End of Exile

1

The glass was cold.

Linc rubbed at it with the heel of his hand and felt the coldness of death sucking at his skin. His whole body trembled. It was chill here in the darkness outside the Ghost Place, but it wasn’t the cold that made him shake.

Still he had to decide. Peta’s life hung in the balance. And before he could decide, Linc had to know.

Wiping his freezing hand against the thin leg of his ragged coverall, Linc peered through the misty glass into the Ghost Place.

They were there, just as they’d always been.

More of them than Linc could count. More than the fingers of both hands. Ghosts.

They looked almost like real men and women. But of course no one that old still lived in the Wheel. The adults were all dead—all except Jerlet, who lived far up above the Wheel.

The ghosts were frozen in place, just as they had always been. Most of them were seated at the strange machines that stretched along one long wall of the place. Some of them were on the floor; one was kneeling with its back against the other wall, eyes closed as if in meditation. Most of them had their backs to Linc, but the few faces he could see were twisted in agony and terror. He shuddered as he thought of the first time he had seen them, when he had been barely big enough to scramble atop an old dead servomech’s shoulder and peek through the mist-shrouded window at the horrifying sight beyond.

It doesn’t scare me now, Linc told himself.

But still he could feel cold sweat trickling down his thin ribs; the smell of fear was real and pungent.

The ghosts stayed at their posts, staring blankly at the long curving wall full of strange machines. The strange buttons and lights; the wall screens above them were just as blank as’ the ghosts’ eyes—most of them. Linc’s heart leaped inside him as he saw a few of the screens still flickering, showing strange shadowy pictures that changed constantly.

Some of the machines still work! he realized.

The ghosts had been people once. Real people, just like Magda or Jerlet or any of the others. But they never moved, never breathed, never relaxed from their agonized frozen stares at the dead and dying machines.

They were real people once. And someday… someday I’ll become a ghost. Like them. Frozen. Dead.

But some of the ancient machines were still working; some of the wall screens still lived. Does that mean that the machines are meant to keep on working? Does it mean that I should try to fix the machine that Peta broke?

His whole body was shaking badly now. It was cold here in the darkness. Linc had to get back to the living section, where there was light and warmth and people. Living people. Maybe it was true that the ghosts walked through the Wheel’s passageways when everyone was asleep. Maybe all the frightening stories that Magda told were true.

It was a long and painful trek back to the living area. Many passageways were blocked off, sealed by heavy metal hatches. Other long sections were too dangerous for a lone traveler. Rats prowled there hungrily.

Linc had to take a tube-tunnel up to the next level, where he felt so much lighter that he could almost glide like one of the bright-colored birds down in the farming section of the Living Wheel. He stretched his legs and covered more paces in one leap than he had fingers on a hand.

Here in the second level it was fun. The corridors were empty and dark. The doors along them closed tight. There were strange markings on each door; Linc couldn’t understand them, but Jerlet had promised long ago to someday show him what they meant.

He was alone and free here, soaring down the corridor, letting his muscles lift his suddenly lightened body for long jumps down the shadowy passageway. He forgot the ghosts, forgot Peta’s trouble, forgot even Jerlet and Magda. There was nothing in his mind except the thrill of almost-flying, and the words of an ancient song. His voice had deepened not long ago, and no longer cracked and squeaked when he tried to sing. He was happily impressed with it as he heard it echoing off the bare corridor walls:

“Weeruffa seethu wizzer Swunnerfool wizzeruv oz—”

Then he sailed past a big observation window and skidded to a stop, nearly falling as he braked his momentum, and turned to look through the broad expanse of plastiglass.

The stars were circling slowly outside, quiet and solemn and unblinking. So many stars! More stars than there were people down in the Living Wheel. More than the birds and insects and pigs and all the other animals down in the farms. More even than the rats. So many.

Was he right about Jerlet’s teachings? It seemed to Linc that some of Jerlet’s words meant that the Living Wheel—and all the other wheels up at the higher levels—were actually part of a huge machine that was whirling around and carrying them from one star to another. Linc shook his head. Jerlet’s words were hard to figure out; and besides, that was Magda’s job, not his.

Then the yellow star swung into view. It was brighter than all the rest, so bright that it hurt Linc’s eyes to look at it. He squinted and turned his face away, but still saw the brilliant spot of yellow before his eyes, wherever he looked.

After a few moments it faded away. And Linc’s blood froze in his veins.

For he saw stretched across the scuffed, worn floor plates of the passageway a vague dark shadow stretching out, reaching up the far wall across the passageway from the window.

His own shadow, Linc realized quickly. But that brought no relief from fear. For the light casting the shadow came from the yellow star.

It really is getting closer to us, Linc told himself. The old legends are true!

Keeping his back to the window and the yellow star, staring at his slowly shifting shadow, Linc felt panic clutching at him.

The yellow star is coming to get us. It’s going to make ghosts of us all!

2

Linc had no idea how long he stayed, nearly paralyzed with fear, at the observation window. His shadow crept across the floor and up the far wall of the passageway, faded into darkness, then reappeared again. And again, And again.

Finally he pulled himself away, muttering, “If I tell the others about this, they’ll go crazy. But Magda… I’ve got to tell Magda.”

His voice sounded odd, even to himself. Shaky, high, and unsure. “I wish Jerlet was still with us.”

He stalked down the passageway purposefully, no more playful lightweighted leaps. Into the next open hatch he ducked, then stopped at the platform that opened onto the longspiraling metal stairs of the tube-tunnel. Jerlet was upward, in the far domain where legends said there was no weight at all and everything floated in midair. Downward were the others, his own people, in the Living Wheel, where there was warmth and food and life.

And fear.

“Jerlet. I’ve got to find Jerlet,” Linc told himself sternly, even though he had no idea of how far the journey would be, or how difficult.

Linc placed his slippered foot on the first cold metal step leading upward. But he heard a scuffling sound—faint as a breath, but enough to make him freeze in his steps.

Again. A faint rustling sound in the darkness. Something soft padding on the metal steps in the shadows below.

Rats? Linc wondered.

There hadn’t been any rats in this tube-tunnel for a long time. although it had taken the death of four of Linc’s friends to clear the tunnel of them. The little monsters fought fiercely when they couldn’t run or hide.

Linc gripped the hilt of his only weapon, a slim blade that had once been a screwdriver. He had ground the working end down until it was a sharp dagger. Holding the plastic hilt in a suddenly sweaty palm, Linc peered into the darkness of the tunnel, looking down the spiraling steps for the glint of red, beady eyes.

If there’s too many of them —

The shadows seemed to bunch up and take shape. A person.

“Petal!” Linc shouted; and his voice echoed off the tube’s cold metal walls.

The kid jumped as if sparks from a machine had seared him.

“Peta, it’s me, Linc. Don’t be afraid.”

“Linc! Oh, Linc—” Peta scrambled up the steps and grabbed at Linc’s outstretched hand. He was breathless, sweaty, wide-eyed.

“What are you doing up here?” Linc asked. “I thought you were waiting for Magda to…”

“I’ve got to get away! Monel and his guards… they’re after me!”

Linc thought of Peta as just a kid, although all the people in the Living Wheel were exactly the same age, of course. But Peta was small, his skin pink and soft, his hair as yellow as the star that was coming toward them. He looked more like a child than a young man. Linc, whose face was bony and dark with the beginnings of a beard, towered over him.

Linc held the slim youth by both shoulders. “Listen. You’re supposed to be waiting for judgment by Magda. You can’t run away.”

Peta’s hands were fluttering wildly. “But Monel and his guards… he said I’d broken the pump on purpose. He said they were going to cast me into outer darkness!”

“He can’t do that—”

“But Magda can. He said Magda told him that’s what she was going to judge.”

Linc shook his head. “No, Magda wouldn’t make up her mind before hearing your side of it.”

Peta glanced back over his shoulder. “I was hungry. And tired. I’d been working in the tanks for a long time… everybody else had a chance to eat, but Slav said I couldn’t stop until I finished weeding my whole tank.”

“Slav knows what’s right,” Linc said. “He’s fair.”

Even in the shadowy light of the tube-tunnel, Linc could see Peta’s normally pink face had gone completely white with fright. “I know… but I stuffed the weeds I had pulled into the water trough.”

“Oh no—” Linc could feel the back of his neck tensing. “And they clogged the pump…?”

Peta nodded dumbly.

“And that’s why the pump broke, and now half the farm tanks can’t get water,” Linc finished. “Half our food supply is ruined.”

Peta’s voice was a miserable whine. “Monel came to my compartment with his guards. They took me out… said they were taking me to the deadlock to… to cast me out.”

“He can’t do that!”

“I ran away from them,” Peta babbled on. “I grabbed the stick that Monel carries and hit the guard that was holding my arm and ran away.”

“You what?”

“I… hit… the guard.” It was a tortured whisper.

“You hit him? You really struck him?” Linc sank down onto the metal step and let his head droop into his hands. Peta stood fidgeting in front of him, his mouth opening but nothing coming out except a barely audible squeak.

Looking up at him again, Linc asked, “How could you do it? If you had deliberately tried to break every rule Jerlet’s given us you couldn’t have done worse.”

“They were going to push me into the deadlock,” Peta cried.

Linc shook his head.

“Help me!”

“Help you?” Linc spread his hands helplessly. “How? Half the people will starve because you were lazy. Maybe I can fix the pump, but you know Jerlet’s laws about touching the machines. And you hit a guard. Violence! All the tales about the wars and the killings… didn’t they mean anything to you?”

“They were going to cast me out!”

“Not even Monel would do that without Magda’s judgment,” Linc snapped. “I’m no friend of his, Jerlet knows. There’s a lot about him I can’t stand. But he’d never hurt you with anything except his tongue. He and his guards were playing with you, and you were stupid enough to believe they meant what they were saying. Only Magda can give punishment, you know that.”

Peta dropped to his knees and clutched at Linc. “Help me, please! They’ll take me back for judgment—”

“That’s just what you deserve.”

“No! Please! Hide me… help me get away from them.”

Linc shook his head. “You can’t hide away, all by yourself. You’d either starve or have to steal food; Monel’s guards would catch you sooner or later. Or the rats would.”

“Please Linc! Do something. Don’t let them get me. They’ll…”

Linc pushed him away and stood up. “Come on, I’m taking you to Magda.”

“Noooo,” Peta cried.

“The best thing is to give yourself up. Maybe she’ll make your punishment easier then. I’ll ask her to go easy on you.”

“Very well spoken!”

Linc wheeled around. From out of the darkness above him, Monel and three guards came down the metal stairs. Two of the guards held Monel’s chair, grunting with each step they took. Another three guards appeared out of the shadows on the steps below them.

Monel was smiling. Once he had been as tall as Linc, but since the fall that ruined his legs and forced him to stay forever in his chair, his body had seemed to shrivel and dry out. Now he was a twisted, frail knot of anger and pain. His eyes burned in the darkness. His voice was as brittle-thin and hurtful as a bare high-voltage wire.

“Don’t look so surprised, little Peta,” he said in his thin, acid-bitter voice. “Once we saw you scramble into this tunnel it was a simple matter to set a trap for you.”

Linc bent down and, as gently as he could, lifted the wordless Peta to his feet.

“I thought for a moment,” Monel said to Linc, “that we would catch you in the trap, too. But you turned out to be a loyal friend of Magda.”

Linc said nothing. He could see in the dimness a dark welt along the cheek of one of the guards. Must be where Peta hit him.

Monel’s smile was blood-chilling. “Let’s go see Magda now. She’s waiting for her little Peta.”

3

The meeting room was filled. All the people were there; many more than the fingers of both Linc’s hands. More even than the knuckle joints on each finger.

Magda sat in the center of the meeting room, as she should. She sat on the old desk with its tiny, dead viewing screen and the pretty colored buttons alongside it. Everyone sat on the floor tiles around her, as they should. All eyes were on Magda. Even the empty shelves that lined the walls of the big room seemed to be staring at her. There were only a few ancient books left on the shelves, dusty and crumbling. They were being saved for an emergency, for a time when the cold seeped so deeply into the Living Wheel that even this last precious bit of fuel would be needed. All the other books had been used for warmth long ago, before Linc could remember.

Magda sat on the desk, her back straight, her chin high, her eyes closed. Her slim legs were folded under her in the correct manner for her duty as priestess. Her dark hair was carefully combed and glistened in the shadowless light from the ceiling panels.

She wore her priestess’s robe, and although it was threadbare and patched in places, the strange signs and lettering on it still stood out boldly: ELCTRC BLNKT, II0 v, AC ONLY. In her right hand was the wand of power and authority, which the ancients called a sliderule; in her left was the symbol of justice and compassion, an infant’s skull. Around her waist was the golden chain of the zodiac, with its twelve mysterious signs.

Linc sat at Magda’s feet, close enough to the desk to reach out and touch it. Which no one in his right mind would dare to do. The desk was sacred to the priestess, and not to be touched by ordinary hands.

He looked up at Madga’s face, framed by the huge silver-gray wall screen behind her. When she was serving in her office as priestess and meditating, as she was now, Magda seemed to be unable to see anyone, so fiercely did she concentrate on her duty.

