighed tiredly. “My employer is Mr. Hy Barenboim. Does that mean anything to you?”

“Oh!” Spinetti’s eyes shuttled in concern. “The chemicals laboratory out at Kilo 12.”

“Kilo 13, I think.”

“Kilo 12 on Radial Three,” Spinetti gritted. “Do you want to come up here and measure it yourself?”

“Don’t let this happen again,” Carewe said, and broke the connection, hoping he had not upset Spinetti’s digestion too much. He picked up his satchel, went out to his parked bullet and drove northwards.

A cloud-torn sun was nearing the horizon when Carewe reached Drumheller and, counting the kilometers, swung out from the city center along Radial Three. Now that he was faced with it, the prospect of breaking into a laboratory which was almost certain to be guarded was more daunting than he had anticipated. His earlier conviction that he had located Athene was beginning to fade rapidly, and had almost vanished when he stopped the bullet on the darkening roadway. The tenuous fingers of the city had been left behind minutes earlier—Kilo 12 had only two buildings set like movie sets against its vista of sere grasslands. One was obviously a warehouse, and the other a long multileveled structure perched on a low rise. A narrow compressed-earth track ran up from the road to a gate in the metal wall which surrounded the building. Carewe watched for signs of activity but the laboratory glinting redly in the setting sun could have been an encampment left by a long-departed civilization.

He drove further along the road until out of sight from a possible observer on the top of the rise and switched off the bullet’s engine. Ignoring the inquisitive faces which stared at him from passing cars, he slumped down in the seat and waited for the sky to darken behind its lattice of coral-pink condensation trails. The air was cool when he set off up the slope, and breezes searched his body with random, invisible fingers. Corning into view of the laboratory he was reassured to see light streaming from the upper windows, but at the same time became aware of how little cover there was on the approaches. All he could do was hope that Barenboim was not sufficiently security-conscious to have set up heat sensors or infrared scanners.

The feeling of helpless exposure increased until he was in the lee of the perimeter wall, which proved to be over three meters high. Close examination showed it to be seamless alloy construction, without even a rivet head to offer a foothold. Carewe made an experimental leap to satisfy himself he could not reach the top with his fingers, then walked along the base of the barrier, passing around the rear of the lot and finally drawing near the entrance gate. The wall was featureless and unclimbable the whole way, and the gate— which was closed—appeared equally unpromising. He glared helplessly across the quiet prairie to where the lights of Drumheller shone like scattered embers. Will Carewe, amateur commando, had been thwarted at the first simple obstacle, a construction of sheet alloy which he could probably have cut with a domestic can opener ….

Seized wom,spiration, he took the axe from his satchel and went to the side of the wall furthest from the road. Close to the corner he swung the axe and it sank cleanly into the pale gray metal with surprisingly little sound. A wait of five minutes produced no sign of alarm within the enclosure, so he returned to the wall and attacked it with cautious economical blows. In a few minutes he had cut a meter-high tongue in the shape of an inverted V which he was able to bend downwards to the ground. There was a cavity wide enough to contain the wall’s uprights, and beyond it another sheet of alloy. The inner skin gave him more trouble because he was unable to make clean swings at it, but working carefully and with frequent long waits he succeeded in cutting another tongue. Pushing its apex inwards a short distance, he looked through at a dimly lit expanse of concrete bounded at its far edge by a wall of the laboratory building itself. Apparently he had not attracted any attention.

He tucked the heavy knife into the waist band of his hose and, retaining the axe in his hand, pushed through the wall. The triangular piece of alloy easily bent upwards again to make the opening less noticeable. Carewe was pushing it into place when a sudden glare of light threw his shadow across the wall. He spun, raising the axe, and glimpsed the headlights of a car which must have come through the front entrance. The brilliance of its lights, reflected and channeled down the narrow strip between the laboratory and the outer wall, seemed to fill the entire universe. There was no way, Carewe thought, for the driver to miss seeing him—but the vehicle continued on its curving path and moved out of sight beyond the far end of the building.

