"I didn't think they bothered to keep us alive, with that much gone."
"I guess Alec's something special. He's senior in all Heaven. He's been here—" Gutnick's voice was respectful—"almost six years."
Ryeland didn't have much appetite; but after he'd taken a few bites he had to stop in order to feed Gutnick anyway; and then he himself began to perk up. It was astonishing, he marveled after lunch, trudging aimlessly around the walks of Heaven, how the food here made life so bearable. It showed that a good diet made a happy man. It showed—why, he thought with a sudden miserable flash of insight, it showed nothing at all except that even a doomed creature like himself could submerge the forebrain in a wallow of physical pleasures. He determined to go right back to the house and get the diary, study it; plan—
Someone was calling his name.
He turned, and Oddball Oporto was rushing toward him. "Gee! Ryeland! It's you!"
Oporto stopped. So did Ryeland; and then he realized that what they were doing was appraising each other, looking for missing parts. So soon it had become a habit in this place.
"You don't seem to be missing anything," said Ryeland.
"I've only been here two days. Got here right ahead of you—I saw you come in. I guess you stopped to turn in your gear? They didn't bother with that, \vith me ... I should've stayed in Iceland, hey? Not that I hold it against you," he finished glumly.
"Sorry."
"Yeah. Well, where you living?" Ryeland told him about the Dixie Presidents, and Oporto was incredulous. "Gee! Those moldy old creeps? Say, why not come over to our place? There's two vacancies right now, and some of the boys are real sharp. You know, you lose a few parts and there isn't much left but the brain; so what you want is a few little problems to work on. Well, fellow next to me, he has a whole bunch of stuff from the Lilavata—old Hindu math problems, mostly diophantine equations when you come down to it, but—"
Ryeland said gently: "I'm working on a different problem right now."
Oporto waited.
"I want to get out of here."
"Oh, no. Wait a minute! Steve, don't be crazy. A fellow like you, you've got years here. Plenty to look forward to. You don't want to—"
"But I do want to," said Ryeland, "I want to get away. It isn't just my life, though I admit that's got a lot to do with it."
"What else? Oh. You don't have to tell me. That girl."
"Not the girl. Or not exactly. But she's part of it. Something bad's happening with the spaceling and Colonel Gottling. It ought to be stopped."
Oporto said dismally, "Gee, Steve. You don't want to talk like that. Anyway—" He stopped.
Ryeland knew Oporto well enough to wait him out. He prompted: "Anyway what?"
"Anyway," said Oporto with some hesitation, "I don't know why you want to bother with her. I thought that other girl was more important to you. You know, 837552—I forget her name."
Ryeland took it like a blow between the eyes. That number—he didn't have Oporto's queer memory for any arithmetical function, but surely it was the number of. . .
"Angela Zwick," he whispered, remembering blonde hair, blue eyes and a mouth that testified against him at his hearing.
"That's the one. Well, now! So you didn't forget her?" Oporto was enjoying his bombshell. "Why not go see her? She's been here quite a while—over in a cottage by the lake."
"She's really here? But she was with the Plan Police." Ryeland was dazed. Had the Plan come to this, that it scrapped its own undercover agents?
"Well," said Oporto judiciously, "I guess you'd say she's here. Anyway, there's a quorum present. Why not go see for yourself?"
The first sensation was shock, and a terrible embarrassment. Ryeland scraped one foot against another, staring at the girl in the wheelchair. He said her name gruffly, and then he met her eyes and could say nothing else. Angela? This thing in the chair, was it the girl he had known? She had no arms and, from the flatness of the lap robe that draped her, no legs either. But her face was intact, blue-green eyes, golden hair; her husky, warm voice was the voice he had known.
"Steve! It's good, to see you!" She was not embarrassed at all, only amused. She laughed. "Don't gawk. But I know how you feel. You've only just arrived, and I've been here twenty-one months."
Ryeland sat awkwardly on the grass before her. Her cottage lay in a little clump of woods, and there were neatly tended beds of flowers around it. Flowers! Ryeland could not remember ever having seen flowers around a dwelling before, only in parks. Though this was a kind of a park, at that.
Angela said softly: "I wondered if I would ever see you again, after what happened." She cocked her chin, and a tiny motor droned; the vel-vet-covered chin rest that supported her head seemed to have switches in it, so that she could move the wheels of her chair. Facing him, she said seriously: "You don't blame me, do you?"
Ryeland muttered: "You did your job under the Plan."
"So wise of you to say that, Steve. Ah, Steve! I'm glad to see you again." She lifted her lovely chin. "We've got so much to talk about. Take me down by the lake," she commanded. . .
For nearly three years Ryeland had rehearsed the speeches he would make to Angela Zwick if ever they chanced to come together, but in this place they were all wrong, he forgot the words. He had raged silently in his bed, he had pleaded with the stony fields of the isolation camp; now, facing the girl, he found himself engaged in a little conversation. They chatted. They laughed. It was pleasant. Pleasant! And she had put the collar around his neck.
"There is always peace in serving the Plan," she told him wisely, reading his mind.
They stopped by the lake and he sat down. "I don't even mind the collar any more," he murmured, suppressing a yawn. "Of course not, Steve."
He scratched his shoulderblades against the bole of a palm. "I never thought I'd stop minding that. Why, I remember talking to a fellow about it in the isolation camp. He said I'd get over it. I said—" He stopped, and frowned faintly. "What did you say to him, Steve?"
"Why," he said slowly, "I told him that I'd never stop hating the collar unless I was dead, or drugged." She smiled at him with mandarin calm.
Back at the cottage of the Dixie Presidents, Ryeland thumbed through the journal that had once belonged to his predecessor in the bunk. There was an entry that he wanted to read again. He found it:
This place is insidious. The atmosphere is so tranquil—God knows how!—that it is very tempting to relax and let what happens happen. Today Cullen came back from the clinic giggling because a nurse had told him a joke. He had lost both eyes!
And two days later:
Yesterday I lost my other leg. It is painful, but they gave me shots for that. I wonder why it doesn't bother me. I keep thinking of Cullen.
Frowning, Ryeland closed the book and went out to stand in the afternoon shape-up. The other Dixie Presidents were already there, and their greetings were chill. Ryeland paid very little attention, although he knew they were annoyed because he had spent so little time conforming with the customs of the cottage. He hardly even noticed the guards, with their scarlet hearts blazoned on their white tunics, as they came droning down the line with their rolls.
There was something more important on his mind. Ryeland was reasonably sure that his mind was functioning as well as it ever had. But he was finding it hard to think this matter through. He didn't mind the collar. That was the first term in the syllogism. Something in the diary supplied the second term. What was the conclusion?
"Come on, I said!" said a guard's voice, annoyed, and Ryeland woke up to the fact that his name had been called. He gawked. "Me? Are you calling me?"