Still she was beautiful. Her eyes were darker than the eternal night outside the Wheel. Her face as finely cast as the most delicate tracings of the golden zodiac signs. Yet there was strength and authority in those high-arched cheekbones and firm jawline. And wisdom came from her lips.

She stirred and opened her eyes. The crowd sighed and shifted uneasily. Her meditation was ended.

Magda’s deep black eyes focused on the people. She swept her gaze across the room and smiled.

“I’m ready,” she said simply.

Monel started to push his wheeled chair forward, but Linc was faster and got to his feet. Peta, sitting flanked by two of Monel’s guards, didn’t move at all. He seemed petrified, too terrified even to tremble.

“We have a problem,” Linc said in the time-honored words of custom. “Peta messed up his work at the farm tanks and one of the main pumps is broken because of his carelessness—”

A gasp went through the crowd. Most of them already knew about the pump’s breakdown, but still the thought of losing half their food shocked them.

Magda glanced at Peta but said nothing.

“And then when Monel and his guards threatened him,” Linc went on, “Peta hit one of the guards and ran away.”

The crowd sighed again, louder this time. Whispers buzzed through them.

The priestess’s face went cold. “Is this true, Monel?” she asked.

Monel wheeled his chair up to where Linc was standing and motioned his bruised guard to step forward. “The evidence is clear to see,” he said. The guard turned slowly so that the whole crowd could gape at his bruised face.

“Peta was frightened,” Linc said. “Monel told him they were taking him to the deadlock.”

“A lie!” Monel snapped. “Peta was running away and we tried to stop him.”

Linc shook his head. “Peta has decided to give himself up to your justice, Magda. Monel and his guards came on us in the tube-tunnel just as he agreed to return to you and ask for mercy.”

Magda tapped her wand against her knee for a moment. “What do you have to do with all this, Linc? Were you there when it happened?”

“No. I was off duty.” No sense telling everybody about the Ghost Place. Or how close the yellow star’s getting. It would only scare them. “Peta and I met by accident in a tube-tunnel.” Monel edged his chair slightly in front of Linc. “Peta is a lazy clod. And stupid. His laziness and stupidity ruined half the farm tanks. Ask Slav if it’s not so!”

“Are they really ruined?” Magda asked. “Yes,” came Slav’s heavy voice from the rear of the crowd. She looked down at Peta. “All that food—ruined. How can we live without food?”

Before the frightened youth could answer, Linc said, “I brought Peta to you for justice. And mercy.”

She almost smiled at Linc. For an instant their eyes were locked together as if no one else was in the room with them. Linc could feel his own lips part in a slight grin.

“But worst of all,” Monel shouted, “is that Peta is violent! He attacked my guard. He could attack anyone, at any time. Any one of you!” He waved his arm at the crowd.

They muttered and stared at Peta. He hung his head so low that no one could see his face. The guards alongside him tensed and watched Monel, not Magda.

“We all know the punishment for violence,” Monel went on, still speaking to the crowd rather than the priestess. “Violence is the one crime we cannot tolerate.”

“Cast him into outer darkness!” someone shouted. “Cast him out!” one of the guards echoed.

“Yes… yes—” The crowd picked up the vibration.

Monel turned back toward Magda, his thin face flushed with success, his crooked smile triumphant.

Magda raised her arms for silence, and the crowd settled down to a dull murmur. She waited a moment longer, staring at the people, and they became absolutely still. Peta sat unmoving, his head sunk low.

“Peta,” she said softly. “What do you have to say for yourself?”

He raised his face high enough to look at her. With a miserable shrug he let his head droop again.

“Peta,” Magda said, but now it was a voice of command, “get to your feet.”

He slowly stood up.

“Is it your fault that the pump is dead?” she asked.

He nodded dumbly.

“Did you strike the guard?”

“He…they said—”

“Did you strike him?”

Peta’s voice broke. He nodded.

Monel rubbed the wheels of his chair. “He admits it.”

“He came here for justice and mercy,” Linc said.

“The punishment for violence is to be cast into the outer darkness!” Monel raged. He turned back to the crowd again. “Everybody knows that. Right?”

Before they could respond, Magda raised her slim arms.

“The punishment for violence,” she said in a steel-cold voice, “will be decided by the priestess, and no one else.”

“Give me a chance to look at the broken pump,” Linc said. “Maybe I can fix it.”

“Fix it?” Monel almost laughed. “You mean—make it work again, so that the crops won’t die?”

“Yes,” Linc said.

“Madness! You know it’s against Jerlet’s law to touch such a machine. And even if you could, how would you fix it? It’s not like a cut finger that can be healed—”

“Or a bruised face that will be normal in a little while?”

Monel’s face darkened. “That’s something else again. But the farm pump is a machine. Once it’s dead, it’s dead. It can’t be healed, or fixed.”

Turning to Magda, Linc said, “Let me try to fix the pump. Maybe we can save the crops. I’ve fixed other things before… wires, some of the electrical machines. Maybe—”

But Magda shook her head. “It’s forbidden to touch that kind of machine. You know Jerlet’s laws.”

“But…”

“It is forbidden.”

And she closed her eyes for meditation. Everyone in the crowd did the same. Linc sat down on the floor and shut his eyes.

He tried to squeeze out all thoughts and let his mind float free. But he kept seeing the frozen ghosts at the Ghost Place. He shuddered. The cold is getting worse; it’s coming into the living section. Even some of the crops in the farm tanks are dying of the cold. Then he remembered the yellow star approaching. Strange that we’ll all die in fire. If only we could use that star to warm us and drive away the cold…

But such thoughts were not helping him to meditate. Linc tried to get his mind free. The world is only a temporary illusion, he chanted to himself. The world is --

“I have decided,” Magda announced.

Everyone looked up at her.

She pointed the wand at Peta. “No one has committed the sin of violence among us since Jerlet left us, back when we were all children. We must ask Jerlet for judgment, because the punishment for violence is too heavy even for the priestess to bear alone.”

Peta’s thin chest was rising and falling in rapid, choking gasps. Magda touched the colored buttons on the desk top where she sat. The big wall screen behind her glowed to a silvery-shimmery gray.

Jerlet’s face filled the screen, huge, dominating the whole assembly, bigger than Linc’s own height, mighty and powerful.

He was old, far older than anyone in the Living Wheel. His face was strong and square, with deep creases around the eyes and mouth. His hair was long and thick, streaked with gray as it curled over his ears and down to his shoulders. His voice was a thundering command, saying the words of the law just as he always said them:

“I’ve tried to set you kids up as well as possible. The servomechs ought to last long enough for you to grow up enough to take care of yourselves. There’s nobody left now except me… and all of you. I can’t stay any longer, but I think you’ll be okay. You can make it. I’m sure of it.”

Most of the people sitting on the floor were mouthing the ancient words along with Jerlet’s image on the screen. Everyone knew the words by heart, they had heard them so often since childhood.

“I’ll come back whenever I can to see how you’re doing… and I’ll watch you on the TV intercom. But I’ve got to get up to the zero-g section now. My heart can’t take any more of this load.”

Linc had to shift his position on the floor to see around Magda. She sat transfixed on the desk top, her slim body a dark silhouette against the massive presence of Jerlet.

“Now remember,” Jerlet was saying, “all the rules I’ve set down. They’re for your own safety. Especially, don’t mess around with the machines that I haven’t shown you how to handle. Let the servomechs take care of the machines; that’s what they’re for. You’ll only hurt yourselves if you touch the machines. It’s going to be tough enough for you, alone down here, without fooling around with the machinery.

“And above all—don’t hurt each other. Violence and anger and hate have killed almost everybody on this ship. You’re the only chance left for survival. Don’t throw everything away… everything that we’ve worked for, for so many generations. You have a tough road ahead of you. Violence will make it tougher… you could easily wipe yourselves out. So…” his eyes squeezed shut, as if he were in sudden pain, “…above all… don’t hurt one another. Violence is the greatest enemy you face. Never hurt one another. Never!”

The image disappeared, leaving only an empty glowing screen. Linc heard a few of the girls crying softly in the crowd.

“Jerlet has spoken,” Madga said.

“But—” Peta found his voice. “But, that’s what he always says—”

Magda nodded gravely. “He has not changed his rules for you, Peta. There is no forgiveness for the sin of violence. You must be cast out.”

Peta tried to scramble to his feet. The guards grabbed him roughly and he screamed out, “No! Please!”

Linc yelled at Magda, “Show him mercy!”

“He deserves none,” Magda said, her gaze flicking from Linc to Monel and back again. Peta was standing now, no longer struggling, head down. The two guards had a firm grip on his arms.

“But,” Magda went on, “we have never seen the sin of violence before, and it would take even more violence to cast Peta into the outer darkness. That is the nature of the sin; violence breeds more violence.”

Linc wondered what she was leading up to.

“Therefore,” she said, “Peta will not be pushed through the deadlock into outer darkness. Instead, he will be given enough food and water for three meals, and sent into the tube-tunnel to seek Jerlet’s domain. Let Jerlet take him and make the final judgment.”

The crowd was stunned. No one moved.

Magda uttered the magic words that made her decision final:

“Quod erat Demonstrandum.”

4

Slowly everyone left the meeting room, leaving only Magda and Linc there.

He walked up and stood beside her. She touched the control button that turned off the wall screen, then put down her symbols and let her robe slip off her shoulders.

Linc didn’t try to touch her, even though she was now no longer acting in her office as priestess.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

Nodding. “Yes…”

“For sure?”

“Well,” she smiled and the room seemed to glow brighter, “it always shakes me when Jerlet speaks to us. His voice… I have dreams about it sometimes.”

“That’s why you’re the priestess.”

With the two of them alone in the big empty room, with no one and nothing there except the few remaining books on the bare shelves, Magda was less the priestess and more of a normal human being.

She looked up at Linc, her dark eyes questioning. “Are you angry with me?”

“Angry? Why?”

“You wanted me to show mercy to Peta.”

Linc felt his teeth clench slightly. Peta. I’d nearly forgotten about him. A few moments alone with her and I forget everything.

“Jerlet will take him,” Linc said.

“But you think I should have gone easier on him.”

Is she trying to start a fight? “You could have, if you wanted to. Peta isn’t really a violent person.”

“No; I could see that he acted out of panic.”

Linc felt puzzled. “Yet you sent him out into the tubes. He might never make it as far as Jerlet’s domain. The rats, and who knows what else—”

“Do you know why I had to send him away?”

Linc shook his head.

“Because of Monel,” Magda admitted.

“You thought he was right and I was wrong.”

She laughed suddenly, and reached out to touch Linc’s cheek. “No, you silly fool! And stop looking so grim. I wanted to let Peta go free. It would have been fun to watch Monel turn purple. And besides—”

Linc waited for her to go on. When she didn’t, he asked, “Besides…?”

She walked away a few steps, toward the room’s big double doors. “Besides, it would have pleased you.”

Linc rocked back on his heels. Magda turned away from him and hurried toward the door.

“Hey… wait. Magda!” He raced across the worn floor tiles after her. His long legs gobbled the distance in a few strides, and he jumped in front of her, leaning his back against the closed doors.

“You wanted to please me?”

“Yes.”

Truly puzzled, he asked, “Then… why didn’t you? Why cast Peta out? Why ask Jerlet to speak? You knew he’d just say the same old things… he never says anything else.”

Her smile faded and the troubled look returned to her eyes. “Linc.,. Monel wants power. He’s a bully. I’m sure he frightened Peta terribly; why else would the poor boy strike one of his guards? Peta never harmed anyone in any way before.”

“But then—”

She put a finger over his lips, silencing him. “Hear me. The real reason why I’m priestess is that I’m sensitive to the way people think. Monel wants to rule. He wants to be the leader and tell everyone what to do. He would make a terrible leader; he would hurt people. So I’ve got to stay ahead of him. I’ve got to make sure that he doesn’t gain more power.”

Linc felt as fluttery inside as he did up on the second level, where the gravity was lower. But now it wasn’t a happy feeling.

“Monel wants… how do you know…?”

She shrugged her slim shoulders. “I know. I can hear him thinking about it. I can smell his hunger.”

Linc muttered, “Monel likes to boss people around.”

“He’s made it clear that he’d love to have an alliance with me. I stay priestess and he tells me what to do.”

In his mind, Linc saw himself facing Monel, and for the first time in his life he wanted to be violent.

“You’re shaking!” Magda said.

He grasped her shoulders. “I haven’t liked Monel since we were all children together and Jerlet lived with us. When he had the fall and his legs were crippled, well… I tried to forget that I didn’t like him. But now… now—”

“It’s all right,” Magda soothed, stepping close enough to Linc to lean her cheek against his chest. “I know how to handle Monel. Don’t fear—”

“It’s not fear that I feel,” Linc said tightly. His arms slid around her. Then a new thought struck him. “But… why did you do what Monel wanted? Why did you send Peta away?”

She pulled away from Linc slightly and looked up into his eyes. “Suppose I let Peta go free. And suppose somebody was attacked afterward? What then?”

“But Peta wouldn’t—”

“No. But Monel would. And then say that Peta did it.”

The breath nearly left Linc’s body. “Now I understand.”

“I couldn’t let that happen; I couldn’t take the chance. It would mean that Monel would take charge of everything and everyone—even me. I will not have that. I am the priestess and I’m going to stay the priestess, no matter what Monel tries.”

“So Peta had to be sacrificed.”