Did that mean he had escaped detection? Or that the driver had been quick witted enough to pretend he had noticed nothing? Carewe slid the axe into the top of his hose at the back and ran to the nearest wall of the laboratory. He gripped a downpipe and scaled it, using instinctive skills nurtured by fear. The flat roof overhung the wall and as he was pulling himself around the projection the axe slid to one side and dropped. It rang loudly on the concrete below. Carewe pressed himself to the roof, then realized the low section he was on was overlooked by windows of the laboratory’s upper story. He scuttled across the roof and crouched in a corner, his head just below the level of the windowsills. Five, ten minutes went by before he began to accept that his presence still had not been discovered. Experiencing a return of the optimism which had prompted him to embark on the mission, he took stock of his surroundings.

From the elevated position he could see over the wall to the prairie, which faded away to the north in impassive gray-glimmering folds—no menace from that direction. Of the row of windows above his head, one was lit. He crawled until he was underneath it, got to his feet and risked a slanting glimpse inside. The room within was small and its only furniture appeared to be one chair and a folding bed upon which a black-haired woman was lying. Her back was to the window, but Carewe recognized the languorous upthrust of hip immediately—with his eyes, with his mind, with every molecule of his body.

Athene!

He tapped the window instinctively and froze, belatedly wondering if there was anyone else in an unseen corner of the room. Athene lifted her head slightly and relaxed again. Carewe waited several heart-pounding seconds and tapped more loudly, watching Athene’s reaction. She raised her head, sat up and turned in his White coronas of shock flared around her eyes, then she was at the window, her hands pressed to the glass. Her lips moved silently and a heady exultation filled Carewe—once he and his wife were out of the room they could be through the perimeter wall and out on the open grasslands in a matter of seconds.

He slipped his knife out, reversed it and drove the haft against the glass. It connected with an unnervingly loud report which jarred his wrist, but the tough glass remained intact. He tried again, and this time the knife almost flew from his numbed fingers. Athene covered her mouth with trembling fingers and her gaze flickered towards the door of the room. Dismayed by the resilient strength of the glass, Carewe put the knife away and had reached for his axe before remembering it had fallen to the ground. He gestured vaguely to Athene, ran to the edge of the roof and swung his legs over. His feet were unable to find the downpipe, but there was no time to be cautious. He pushed himself off into space, threshing for balance, and landed heavily already groping for the axe. The pipe he had climbed was less than a meter away, but the axe was nowhere to be seen. Cursing its perversity, he began to search a wider area.

“It’s over here, Willy.” The voice was cool and amused, as only that of a two-centuries-old immortal could be.

Carewe lurched to his feet, breathing hoarsely, and forced his eyes to a reluctant focus.

The portly, highly fashionable figure of Hy Barenboim looked incongruous against the bleak surround of the-perimeter wall. His eyes watched intently from their bony lairs, and his right hand held a flashlight in a way that left no doubt it was a weapon.

“Hy,” Carewe said. “I had a feeling you’d show up.” “Then it was mutual, dear boy.” Barenboim gestured with his flash. “Let’s go inside.”

“Just a minute—I hurt myself when I made that drop.” Carewe winced and slid his hand inside his tunic. It came to rest on the handle of the knife.

“You should have known better than to attempt such undignified heroics,” Barenboim drawled. “Now move.”

“Why not kill me here? Or is it too public?” Carewe eased the knife upwards till it lay in his hand.

“The exact location of your demise is a small matter,” Barenboim said coldly. He switched on his flash and directed the spot at Carewe’s face.

