She said seriously: "No, I suppose not. But if I were you, I think I might. You said you were a mathematician. If I were a mathematician, and wore the collar, it would be only one more problem for me. I would find a way to solve it."
He said with a touch of anger: "The collar was invented by Colonel Zamfirescu, the best engineer in the Technicorps—before he was salvaged himself. He thought of everything."
"It's only a metal band, Steven."
"The toughest armor plate in the world! And inside it there's a decapitation charge, fused with a hydrogen power cell—it won't last forever, no, but it will keep full power for a century! And that's longer than I can wait. And the collar's booby-trapped. If I try to cut it open—if I even try to unlock it, and use the wrong key, or turn it the wrong way-it will kill me on the spot. Have you ever seen a decapitation charge go off, Miss Creery? I have."
She shuddered, but she said: "If I were you, I would run away."
"Not very far! Radar runs faster. And even if you could get away— out to the Cold Planets, say, or to one of the orbiting stations around Mercury—there's a timing device in the collar. It has to be reset periodically, with a key. If not—boom. And you never know when; just that it will be less than a year."
"Oh." She shook her head sadly. "Then you must take it off," she said wisely.
He laughed out loud; he couldn't help it. The idea was preposterous!
"Don't laugh, Steven. Ron Donderevo did," she told him.
"Donderevo! What do you know about Donderevo?"
She said, "Oh, a little. I knew him, you see, when I was very small. I remember seeing him with the collar-and I saw him again, without."
He stopped, staring. He began: "You saw Donderevo—"
But there was a sudden, harsh knocking at the door. "Miss Creery!" a worried male voice clamored. "The Planner has sent for that Risk!"
Ryeland sat bolt upright. For a moment he had forgotten; the voice had brought him back to the realities of his life.
The girl said, "You'll have to go, Steven." She whispered, and one of the Peace Doves restlessly rose from her shoulders and circled the room, its hot red eyes fixed on Ryeland. It touched the door, and without sound the door opened. "Be careful," the girl said gently. "And don't think too much about Angela."
"All right," Ryeland said, numb, walking like a mechanical man to where the radar-horned officer of the Planner's guard waited for him, with an expressiofi like malevolent granite. It wasn't until the door had slid silently closed behind him that he remembered he had never mentioned the name of the girl who betrayed him, his teletype girl, Angela Zwick.
For all of Ryeland's life the Planner had been watching him. That fearless, genial, giant face had looked down on him from stereo posters in the home of his parents, the barracks of the Technicubs, the classrooms of his school—in every public square, and all the laboratories and buildings where he had worked. Ryeland knew that face as well as his own father's—better—and so did every other human alive.
The Planner sat behind a great hardwood desk in a chair that was all air cushions and cunning springs. He was looking absorbedly through a folder of papers on his desk. Uncomfortably Ryeland stood waiting.
There was no resemblance between the Planner and his daughter. She was brunette and lovely, with the face of a child saint; he was square and silver, a lion's face. His hair was short, gray-white; it sat firmly on his head like a collision mat. And over his head, on the back of the great chair, a steel-gray falcon sat frozen; but it was not an ornament, for slowly metal-sheathed eyes opened and tiny bright red eyes peered out at Ryeland.
At last the Planner looked up and smiled. He said in a velvet bass voice: "Son, don't you check in?"
Ryeland jumped. "Oh. Sorry, sir." He hurried over to the gold-plated teletype and tapped out his name. The station plate on the machine said simply: "ONE".
The old man chuckled. "You're Steven Ryeland. I saw you once before, but you wouldn't remember that."
Ryeland started. "Sir?"
"It was a long time ago, boy," the Planner said contemplatively. "I visited your home; you were a baby. Don't look shocked. You see, I knew your father."
Ryeland staggered. He was half floating as the hurtling sphere reached maximum velocity, hundreds of miles under the open air; but it was not that which made him dizzy, nor even the fact that he had not eaten for nearly a full day; it was this man on the other side of the desk. He said incredulously: "Sir, my parents never said anything about knowing the Planner. Surely they would have been proud. . . ."
The Planner laughed, a glorious huge laugh. "My boy," he cried, "it's a wise child, eh? And you are not that wise. You don't know much about your parents. They were not proud of knowing me at all; they were ashamed because, you see, your father hated me very much." He nodded, the smile drying on his face. His voice became like the rasp of a file. "Your father was an enemy of the Plan!" he barked.
"Sir," Ryeland protested, "I don't know anything about my father. He disappeared when I was young. And my mother never told me that."
"She wouldn't," the Planner said savagely. "She was a dangerous woman, but not a stupid one. Neither of your parents were stupid, Ryeland; so how is it that you are?"
Ryeland said baffled: "Sir?"
"You're a Risk!" rasped the Planner. "You should not have dared defy the Plan. That was an act of stupidity!"
Ryeland took a deep breath. Perhaps this was his chance to get his case on the record. He began: "Sir, let me explain. I had no intention of defying the Plan. There was a girl who reported me, and the Machine reclassified me as a Risk. I think this was an error, but—"
"You question the Machine?"
"No, sir. Not the Machine, but the information that—"
"Never mind!" snapped the Planner. "I don't want you to incriminate yourself further. You are your father's son, and you must remember that everything you do is suspect for that reason."
It took Ryeland's breath away. For a moment he couldn't speak. He stood there, weaving slightly in the unsteady footing as the sphere rolled restlessly about in the beginning of its up-drive back to the surface.
Then he burst out: "Sir, do I understand you? You're saying that the Machine considers me a Risk because of what my father may have done before I was born! That's not fair. That's-"
"Fair!" bellowed the Planner, while the raven opened its tiny eyes and whirred restlessly over his head. "What sort of word is that, Ryeland? 'Fairness.' 'Freedom.' 'Democracy.' All those words your father used to use, they run in the blood. And they mean nothing. What does 'fairness' have to do with seventeen hundred and fifty calories a day?
"Fairness," he sneered, "is used up, gone, spent! Do you know what your blessed ancestors did, boy? They mined 'fairness' and 'democracy' from the untapped resources of the world. They didn't invent them, they mined them—just as the old farmers mined minerals from their cornfields, twenty crops of corn and a foot of soil! Well, the topsoil's gone now. And so is fairness and freedom. The world is a closed system now boy, and there isn't enough to go around!"
The ferocity of the outburst left Ryeland stunned. "But—but sir," he said, "surely the far planets offer new frontiers, new resources—"
"Be still!" barked the Planner, the square silver head thrust forward like a hammer. Above him the steel-gray falcon whirred theateningly.
The Planner glowered up at Ryeland, shifting his position in the compensating chair as the subtrain began its up-grav thrust. Weight came back to normal, then more than normal. Planner Creery said: "Ryeland, you're like your father. He never learned that the frontier was gone, but you must. The Plan of Man is based upon a systematic reduction of the pernicious personal liberties that almost destroyed our world. War! Dust bowls! Floods! Forest fires!" Each word was a foul epithet; he spat them at Ryeland. "We have to pay the bill for the waste that has gone before —waste that your father, and those like him, would have spread. Never forget it, boy!"