“Punished,” Magda corrected. “He was lazy, and stupid, and violent. Showing him mercy would have been playing into Monel’s hands.”

For a long moment Linc said nothing. Finally, “I hope he makes it up to Jerlet’s area. It’s a long climb. And dangerous.”

Magda turned slightly in his arms to glance at the wall screen. “Let’s get out of here. I have the feeling that he sees and hears everything we do in here.”

“Jerlet?”

“No. Monel.”

They were walking down the corridor toward the living area when Linc told her about the yellow star.

“It’s bright enough now to cast shadows. It’s getting so close that you can’t look at it without hurting your eyes.”

“How long do we have?” Magda asked.

He shrugged. “Who can tell? Maybe only a few sleeps. Maybe so long that we’ll all grow as old as Jerlet.”

“No one could ever get that old!”

They laughed together.

Then Linc said, “Want to go up and see it?”

Magda hesitated only a moment. “Yes. Show me.”

They were almost at the hatch that led into the tube-tunnel when one of the farm workers called out to them. Magda and Linc waited at the hatch as he hurried along the passageway toward them. The overhead light panels were mostly dead in this section of the passageway, so the worker flashed from light to shadow, light to shadow, as he approached.

“Magda,” he puffed as he came to a stop before them, “Monel… wants to see you… right away.”

“He can wait,” Linc said.

“No… it’s about the crops. Now that there’s not enough food for everybody—”

Magda’s face set into a tight mask. Even so, she’s beautiful, Linc thought.

“All right,” Magda said to the worker. “I’ll speak to Monel about the food.”

The three of them started down the passageway. Linc looked back over his shoulder at the hatch to the tube-tunnel. That must be the tunnel they put Peta into. I wonder if he’s a II right? Can he get to Jerlet before he needs food or sleep? Does the tunnel really go all the way up to Jerlet’s domain?

Monel was in a warm little compartment that had a rumpled bunk, a dead viewing screen on the far wall, and a desk studded with push buttons—also dead.

But on the bare part of the desk he had strewn lots and lots of colored chips of plastic. Where did he get them? Linc wondered.

He and Magda stood by the door of the little room. Monel sat behind the desk in his wheeled chair, his long skinny fingers toying with the plastic chips. Sitting on the bunk was Jayna, a girl who had worked as a farmer. Now, somehow, she seemed to work for Monel all the time.

“I’ve learned how to use these bits of plastic to solve our food problem,” Monel said.

“And I helped,” Jayna added.

“We’re going to eat plastic?” Linc asked.

“Of course not!” Monel snapped. “But these plastic pieces can show us how to give food to the right people.”

“The right people?” Magda echoed.

“Yes… look—” Monel touched a few of the chips, began lining them in straight files. “You see? Each piece stands for one of us.”

“The yellow ones are for the boys and the green ones are for the girls,” Jayna said, with a big smile of accomplishment on her face.

Linc watched Monel lining them up. “How do you know you’ve got the same number of chips as there are people?”

“That’s what I did,” Jayna said happily. “I picked out one chip for each person. I remembered everybody’s chip… see, they’re all shaped a little differently. So I can remember which chip belongs to which person. I’m good at remembering.” She jumped eagerly from the bunk and bounced to the desk. “See? This one is you, Magda… it’s the biggest green one. And this one is Monel, he’s right behind you. Each chip means somebody!”

Monel seemed to be smiling and frowning at once.

“Very interesting,” Magda said. It sounded to Linc as if she were trying to keep her voice as flat and calm as possible, and not quite succeeding. “But what does all this have to do with food?”

“Ahah!” Monel’s frown vanished and he was all toothy smile. “Since Peta broke the pump, we have a problem: not enough food for everybody.”

“Not yet,” Linc said. “We have enough for the time being.”

Monel shot him a nasty glance. “But when the next crop is harvested, we’ll only have half of what we need. Somebody’s going to go hungry… lots of people, in fact.”

“We all will,” Magda said. “We share the food equally.”

“We always have,” Monel agreed, “up to now. But that doesn’t mean we have to keep on doing things the old way. With these little chips, we can decide who should get food and how much he or she should get.”

“But everybody needs food,” Linc said.

Monet’s answer was swift. “But not everybody deserves it.”

“Deserves…?”

“You know people are always doing wrong things.” Monel said. “Not working hard enough, getting angry, not meditating when they’re supposed to… my guards see a lot of wrongs being done, and so do you, if you keep your eyes open. With these chips, we can put a mark down on a person’s chip whenever he does something wrong. The more marks he gets, the less food we give him.”

Linc felt his jaw drop open, but before he could say any thing, Magda’s voice cut through the room like an ice knife:

“And who decides when someone’s done something wrong?”

Monel smiled again, and it was enough to turn Linc’s stomach. “Why, the priestess will decide, of course,” Monel said. “Assisted by these chips and those who know how to work them.”

“You can’t—” Linc began, but Magda waved him silent.

“And suppose,” she asked, “that the priestess is unwilling to do this? Suppose that the priestess decides that this is an evil scheme, to deprive people of food deliberately?”

The smile on Monel’s thin face stayed fixed, as if frozen there. Finally he said, “When the people get tired of having so little to eat, they will see that this scheme is better for them.”

“Some of them.”

“The good ones among us,” Monel said. “Once they are convinced that this plan is better than letting everyone go hungry, they will decide that the priestess is wrong to oppose it.”

“And then?” Magda asked.

“Then we will get a new priestess.” He turned, ever so slightly, toward Jayna. The girl stared at Magda with bright eyes.

“It’s wrong!” Linc shouted. “We’ve always shared all the food equally. This plan is just plain wrong. It’s against the rules that Jerlet gave us.”

“Then ask Jerlet what to do,” Monel snapped.

For the first time, Magda looked shaken. Her voice almost trembled as she said, “You know that Jerlet doesn’t answer every little question we put to him.”

Monel said acidly, “I know that Jerlet never answers any questions that you put to him. He only says the same thing, over and over again.”

“But if we had a new priestess…” Jayna whispered.

“…maybe he would answer her,” Monel finished.

Linc suddenly felt rage. He wanted to smash his fists into something: the dead wall screen, the desk, the door… Monel’s-twisted smiling face. Violence! Mustn’t commit the sin of… Yet his fists clenched, and he took a step toward Monel.

Magda grabbed at his arm. “Linc! Come with me. We’ve heard enough of this.”

He stared at Monel with hatred seething inside him, but Magda’s hand on his arm and her voice were enough to turn him. Without another word he followed her out of the room and into the passageway.

She pushed the door shut. It was cooler out in the corridor. Linc could feel the flames within him damping down.

“That’s just what he wants,” Magda said. “If you attack him he’ll have you cast out. Now I understand what happened to Peta… Monel used him as a test. If he could make poor little Peta attack him, he knew he could get you to do it.”

“I’ll kill him,” Linc muttered.

“You will not,” Magda commanded. “If you even try, you’ll be killing yourself; and me, too.”

“Then what can we do?”

She let herself smile. “You were going to show me the yellow star. Let’s do that.”

“Now?”

“Yes. Now.”

They stood together at the wide observation window, his arm around her shoulders, hers around his waist. They gazed out at the stars that scattered across the darkness in an endless pattern of glory. And when the yellow star spun into view, they turned their faces and watched their shadows creep across the floor and walls of the passageway.

“It’s strange,” Magda murmured. “The yellow star brings warmth… it drives away the cold. It feels good.”

“Only for a while,” Linc said. “It will get hotter and hotter. It will turn everything to fire.”

“Too much warmth and we die,” she said.

Linc nodded.

“Too little food and we die,” she added.

He still said nothing.

“Linc… Monel is right, isn’t he? I’ll have to decide on his way about the food?”

“You can’t do that,” said Linc. “We’ve always shared everything equally. You can’t just decide that one person will starve while another eats.”

Her dark eyes seemed to cut right through him. “The priestess can decide such things,” she said.

“It would be wrong—”

“I decide what’s wrong! No one else. Only the priestess.”

“With Monel telling you what to do,” Linc shot back.

She nearly smiled. “No one tells me what to do…except Jerlet.”

The anger that Linc had tried to keep bottled up inside him came boiling out. “Jerlet never says anything new to you or anybody else. He always says the same thing!”

Magda remained icy-calm. “Of course. That’s because he’s told us everything that we need to know. Don’t you see? Jerlet has given us all the rules we need. It’s up to his priestess to use those rules wisely.”

“By letting people starve?”

“If I find it necessary.”

“If Monel tells you it’s necessary!”

“Linc… there are so many things you don’t understand. If I must decide that certain evil people must starve, and the people accept it, what’s to stop me from deciding one day that Monel must starve?”

“You…” Linc had to take a breath, and even when he did, his voice was still high-pitched with shock. “You would do that?”

“If I find that Monel is evil.”

He stared at Magda, as if seeing her for the first time in his life. This slim, lovely girl was in command of their lives. “You’d kill him?”

Magda smiled. “It will never come to pass. Sometimes I can see into the future… well, maybe see is the wrong word. I get feelings, like a cold draft touching me—”

“And?”

Turning slightly away from Linc, staring off into the darkness of the corridor, Magda said in a strangely hollow voice, “I’m not sure… I don’t see myself sentencing anyone to starve…not even Monel. I… it feels as if a miracle is going to happen. Yes, that’s it!” She fixed her gaze on Line. “A miracle, Line! Jerlet’s going to make the pump work again! He’s going to bring it back to life!”

Line couldn’t pull his eyes away from Magda’s brightly smiling face. But his mind was telling him, Jerlet’s not going to do a thing… unless you do it for him.

5

They slept right there in the passageway, next to the big observation window, huddled together to keep the chill away. The yellow star’s radiance wasn’t enough to really warm them, but that didn’t matter.

Linc woke first.

He sat up and watched Magda breathing easily in her sleep. Just like when they had been children together, and there were no worries or fears. Jerlet had been with them then, and he had strange and wonderful machines that did everything for all the children: kept them clean, even kept their clothing clean; fed them; taught them how to speak and walk; everything.

One by one, the machines broke down or wore out. A few of the cleaning machines still worked. Something Jerlet had called ultrasonics. You stepped in and a weird trembly feeling came over you for an instant. Then you were clean. But even those machines were wearing out.

Linc frowned at the memories playing in his head. He had fixed one of the cleaning machines once, a long time ago. It wasn’t working right, and Linc poked into its strange humming heart one day when no one was looking. There was a lot of dust and grime inside. He cleaned it out and the machine worked fine afterward.

He never told anyone about it. It would have made Jerlet angry.

It’s a strange rule. Linc thought. Why would Jerlet give us a rule like that? If the machines don’t work, we’ll all die. But if we could fix them, fix the heaters and the farm tanks and the lights…

He glanced down again at Magda. She was stirring, beginning to wake up.

If I could fix the pump, then Monel’s game with the chips wouldn’t be needed.

He had told himself that same thing a thousand times since Magda had spoken of a miracle.

If I can fix it.

And if I don’t get caught.

Magda finally awoke and they went down to the Living Wheel together. People were up and about. Monel was hissing orders at everyone as they lined up for firstmeal. He browbeat the cooks and made sure that everyone stayed in Linc. He checked the worn and faded plastic dishes that each person carried, and made sure no one took any extra food. He made a general nuisance of himself.

But no one complained. A few smiled. A mild joke here and there. That was all. They were accustomed to Monel’s fussing about. And afraid of his guards.

Then the workday began. Linc’s task was in the electrical distribution center. He stood by a flickering wall screen, just as Jerlet had taught him to do when he had been only a child, and watched the colored lights flash on and off. There was little else to do. The screen flashed and flickered. Once in a whole a light would flare red and then go blank. It would never light up on the screen again.

Over the years, Linc had gradually figured out that each little light on the screen stood for different rooms of the Living Wheel, and even different machines within the rooms. Whenever a symbol disappeared from the screen, a machine went dead somewhere. It could be a heater, or an air fan, or a cooking unit… anything. Which one stands for the pump Peta broke? Linc studied the section of the screen that represented the farming chambers.

One of the biggest thrills of Linc’s life had been the moment he realized that the straight lines on the screen stood for the wires that stretched along the passageways behind the plastic wall panels. The lines were even colored the same way the wires were: yellow, green, red, blue, and so forth. Once he had even fixed one of the wires; he found the trouble spot by noticing that one of the lines on the screen suddenly showed a flashing red light on it.

It had taken a long argument and nearly a day’s worth of meditation by the priestess before she decided that a wire was not a machine, and therefore could be touched by human hands. Linc fixed the faulty wire the way he had seen Jerlet and the servomechs do it years before, and a while room that had gone dark and cold suddenly became light and warm again.

Can I fix the pump? he asked himself, over and over again, all through the long day.

At the end of the workday he was still asking himself. He wondered about it all through lastmeal… which was noticeably skimpier than most lastmeals. And Monel was still there at the food Linc, wheeling his chair back and forth, badgering everybody.

Magda was nowhere to be seen. Which meant she had retired to her shrine to meditate.

She’s trying to reach Jerlet, Linc knew.

With Monel’s voice yammering in his ears, Linc took his food plate back to his own compartment and ate there alone. In silence.