“My eyes,” Carewe whimpered. He twisted his head away from the light and in the same movement brought the knife out from under his tunic. Barenboim gasped as Carewe, taking the single chance open to him, hurled the heavy knife with all his adrenal-boosted strength. It hit Barenboim square in the throat, handle first, and he fell back against the wall, still holding the flashlight. Carewe closed in before the laser sword could be turned in his direction. He caught Barenboim’s right wrist, forcing the flash away, and drove his fist into the ballooning stomach, once, twice, three times …

Carewe came to his senses when he discovered he was having to hold Barenboim up to keep hitting him. He let the other man fall and stood back, suddenly realizing he had done his best to kill Barenboim. His reaction on seeing the knife strike the wrong way had been one of savage disappointment and anger. He felt vaguely that his sense of shock should have been greater, but his taste for introspection seemed to have vanished somewhere on the long road to Nouvelle Anvers, Idaho Falls and Drumheller.

Kneeling beside the unconscious man, he picked up the dual-purpose flashlight, then opened Barenboim’s pouch and took out all the keys he could find. He ran down the narrow strip of concrete to the front of the laboratory. A roadcar, the one in which Barenboim must have arrived, was parked in the forecourt and the gates were now lying open. Carewe ran to the laboratory door and found it locked—which suggested the building was empty except for Athene. He tried several keys until he got the door open. The lobby beyond was empty, but he hesitated—he had merely assumed Barenboim had no lieutenants inside.

Carewe examined the flashlight, which was still lit. Moving the slide backwards extinguished, and pushing it forward restored the light. He pointed the flash at the ground and edged the slide further forward. There was a springy resistance, then the concrete surface exploded into sputtering lava. He hefted the flashlight respectfully and ran on into the laboratory block, no longer worried about meeting opposition. There were staircases on both sides, but the one on the right seemed most likely to lead him to Athene. He sprinted up it and along a corridor which stretched the length of the building. At the far end he found a shorter transverse corridor with six doors in its outermost wall. Estimating the position of Athene’s room, he tried a door. It was locked, but he could sense her presence within.

“Athene,” he called.

“Will!” Her voice was faint. “Oh, Will—is it really
your

“You bet,” he shouted. The fourth key he tried opened the door and—with no perceptible lapse of time—she was in his arms. “Easy, easy, easy,” he whispered, trying to damp out the trembling of her body with the strength he had discovered in his own.

“Will.” Abruptly she pushed him to arm’s length. “You’ve got to get away from here. You don’t know what those two are really like.” Her eyes hunted over his face and his throat constricted when he saw the left eyelid was almost closed, a familiar signal of stress.

“That’s the whole idea, hon. Let’s go.” He took her hand and they ran. Carewe felt as though carried along by a powerful wind; he could scarcely feel his feet touching the floor. They sped down the stairs through the door and out into the night air. “We’ll take Barenboim’s roadcar,” he snapped.

They tumbled into it and slammed the door. Carewe experienced a moment of panic as he tried key after key in the ignition lock, but at last he found one which fitted. The turbine spun up instantly. Without waiting to swith fn the lights, he slewed the car across the forecourt in a wallowing turn and fired it through the open gateway like a rocket. Something large moved in the darkness beyond the gate. He had a split-second to realize it was another car coming in, then there was a rending impact. Carewe felt his own vehicle climb skywards for an instant and he had a crazy hope he was going to drive right over the streamlined contours of the other car. Athene screamed as the universe tilted sideways, and her voice was lost in the bomb-burst of the car smashing into the hillside.

The impact balloons, exploding out of the dashboard under the force of their gas bottles, saved Carewe’s life. But as he sat trapped by their insistent pressure— and looked up at the pink, triumphant face of Manny Pleeth—he found himself wishing he had died.

XVI

“Before they come out of there,” Barenboim said, breathing heavily and still clutching his stomach, “get me my flash. Our young friend took it before he made his dash.”

Pleeth nodded and worked his hands between the plastic skins of the impact balloons. He groped around on the vehicle’s front shelf for a moment and withdrew the flashlight, the thin line of his mouth curving tightly with pleasure.

“That’s better. I hadn’t realized guinea pigs could be so dangerous.” Barenboim took the flash. “Would this mess have been noticed down on the road?”

Pleeth shook his head. “Don’t think so. We both had our lights off.”

