A faint murmuring vibration was borne by the air current along the tube.
Quarla Snow moved closer to Boysie Gann. Unconsciously he touched her shoulder, hurried past her. Whatever the sound was, it could wait.
The general was out of sight.
Gann stepped up his pace, gasping for breath. The air was thinner here than he was used to, as if the old refresher tanks were running dry. He glanced around and found himself at a numbered landing, where the gray light faintly showed a sign, mess c.
Long tables stretched off into darkness, where crewmen in flight must have stood to eat their meals.
Gann stopped and waited for the girls to catch up with him. "The general's gone," he said. "After his Planning Machine. I... I think he may find it, and I'm afraid of what may happen if he does." He glanced at Quarla, the concern on her face caused mostly by worry about her vanished spaceling, and at Sister Delta Four, whose hooded eyes showed no expression at all. He said, "If the Machine on this ship is half as powerful as the one on Earth—and they say it is more than that, an exact duplicate—then Wheeler just might rule the solar system with it."
Quarla Snow said only, "What do you want us to do?"
"Split up. Find him. He's armed, of course. Don't try to handle him yourself, either of you. Just scream—good and loud—so I can find you."
Sister Delta Four's pure, chiming voice was like a breath of reason.
"You are not armed either, Major Gann. You will be no more able to cope with him than we."
"Let me worry about that! Just find him if you can . . . What's the matter?"
"Nothing is the matter, Major Gann," said Sister Delta Four, her face still hooded.
"Not you. Quarla. What is it?"
Quarla said unhappily, "It... it can't be dangerous, Boysie. I mean, you don't have to worry."
Gann laughed sharply, unable to help himself; her reassurance was so pathetically out of place.
"No, I mean it, Boysie. After all, we're not here by accident. I was sent to bring you. All of you. The ... the Starchild, if that's who it was that sent me—he'll know how to handle the general."
"I don't intend to take that chance," said Gann grimly. "Quarla, go on down the passage, Julie, follow her, check all the side ways. I'll look around here and follow."
He was halfway through the ancient mess hall and the girls out of sight before he realized something.
She didn't correct me when I called her Julie, he thought. And wondered why.
Gann found himself shaking as he followed the polished guiderails between the endless rows of long, high tables—not with fear but exhaustion. Exhaustion and something else.
The more fatigue tried to slow him down, the more it weakened his control, the more he remembered that one incredible moment-long lifetime of ecstasy the Machine had given him in those last few minutes before it had gone mad. The longing was almost physical. He understood Sister Delta Four's addiction. She must be suffering far more than he— her addiction longer standing, and if what she had said was true, at a far higher pitch. Perhaps that was why she had seemed strained. . . . And Quarla Snow. The girl was sick! That golden glow had meant death to Machine Colonel Zafar and to the three in the Mercury observatory . . . death, or something far more terrifying than death.
He forced his mind away from both girls and onto his quest. It was vitally important to find the general. Gann cursed himself for not having anticipated the problem. Yet there was little he could have done; when all was said and done, the general had had the arms, not he. Not that the general needed them as far as Gann was concerned, not as long as he wore the security collar. He touched it absently. Freedom ... a world without collars ... a world where men could live like men, not like the Machine's cogs . . .
He jerked his hand away, appalled.
He realized he had been wandering among these benches for minutes! What was the matter with him? Why was his mind wool-gathering?
It could be fatigue, he thought. Or hunger. He glanced around; he was in the galley for Mess C. But no drop flowed when he tried the taps at the sinks. The pantries and lockers gave him no more. Neat labels on bins named the foods they should have contained, but every bin was empty.
No matter. Boysie Gann pushed that thought out of his mind, too, and resumed his search.
Mess B and Mess A were equally spotless and equally bare. There was nothing else on that level.
The level above was crew quarters, emptied and abandoned. No doubt Quarla or Sister Delta Four had already searched them; Gann hurried on, back into the queer gravitational inversion of the passage, to the next level. The distant mutter of sound was louder now, but he still could not identify it. . .
Until he saw the landing where a locked door greeted him with the sign, restricted to machine personnel.
Behind those locked steel doors was the muffled and multitudinous humming vibration. The lost slave unit of the Planning Machine. Still running.
Or running again? Had General Wheeler reached it, started it up? And what was it planning now?
Boysie Gann hammered on the door. "You, inside there!" he bawled. "Open up! Let me in!"
Only the dulled mechanical mumble answered him.
"Open!" he roared. "I know you're in there, General Wheeler!"
A great chuckling laugh sounded in his ear. "Not at all, Major Gann," boomed the voice of the Planner.
Gann whirled. The Planner here?
No one was in sight.
"You might as well keep going, Boysie," advised the voice of Technicadet M'Buna in a tone of friendly concern. "You're wasting time, you know."
Gann stood paralyzed. But M'Buna was dead! And so, he remembered tardily, was the old Planner; General Wheeler had shot him down. "Who's there?" he shouted. "What kind of a trick is this?"
A girl's shrill scream answered him. "Boysie! Boysie Gann, where are you?"
The voice was Quarla Snow's. Unlike the other phantoms, hers seemed to come from far away. Gann passed a hand over his forehead, sweating. It caught the metal plate of the communion badge, and he felt the old ache rising in him again—the moment of infinite joy—the longing to experience it again . . .
He repressed the thought, but not easily. What was happening to him? Was he losing his mind?
He gazed emptily at the impregnable doors. It all seemed too difficult, so much trouble—so little worth while anyway. Why had he bothered to come all this way?
And that thought, too, he realized with shock and dismay, was a sort of delusion. Something was inside his mind. Something . . .
He remembered what Quarla Snow had said, what Machine Colonel Zafar had cried out in his delirium. The mind trap. Beware of your heart's desire.
Something was aboard the Togethership with him that could enter his mind. Something that could control him almost as easily as it had directed Quarla Snow's spaceling.
He heard the rapid approach of light, running feet and turned.
"Boysie!" It was Quarla, running toward him. "Thank heaven I found you! The general—he tried to kill me!"
Gann caught her in his arms. The girl was shaking, terrified. She whimpered, "I think he's insane, Boysie. He saw me coming toward him. He shouted something—something wild, Boysie, all jumbled up, about the romantic fallacy and the need for man to be controlled—and I saw the gun and ran. He almost killed me."
Gann said stupidly, "I thought he was in here. With the Machine."
"No! He's on the next level—something called a Fire Control Stadium, the sign said. It's all bulkheaded compartments and safety doors. You'll never find him there." She took a deep breath and freed herself gently from his arms. "We ought to go on anyway, Boysie. Up to the control room."