The lights dimmed for sleeping as they always did, automatically. Linc stretched out on his bunk and felt the warmth in the room seeping away; the heaters were turned down, too, at sleep time. But Linc had no intention of going to sleep.

Now the question he asked himself wasn’t: Can I fix it? It was: Will they catch me?

He stayed silent and unmoving on his bunk for a long time, eyes staring into the darkness. Jerlet didn’t want us to tamper with the machines because we were just kids when he had to leave us. He left the servomechs to fix the machines. He didn’t want us to hurl ourselves, or mess up the machines.

Linc rose slowly and sat up on his bunk. The servomechs were supposed to keep all the machines working. But they themselves broke down and died. So there’s nobody here to fix machines. Except me.

He went to the door of his compartment and opened it a crack. The corridor outside was darkened, too. No sounds out there. Everyone was asleep.

I hope! Linc told himself.

Swiftly, he made his way down the corridor that went through the sleeping compartments, through the kitchen and the bolted-down tables and chairs of the galley, and up to the metal hatch that opened on the main passageway.

Magda and the others are wrong when they say Jerlet doesn’t want us to tamper with the machines. He wouldn’t mind if I tried to fix the pump. He wouldn’t get angry at me.

Still, Linc could feel a clammy sweat breaking out all over him. Gathering his strength, he pushed the hatch open and stepped out into the main passageway of the Living Wheel. Down at the end of the passageway loomed the huge double doors of the farm area. They were called airlocks, although Linc could never figure out how anyone could lock up air.

So far, all you’ve done is take a walk. But if they find you inside the farm section, Monel will know what you were up to.

Then he pictured Monel’s smug face with the plastic chips, smiling at Magda and telling her that she was a failure as priestess. Linc pushed down on the heavy latch that opened the airlock door.

The farms were fully lit, and the vast room was warm and pungent with green and growing smells. The air felt softer, somehow. Linc squinted in the sudden brightness and let the warmth soak into his bones. It felt good. The crop tanks stood there, row after row of them, huge square metal boxes glinting in the glare of the long overhead light tubes. The only sound in the vast high-domed chamber was the gentle gurgle of the nutrient fluids flowing through the crop tanks. The pigs and fowl and even the bees were asleep in shaded, shadowed areas across the big room.

Linc went straight to the pump that had been damaged. It looked completely normal from the outside: a heavy, squat chunk of metal with pipes going into it and out of it. But it was silent. The floor plates around it were stained, as if there had been a flood of nutrient fluid that the farmers had mopped up.

He clambered up the metal ladder to the rim of the nearest crop tank and peered in. Young corn was growing in the pebbly bed, together with something else green that Linc couldn’t identify. Nothing seemed to be wilted yet, but Linc was no farmer. Slav had said the crops would die without the nutrients that the pump provided, and the troughs criss-crossing the plastic pebbles of the tank were completely dry. The crops’ roots were sunk into those pebbles, and they were getting no nutrients.

Frowning, Linc clambered down again and stared at the pump. All right, brave hero. Now how do you fix it? Linc realized that he didn’t even know how to get the pump’s casing off so he could examine it.

Jerlet would know. But Jerlet never answered Magda’s questions; he only spoke the same old words. Linc squatted down and stared at the pump. It sat there, silent and dead. Beyond it, on the far wall of the chamber, Linc could see a dead viewing screen. No one had used it since Jerlet had left them; it was a machine that only Magda could touch.

Linc focused his eyes on the distant screen. Suppose I called Jerlet and just asked him how to fix this pump? If he didn’t want me to touch it, he could tell me. He frowned. Another voice in his head asked, What makes you think Jerlet will answer you, when he doesn’t answer the priestess?

“If he doesn’t answer,” Linc whispered to himself, “that means he doesn’t want me to touch the pump.”

Yes, but to try to reach him means that you’ll have to touch the viewing screen controls. That’s just as bad as tampering with the pump.

Linc had no answer for that. He walked across the big empty room and stood in front of the wall screen. A tiny desk projected out from under the screen. It had three rows of colored buttons on it. Some of the colors on the buttons had been chipped away. That’s where Monel got his colored plastics!

There was no chair at the desk. Linc looked down at the buttons, then up at the screen, then down at the buttons again.

“Jerlet wouldn’t mind me calling him,” he told himself. “Besides, if Monel can touch the buttons, why can’t I?”

Still, as he reached out for the biggest of the buttons, his outstretched hand trembled. Swallowing hard, Linc jabbed at the button.

The screen glowed a pearly gray.

No face showed on it, no picture of any sort, nor any sound. But it was alive! It glowed softly.

“Jerlet,” Linc blurted. “Can you hear me?”

The screen did nothing. It merely kept on glowing. Frowning, Linc called Jerlet’s name a few more times. Still no response. Impatiently, he started pressing the other buttons, jamming them down in haphazard fashion. The screen flashed pictures, lights, swirling colors. But no Jerlet. “Jeriet! Jerlet, answer me! Please!” After a few frantic minutes, a booming voice said:

“UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ARE NOT PERMITTED TO USE THIS TERMINAL.”

Linc staggered back, startled. “Wha… Are you Jerlet?”

“UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ARE NOT PERMITTED TO USE THIS TERMINAL.”

“Jerlet! I need help!”

“UNAUTHORI—” The voice stopped for an eyeblink. “WHAT SORT OF ASSISTANCE DO YOU REQUIRE?”

It didn’t sound at all like Jerlet’s voice. But it was somebody’s voice.

“The pump… the main pump for the crop tanks,” Linc said. “I need help to fix it.”

The screen hummed for a moment. Then, “MAINTENANCE AND REPAIR HYDROPONICS SECTION: CODE SEVEN-FOUR-FOUR.”

“What?” Linc said. “I don’t understand.”

The screen suddenly showed a picture of the buttons on the desk. Three of the buttons had red circles drawn around them.

“MAINTENANCE AND REPAIR INFORMATION FOR HYDROPONICS EQUIPMENT. PUNCH CODE SEVEN-FOUR-FOUR.”

It took Linc a while to figure out what the strange words meant. He poked at the buttons indicated, and some even stranger symbols appeared on the screen. He told the screen that the pump was broken. The screen jabbered more meaningless words at him, then showed some pictures. Gradually, Linc realized that they were pictures of the pump: its insides as well as its outside.

It took a long time, so long that Linc was certain the workday would begin and the farmers would come in and discover him there.

In pictures, the screen showed him that the tools he needed were stored in a special wall panel. Linc found the panel; it hadn’t been touched for so long that it was crusted over with dirt, but he pulled it open with back-straining desperation.

Some of the tools the screen’s voice spoke about just didn’t work. Something it called a “torch” stayed cold and lifeless, even when the pictures showed that a flame was supposed to come out of it.

Maybe I just don’t know how to work it, Linc thought.

But the screen was patient, and staggered Linc with its flood of knowledge. With pictures and the steady, unhurried voice, it showed Linc how to unfasten the pump’s cover, disconnect its input and output pipes, check the seals and screens and motor. Linc, sitting in the midst of scattered bolts, metal pieces, lengths of plastic pipe, found that the main inner chamber of the pump was clogged with weeds and dead leaves. He cleaned it as thoroughly as he could, then followed the screen’s instructions in reassembling the machine.

“ACTIVATE THE POWER SWITCH,” the voice said at last, and the picture showed a yellow arrow pointing to a tiny switch at the base of the pump.

Linc went back and pushed at the little toggle. The whole pump seemed to shudder and clatter for an instant, then settled down to a smooth steady hum. Above his head, in the crop tanks, Linc could hear the sudden gurgle of nutrient fluid flowing again.

He should have felt exultant. Instead, he merely felt tired. He managed a weak smile, went back to the screen, and said:

“Thank you, whoever you are.”

The screen did not reply. Linc clicked it off, then turned just in time to see the first group of farmers entering the big, echoing room.

6

Linc’s first impulse was to run.

But as the farmers noticed him there, sweat- and dirt-streaked, they seemed more surprised and curious than angry.

Why should I be afraid? Linc asked himself. I fixed the pump. There’s nothing to be afraid of.

The farmers were walking up to him, slowly, looking puzzled.

“Linc,” said a lanky girl called Hollie, “what are you doing here?”

“What’s going on?” Slav’s strong voice came from behind them. The broad-faced, sandy-haired leader of the farmers pushed past Hollie to stare at Linc.

Linc was so tired that all he wanted to do was sleep. He pointed to the pump. “I fixed it,” he said. “I saved the crops.”

“What? You must be crazy,” Slav said. “Nobody can fix the pump. It’s dead.”

Linc grinned at him. “Go see for yourself.”

A crowd of farmers was gathering around them now. With a good-humored shrug, Hollie said, “Won’t hurt to look.”

She went to the pump, bent down and listened, put a hand on it.

“It’s working, all right!” she shouted.

Everyone rushed to the pump, leaving Linc standing alone. Slav clambered up to the top of the nearest crop tank. A few other farmers followed him, bumping each other in their haste to climb the metal rungs. Others dashed to other tanks.

“The nutrient’s flowing again!” someone yelled.

They all rushed back toward Linc. Slav grabbed him in a bear hug that almost cracked his spine. The others pounded Linc on the shoulders, laughing and shouting, congratulating and thanking him. They half-carried him toward the airlock doors.

“Hey, no—” Linc objected weakly. “Let me go… all I want is some sleep.”

They left him at the doors and turned back to their work. They were all smiling. One voice picked up an ancient work song, something about Hi Ho, whatever that was. Other voices joined the chant.

Linc smiled, too, as he headed down the passageway toward his bunk.

He was jolted out of his sleep when one of Monel’s guards kicked his door open. Before Linc could get up from the bunk, they were on him, three of them. Two grabbed his arms and yanked him to his feet.

The third said, “Monel wants to see you. Now.”

They pushed Linc out into the corridor and led him down to Monel’s little room.

He was sitting at the desk, fingering the plastic chips. Jayna sat back in a corner, looking frightened, staring at Monel with big unblinking eyes. Monel himself seemed furious. He was flexing the chips in his fingers, bending them as if he wanted to break them into tiny bits.

For a long time Linc simply stood there, crowded against the doorway by the three husky guards.

Finally, Monel looked up at him. “You tampered with the food tank.” His voice was pure acid.

“I fixed the pump.”

“You touched a machine when you knew it was forbidden!”

Linc repeated stubbornly, “I fixed it.”

“That’s a crime! And you know it.”

Stepping up closer to the desk and leaning his knuckles on it so that he loomed over Monel, Linc said, “I made sure that we’ll have enough food for everybody. So you won’t have to decide who’s going to eat and who should starve.”

“You committed a crime,” Monel insisted.

“That’s for the priestess to decide; not you.”

Monel glared at Linc for a moment. Then a teeth-baring smile spread across his face. “Oh, she’ll say it. Don’t worry about that. She’ll say it, and you’ll be condemned to outer darkness. Or maybe you both will!”

They let Linc go back to his room while the workday wore on. After lastmeal everyone would gather in the meeting room to hear Magda’s decision about Linc.

He sat on his bunk and stared at the wall. Magda won’t sentence me, she’ll thank me. I did it for her. She’ll be glad.

But still he worried.

The time for midmeal passed. Linc didn’t bother going out to the galley, and no one brought him any food.

But then he heard swift footsteps outside his door. The door slid open, and Magda stepped into his room.

He stood up and reached for her.

“How could you?” she whispered.

He blinked, confused. “What do you mean?”

“How could you cause all this trouble? Fix the pump! You know that it’s forbidden to tamper with the machines.”

“I didn’t tamper with it,” Linc said stubbornly, “I fixed it. I figured out how to use the wall screen in the farm section, and the screen told me—”

But her eyes were wide with horror. “Linc! Do you realize what you’re saying! No one’s allowed to touch the machines. You can’t play with viewing screens.”

“But the screens know how to fix the machines.”

She covered her mouth with one hand and paced the length of the room in four rapid strides. Turning back to Linc, she asked:

“Have you told anybody about the screen?”

“No… I don’t think so.”

“Good. Now listen to me. When we meet after lastmeal, say nothing about the screen. Or—better yet, tell them Jerlet appeared on the screen without you touching it.”

“I was trying to get Jerlet to speak, that’s why I turned the screen on.”

“Listen to me,” she urged. “Don’t say that you turned the screen on. I’ll tell them that I was meditating and looking for an answer to our problem all through the night. Which is no lie. I was. And Jerlet must have seen me, or heard me… and fixed the pump for us.”

“But that’s not true,” Linc said. “I fixed it. I did it by myself, with my own hands.”

She shook her head impatiently. “Monel will destroy you … both of us, if we give him the chance.”

“But I saved the crops. Nobody will go hungry.”

“Which is why he’s angry.”

Linc pounded his fists against his thighs. “The people will be glad that the pump’s working again. The farmers were singing!”

Magda glared at him. “Linc, people don’t behave like machines. Don’t you see what Monel will do? He’ll say that it’s a crime to tamper with the machines, yet you went ahead and did it anyway. This time it worked, but if you’re left free to tamper again, you could destroy something and kill us all.”

Linc sank down onto his bunk. “That’s stupid.”

“But that’s just what he’ll do. And then he’ll tell me to get Jerlet to speak to us, and Jerlet will just answer with the same words he always speaks, and I’ll have to condemn you. I’ll have to!”