“That’s something in our favor.” Barenboim walked around his own car, inspecting it critically. Carewe felt Athene stir beside him in response to Barenboim’s changing position, like iron filings disturbed by a magnet. He tried to reach her hand.

“The steering gear is gone,” Barenboim said, halting beside Pleeth. “Can you find a line somewhere and tow my car inside the gate?”

“Should be some in the store.”

“Good. You take care of that while I escort our guests back inside.” Barenboim touched a release valve at the side of the car and gas hissed out of the balloons, causing their skins to wrinkle and pop. As soon as he could move, Carewe climbed out of the vehicle and helped Athene to come through the same door. The one at her side was too badly crumpled to open. Barenboim, standing well clear of Carewe and with his flashlight at the ready, pointed towards the lab. Carewe shrugged, put his arm around Athene’s shoulders and began to walk. Inside the lobby he headed for the right hand stair.

“Not that way—we’re going down to the basement.” Barenboim indicated a door below the staircase. Carewe opened it and ushered Athene down a single flight of steps to a large basement which was fitted out as a high-temperature laboratory. The center was occupied by what he tatively identified as an electron furnace. It was ringed by tele-microscopes, servo hands and heat shield projectors.

“Will,” Athene whispered, “you shouldn’t have come here. He’s going to kill us.”

Carewe tried vainly to think of a reassuring lie. “It looks that way,” he said sadly.

“But I thought you of all people would have been … Aren’t you afraid, Will?”

“Scared stiff would be a better way to put it.” Carewe wished he could explain something to her about his discovery that living in fear, as he had always done, was a little like being already dead—but he had an idea it would sound ridiculous. And, being Athene, perhaps she already understood.

“Athene,” he said desperately, “I let you down ….” “Don’t, Will, don’t.” Her eyes became lenses of tears as she pressed her hand over his lips.

“This is too much,” Barenboim commented in a bored voice. “Spare me the reconciliation scene, please.”

“Hy,” Carewe said slowly, “I’m very sorry I wasn’t good enough to split you open when I threw that knife. But in a way it doesn’t matter much. You see, you don’t really exist—so there was no need for me to kill you.” He watched Barenboim’s eyes as he spoke, and derived a spare satisfaction from the realization that for the very first time he had made contact with the other’s glacial mind. During their entire previous relationship, he now understood, Barenboim had been using him with exactly the same detachment he would have had in cutting a laboratory animal to shreds to further an experiment. Suddenly he felt almost as old as Barenboim.

Barenboim’s womanly lips twitched once, then stretched into a smile. “Good stuff, Willy,” he said. “Very deep.”

Keeping the flash trained on Carewe, he went to a wall-mounted control panel and threw a series of switches. Eight electron guns ringing the furnace began to glow with pinkish light, which dimmed slightly as the heat shield projectors set up their floor-to-ceiling barriers. The force fields they created were vastly intensified versions of the tenuous screens used in weather control, designed to contain the hellish sun-like environment which was being created at the heart of the furnace. Exhaust grilles mounted in the ceiling directly above the furnace carried the excess heat away to an exchanger system for use in warming the rest of the building.

“You’re too late,” Carewe said, as Athene buried her face in his shoulder, “I’ve already been to the police— I told them everything I know about you.”

“Which isn’t very much.” Barenboim adjusted a vernier.

“They know you tried to have me murdered in Africa and at Idaho Falls.”

“Correction, Willy. They know somebody tried to murder you—but with Gwynne conveniently out of the way there is no provable connection. And what possible motive could I have had?”

“Money,” Carewe said. “They know that the Farma Corporation is headed for a spectacular bust.”

Barenboim’s face clouded for an instant. “I think, Willy, that I was guilty of an error of judgment when I selected you. I don’t know how you managed to defeat Gwynne, and all along you’ve shown an unexpected tenacity—but you still can’t explain how disposing of you would solve any financial problems I might have.”

“I was hoping you would tell me that.”

