And something moved around Gann's neck. He couldn't see what Hickson was doing, was sure that the tubby little hermit had not brought any tools or instruments. Yet there was a sudden constriction at his throat.
He heard the lock snap . . .
The collar fell off his neck and clattered to the floor of the cave. Gann leaped to his feet and spun, white-faced, to be ready for the explosion. But no explosion came.
"Now, rest easy, Boysie," complained the hermit. "You're spooking Omer here. That thing can't blow up any more." Casually he picked up the collar and lifted it to examine it in the light of a mass of luminous diamond that would have been worth millions on earth. "They make them real nice," he said admiringly. "Lot of detail in this thing. Too bad it can't be something more useful." And he tossed it to the rear of the cave. "Well," he said, "you about ready to move on now?"
Gann stood silent for a second, looking at him. "Move on where?" he asked.
"Oh, don't worry, Boysie. I know what you were thinking. Plain as day. You figure I ought to go back and get examined by the Planning Machine, 'cause you don't quite understand what I'm up to, but you think it's unplanned. Well, that's right. Unplanned is what I am. And I don't mind if you do what you're thinking, and take my laser-gun and call help so you can get out of here. But I'm not going with you, Boysie. Make up your mind to that."
"All right," said Gann, surrendering. But in his mind he was not surrendering at all.
Hickson had put it very mildly when he said that Gann wanted to take him back for study. Gann not only wanted to; he intended to. In fact, he had never intended anything as hard in his life—had never been so determined or insistent, not even about his career in the service of the Machine, not even in his great love for Julie Martinet.
This man Harry Hickson was an unplanned disaster in the making.
Whoever he was, however he did what he did, he was a terrible danger to the Plan of Man. Gann could almost hear the instructions of his briefing officer back on Pluto—if he had been able to report Hickson's existence to him, and if the briefing officer could issue an order: Subject Hickson is a negative factor. His uncatalogued knowledge must be re-trieved for the Plan. Then each organ of his unautomated body must be obliterated . . .
But how to get him back into the jurisdiction of the Planning Machine?
There had to be a way. There would be a way. Machine Major Boysie Gann was sure of it. All it required was that he be patient—then, when his chance came, be ready.
Gann said, "If you mean it, then let's take your gun and signal right now. I'm ready to move onf"
Harry Hickson led Gann to a point of red-scaled rock, puffing and wheezing. On his bald scalp the fledgling pyropod wheeled and slithered, keeping its bright red eyes on Boysie Gann.
"See up there?" called Hickson over his shoulder. "That star there next to Vega . . ."
Boysie Gann followed his pointing finger. "You mean Theta Lyrae?"
The hermit turned and looked at him, mildly surprised. "That's right, Boysie. You fellows learn a lot in that spy school. Too bad you don't . . . Well, never mind that. One I mean, it's just below Theta Lyrae. The faint red one. Forget the name, but that one right there. That way's Freehaven."
Gann felt his blood pound. "Freehaven? I've heard of it. A colony of reef rats."
"Aw, Boysie, don't say it like that. They're free men—that's all. That's the biggest place in the Reefs, Freehaven is. Like a . . . well, what would you call it? A kind of a town only it's one whole cluster of Reefs, maybe a hundred thousand miles across. And maybe half a billion miles from here."
"I see," said Gann, thinking with exultation and pride, What a prize to bring back to Pluto! A whole city to be planned and returned to the brotherhood of the Machine! He could almost see the glowing jet trails of the Plan cruisers vectoring in on the cluster. . .
"Don't get your hopes up," Hickson said dryly. "You ain't there yet, Boysie, and maybe even when you get there you won't find it too easy to pick up a phone and call the Machine. Now hush a minute while I send for your ride out there."
He picked up the clumsy old laser gun he had taken out of its greasy rag wrappings back in the cave, checked its power settings, raised it, and aimed carefully at the distant red spark that was the line-of-sight to Freehaven. Three times he snapped the trigger, then lowered the gun and turned to Gann.
"That's all there is to it. Take 'em awhile to get here. Might as well go back to the cave."
But he paused, glancing at Boysie Gann as if he was mildly embarrassed about something. Then he seemed to come to a decision.
He turned back to the stars, set down the laser pistol, and stretched out his arms. His lips moved, but Gann could hear no sound. On his bald pate the pyropod hissed and slithered. The hermit's whole body seemed stretched, yearning, toward—toward what?
Gann could not tell. Toward Freehaven, perhaps. Toward the faint red star that marked its position—or toward Theta Lyrae nearby—or toward the great bright giants of the Summer Triangle that marked that part of the sky, Vega, Altair, and Deneb . . .
Then Harry Hickson relaxed and the pyropod scuttled down from his scalp onto his shoulder as the hermit raised one arm and made a sinuous, undulating motion. Like the wriggle of a snake, Gann thought. Or the looping movement of a swan's neck.
Swan? Some faint old memory stirred in Boysie Gann's mind. Something about a swan—and a star. . .
But it would not come clear, and he followed Harry Hickson back to the cave.
Harry Hickson's little reeflet was one drifting island in an expanding infinity of matter and space. The doctrine of the Neo-Hoyle Hypothesis was clear: The universe was limitless, in space, in time—and in matter. New mass was forming everywhere in the form of newly created hydrogen atoms as the old complexes of matter—the stars and the planets, the dust clouds and the galaxies—were spinning slowly apart.
Hickson's reeflet was an infant among bodies of organized matter, probably only a few millions of years in age, in size no more than a dust mote. Yet it was like most of the universe in that; for most matter is young. The spiraling growth in rate of creation of new matter makes that sure. Some galaxies, and even some of the reefs between them, are old beyond computation and imagination, because the steady-state universe has neither beginning nor end. And life is the oldest phenomenon of all. Older than the oldest stars-but yet young, though those scattered and forgotten stars are black and dead.
Life in space has lived—literally—forever.
Every possible biology has been evolved, through every conceivable evolutionary test.
Watching Harry Hickson play with his pet pyropod, Boysie Gann reflected that the strangest life form he knew was man. For here was the pudgy, balding hermit—unplanned and deviant, a deadly danger by every standard of the Planning Machine—solemnly attempting to teach his pyropod to fly.
He lifted the little horror off his head and set it carefully on a high ledge, then retreated. Spitting and hissing, its red eyes glittering, its scales seeping the smoke of its internal jet fires, it wailed in a thin, raucous screech for him to come back. Then, despairing, it launched itself out into the air, missed Hickson by yards and crashed into the rock wall at the far side of the cave, where it remained, writhing and hissing, until Hickson took pity on it and picked it up. "It's a wonder it doesn't dash its brains out," muttered Gann the fifth time the little beast crashed into the rock.
"Oh, I guess so," Hickson agreed mildly. "Don't suppose it has any, really, though. A pretty clumsy kind of beast it is—right, Omer?" And he patted the little monster with the appearance of real affection for a moment, then sighed and set it down. He carefully inverted a crate and set it down over the pyropod, then put a mass of silvery fusorian coral upon the crate.