“I did it for you,” Linc muttered. “You wanted a miracle.”

Her look softened. “I know. But we’ve got to be careful about how we explain it to the people. You’ve got to say that the screen came on by itself, and Jerlet told you what to do.”

With a frown, Linc said, “And how do I explain why I went into the farms in the first place?”

Magda bowed her head in thought for a moment. Then she came up smiling. “Oh, it’s easy! You say that Jerlet came to you in a dream, while you were sleeping, and told you to go to the farms.”

“But that’s not true!”

She sat on the bunk beside him and put a finger to his lips. “Linc, you couldn’t have fixed the pump without Jerlet’s help. We both know that.”

“But…”

“We’ll just explain his help a little differently from the way it really happened. It’s not really lying; it’s… well, it’s bending the truth a little, so that the people won’t get frightened.”

“I don’t like it.”

“Trust the priestess,” Magda whispered. “I want to help you.”

With a shake of his head, Linc answered, “But you don’t understand what’s really important. I found out that the screens … they know how to fix things. They show you what to do. We can fix all the dead machines…”

“No!” Magda snapped. “You mustn’t say that. You’ll frighten everyone … you’ll be playing into Monel’s hands.” She got up from the bunk and started pacing the floor again.

He looked at her. “Am I frightening you?”

From the corner of the tiny compartment she returned his stare. “Yes,” she said at last, in a hushed voice. “Yes …a little.”

He reached a hand out toward her, and she rushed over and sat beside him on the bunk. She gripped his hands hard, and her fingers were ice cold.

“Magda, we can fix everything…”

“Hush.” She bent forward slightly, squeezing his hands with a strength he never knew she possessed. She pressed her eyes shut, and began to tremble wildly.

Linc had seen Magda entrance herself before. She was searching the future, trying to see what would happen, what they should do.

She stopped trembling and eased up the pressure on his hands. She straightened up and looked into his eyes. Her own deep black eyes were rimmed with red and glimmering with tears.

“Linc… you’re going to Jerlet.” Her voice was a frightened whisper. “You…you’re going to see him, talk with him. But before you do… you’ll see Peta again.”

Linc pulled his hands away from her. “That’s what you see in the future, huh? All that means is that you’re going to have me cast out, just the way you cast out Peta.”

“No—” she gasped.

He jumped to his feet. “I know how to fix the machines, but you and the others are too scared to see the noses on your faces!”

‘You think I’m wrong?” Magda’s voice went rigid; it was the priestess speaking now, not his friend.

“The screens can tell us how to fix everything—”

“It is forbidden to touch the screens, or any other machine. You have committed sins and you’re telling me that you’re not sorry about it. You’re telling me that you want to do even worse things.”

“I want to save us! If we can learn how to fix all the machines, maybe we can push the yellow star away.”

“You’ll make Jerlet angry at all of us.”

“No, I want to save us all.”

Magda walked past Linc to the door. She stopped, facing it. He could see from the stiff back, the way she held her head high, that every centimeter of her slim body was rigid with tension and anger.

She whipped around and faced him once more. “Linc, I want to help you, but you’re going against everything we know. Everything we have. So you fixed one pump. That might have been luck or even a trap…”

“A trap?”

“Yes!” she insisted. “You think you know how to fix all the machines. Suppose Jerlet is just testing you, seeing if you’ll tamper with more machines. You’re going against his rules, Linc! I can’t let you do that.”

For the first time, Linc felt anger seething inside his guts. “You just don’t believe that I can fix them. You believe all this stuff about not touching the machines, but you don’t believe me.”

“No one can fix them.”

“You’d rather just sit here and let one machine after another break down until we’re freezing and starving. You’d sit here and let the yellow star swallow us up, without even lifting a finger to try --”

“Jerlet’s rules are--”

“Don’t yammer at me about Jerlet’s rules!” he roared. “I don’t care about his stupid rules!”

Her mouth dropped open.

Forcing himself to take a deep, calming breath. Linc said more softly, “Magda, listen to me. Suppose this really is a test? Suppose Jerlet’s trying to find out if we’ll use the brains he gave us to find out how to fix the machines?”

“But his rules say we mustn’t tamper with the machines.”

“We were children when he told us that… so small we couldn’t see over the galley tables. And all the servomechs worked then. Things are different now, and Jerlet hasn’t said anything new about the machines for a long, long time.” He felt a smile trying to work its way across his face. “Remember back then? Remember how I used to boost you up, so you could reach the top buttons on the food selector?”

She grinned and looked down, so that Linc couldn’t see her • face. “Yes—”

“But then the selector broke down…and the servomechs broke down … all the machines are dying. Jerlet wouldn’t want us to sit here and die. with them. He wants us to fix them.”

“Then why hasn’t he told us so?” Magda asked.

Linc shrugged.

She came away from the door and sat on the bunk beside Linc. “And you’ve forgotten about Monel.”

“Hmp! What about him? After I’ve fixed a few more machines he--”

She touched his shoulder. “Linc, you might know about machines, but you don’t know about people. Monel won’t let you fix anything. I can see just what he’ll do.”

He took her hand, engulfing it in his own. “He won’t be able to stop me if you’re on my side. Together we can convince the people.”

“No.” Magda shook her head. “Not if you try to tell everyone that the screens speak, and you want to fix all the machines. It’s too much for them to take, all at once. Monel will turn them against you.”

“The farmers—”

“The farmers are glad the pump’s working again. But Monel can frighten them into casting you out.”

“But if I just tell them the truth—”

“If you tell them the truth, we’ll both be cast out!” Magda’s voice was iron hard now. “I want to save you, Linc, but you’ve got to help me. I will not allow Monel to become my master. I will not allow him to set up another priestess, I must be the priestess here! It’s Jerlet’s command.”

Linc could feel the coldness of outside seeping into him. “You mean that you’ll let them cast me out, rather than risk your position as priestess.”

“It’s what I have to do.” Magda’s voice was low, almost a whisper, but still unalterably firm.

“It’s what you want to do,” Linc answered bitterly.

Magda sat unmoving, like a statue. Even her face seemed to have gone hard and lifeless.

Finally, she spoke. “I am the priestess. I can see the future. I can see into people’s minds. I must stay as priestess. No one else can be priestess in my place.”

Linc said tightly, “So what happens now?”

Magda still didn’t move. Her voice sounded as if it came from one of the ghosts. “You will be brought before me for judgment, because you tampered with the machine.”

He said nothing.

“If you confess that you did it, and say nothing about the screen, and tell the people that you followed Jerlet’s commands, I can show you mercy. Monel wouldn’t dare insist on casting you out… this time. But if you try to insist that you can reach Jerlet by using the screens, and fix all the machines—”

Her voice trailed off.

For a long moment there was no sound in the tiny compartment except the distant buzz of an air blower. Linc felt the wall hard and unyielding against his back, the softer foamplastic of the bunk beneath him. It all seemed unreal, strange, as if he’d never been in this place before. Yet he had lived all his life here.

“And your vision of the future,” he heard himself ask, stiffly, as if he was talking to a stranger. “You said I was going to find Jerlet…and Peta.”

Magda nodded slowly.

“That means I’m going to be cast out, just as Peta was.”

Her voice was distant, as if it came from the farthest star. “Don’t force me to do it. Linc. Please … don’t make me do it.”

He didn’t answer.

After a long silent time, she got up and left him sitting there by himself.

7

He stayed alone on his bunk for only a few minutes.

Everybody’s at lastmeal by now, he thought. He knew what he had to do. Suddenly, It was as clear as the instructions the wall screen had given him about the pump. Magda’s vision of the future was right. I’m going to find Jerlet.

He went to the door and stepped out into the corridor. It was empty; everyone was in the galley.

Hurriedly, Linc padded down the corridor to his station at the electrical distribution compartment. He gathered a few tools: the knife he had made out of a screwdriver, a length of metal pipe, some coiled wire. They were the only things that he could vaguely imagine as being helpful on the long trek upward to the region of weightlessness.

H e almost got to the tube-tunnel hatch without being seen. A couple was lounging in the recessed alcove that the hatch was set into, out of sight from the main walkway of the corridor, shadowed from the overhead lights. They were just as startled to see Linc as he was to find them there when he ducked into the alcove.

“Hey what—” The guy jumped and yelled as Linc bumped into him.

“Oh… sorry,” Linc said.

The girl was even more upset. “Why don’t you watch… say,” she recognized Linc. “Where are you going? There’s going to be a meeting about you—”

Linc pushed past. “I won’t be there.”

“You can’t run away,” the guy said, reaching out to grab Linc. “Monel wants you—”

Linc brushed his hand away. “I’m not running away from anybody. I’m going up to find Jerlet. Tell Monel I’ll be back.”

They stood there, stunned, as Linc worked the hatch mechanism and swung it back. He stepped through. The last he saw of them was their shocked, wide-eyed faces as he slammed the hatch shut again.

It was dark in the tunnel. Linc stepped out across the metal platform and leaned over the railing. Up and up spiraled the metal steps, winding around the tunnel’s circular walls until they were lost in blackness.

How far up did they go? Can I really climb them high enough to reach Jerlet? Linc wondered.

As he started up the winding steps, he told himself, it must be possible. Magda wouldn’t have sent Peta up this way if the steps didn’t go all the way to Jerlet.

With a sudden shock Linc realized that he had no food with him, and he had missed lastmeal and midmeal. He didn’t feel particularly hungry; more excited and curious. But suppose it takes a really long time to get-up there? I could starve!

He shook his head and kept on climbing. No, Magda’s vision said I’d find Peta and Jerlet. I won’t starve.

Sleep reached out for him before hunger did. Linc climbed for as long as he could, until his legs grew numb and his eyes gummed together. Then he tried to get out of the tunnel; he didn’t want to sleep in this cold, dark, hollow-ringing metal tube. There could be rats here, or other things, unknown things, that were even worse.

The first hatch that he tried was jammed shut. Linc strained against it, but it refused to budge. He climbed up a long, spiraling level. The hatch there was shut, too, but there was a small window in it. Yellowish light slanted across the scene on the other side of the hatch. The yellow star! Linc realized. Closer than ever.

Then he focused on what the light was showing him. The passageway beyond the hatch was wrecked. Its walls gaped open, and Linc could see stars from outside peering into the shattered, twisted passageway. No one could live in there; it was all outer darkness, even in the warmth of the approaching star.

The hatch at the next level was open and Linc wearily stepped through. The passageway was intact; it was even warm. Rows of doors lined the walls. Groggy from sleepiness, Linc tottered to the nearest door and pushed it open.

It was a small storeroom of some sort, caked with dust and ages of filth. In the light from the corridor, Linc found the control switch on the wall beside the door and flicked it. The overhead panels glowed to life.

No one had been in this room for ages. The thick dust was undisturbed. Not even the tiny footprints of rats or other animals. Linc nodded, satisfied that it was safe. He shut the door, turned off the lights, and stretched out on the grimy floor. He was asleep almost instantly, in spite of the choking smell of dust in his nostrils.

A dream awakened him.

Linc sat bolt upright, sweating and trembling. He had been screaming in his nightmare, and his mouth was open now, but nothing came out except a strangled cough. The dream fled from his memory; the harder he tried to recall, the smaller and smaller it dwindled inside his mind until, within a few moments, it was lost altogether. All he could remember was the terror. Something had been after him and nearly got him.

Still coughing from the dust, Linc got to his feet and left the room. Within a few minutes he was back in the tube-tunnel, shuddering slightly from the coldness of it. He touched the curving metal wall; it was so cold that it hurt his fingertips.

Upward, ever upward. Spiraling around and around until he grew dizzy and had to stop and sit on the steps and catch his breath. Then the cold would seep through his thin coveralls and he’d be forced to his feet again. Exercise warmed him. But his belly growled complainingly. It had been empty too long.

Once when he stopped, he heard scrabbling sounds. Clawed feet scratching across metal. Lots of them. In the echoes of the tunnel he couldn’t tell if the noise was coming from below him or above.

Linc pulled the length of pipe from his belt loop and hefted it firmly in his hand. But his hand shook, and not merely from the cold.

He climbed more slowly now, and paused often to listen. The sounds were always there, and seemed to be drawing nearer. He pounded the pipe against the steps, and the clanging frightened even himself. But within a few heartbeats, the scrabblings of the rats returned.

Linc had suffered an electric shock when he had fixed a faulty wire in the distribution center. He still remembered the feeling.

It was mild compared to the shock he felt when he saw Peta’s body.

The boy was lying in a tumbled heap at one of the platforms in front of a hatch. H is clothes were badly chewed up and caked with blood. Linc sank to his knees and stared at the dead body. There was a huge red gash across his forehead. His eyes were open, staring sightlessly at nothingness.

Linc lost track of how long he knelt there, not knowing what to do. Did Jerlet do this? No, it couldn’t be. This isn’t the weightless domain. Jerlet’s not here.

That meant that something, or someone, had killed Peta.

Monet’s guards? Did they track him all this way and kill him? Linc shook his head. Impossible. Why would they? And even Monel’s guards couldn’t deliberately kill somebody.

As he knelt there, a tiny tick-tick-ticking sound scurried across the platform. Linc looked down to Peta’s bare feet. A pair of rats were sniffing there, their red eyes glittering in the darkness.