“I’ll bet you were.” Barenboim’s joviality had returned as he made a final adjustment on the control panel and moved away from it. “I believe it’s customary on tridi thrillers for the villain to make a full explanation at this stage, but just to show you how inhuman I am I don’t think I’ll play the game. How’s that for a touch of vindictiveness?”

“Not bad,” Carewe conceded, shifting his weight slightly. Barenboim’s reactions had been a little slow in their earlier encounter, and his only hope lay in making an unexpected lunge for the flash. “But I wonder what inspired it. You’re proud of being inhuman, so it must have been … ah … my reference to your incompetence in business?”

“Incompetence!” Barenboim sounded genuinely angry.

“What else would you call it?” Carewe disengaged himself slightly from Athene. “When a man with two centuries of experience allows a viable concern like Farma to go bust …”

“Farme” Barenboim snapped. “Farma is a triviality, Willy. Within the next few hours, I, personally, will earn myself one billion newdollars—do you call that incompetence?”

“I … The strain of maintaining an artificial conversation brought sweat out on Carewe’s forehead. Moving as casually as possible he stepped away from Athene. “I don’t see …”

“Of course you don’t. You didn’t even see that E.80 —the miracle biostat you fired into your thick skin— was all a hoax. You didn’t see that I was setting you up, Willy. You and your wife.”

“Setting us up?” Carewe glanced at Athene, whose face was almost luminescent in its pallor. “But …”

“I invented the E.80 story, Willy. And I didn’t keep it a secret, as you imagined. I leaked just enough information to a Eurasian group to convince them …”

“To hell with that,” Carewe snarled, a sense of premonin pounding inside his skull. “What did you do to me and Athene?”

Barenboim regained his self-control and smiled frostily. “Of course, Willy, I’d forgotten that your peculiar emotional fixation would unbalance your view of the operation.”

Carewe took one step towards him, heedless of the laser. “What about me and Athene?”

“You were guinea pigs, man. And to demonstrate the efficiency of E.80 you had to produce a litter. Your shot of E.80 was nothing but plain water—your wife’s was something entirely different”

“Such as?”

“Didn’t you notice anything out of the ordinary in her behavior after that shot?”

Carewe thought back to the three days at Lake Orkney—Athene had burned with a white heat which no normal system could have sustained. “You mean …”

“It was rather an expensive aphrodisiac, Willy, but it was necessary to drive your wife into an early pregnancy.” Barenboim smiled again. “And surely there must have been considerable fringe benefits for you.”

Carewe turned to his wife. “Athene, I …” His voice faltered.

“It’s all right, Will.”

He faced Barenboim again and walked forward on rigid legs. “You’d better kill me now,” he whispered. “Otherwise …”

Barenboim shrugged and leveled the flashlight. His thumb pushed the slide forward.

“Hold it,” a voice called from the stair. “What are you doing, Hy?” Manny Pleeth leaned over the handrail, his pink-stained eyes triangulated on Barenboim’s face.

“What does it look like?”

“It looks like murder—and I never agreed to that.” Pleeth descended the remaining steps and advanced across the laboratory, his cigar-like gold ornament swinging at his chest. Carewe’s mind, locked in an icy stasis, picked out an incongruous detail of the scene—Athene was backing away from Pleeth, the man who was arguing for her life.

“Come now, Manny.” Barenboim spoke tiredly. “I thought you were a realist.”

“No killing!”

“Manny—in a few hours from now you and I are going to receive one billion newdollars.” Barenboim kept the flash centered on Carewe’s chest. “In exchange for that one billion newdollars we are going to hand over a formula which is worth precisely nothing. When our clients discover the truth they ae going to be angry. Have I made it simple enough for you thus far?”

“I never agreed to murder.”

Barenboim continued smoking with elaborate, insulting precision. “Anticipating our clients’ anger, and their subsequent and very natural desire for revenge, you and I have arranged to disappear. To do that successfully we need a lead of several days. How far do you think we’d get in today’s world with our friends shouting their heads off?”

“We could tie them up and drug them.”

