True, there were some puzzling problems. Some of them, indeed, were almost frightening.
What could Quarla Snow hope to gain by pretending that Harry Hickson was dead? What did she think Gann had seen on the little reeflet? A ghost? It was no ghost that had fed him, healed him, taken the collar from around his neck.
And it was no coincidence, he was coming to believe, that had brought him to Hickson's world in the first place.
There was no proof, of course. But he was sure that M'Buna, perhaps Colonel Zafar as well, was in some way related to Hickson and the treasonable activities that were going on all around him in this unplanned, decadent, dangerous world of the Reefs. He had heard hints. An unguarded word, a look, a remark that was halted before it began. Nothing tangible, but enough to make him sure that there were links between the Reefs and the Plan worlds—links that extended even into the Technicorps, even into the vital defenses of the Spacewall itself.
If he could get back— No! he thought. When he got back, with the proof of this spreading rot, with the najnes of the conspirators and the evidence that would send them to the Body Bank, then no reward in the Machine's power would be too great to give to Machine Major Boysie Gann. And Julie Martinet would be waiting. . . .
Meanwhile there was a lot of work to do.
Gann dared not make notes or attempt to secure tapes or photographs; but he missed no opportunity to scout and examine every part of this queer community of Freehaven. Even the name was strange and somehow disconcerting. Freehaven.
As if "freedom" were important!
Yet Boysie Gann could not help but notice that strangely the decadent, unruly mobs that dwelt in Freehaven seemed somehow sturdier, somehow happier, in some way more alert and even more prosperous than the billions who lived under the all-powerful and protective embrace of the Plan of Man. . . .
It was confusing.
But his duty was clear. Gann set himself to learn all there was to know.
Freehaven consisted of a couple of thousand people, scattered over a hundred fusorian-grown rocks and a hundred thousand miles of space. Many of the rocks had been terraformed, Gann learned, with the lichen-ous air plant he had first seen on Harry Hickson's little reef. The rest of them were airless, but all of them supplied useful metals and minerals to the bustling economy of Freehaven.
Gann was not sure just what he had expected—tattooed savages, perhaps, dancing to a wild tomtom—but he had surely not been prepared for this modern, busy community. There were farms and herds—of spacelings and even, in one case, a stock farm with sixty head of what seemed to be Guernsey cattle, stolen somehow from the Plan of Man and transported in some improbable manner out to this hydrogen-based worldlet twenty billion miles from the sun. On one airless reef that was mostly pure fusorian iron was a steel mill—one of the small nuclear-powered units developed by Technicorps engineers for use on the asteroids, to save the high cost of lifting terrain steel into space. Gann marveled at it all. He admitted it to Quarla Snow and her father, with whom he was staying as guest—or prisoner, he was never sure which—at a meal when he was served as fine a steak as he had ever tasted, with wines that bore the bouquet of French vineyards.
Dr. Snow boomed, "It isn't only the food that is good here, young man. It is life! It has a flavor here that the Plan worlds will never taste."
Boysie Gann said engagingly, "You may be right. I . . . well, you have to excuse me. You see, I've never known anything but the Plan."
Quarla's father nodded briskly. "Of course. None of us had, before we made our way out here. None but Quarla, at any rate, and a few others like her who were born here. They've lived in freedom all their lives."
Gann said, with just the right inflexion of doubt, "But I don't understand. I mean, how does it work? Who tells you what you're to do?"
"No one, boy! That's the whole point of freedom! We came here because we didn't want to live under the collar of the Machine. We work together, and as you see we work well. Prosperity and happiness! That's what we've built out of nothingness, just as the fusorians build our worlds for us out of thin gas and energy. Why, when Harry Hickson and I came here—" He broke off and tugged at his chin, frowning at Boysie Gann.
"Yes?" said Gann. "You and Hickson. . ."
"It was different then," said Dr. Snow shortly. "Boy, do you still want us to believe that story of yours about Hickson? A man I helped to bury myself, right under the rocks of his home?"
Gann said carefully, knowing that he was on dangerous ground, "Well, sir, of course I don't know anything about Hickson. But what I told you was true. The man who summoned Quarla said he was Harry Hickson, and I had absolutely no reason at all to doubt him at the time."
Snow nodded somberly and said no more; but Gann noticed that he no longer seemed to enjoy his meal.
Gann put the matter from his mind. He was thinking of something bigger. He was thinking of the gratitude of the Machine when he returned, riding one of Quarla Snow's spacelings—as she was even now teaching him to do—bringing word of the community of Freehaven and its precious crop of several thousand splendid candidates for tissue salvage at the Body Bank!
He rose and strolled outside with Quarla. Harry Hickson's pet pyropod, which Quarla had insisted on rescuing from the cave when her father arrived to take them off the reeflet, hissed and slithered around the area outside the door where its staked chain permitted it to move.
He took her hand and held it, as they looked over the green ramble of glowing vines toward the distant beacon that was the central urban area of Freehaven. "You promised to let me ride one of your spacelings," he said, squeezing her hand and grinning. "If I'm going to be a permanent inhabitant here, I'd better start learning my way around."
She looked at him thoughtfully, then smiled. Under her golden hair her eyes were an intense blue. "Why not?" she said. "But not out of the atmosphere, Boysie. Not at first."
"I thought the spacelings brought their air with them."
She nodded but said firmly, "Not out of the atmosphere. For one thing, there might.be pyropods."
He scoffed, "So close to Freehaven? Nonsense, Quarla! What's the other thing?"
She hesitated. "Well," she began. She was saved the trouble of answering. A pale blue wash of energy brightened up the sky over their heads.
Both of them turned to look; a spacecraft was coming in for a landing, full jets blazing to slow its racing drive. Whoever it was who was piloting the craft, he was in a hurry. In a matter of seconds the ship was down on the lichenous lawn before Dr. Snow's clinic, its lock open, a man leaping out. He glanced toward Quarla and Boysie Gann, cried, "Emergency!" and turned to receive something that was being handed to him out the lock of the ship.
Quarla cried, "I'll get my father. Boysie, run and help them!" Gann was already in motion, hurtling across the lichenous ground, though the two men in the rocket needed little help. What was coming through the lock of the ship was a man on a stretcher, wrapped in white sheets. In the light gravity of the Reef the two of them were perfectly adequate to handle it. Gann bore a hand anyway.
"Sick," panted one of the men. "Don't know who he is, but he collapsed in my spaceling corral. Thought it might be something dangerous—"
Gann nodded, helped lift the stretcher on which the sick man was thrashing and babbling . . .
And almost dropped it, light gravity or not.
He stood there, jaw hanging, eyes wide. Face streaming with perspiration, eyes vacant, head tossing from side to side in delirium, the face of the man on the stretcher was nevertheless very familiar to Boysie Gann. It was the face of Machine Colonel Mohammed Zafar.