Linc swung his pipe at them but they scampered away unharmed and disappeared. The pipe clattered across the metal floor plates.

Can’t leave Peta here!

Linc retrieved the pipe, then hoisted Peta’s cold body to his shoulder. He worked the hatch open and stepped into the passageway on the other side…

For the first time he realized how little weight there was here. His own weight had been diminishing steadily, but he had been too sleepy and hungry, and too tired, to notice it. Peta felt as light as a bunk mattress, and Linc was almost tempted to try gliding down the passageway.

There’s got to be a deadlock here someplace. Linc told himself as he tiptoed down the passageway. Got to put Peta safely away into the outer darkness.

The passageway seemed strange. The ceiling was lower than any Linc had ever seen before. There were doors only on one side of the corridor. And the floor curved sharply upward. It looked as if Linc were walking uphill, but it felt to his tired legs as if he was on a perfectly flat floor.

The deadlock was at the end of the passageway, blocking it completely, a huge, heavy metal hatch with the strange symbols that the ancients had put there.

Linc studied it for a long while, to make certain it was exactly the same as the deadlock in the Living Wheel. It seemed the same; as if it had been made by someone who couldn’t possibly make two things differently.

He didn’t like the idea of staying there any longer than he had to, but Linc worked the deadlock very carefully. He went exactly by the ritual Jerlet had taught them so long ago, for he knew that to deviate from the ritual would mean instant death.

Carefully he touched the buttons set into the wall alongside the hatch in the proper order and watched the lights inside each button turn on, just as they were supposed to. When the correct ritual had been performed, the inner hatch slid open, and Linc peered into the glittery metal chamber of the deadlock itself.

Strangely, he found that his eyes misted over and he was nearly crying as he gently laid Peta’s body in the cold metal chamber. He looked so little, so helpless.

“Soon you will be outside,” Linc whispered the words of the ritual, “with all the others who have ever lived. You will become a star, Peta, and you will never feel cold or alone again.”

Linc went back to the keyboard to finish the ritual. The hatch closed and the red light over it flashed on. Linc could hear a faint hum and whoosh of the outer hatch opening and Peta’s body taking flight for the stars. Then the humming stopped and the red light turned off.

It was done. Peta was launched into the outer world, as was proper. Yet Linc felt no happiness about it. He had done the correct thing, but it made him sad and somehow lonelier than he had ever felt before in his life.

Grimly, he made his way back along the passageway to the hatch that opened onto the tube-tunnel. Hunger and cold were his only companions now.

Except for the rats.

8

The tunnel was endless.

Linc pushed on, up the eternally-spiraling steps, eyes burning from lack of sleep, hands shaking from the cold. It was dark in the tunnel, the only light came from an occasional window. The starlight carried no warmth with it. Somehow the light from the yellow star never reached these windows; its warmth never touched the metal chill of the tunnel.

At his back Linc could hear the rats. At first they had been faint, distant. But now their scrabbling claws scratched clearly on the metal steps. Their screeching chatter came echoing off the curved tunnel walls.

Linc pushed on. His weight was getting lighter and lighter, but his strength was ebbing away fast, too, leached from his body by the cold and hunger.

Can’t stop, he told himself. If you stop you’ll fall asleep. And the rats will get to you --

He stumbled. He fell. He picked himself up. He spread out his arms and soared effortlessly. The tunnel was no longer spiraling up over his head. It was flat and open and there was no up or down. He laughed aloud, and heard a strange crackling harsh voice echoing off the metal walls of the tunnel.

He floated almost weightlessly. Floating, floating… Everything was dark around him. Impenetrable black. He was alone in the darkness, without even a star to watch over him. Nothing… no one… alone… Something deep inside Linc’s mind was telling him to stay awake, but the voice was far, far away.

Alone… all alone… and cold… It didn’t make any difference if his eyes were open or shut. There was nothing to see. The darkness was complete.

Linc drifted, weightless. His eyes closed. The cold seemed to wrap him tenderly now. It didn’t hurt anymore. His aching muscles relaxed. He floated on nothingness.

Nothingness.

Pain awoke him. Not a sharp stabbing pain, but a far-off dull kind of discomfort that comes when there’s a lump in your slipper. Or when a rat begins chewing on a leg that’s numb from cold.

Linc shook his head to clear it. He wasn’t certain that he was awake--

And then he saw the red gleaming eyes, heard the chittering of thousands of rats, felt them crawling over his body. A warm furry blur brushed across his face.

He screamed and jackknifed, doubling over weightlessly and sending his body twisting madly across the dark tunnel in a cloud of equally-weightless rats. They screamed, too, and scattered.

Linc bounced off a bitingly-cold metal wall and felt around his waist for the pipe he had been carrying, the wire, anything he could use as a weapon. His hand felt warm sticky blood.

Thousands of glaring red eyes surrounded him in the darkness. He kicked out, flailing arms and legs as he edged his back along the burningly-cold wall.

The rats flowed back away from him. They chattered among themselves as if to say. Stay clear. He’s still strong enough to fight. Wait a while. He won’t last long.

Linc kept edging away from the malevolent eyes, his back to the wall. But in the dark and weightlessness he couldn’t tell which way he was going. Which way is up? he sobbed to himself. How can I tell?

The rats hovered just out of his reach, waiting, chittering.

Linc’s feet were still dangling in midair. His only contact with the tunnel was the wall at his back. He pushed sideways on the frozen metal with the palms of his bloody hands, reaching out with his feet for some solid contact.

The steps. His feet touched a step. The rats followed him, chattering, patient.

Sinking to his knees on the steps, Linc forced his mind to remember: The railing. When you were going up the tunnel, the rail was on your left and the wall was on your right.

,He reached out with his left hand. Nothing. He peered into the darkness but he couldn’t even see his own hand. He reached out farther. His hand bumped into the wall.

Suddenly Linc was sweating. It was a cold sweat trickling down his face and flanks like rivers of ice, making him shiver. He edged away from the wall and reached out with his right hand. It touched something warm and furry that shrieked. Linc yelled, too, and pulled the hand back. Tremblingly, he forced himself to reach out again. Yes, there’s the rail.

Rail on the right. Wall on the left.

Thai means I’m turned around. I’m facing down the tunnel.

Something in him didn’t believe that. Somehow he knew that if he turned around and started down the tunnel in the reverse direction from the way he was facing now, he would be walking into an endless fury of rats, heading away from Jerlet, going back the way he had so laboriously traveled.

He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to concentrate. He pictured all the times he had been in the tunnel, including the long journey he was on now. And he saw himself climbing up the spiraling steps with the rail on his left and the wall on his right.

No, the frightened voice within him screamed. You’re wrong. I know you’re wrong.

Linc opened his eyes. The rats were edging closer, glowering at him, saying, Make up your mind. Either way, it doesn’t matter. We’ll get you no matter what you do.

Every instinct in Linc’s body was screaming for him to go forward, not to turn around, not to turn his back to the rats.

But his memory, his mind showed him clearly that he must travel with the rail at his left if he wanted to continue upward, toward Jerlet.

Forcing down a shaking shriek of fright, Linc slowly turned and grasped the rail firmly with his left hand. His feet floated slowly off the steps.

He took a deep shuddery breath, grasped the freezing, skin-sticking rail with both hands, and pulled himself into flight. He soared through the darkness like an arrow… upward toward Jerlet. I hope!

The rats followed, screeching.

But Linc could use his hands to pull himself along the spiraling railing, speeding along faster than the rats could follow. Hand over hand, racing faster and faster through the darkness, while the red eyes and evil voices dwindled behind him.

Even if I’m going in the wrong direction, Linc thought, at least I’m outdistancing them.

He was almost feeling good about it when he slammed into something utterly hard and unyielding. The darkness was split by a million shooting stars of pain.

And then the darkness swallowed him completely.

He awoke slowly.

And when he opened his eyes for the briefest flash of a moment, he wasn’t sure that he had really awakened.

Dreaming, he told himself. I’m dreaming.

He cracked his eyes open again, just a slit, because of the brightness.

Squinting cautiously, he saw that he was in a room. A small room, not much bigger than his sleeping compartment back in the Living Wheel. But it was brilliant with light, light everywhere, white and clean and dazzling. And warm! The warmth flooded through him, soothing and gentle. Linc felt warmer than he ever had since he had been a tiny child.

Then the dream began to turn into a nightmare. He felt good enough to sit up, but found that he was unable to move. He could raise his head a little, but that was all. The rest of his body seemed to be paralyzed. He looked down at himself and saw that broad soft straps were holding down his arms and legs. Another strap crossed his middle so that he couldn’t move his torso much.

There were some sort of coverings wrapped around his hands and feet. He was dressed in a clean, crisp white gown with short sleeves.

And there was a slim, flexible tube connected to his left arm, just above the inner elbow.

Suddenly frightened, Linc twisted his head around and saw that the tube was connected to a green bottle that was hanging upside down from a support on the wall. The other end of the tube was inside his arm. The place where it entered his flesh was covered by something white and plastic looking. Linc could feel it inside him, and it made his flesh crawl.

“What is this place?” he yelled out. “Where am I? What are you doing to me?”

Only then did it occur to him that he had no idea at all of who “you” might be. The ship was much vaster than he had ever imagined. There might be all sorts of people living in it—

Linc let his head sink back on the bed. Don’t panic, he told himself. At least you got away from the rats.

But the tight knot in his stomach didn’t feel any better. Not for a moment. He glanced up at the tube going into his arm again, then turned his face away.

What are they doing to me?

He must have fallen asleep, because he was startled when the door banged open. Lifting his head as far as he could, Linc saw a shaggy, hugely fat old man push himself through the doorway, barely squeezing through. He floated weightlessly toward the bed, like an immense cloud of flesh wrapped in a gray, stained coverall that barely stretched across his girth.

“You finally woke up.” His voice was as heavy and gravelly as his body and face.

“Who… who are you?”

The old man looked mildly surprised. “Don’t you recognize me? I’m Jerlet.”

“No you’re not,” Linc said. “You don’t look anything like Jerlet.”

9

A slow smile spread across the old man’s craggy features. His face was shaggy with stubbly white hair across his cheeks and chin. The skin hung loose from his jowls and looked gray, not healthy. His hair was dead white and tangled in crazy locks that floated every which way in the weightlessness.

“Don’t recognize me, huh,” he said. He seemed amused by the idea.

He started unfastening the straps that held Linc down. “Don’t move that arm,” he warned, “until I get the l.V. out of you—”

Ivy? Linc wondered. That was something that grew down in the farms.

The old man floated lightly over the bed, to the side where the tube was, his huge bulk blotting out the light from overhead as he passed over Linc.

“Yep,” he muttered in a throaty deep rumbling voice, “it’s been a helluva long time since I cut those training tapes for you squirts. You’re practically an adult— What’s your name?”

“Linc.”

“Linc… Linc--” The old man’s face knotted in a frown of concentration. “Hell, been so long I don’t even remember myself. Got to look back at the records.”

Linc was studying his face. The more he watched it, the more he had to admit that there was some resemblance to the Jerlet who showed himself on the screen down in the Living Wheel. But while the Jerlet he knew from the screen was old, this man seemed ancient. Even his hands were gnarled and covered with blue veins. Yet his body was huge, immense.

Those gnarled old fingers withdrew the tube from Linc’s arm and covered the wound with a patch of plastic so quickly that Linc couldn’t see the wound itself.

“The l.V.’s been feeding you since I brought you here… you’ve been out cold for nearly seventy hours.”

“Hours?” Linc echoed.

The old man made a sour face. “Yeah, you squirts probably don’t measure time that way at all, do you?”

Linc shook his head.

“Okay, see if you can sit up. Go easy now…”

Linc pushed himself up to a sitting position, then gripped the edge of the bed to keep from floating away. Weightless… maybe this is Jerlet’s domain, after all.

“Guess I’ve aged a bit,” he was saying. “Bloat like a gasbag up here in zero g. But listen, son—I am Jerlet. The one and only. Nobody here but me. Those pictures of me you see on the screens down in your area, well, those tapes were cut a long time ago. I was a lot younger then. So were you.”

Linc was barely listening. He was staring down at his bandaged arms and legs. “You saved me from the rats.”

Shaking his head, the old man said, “Nope, you saved yourself from them. I just saved you from bleeding to death, or freezing. You ran smack into my electrical fence and knocked yourself out. I had to come out and get you. Wasn’t expecting visitors. But I’m glad you came.” •

“You… really are Jerlet?” Linc asked.

He bobbed his head up and down, and his tangled hair waved around his face.

Linc scratched at his own shoulder-length hair and realized that it too was floating weightlessly.

“Look, kid, I know I look kinda shabby, but I’ve been living alone up here for a lotta years… since you and your batchmates were barely big enough to reach the selector buttons in the autogalley.”

“Why did you leave us?”

Jerlet shrugged. “I was dying. If I had stayed down there, in a full Earth gravity, my ol’ ticker would’ve popped out on me.”

“What? I don’t understand?”

Jerlet smiled at him, an oddly gentle smile in that stubbly, shaggy face. “C’mon, I’ll explain over lunch.”

“What’s lunch?”

“Hot food, sonny. Best in the world … this world, at least.”

Jerlet led Linc out of the little room and down a narrow passageway that curved so steeply Linc couldn’t see more than a few paces ahead. Yet it was all weightless.