“True, but somebody else could untie and undrug them. Did you know Willy has already been to the police?”

Pleeth’s plastic-smooth face turned towards Carewe. “But why?”

“Because your partner”—Carewe stressed the word— “has been trying for days to have me killed. You’re in pretty deep, Manny.”

“Perfectly correct,” Barenboim said briskly. “Even Willy realizes it’s too late for you to indulge in scruples, Manny. Now …”

Athene, who had backed in the direction of the stair, gave a tremulous sob, and Barenboim swung the flash in her direction. Carewe sprang forward, but he was too slow—Pleeth cut in before him and stood directly between the laser and Athene.

“All right,” Pleeth said quickly. “I agree that Carewe has to be silenced. But not the woman. Let’s …take her with us.”

“What’s happened to you, Manny?”

“But she’s pregnant!” The words seemed to tear Pleeth’s throat.

“So what?” Barenboim’s forehead crinkled slightly. “You aren’t the father.”

“I …” Pleeth’s throat worked convulsively, and his lipless mouth curved upwards in a parody of a smile. “I am the father, Hy. You wouldn’t deny me a child.”

“Have you gone crazy?”

“No, Hy, no.” Pleeth cupped his gold cigar in both hands and held it out to Barenboim. “I was twenty, Hy. Twenty years old and I’d never had a woman. It was my mother, you see—my father moved out before I was born, but she wouldn’t live in a commune. There was just the two of us. I’ve figured out, since, how it all happened. I was a substitute for my father, but I had to be a safe substitute. One who could never burden any woman with a child. There were all those things she told me about sex … the old books about old dead diseases … perhaps she had picked up a nonspecific urethritis, and thought it was …” Pleeth took a quavering breath, and his words camefaster.

“She—my mother, I mean—she didn’t like to be called she, objected to the personal pronoun—came into my bedroom one afternoon. The tridi set was on and there was a girl in the focus … I was never an image cuddler, Hy, not really … it was more like a sort of dance—but she, my mother, called it self-defilement …. She had a hypo gun, I don’t know how, and she shot me … made me kneel down in front of her… and she shot me …”

“Don’t come near me,” Barenboim said in a faint voice.

“I was only twenty years old,” Pleeth crooned, his eyes fixed on his gold cigar, “but I fooled her, my mother … she’d forgotten about the two days’ grace. Grace!” His eyes unfocused momentarily as he considered ironies inherent in the word. Barenboim moved impatiently but Pleeth regained his dominance, overwhelming the tableau with his naked agony.

“I had two days left to collect my own semen. Being a chemistry student, I had no difficulty in preserving it in a bacteriostat … then I designed this phallus to keep it in … and she, my mother, never guessed.”

“You’re ill,” Barenboim whispered strickenly.

“Not I.” Pleeth smiled as he revealed his secret triumph. “I’m still functional, Hy—not like you…. I still wear the badge of manhood. And I’ve had other women, even without using aphrodisiacs, sometimes … but none of them ever became pregnant. When I knew that Athene’s shot contained both an aphrodisiac and a fertility factor—well, what red-blooded man could resist an opportunity like that?” The pink curvatures of Pleeth’s face tightened as he grinned at Barenboim.

“You went to her house!” Barenboim’s face had become ashen. “You risked a billion-dollar operation—for this!” He snatched the gold cigar from Pleeth’s hands and, with a stiff-armed swing which snapped the fine supporting chain, hurled it towards the furnace. Its glittering trajectory took it through the heat shields and into the shimmering pink hell beyond. There was the briefest flare of light and the cigar was gone.

“You too,” Pleeth whispered, with a barely perceptible shaking of his head. “You’ve cooled me, Hy.”

He threw himself at Barenboim. The two men were locked together for a second, then the laser stabbed a smoking hole through Pleeth’s body. He went down immediately. Carewe felt himself moving as though in a dream; the very air had become a clear, clinging syrup. He launched himself over Pleeth’s crackling corpse, just as the laser was turning in his direction, and dubbed Barenboim with a fist that seemed to be made of lead. Barenboim crumpled, and Carewe prised the laser from his fingers. He shone its aiming spot into Barenboim’s eyes, watched the pupils shrink like receding black universes, and eased the slide forward.

