Oporto opened his eyes, stared and emitted a strangling sound. "She —She—" He swallowed and clutched at Ryeland. "Steve, it's the Planner's daughter!" he*gasped, and flung himself to the floor. "Please!" he begged, writhing toward her. "Please, we didn't mean to bother you!"
But the approach must have alarmed her. Not very much; for she didn't raise her voice; but she stopped singing in the middle of a note and said, quite softly: "Guards."
There must have been a microphone to pick up her words, for there was a sudden commotion outside. But more than that, she had defenders nearer still. The doves on her shoulders leaped into the air and flung themselves at the prostrate little man. Sharp beaks tore, wingtips like knives beat at him. The door opened and four tall women in the blue of the Planner's guard raced in.
Death had not been far from Steve Ryeland for these three years. It had worn the neat white smock of Dr. Thrale, the fat, bald, oily man who had been his chief therapist. It had whispered in the soft, asthmatic voice of Dr. Thrale, warning him a thousand times that he stood in danger of the Body Bank, unless he could recall a message from Ron Donderevo, unless he could find the right answers to nonsense questions about a string of words and names that meant nothing to him —spaceling, reefs of space, Donderevo, jetless drive.
Death had taken other forms. The concealed trigger of a radar trap, the menacing horns of a radar-headset, the more subtle and more worrisome peril of orders to the Body Bank; these were the deaths he had known and learned to live with. These women, though, carried projectile weapons, not radar. Queer, thought Ryeland, even in that moment, for if carried through the thought indicated that there were some dangers to the person of the Planner's daughter that did not come from classified Risks like himself. Could ordinary citizens—cleared citizens—be dangerous to the Plan?
But there was no answer to that question just then. Oporto was screaming under the attack of the silvery doves, the woman guards were bearing down on them.
The girl stopped them all with a single word. "Wait." She swept a mound of bubbles away from her face to see better, exposing a throat of alabaster. Her eyes were green-gray and serene. She looked very lovely and very young.
She caught Ryeland completely undefended.
In the isolation camp there had been no women—not even a pin-up picture; and here he was in the presence of a most beautiful woman, in what should have been the privacy of her bath. Apart from everything else, she could hardly have been unaware of the shattering effect she had on him. But she seemed completely at ease. She said, in a voice more polite than curious: "What do you want?"
Ryeland coughed. "This man needs a doctor," he said hoarsely, looking away.
The first of the female guards laughed sharply. She was tall, brunette; a heroic figure of what might have been a lovely girl, if reduced ten per cent in all dimensions. She said in a voice that just missed being baritone: "Come on, Risk! We'll take care of you and your friend too!"
But the girl in the tub shifted position lazily. She waved an arm through the foam, watched the bubbles billow in slow concentric waves and said: "Never mind, Sergeant. Take the sick man to a doctor, if that's what he wants. Leave the other one here."
"But, Madam! The Planner-"
"Sergeant," said the gentle voice, not raised at all; the sergeant turned almost white. She gestured at the others; they half carried Oporto out. The door closed behind them, cutting in twain a look of pure hatred and contempt that passed from the sergeant to Ryeland.
The doves, which had been describing precise circles in the air, shook themselves and returned to the girl's shoulders. Their hot small eyes never left Ryeland, but after a moment they began to coo again.
"You're an iron-collar man, aren't you?" the girl asked suddenly.
Ryeland nodded. "A Risk. Yes."
"I've never spoken to an iron-collar man" she said thoughtfully. "Do you mind if we talk? I'm Donna Creery. My father is the Planner."
"I know." Suddenly Ryeland was aware of his rumpled denims, of the fact that he was an intruder on this girl's bath. He coughed. "Don't you think your father—I mean, I don't mind if we talk, but—"
"Good," said the girl, nodding gravely. She shifted position to get a better look at him. The bubbles rippled wildly. "I was afraid you might be sensitive about it," she told him. "I'm glad you're not. What's your name?"
Ryeland raised his chin and spread the collar of his denim shirt to display the iron band.
"Steven Ryeland," she read, squinting to make out the glowing scarlet letters with his name and number. "Why, I think I know that name. A doctor? No. A rocket pilot?"
"I am a mathematician, Miss Creery."
She cried: "Oh, of course! Your folder is on my father's desk. I saw it this morning, when we were leaving Copenhagen."
An anxious eagerness took his breath. For three years he had been trying to learn the charges against him. The therapists had refused to give him information. Their questions had been carefully phrased to tell him nothing—they had asked him a thousand times what the word space-ling meant, and punished him more than once for guessing that it meant an inhabitant of space.
"Did the folder tell—" He gulped. "Did it specify any charges against me?"
Her greenish eyes surveyed him, unalarmed.
"You displayed unplanned interests."
"Huh? What does that mean?"
"You possessed a secret collection of books and manuscripts, which had not been approved by the machine."
"No, I didn't!" A cold breath touched the back of his neck. "There has been some terrible mistake—"
"The Planning Machine permits no mistakes," she reminded him gravely. "The titles of the forbidden books were listed in the folder. The authors were scientists of the wicked times before the Plan. Einstein. Gamow. Hoyle—"
"Oh!" He gasped. "Then those were just my father's books—a few that I saved. You see, when I was a kid I used to dream of going to space. I've met Ron Donderevo. I wanted to pilot a spaceship, and discover new planets. The Machine killed that dream."
He sighed.
"It transferred me out of the Technicorps and reclassified me as a research mathematician. It assigned me to an installation somewhere underground—I don't know where it was; we were not allowed even to guess whether we were under dry land or the ocean floor or the polar ice. I don't remember, even, if I ever guessed. My memory has . . . holes in it. I had two helpers—a teletype girl and a little man named Oporto, who is a sort of human computing machine. The Machine sent us problems, like the problem of hysterisis loss in the subtrain tunnels. They were problems the Machine couldn't answer, I suppose—even it doesn't know quite everything. Anyhow, we solved the problems.
"Of course I wasn't supposed to need reference books, because I could ask the Machine for any fact I wanted. But for the sake of efficiency it had let me keep a few handbooks, and I had brought those books of my father's among them."
He smiled at her hopefully.
"You see, for a man who had set his heart on space, life in a tunnel isn't very exciting. For a sort of hobby, I read those books about space. They were full of old theories about the nature of the universe. Using modern mathematics, I worked out a new set of equations to describe the expanding universe and the continuous creation of matter in the space between the galaxies—"
Her frown checked him. This was not quite the sort of talk for a young girl in her bath!
"But that was not unplanned," he finished desperately. "It was just a harmless hobby. In fact, it was useful to the Plan. The equations that I used in improving the helical field units were derived from the equations that describe the continuous creation of matter and space."