“It’s not really zero gravity here,” Jerlet said as they glided along the passageway. “Just enough weight here to keep something down where you put it. But with your one-g muscles this must seem like total weightlessness.”

Linc nodded, not really sure he understood what the old man was rumbling about. He must be Jerlet, all right. Linc told himself. But he sure doesn’t look the way I thought he would!

They passed a double door. Jerlet nodded at it. “Biology lab; where you and the rest of the kids were born. Show you later.”

Linc said nothing. Jerlet’s words were puzzling.

Jerlet squeezed his bulk through a doorway, and Linc followed him into another small room. But this one had a round table and several soft-looking chairs in it. One wall was covered with buttons and little hatches and strange symbols.

“A food selector!” Linc marveled. “And it works?”

“Sure,” Jerlet answered heartily. “Look at the size of me! Think I’d let the food recyclers go out of whack?”

Linc studied the buttons and the symbols on each one.

Jerlet loomed beside him. “Go on! Pick anything you want… it all works fine.”

“Uh—” Linc suddenly felt stupid. “How do you know which button to push? I mean, back home we knew which button gave what kind of food… before it all broke down—”

“Broke down?” Jerlet snapped. “You mean the repair servomechs didn’t keep it going?”

“They broke down, too…”

“Then how do you … you cook the food yourselves?”

Linc nodded.

The old man looked upset. “I didn’t think the machines would fail so soon… the repair units, especially. I’m not as smart as I thought I was.” He put a hand on Linc’s shoulder. His voice sounded strange, almost as if he was afraid of what he was saying. “How… how many of you… are still alive?”

Linc shrugged. “More than both hands.”

“Both hands? You don’t know the number? You can’t even count? What happened to the education tapes?”

Somehow Linc felt as if he had hurt the old man. “I can name everybody for you. Would that be all right?”

Jerlet didn’t answer, so Linc began, “There’s Magda, she’s the priestess, of course. And Monel, and Slav—” He went through all the names of all the people. He almost said Peta’s name, but left it out when he remembered.

“Fifty-seven of you,” Jerlet muttered. He seemed shaken. He shuffled slowly from the food selector to the nearest chair and sat down heavily, despite the minuscule gravity. “Fifty-seven. Out of a hundred. Nearly half of you “dead in less than fifteen years—” He sank his face in his hands.

Linc stood by the food selector wall, helpless, and watched the old man, his huge bloated expanse of flesh squeezed into the graceful little chair. A far part of Linc’s mind marveled that the chair’s slim legs didn’t buckle under Jerlet’s gross weight, despite the low gravity.

The old man looked up at last, and his eyes were rimmed with red.

“Don’t you understand?” His voice was rough, shaky, almost begging. “I made you! You’re my children, just as surely as if I was your father… I made you, and then I had to leave. Now nearly half of you are dead … my fault—”

Linc stared at him.

Jerlet pulled himself out of the chair and took a shambling step toward Linc.

“Don’t you understand?” His voice rose to a roar. “It’s my fault! You were going to be the beautiful new people, the best generation ever! You were going to reach the new world … raised in love and kindness… BUT YOU’RE NOTHING BUT A PACK OF IGNORANT HOWLING SAVAGES!”

His voice boomed off the walls of the tiny room. Linc winced and backed a step, bumping into the selector buttons.

“Fifty-seven of you,” Jerlet bellowed. “Stupid, superstitious savages.” He took a couple of faltering steps toward Linc, then stopped, gasping, his huge body wracked with shuddering panting sobs.

“No—” he gasped. “Not now…” He seemed to be muttering to himself. But then his eyes focused on Linc, and he could see that the old man’s eyes were as red and burning as the rats’. But not with hate, Linc knew. Jerlet’s eyes were filled with pain.

“You don’t… understand… any of this,” the old man puffed, his voice low and rasping now. “Do you? It’s all… beyond you—”

Linc wanted to say something, to reach out to him or run away, do something. But he was frozen where he stood. Even his voice seemed paralyzed.

Jerlet waved a meaty hand, feebly, at Linc and staggered out of the room.

He’s crazy. Linc thought. Like Robar, when he tried to go through the deadlock with Sheela’s body. What he says doesn’t make any sense.

Linc wondered if he should try to follow the old man. Then he noticed that some food had dropped into the selector’s pickup bin. I must have touched some of the buttons when I backed into the wall, he realized.

The food was neatly packaged, sitting in little shining boxes on a tray. Linc looked up toward the door, then decided, I’d better leave him alone. If he really is Jerlet, he’ll come back to me.

He picked up the tray and took it to the table. Unwrapping each box, he blinked at the strange sights. One box contained a liquid that was an odd color, almost like one of the colors used in the wiring back at the Living Wheel. It felt cold to his lips. The second box was an oblong metal container filled with something that looked almost like meat. When Linc peeled off the transparent film from its top, the stuff began to steam. Linc smiled. It smelted like meat.

The third box was also cold, and filled with something smooth and featureless and white. Linc dug a fingertip into it, and tasted the tiny sample. Sweet! He had never tasted anything like it before.

Without thinking about additional selections he might make, Linc sat down at the table. This stuff was strange, but it was good food.

So his first meal in Jerlet’s domain consisted of orange juice, soyburger, and ice cream.

Linc slept right there in the eating room. The floor was soft and warm, so he stretched out and went to sleep almost immediately.

In his dreams he saw Jerlet and some of the people from the Living Wheel—Magda was trying to tell him something, but Monel got between them somehow. It was all mixed up and strange.

Then he was falling, in his dream, falling through darkness with the evil red eyes of the rats chasing behind him. But the eyes all merged into one single huge red eye with a great hollow booming voice roaring after him. Linc fell through the empty darkness, cold, alone, helpless…

And woke with a shock. He was lying face down on the soft floor of the eating room. Soaked with sweat, hot, mouth open in what must have been a yell of terror.

He sat up.

He felt wide awake. The dreams quickly faded into the dark parts of the mind where forgetfulness covers everything.

Drawing his knees up under his chin, and wrapping his arms around his legs. Linc tried to concentrate and think.

Almost immediately he smiled to himself. “Magda, wherever you are, forgive me. I’m not going to meditate. I’m not going to ask for Jerlet to point out the way I should go. I have to think this out for myself.”

It was funny, but in a bitter way. Here I nearly kill myself to find Jerlet, and it turns out that he’s crazy. A new thought struck Linc’s mind, and even his faint smile vanished. Maybe he’s dangerous! Maybe he’ll try to hurt me… kill me. He sure looked angry at lastmeal. Sounded it. too.

Carefully, Linc pushed the door open and peered down the narrow, strangely-curved passageway. No one in sight. He tiptoed down the passageway and tried several other doors. No sign of Jerlet, although he did find a couple of sleeping rooms, complete with sonic showers and bins full of strange-looking clothes.

All the machines worked up here! Linc saw that the lights were all glowing faithfully. He stepped into one of the bedrooms and the door slid shut behind him automatically. He tried the water tap, a shining metal faucet set above an equally-sparkling sink, and water flowed sweet and cold from it.

I’ll bet the sonic shower works, too.

Locking the door to the passageway. Linc quickly stripped off the formless white robe Jerlet had dressed him in and showered. The tingling vibrations all over his skin made him feel better than he had since he’d been a child. No standing in Linc. No worrying about the power running down before your turn comes.

He examined the clothes that were stored in the bins next to the bed. They seemed too small for Linc to wear, but when he tried on one of the shirts, it stretched to fit his body exactly. The pants, too.

And there are different colors!

One of the wall screens was strangely shaped, long enough to reach from ceiling to floor, and so narrow that it was barely as wide as Linc’s shoulders. And it was bright; it reflected everything in the room very clearly. Linc had never heard of a mirror before, but he automatically used this one as he tried on clothes of different colors.

He finally settled on a high-necked shirt that was almost the same shade of blue as his eyes, and a dark-brown pair of pants. He found slippers in another bin, and even they adjusted their shape magically to fit his feet snugly.

“Hello!”

Linc jumped as if an electric shock sparked through him.

“Hello!” Jerlet’s rough, husky voice called again. “Can you hear me?”

It was coming from a speaker grill in the ceiling, Linc realized. There was a viewing screen on the wall facing the bed, but it was dark and dead.

“Look… I don’t even remember your name, dammit. I, uh, listen son, I got very upset yesterday and I acted like an idiot. I’m sorry.”

Linc saw that there was a small keyboard on the table beside the bed. Frowning, he wondered if he should touch any of the buttons.

“It won’t do you any good to hide from me. You’ll have to come out for food sooner or later,” Jerlet was saying. “And I really want to help you, son. Really I do. The way I acted yesterday… well, I’ll explain it if you’ll give me a chance. At least turn on one of the screens so I can talk to you face to face… what in hell is your name, anyway. I know you told me, but you mentioned all those other names, too, and now I can’t remember… guess I’m getting old.”

Linc stepped across to the table where the keyboard buttons glowed in their different colors. He felt as if his head was spinning; not just from the low gravity, but from the effort to decide what he should do. Slowly, reluctantly, he reached out for the buttons.

“If you want to turn on a screen,” Jerlet was saying, “just punch the red button on any of the keyboards—”

Linc’s outstretched finger touched the red button. Jerlet’s haggard, stubbly face leaped into view on the wall screen across the room.

He was still saying earnestly, “I know I acted like a madman last night, but I can explain… oh, there you are!”

Linc gazed straight into Jerlet’s eyes. They looked sad now. The pain was still there, but it was deeper, covered over by sadness.

“Linc. My name is Linc.”

Jerlet bobbed his head eagerly, making his fleshy jowls bounce. “Yep, that’s right. Linc. You told me, but I couldn’t remember.”

Linc started to reply, but found that he had nothing to say.

Jerlet filled in the silence. “I see you’ve cleaned up and changed clothes. Good! How about meeting me in the autogalley? Got a lot of things to show you.”

“The autogalley?” Linc asked.

“The eating room. Where the food selector is.”

“Oh… Okay.”

“Do you know how to find it from where you are?” Jerlet asked.

Linc nodded. “I can find it.”

“Okay, good. I’ll meet you there.” The old man seemed genuinely happy.

He was still smiling when he eased his bulk through the doorway of the autogalley and glided toward Linc. He stuck out a heavy, short-fingered hand.

“Linc, I dunno what kind of customs you kids have put together down in the living section, but it’s an old human custom for two men to shake hands when they meet.”

Thoroughly puzzled. Linc put his hand out.

•Jerlet waggled a finger at him. “No, no… the right hand.”

With a shrug, Linc raised his right hand and let Jerlet grasp it firmly. The old man’s a lot stronger than he looks, he realized.

“Good!” Jerlet beamed. “Now we’re formally met. Got so much to show you.” He rubbed his hands together. “Let’s start with the food selector. Show you how that works.”

They ate well. Jerlet showed Linc all sorts of new foods and tastes that he had never known before. As the food began to make a comfortable warm glow in his middle, Linc found his worries and suspicions about Jerlet melting away.

Then they were up and moving through the nearly weightless world of Jerlet. The old man showed Linc the power generators, the mysterious humming machines that kept electricity going out to all parts of the ship. Then the master computer, with its blinking lights and odd sing-song voices. And a room full of servomechs, standing stiffly at attention, mechanical arms at their sides, sensors turned off.

“Are they dead?” Linc asked, his voice hushed.

“You mean deactivated,” Jerlet replied in his normal booming tone. “Here… look, lemme show you.” He took a tiny control box from a shelf near the door and touched one of the buttons studding its top. The nearest servomech came to life. Its sensors glowed; it pivoted slightly to face Jerlet, moving on noiseless little wheels.

“See?” Jerlet said. “They all work fine.”

Linc shook his head. “Down in the Living Wheel they all died, a long time ago.”

Jerlet snorted. “Well, we’ll have to do something about that.”

He took Linc down the passageway and through a set of double doors into a strange, dead silent room. It felt odd. Linc knew he had never been here before, yet there was a faint odor of something that made his spine tingle and the back of his neck go shuddery. The room was filled with strange glass spheres, long looping tubes, viewscreens, desks, other things of glass and metal and plastic that Linc couldn’t even guess at.

“Genetics lab,” Jerlet said. His voice sounded odd; half-proud, half-sad. “This is where you were born, Linc. You and the others down in the living section.”

“Here?”

Jerlet nodded. “Yep. Took the sperm and ova from those cryofreezers, back behind the radiation shielding over there,” he pointed to a heavy-looking dull metal wall, “and brought the fetuses to term in these plastic capsules. All very carefully done, very scientifically. Each specimen picked for its genetic perfection. Each resulting infant nurtured as meticulously as the psychologists could hope. A generation of physically and mentally perfect children. Geniuses… left to live in an idiotic environment.”

Linc said, “I don’t understand you.”

Jerlet waved his pudgy hands about the laboratory.”! was in charge of the project. I made you. Right here. This is where you were all created. By me.”

10

Before Linc could ask any more questions, Jerlet swept him through the genetics lab and back out into the passageway.

“You haven’t seen the best part yet,” he said.

Totally puzzled by everything he’d seen and heard so far. Linc quietly followed the old man through a hatch into a tight little metal room. It felt cold and scary, like a deadlock. Bui even if he’s crazy, he wouldn’t put us both in a deadlock, Linc told himself. And a tiny voice asked back, Would he?