“Will!” Athene’s voice came from far aw. “Nol”

Carewe paused, and won his way back to sanity. “I too,” he told Barenboim as he stood up, “am not like you.”

He walked across the laboratory to Athene, who had sunk onto the stairs, and sat down beside her. “You should have told me about Pleeth.”

“I couldn’t have told anybody about that night.” She caught his hand and pressed her lips against it. “I didn’t know what had happened to me. I felt so dirty, Will— I had to drive you away from me.”

“But I would have understood, worked it out some way.”

Athene smiled sadly, her left eyelid quivering. “Would you, Will? I didn’t believe you when you tried to tell me about the new drug … What made us think we were so special that our marriage could be immortal too?”

“We weren’t ready,” he assured her. “But we are now.”

XVII

Athene had been prepared to allow him a year, but he had settled for two months. It was high summer and the waters of Lake Orkney, visible from the hotel room, were sunfire and amethysts.

Carewe took the hypodermic gun from his traveling case and set it beside the small pile of books he had brought to read during the vacation. The books he had chosen were of the traditional printed type, not because they were experiencing a vogue, but because they conveyed a greater sense of history and continuity. He was learning to think of his own allotment of time as being an inseparable thread of all time, of himself as part of the forces of history and entropy. Reading was still not something he particularly enjoyed, and he had doubts about how well the occupation would sustain him down the years—but he had come to respect books themselves. The first immortals …

“I’m going for a swim—while I’m still presentable,” Athene said, examining her naked body in a mirrored wall. Her figure had filled out in the past two months, but only Carewe could detect the first swelling behind which lay the growing embryo, the baby they had decided to keep.

“You look wonderful,” he said. “Don’t bother with a swimsuit.”

“Oh, Will, do you think …?” She turned, saw the hypodermic and the pleased smile faded from her face. “Now?”

“Yes.” He nodded peacefully.

“Do you want me to stay with you?” Athene came towards him.

“No—I’d like you to go on down to the beach and soak up some of thatpensive sunshine. I’ll be right down.” She opened her mouth to argue, and he said, “Don’t you trust me?”

Athene closed her eyes, and they kissed. She tied a flimsy robe around herself and, without looking at him again, left the room. Where she had been, dust motes wheeled and countermarched in a shaft of sunlight. Carewe picked up the hypodermic and sat for a moment, his left hand resting on the books. Perhaps if he read enough he too would be able to write, someday, some year. If he ever did put stylus to paper he would like to set down a philosophy for immortals.

The great mistake is to be greedy, to try to hold on to all of one’s past and all of one’s future. An immortal must learn to accept that endless life is also endless death—of the successive personalities who inhabit his flesh and are gradually changed and worn away by the passage of time, by the shifting tides of events. But most important of all, immortality is also the endless birth of new personalities. An immortal must acknowledge, easily and gracefully, that he as he exists at any one point in time, will die just as surely as if he were one of those mindless, anonymous little shellfish whose featherlight remains are scattered across, and are part of, all the shores of eternity.

For a moment the warm, bright room seemed cold to Carewe, then he understood that he was a different person than the Carewe of three months earlier—and had no regrets about the change. The child Athene was carrying was not his; but, in another sense, he was the father of all the future Carewes. That responsibility was enough to replace the fulfillment of physical parenthood, and it would have to sustain him if ever he and Athene went separate ways.

He picked up the hypodermic, fired its contents into his wrist in an icy cloud, and went down to the beach to rejoin his wife at the beginning of their long, long summer.

Table of Contents

- Title Page
- Chapter I
- Chapter V
- Chapter IX
- Chapter X
- Chapter XI
- Chapter XII
- Chapter XIII
- Chapter XIV
- Chapter XV
- Chapter XVI
- Chapter XVII