"I know. Call it youthfulness. Something that you and I, my dear Ellen, have started to leave behind."
"Maybe you, Doctor."
"All right, Ellen, all right, let's not get into an argu ment."
He fell silent and looked out over the expanse of green that had run riot through the ship. His gaze drifted back up toward the smoke. Was it smoke or condensation venting from a broken pipe? And where were the people? The system was still running, almost the entire ship could be programmed to go on automatic, but certain routine repairs definitely required human intervention.
"Shall we go back up the other way and investigate the smoke?" Ellen ventured.
"Seems a logical place to start."
He looked over the railing for Shelley, but she was nowhere in sight.
"Say, look, Shelley," Ian started, " don't give me that crap about a bad radio. If we get back into the ship and I discover it to be working, I'm going to kick your butt."
He stopped for a moment. An image of Shelley's back side flashed in his mind and suddenly, for the first time, it was an appealing backside. Naw, must be the isolation of three months out, Ian thought.
"Shelley!"
His voice was suddenly cut off by a loud, piercing scream.
"Ian!"
"Shelley, what the hell is going on! "
"Ian!"
"Shelley. Shelley, what the hell?"
There was no response.
"Ian, down there to the left." Ellen was pointing into the heavy growth, and Ian saw the canopy of brush mov ing as if something were passing underneath it.
"Ian, this is Stasz. What the hell is going on? That girl of yours nearly busted my eardrums."
"I don't know, I just don't know…" His voice tapered off. This is what he had feared from the start. The re sponsibility so far had been merely to point out a direction or, at worst, to mediate fights between the team members. But in his deepest fears he had dreaded this moment. Someone was in jeopardy and he had to decide. Worse. He had to got into what was obviously a dangerous sit uation.
He stood frozen by the railing watching the overgrowth ripple toward the middle of the cylinder. He wished more than anything to be absolved, to suddenly disappear back to his little cubbyhole in the stern of the Discovery where he could hide away with his books and forget.
"Ian!" Several voices called at once, all cutting in, demanding. Vaguely he looked at Ellen and saw her mouth moving behind her faceplate, shouting at him in exasper ation.
"Ian, we're coming over," Stasz said. A grunt of assertion surfaced from Richard.
The words started to form in his throat: "Yes, come over and find her, I'm going back to the ship." But that's not what came out.
"Stay there, by the time you suit up they'll be gone. Ellen, go back for a stun gun, I'll try to follow."
He pushed off from the platform, descending the steps in long lazy bounds with each jump landing slightly harder than the one before. He had to be careful not to push off too enthusiastically, otherwise it would be one long jump to the bottom, with an impact at killing velocity. He sud denly remembered some of the cheap space thrillers he had witnessed on the videos, where strange radiation- laden mutants preyed on extraordinarily buxom young nubiles. He actually chuckled at the thought. Shelley was flat- chested, acned, skinny, and bespectacled-he had never seen a monster eat anyone like that before.
What the hell was he laughing at? Maybe that crap was true after all. Ian reached the bottom of the stairs and was confronted by a wild tangle of growth. A virtual jungle canopied the living units and turned the designed green- spaces into nearly impenetrable wildernesses. Ian rec ognized the plant as a variation of the kudzo, which still flourished in the south and had been used aboard the colonies as a quick-growing greenery and food source.
He soon found a number of broken branches, then another broken branch, ten feet farther on. There ap peared to be a tunnel. He surveyed it cautiously for sev eral long minutes, and even as he looked at it, he suddenly realized that the cylinder was getting darker.
"Ellen, are you still up there?"
"No, I'm back in the ship getting the stun gun. Stasz will be coming back with me."
"The lights are shutting down." He felt a chill. His mind raced over the fact and then the obvious answer came to him. Even here, a thousand years out, the old custom of day and night remained. The unit's artificial sun was shutting down. Well, if he was going to find Shel ley, he had to push on.
Taking a deep breath, he started into the tunnel. "I'm entering a tunnel about fifty feet from the base of the stairs. It seems to run along a walkway now overgrown, you'll see the broken branches."
He broke into a slow run, but within a hundred yards he had overtaxed the cooling system of his suit and his own body.
Hell, why am I wearing his pressure cooker? Those plants are oxygen producers, I should crack the helmet.
But the old Ian was still very much alive-he kept the helmet on while contemplating the toxic trace elements that could have filtered into the closed environment.
After several more minutes the twilight seemed to darken appreciably, and against his better judgment Ian turned on his helmet light to follow the trail. He knew that it was a clear beacon of warning, but he wasn't up to crawling through the dark.
He passed a spidery walk that gently arched over a complex of glass-walled buildings, all of them covered by the everpresent kudzo. He estimated that he was nearing the center of the cylinder.
He stopped for a moment to look back through a break in the canopy of foliage. The far cylinder wall was visible, and he saw twin specks of light suddenly appear against it.
"Ellen? Stasz? I think I can see you."
"Ian, where are you?"
"About halfway into the cylinder."
"I'm facing you right now, you should be able to see my helmet light."
From atop their high perch, Stasz suddenly saw the flicker of light, a long way off.
"I think I see you, Ian. Say, Ian, I see something else. It looks like a fire, can't be more than a couple of hundred meters beyond you."
There was no response.
"Ian. Ian?"
He looked at Ellen.
"His light just disappeared," Ellen whispered.
"Oh, shit."
"Holy shit," Ian whispered.
The club was poised alongside his head. The semiclad woman holding it had already convinced him of the need to remove his helmet by her vigorous hand motions and waves of the knotted cudgel. He took a deep breath of the clean-smelling air. Why the hell had he kept that damn helmet on anyhow?
"What do you say?" the woman asked softly, and as she spoke several of her companions came out of the shadows.
Ian sifted through her speech pattern. It seemed to be based on Old English, to be sure, actually Old American, to be more precise. As his mind searched for the right words, his thoughts calmed down. He was engaged in an academic problem and when lost to such efforts, all else was forgotten.
" Oly hit?" the woman asked questioningly.
"No, holy shit," Ian repeated slowly.
"Shit is not holy, only the light is holy; you must be crazy." The others around her chuckled.
"Yeah, I think I am for even being here," Ian replied.
"What you say?"
"Never mind."
"Are you of the Dissenters?" a lanky, graying man asked, stepping from out of the. shadows.
"What the hell are Dissenters?" Ian replied.
"He must be crazy," a heavy set man next to the graying one interjected.
"You dressed like that loud-mouthed girl. She of your circle?" the woman asked.
"Yeah, ahh, yeah, the girl, she's of my circle."
"Tell me, friend, do you accept the concept that individual meditation must occur within a collective body?" the gray one asked. "Or do you accept the right of dissent from the collective?"