Jerlet’s massive bulk seemed to completely fill the metal chamber. Linc couldn’t breathe.

“Not too comfortable in here with both of us,” the old man muttered as he fingered a complicated row of buttons. “Not very comfy in here by myself, come to think of it.”

The top of the chamber swung open, and Linc realized it was another hatch. Jerlet grinned at him, then pushed against the sides of the chamber and floated up through the overhead hatch. Linc took a deep breath, glad to feel un-squeezed.

“Come on up and see the view!” Jerlet called. His voice suddenly sounded very distant and hollow.

Linc crouched slightly and sprang straight up. He shot through the open hatch and past Jerlet’s floating obesity—

And nearly screamed in terror. He was in the outer darkness! Surrounded by stars and the blackness of the outside where there was no air or warmth or--

He felt a hand grabbing at his ankle and Jerlet calling, “Hey, whoa, take it easy.” He realized that there was warmth and air to breathe.

Jerlet was chuckling as the two of them floated slowly in the star-flecked darkness. Yet it really wasn’t dark, either. The stars glowed all around them, over their heads, below their feet.

“What is this place?” Linc asked. His voice seemed to float, too, strange and hollow and lost in vast distance.

“Used to bean observatory,” Jerlet’s voice came back toward him, echoing.

Slowly, Linc’s eyes adjusted to the dim light. They were in a vast round room made almost entirely of glass: transparent plastiglass, actually, although Linc didn’t know that yet. The splendor of the stars surrounded them—stars powdering the blackness of infinity with endless points of light. White stars, blue stars, red stars, yellow stars… stars beyond counting, and even swirls and loops of brightness that glowed with strangely cool blues and pinks.

Linc felt his jaw hanging open as he floated in true weightlessness, hanging in the darkened observatory dome, gaping at the enormity of the universe.

And then he glanced downward, toward where his feet happened to be pointing, and saw the yellow star that was so close. He closed his eyes against its glare, but still its image burned against the inside of his eyelids.

“We’ll be there soon,” Jerlet’s voice sounded near to him.

Linc opened his eyes and saw the old man’s face next to him, haloed by the after-image of the yellow star. “It’s coming to swallow us,” Linc whispered. “It will kill us all in fire.”

Jerlet’s booming laughter surprised Linc. It echoed all around the huge dome.

“You’ve got it just about entirely wrong, son,” the old man said. “The yellow star isn’t coming toward us, we’re heading for it. And it’s not going to kill us—it offers us life. Hope. If we can get to it before this bucket falls completely apart!”

Linc started to say, I don’t understand, but it had become such an overworked Linc that he felt ashamed to use it again.

“C’mon down this way,” Jerlet tugged at his wrist, “and I’ll show you something.”

They swam weightlessly through empty air down to a patch of shadows that were deeper than the darkness of the rest of the dome. A spidery framework took shape as they approached, and Jerlet reached out a practiced hand for it.

“Careful,” he said to Linc. “Slow your speed or you’ll hurt yourself when you hit the deck. Just ’cause you’ve got no weight doesn’t mean you’ve got no inertia.”

He can never say more than three words in a row that make sense. Linc thought. He always uses words I never heard before.

The deck was made of cold metal, and Linc could see that several desks and odd-looking instruments were attached to it. The biggest loomed far over their heads; the cylinder of metal struts that Jerlet had grabbed a few moments earlier.

“Telescopes,” Jerlet said. “Devil’s own time keeping them aligned right. Our closing rate is outrunning the old computer program and I haven’t figured out how to update it. Gyros must be wearing out, too.”

Linc shook his head and said nothing.

Jerlet squeezed his soft body into a seat behind one of the desks. “Take a look at this screen,” he said as he touched some buttons on the desk top. Linc noticed that the desk top seemed to be nothing but buttons, row upon row of them.

The screen lit up and showed a fiery yellow ball that seethed and shimmered and shot out tongues of what could only be pure fire.

“That’s the yellow sun we’re heading for,” Jerlet said. “I tried for years to find out if the old generations had a name for it, but the tapes don’t have their star catalogues on ’em. Not anymore, anyway. Or maybe I just haven’t found the right tape— Anyway, I’ve named it Baryta, in honor of its color and in memory of my long-lost education in chemistry. That’s the name for our star: Baryta.”

A tiny voice inside Linc’s head began to whisper, He’s sounding crazy again.

Linc watched Jerlet’s face. The slanting light from the yellow star threw weird long shadows across his stubbly jowls and strongly-hooked nose. The creases under his eyes and around his mouth became deeply-shadowed crevasses. The glow from the little viewscreen where the blazing star smoldered wasn’t enough to penetrate the shadows.

“Now my frightened-looking friend,” Jerlet smiled up at Linc, “take a look at this —”

H e touched another set of buttons, and the screen went blank for a moment, then showed a picture of a bluish-green circle. It was flecked with white spots. It seemed to be hanging in outer darkness, because all around it was nothing but black.

“The new world.” Jerlet’s voice was barely audible now, a low rumble of hope and awe. “It’s a planet, Linc. A world that orbits around Baryta. I call it Beryl. It’s the destination that this ship has been heading for, for who knows how many generations.”

“A… world?”

“An open, beautiful, free world, Linc. With good air and clean water and more room than any of us could even imagine. Like the old Earth, except better: cleaner, freer, newer. It’s our destination, Linc. Our new home. That’s where we’re going!”

Slowly, Linc began to learn.

With Jerlet as a teacher, and the ship’s computer and memory tapes to help, Linc began to understand the who, the how, and the why of life.

The ship was incredibly old, so old that no one—not even the computer and its memory tapes—knew how long it had been sailing through space. Linc saw that the Living Wheel, the section where he had lived all his life, was actually the outermost wheel in a series of twenty concentric circular structures. The tube-tunnels linked them together like spokes that radiated outward from the central hub. The hub was Jerlet’s domain, permanently weightless. The Living Wheel, turning endlessly on the widest arc of all the twenty wheels, was in a one g, Earth-normal gravitational condition.

The origins of the ship were shrouded in mystery, but the computer tapes made it clear that the ship’s oldest generation was forced to leave Earth, sent away to roam the stars against their will. Watching the men and women who spoke from the computer’s viewscreen, Linc saw that they regarded the Earth as evil and corrupt.

But when the history tapes showed pictures of Earth on the viewscreens, the pangs of ancient memories twisted inside Linc and made tears flow. All the old stories he had seen as a child, before the machines had died down in the Living Wheel: open skies of blue, bright soft clouds of purest white, mountains with snow on their shoulders, streams of clear water, grass and farms and forests that stretched as far as the eye could see. Cities that gleamed in the sunlight and sparkled at night. And people!

People of all ages, all sizes, all colors. By the uncountable multitudes. People everywhere.

Not everything he saw of Earth was good. There, was sickness. There was death. There was violence that turned-Linc’s stomach—gangs beating people on city streets, strange machines that spewed fire, people lying dead and twisted on the streets.

Now I know why Jerlet warned us against violence. Linc told himself.

But even at its worst, it was clear to see that Earth was a beautiful world. It made the cold metal walls of the ship seem like a prison to Linc.

“Beryl’s a planet that’s very much like Earth,” Jerlet said one evening as they watched the ancient tapes together. The viewscreen was showing a broad grassland with strange, long-tailed beasts thudding across the landscape on hooved slim legs. “It’ll be even better than Earth. Untouched. Our new world. Our new Eden.”

“When will we get there?” Linc asked.

“Not when, son… if.”

As Linc learned more of the history of the ship, he soon realized how badly the machines had fallen apart. Here in Jerlet’s domain everything worked well, but that was only one tiny section of the vast ship. Most of the other sections were shattered, ruined, decayed beyond all hope of repair.

“Some of the machines are still working down in the Living Wheel,” he told Jerlet.

“I know,” the old man said. “We spent the best years and the best people we had among us to set you kids up in a strong, safe area. But it might not have been good enough. We’re in a race against time.”

Again and again Jerlet told him the story. How the ship had come to a planet almost like Earth. How the people aboard had decided not to stop there, but to look for a world that was exactly like Earth.

“Beryl is that world… but it might be too late for you kids. It’s already too late for me.”

Jerlet explained it all. Time after time. He kept talking about the ship’s bridge, and how important it was to make the machines there work again. Slowly Linc began to realize that he was speaking of the Ghost Place, and the “ghosts” were Jerlet’s friends and companions who had been killed in some terrible accident.

The old man taught Linc how to read and count, how to work the computers, how to understand the strange words that were needed to run the ship. And every night, during dinner and far into the night, until Linc nodded and fell asleep, Jerlet would tell his own story.

The ship was never designed to function for so long without complete overhaul and repair. Although the ancient generations had been very wise, still they could not keep the ship’s machinery from slowly deteriorating.

As the ship cruised blindly through the depths of interstellar space, seeking the unknown world that was exactly like Earth, the machines that kept the people alive began to break down and die.

Whole sections of the ship became unlivable. The sections that remained intact were quickly overcrowded with too many people. Tempers flared. Violence erupted. And for generations the people of the ship lived in separate warring groups, each hating all the others, learning to fear strangers, to fight, to kill.

The cycle grew tighter and tighter. As more years passed, more and more of the ship’s complex machinery broke down. It became a greater struggle to survive, to keep the air pumps working and the farm tanks productive. Bands of marauding killers skulked through the tube-tunnels, breaking into living areas to steal and murder.

“The most ironic part of all,” Jerlet would say each night to Linc, “was that there was a scientific renaissance going on up here at the same time.”

In the hub of the ship a few dozen people had established themselves in some degree of comfort. They had control of the ship’s main power generators, and could turn off the supply of electricity—which meant warmth, air, life—to any group that displeased them. They tried to put an end to the roving bands of looters, but were never successful at it. On the other hand, the looters never tried to harm them.

The men and women who lived in the hub were scientists. Never more than a handful, they still managed to maintain themselves in relative peace.

“The things they learned!” Jerlet would always shake his head at the thought.

Their work in genetics reached the stage of perfection where they could, if they wanted to, create perfectly normal human children in their lab. The physicists probed deeply into the relationship of matter to energy, in an attempt to find a way to break free of the confines of the dying ship.

“They learned how to turn solid objects into a beam of energy, and then re-assemble them back into solid objects again, the way they were when they started,” Jerlet said. “But it took too much power for anything we really needed. We couldn’t get a rat’s whisker off the ship and back to Earth. But when we get close enough to Beryl’s surface, you’ll be able to whisk yourself down to the planet’s surface in an eyeblink.”

“But us, the kids down in the Living Wheel,” Linc always asked. “How did we come about? Why did you make us?”

And Jerlet would smile.

“We finally found a star like the Sun, and it had a few planets around it, although we were still too far away to see if any of the planets were truly like Earth. But we decided to take the risk. We had to…we knew the ship couldn’t last much longer, no matter what we did.

“I was getting to be middle-aged when we started the program to create you in the genetics lab. A hundred perfect specimens, as physically strong and mentally bright as we could produce. A hundred supermen and women.

“Well, we did it. And we set you up in the living section down in the one g wheel, next to the bridge. Six of us stayed with you the first few years, to get you started right. The servomechs did most of the dirty work, of course. But still… it was damned noisy down there!

“Around the time you were learning to walk, some marauders got to us. We protected you kids, but it cost us the lives of two people. One of them was my wife—”

Linc knew that a wife was a fully-grown girl.

“None of us could live indefinitely in a one g environment. We had all spent too much of our lives up here, in zero-g. I stayed the longest, and I worked damned hard to make sure that all the machines and servomechs would work right and take care of you until you were old enough to take care of yourselves. Meanwhile, the rest of my friends systematically finished off all the marauders on the ship. We weren’t going to let them raid you again.”

“And then you left us on our own?”

Jerlet would nod his head sadly. “Had to. Gravity got to my heart. I had to come back up here. Then, while you pups were still growing up, the rest of my friends died off, most of them in an accident down on the bridge. I’m the last one left.”

Linc heard the story many times. But one particular night, as Jerlet wound up the tale, Linc said brightly:

“Well, at least you’ll be able to come with us to the new world… if the ship makes it there.”

Jerlet fixed him with a stern gaze. “It’s up to you to make sure this bucket limps into orbit around Beryl. That’s what I’m training you for, Linc. I spent a lot of years waiting for you kids to grow up and come up here and find me. You’ve got to keep this ship going until all you kids are safely transferred to the planet’s surface.”

For several minutes neither of them said a word. Finally, Linc nodded solemnly and said, “I’ll do it. I’ll get us all to Beryl if I have to go outside the ship and push it with my bare hands.”

Jerlet laughed. “That’d be something to see!”

“I’ll get us there. All of us. And that includes you.”

But the old man slowly shook his head. “No, not me. I can’t leave this zero g environment. My heart would go poof if I even tried to walk a few levels down the tube-tunnel, where the gravity starts to build up.”

Linc said, “No… we’ll find a way… something—”

“Listen, son,” Jerlet said calmly. “I’m an old man. I might not even make it to the time when we go into Orbit around Beryl. That’s why I’m pushing you so hard. It’s all on your shoulders. Linc. You’re the difference between life and death for all your friends.”