“I don’t like the sound of no farm. I’ve had it with farms. Tell me about the other thing.”
“Not yet.” The woman was looking at him suspiciously. “First, we want to hear you talk, and make sure you can say more than a few phrases. You can start by telling us why you’re different from the rest of the farmers. They haven’t said ten words between them.”
That was a nasty question. If he seemed too different from the other farmers, these people would wonder why. If he were too similar, he would be sent out to the edge of nowhere and spend the rest of his life building a collector to sieve stray atoms from nothing.
If you have to lie, make the lies little ones. “I was the interface,” he said at last. “With people from the harvesters. When engineers came to the farm, somebody had to work with them. We all had a psych profile run. I looked like the best choice. So I got special training. I sorta liked it, wanted to do it more. Mebbe even get a job away from the farm.”
The man nodded, but the woman leaned forward and stared Aybee in the eye. Her own eyes, glowing brown with a yellow center to the iris, gave her a feral appearance. She had the dedicated face of a fanatic. “Did you interface with the group that came to the space farm from the Opik Harvester just a couple of days ago?”
“Yeah.” Aybee did not even blink. “They insisted on a face-to-face with us. I met ’em, four of ’em. My special training came in real useful.”
“How long were you with them?”
“Not long. Ten minutes, mebbe. I been wondering what happened to ’em since the impact. Were they all killed?”
“Why do you care?”
“Dunno. Guess I wondered if they were here, too. They’re like me, don’t mind working with other people. Are they here?”
“No. They went back where they came from. We saw their ship leaving.”
Aybee hid his relief. But the woman was suspicious again. “Why do you care about them? Never mind, I’ll accept that you talk. It seems to me maybe you talk a little too well. I don’t know how you could stand it on the space farm.”
“Let’s give him the test,” the man said. “If he’s lying about what he knows, we don’t have to waste more time talking.”
The woman shrugged and slid two sheets of paper across the table to Aybee. “Write your answers right there if you want to,” she said. “Or say them out loud to us. We don’t care.”
“I’d rather write. If you have something I can write with.” Aybee had seen the first page of questions and had a new worry. If the tests were all like this one, he needed time to think. He was being asked things so elementary that he was not sure how much ignorance he should feign. For what those people had in mind, ought he to know Newton’s laws of motion and Maxwell’s equations and the classical definitions of entropy? Almost certainly. But how about Price’s theorem and spinors and Killing vectors? They were on the list, too, along with Newman-Penrose constants and Petrov classification. He had written papers on each of those, but he did not want anyone to suspect that. The questions themselves were also a tantalizing hint as to the work he might be expected to do. He would certainly be working with kernels.
He took the pen they gave him and carefully wrote out his answers. Two wrong out of each ten. That ought to be about right.
Aybee could see the irony of it. For half his life he had been trying to do well on stupid tests; now he had to do just well enough to be accepted but badly enough to be plausible.
He handed back the sheets and for the first time in his life sweated while he waited for test results. The man was reading his answers, and his expression was guarded.
At last the man looked up. “Did you work with the kernel on the space farm?”
“Some. Part of my job—to check power use and rotational state. Learned how to measure the optical scalars. That was all.”
“You’re not afraid to go near a kernel?”
“Not if the shields are in good working order.”
“I’ll second that.” The man flipped the pages casually onto the table. He turned to the woman. “What do you think, Gudrun? It’s your decision.”
She nodded. “Do you work hard?”
At last, a question that Aybee could answer comfortably. “You bet. Harder than anyone I know. Try me.”
“I guess we will. You have to know one more thing before you say yes or no. If you join us, you’ll have a chance to become a full part of our group. We have big plans, but we’re few in numbers. That means wonderful opportunities. But many people do not understand the importance of our goals. Once you join us, you’ll be considered a rebel by the Outer System. Now let me ask you directly. Do you want the assignment?”
“I think so.” Aybee nodded his head slowly. He had to appear interested, but cautious. “The Outer System never did nothing for me. I never asked to be out on the farm. Guess I’d like to know more about your deal, though, before I’m sure.”
“Fair enough.” For the first time the woman smiled and held out her hand. “You’re on for a trial run. I’m Gudrun. This is Jason. What’s your name?”
Spacebooks. What’s my name? Better pick somebody real. Aybee groped for the name of his first instructor in calculus. “Karl Lyman.”
“Welcome to the program, Karl. Are you tired?”
“Nothing special.”
“Then let’s go and eat.” She saw his expression and laughed. “I don’t mean with me. Don’t worry, we know what people are like in the Outer System. You can have your own cubicle; you won’t have to look at anybody taking meals. But I want to find out a bit more about you and tell you what you’ll be doing.” She gave him another look, one of a shared secret. “I liked your answers to that test, and I think maybe you were wasting your time on the farm. You may be able to go a lot farther with us than you realize.”
As they stood up, she moved to his side and looked up at him. “One thing, though. You’re too tall for this place. We don’t even have a bed to fit you. When you’ve started work, Karl, we’ll give you a spell in a form-change tank and cut you down to size.”
Aybee put on a worried frown. “D’ yer think it’s safe? I mean, we’ve had bad trouble with form-change equipment on the farm. Bad stuff coming out of it. Suppose yours don’t work right, either?”
Gudrun and Jason exchanged a quick look. “Don’t worry your head about that,” the man said. “That’s something we can guarantee—absolutely. You’ll have no trouble with our form-change equipment.”
They led the way on into the interior of the ship. Aybee, following close behind, pondered that final remark. Gudrun and Jason, whoever they were working for, had plenty of confidence and conviction. They acted as though they had a direct pipeline to the secrets of the universe. Could they deliver a safe form-change operation, though, where the whole Outer System was failing?
Aybee wondered if he had become an instant convert to their fanaticism. Somehow, he was sure they could deliver what they promised.
PART THREE
Chapter 18