Machine Colonel Zafar was sitting up. His eyes were less remote, his breathing easier in the hypobaric atmosphere. But the golden glow was even more intense, the perspiration streaming from his brow.
And his eyes were on Boysie Gann. "You!" he cried. "Swan take you! Get back to the Machine, you traitor!" And he made the curious looping gesture with his arm that Gann had seen in Harry Hickson . . .
And then Boysie Gann remembered what the star was that lived in the heart of the Swan.
"Alpha Cygni!" he cried. "Deneb! The star in the constellation of the Swan!"
Zafar fell back on an elbow, glaring at him. "Your dirty mouth profanes the sacred name," he hissed. "The Starchild will punish you. In the heart of the Planner's citadel—in the bowels of Terra, where the Machine plays with its human toys—the Starchild will seek out and destroy its enemies!"
His eyes closed and he gasped for breath. Gann looked at Quarla and her father, but their expressions were as clouded as his own. "Star-child?" whispered the girl. "Father, do you know what—"
The doctor rumbled, "No, Quarla. I know nothing. Only rumors. A myth that there is a Starchild, and that he will bring the faithful of the Church of the Star home to Deneb's planets one day."
"No rumor!" shouted the glowing, golden man, and he paused to cough hackingly. "The Starchild lives! I've seen him in the heart of the Whirlpool! He has touched me with his radiant hand!"
But Dr. Snow was beside him, thrusting him back down on the bed, hushing him. "No!" cried Zafar wildly. "Don't stop the word of the Starchild! See here!"
And with a convulsive effort he drew out of the pouch of the one garment he still wore a stiff, cream-colored sheet of parchment. "The Writ of Liberation!" he shouted. "The Starchild gave it to me to send to Earth. And I send it—now!"
The pyropod that had belonged to Harry Hickson scuttled wildly about, its red eyes bright orange in the high-oxygen air. It hissed and shook its scales; and Zafar's eyes, too, were almost orange, glowing with tiny, dancing golden atoms, even in the pupil. They seemed blind—or fixed on something far more distant than the walls of the doctor's clinic.
Boysie Gann felt a shudder, as if the floor of the room were shaking. It had not moved.
He staggered and thrust out a hand to support himself, yet there was no motion. "To Earth!" cried the sick man, and threw the sheet of paper from him. "Swan, carry it! Starchild, guide it! To Earth . . ." He broke off.
The doctor tried again to calm him, but the dying man thrust him aside. "To Earth!" he cried. "And you—spy, traitor, slave of the Machine! Swan take you. . ."
Gann opened his mouth to say something, anything, but words would not come. The room lurched again, more violently. Sickeningly. The others did not seem to notice, yet the shock came again. He stumbled and almost fell, caught himself and reached out instinctively for the fluttering sheet of paper Zafar had thrown into the air.
It slipped away from him . . . and disappeared. One moment it was there. The next moment it was gone. Where it had been Gann saw a queer flow in the atmosphere, like flawed glass, spinning.
The whirlpool grew. It enlarged and came near him, and the room moved around him once more. Frantically he tried to leap back, to save himself, but he was falling, falling into the whirlpool . . . falling . . . and falling . . .
He fell for what seemed to be a thousand years while the room turned queerly dark and disappeared. Quarla's worried face, the doctor's look of shock, Mohammed Zafar's dying glare of hate—all disappeared, and around him he saw the dim shapes of stars and planets, of galaxies and dust clouds, rippling and glowing. . .
He fell for a long time, through what seemed to be a distance of billions upon billions of empty, airless miles.
And was.
For when the falling stopped and shaken and frantic he staggered to his feet, he fell flat and cut his face, bloodied his nose against a gray, soft-lighted metal floor.
He was in full Earth gravity.
He was on the Reefs no longer. He was on a planet. And around him stretched long empty corridors of metal walls and spinning tapes and glittering lights. Machine Major Boysie Gann was home at last. He was in the catacombs under Earth's surface that housed the mighty electronic masses of the Planning Machine.
6
And that was how it began for Boysie Gann, with a twenty-billion-mile drop that landed him in a place where no one could possibly be, in the heart of the Machine.
A warm wind blew between the narrow walls of the corridor. There was a faint distant hum, overlaid by the whir and hiss of rushing tape, the drone of enormous far-off machines. Gann stood up, gasping with the effort of moving his new weight—nearly a hundred kilos, when for months he had had to carry only a fraction of that, or none. He looked around, dazed.
He was in a long corridor. At the end of it, hundreds of yards off, was a brighter light that seemed to be a room.
He stumbled toward it, stanching the flow from his nose with the back of a hand, coughing and tasting the acrid blood at the back of his mouth.
The gray light turned out to come from a strange round chamber, its roof a high concrete dome. The great floor was broken with little island clusters of consoles and control panels, unattended. The wall, almost circular, was pierced with twenty-four dark tunnels like the one he had come from.
Gann leaned dizzily for a moment against the frame of the door through which he had entered. Then, summoning his strength, he shouted, "Help! Anyone! Is anybody here?"
The only answer was a booming echo from the great concrete dome, and the distant whirring of the tapes.
The control stations were empty, the corridor vacant. Yet as Gann stood there he began to feel that the place was somehow alive. As the echoes died away his ears began to register fainter, more distant sounds —a muffled mechanical murmur, a hum and whir. All the corridors were as empty as the one he had left. He peered into them one by one, saw nothing but the endless banks of computing equipment, the jungle of thick cables that roofed them.
Almost on tiptoes, humbled by the immense hush around him, Gann went to the circular islands of consoles in the middle of the chamber. One unit, glowing with illuminated dials and buttons, faced each radiating tunnel. He stood entranced, watching the race of indicator lights across the face of each console.
He had never seen this place in his own person before, yet it was all familiar to him, had been repeated a hundred times, from a hundred angles, in the texts and visual-aid lectures at the Technicorps academy. He was in the very heart of the Planning Machine—the most secret, the most elaborately guarded spot on nine planets. The nerve center of the Plan of Man.
And the Planning Machine did not even know he was there!
That was the fact that most shook Boysie Gann, almost terrified him, not only for himself, although surely he was on dangerous ground—men had gone to the Body Bank for far less. His fear was for the Plan of Man itself. How was it possible?
With all its storage of facts on every act of every human being in the Plan—with its great taped mass of data covering every field of knowledge, every scientific discovery, every law—the Planning Machine seemed to have no way of telling that an unauthorized human being was at large in its very heart.
Gann found himself sobbing. Dizzied, he clutched at the edge of the nearest console and frantically tried to make sense of the unfamiliar glitter of dials and scopes and racing lights. There was a linkbox! For a moment he was hopeful—yet the linkboxes to the Machine were meant only for those who had received communion, who wore the flat plate in their skulls that gave the Machine access to their cranial nerve centers. Dared he use the linkbox?