Ryeland looked again at the teletype. The truly important part of the message also needed some thought. Machine Major Chatterji is authorized to reconsider your status. Then this man here, with the liquid black eyes and the lean, hooked nose, this was the man who could turn the key that would unlock the iron collar?
Or was that the wrong assumption to make? The Machine was always exact. But sometimes the mere human who read its message failed to understand the meaning. For instance, did that message mean that Machine Major Chatterji* could clear Ryeland—or did it mean that he could downgrade him . . . say from Risk to raw material for the Body Bank?
It was a sobering thought.
The faded unreality of everything in his past except his knowledge of science left Ryeland with a nagging sense of bewilderment and loss.
"Why does the Machine need a jetless drive?" Uneasily, he put the question to Major Chatterji. "The ion jet ships are good enough to reach the planets—and anyhow the Plan of Man seems to be retreating from space and burrowing into the Earth."
"Stop it!" Chatterji warned him sharply. "Such speculation is no part of our function."
Ryeland insisted, "The Machine seems to be afraid that a jetless drive in the wrong hands would be dangerous to the Plan. Whose hands could that be? The Plan has conquered all the planets, taken in the whole human race. Except for a few fugitives like Ron Donderevo—"
"Don't talk about him!" Chatterji looked shocked. "Our own function here is enough to keep us busy without any such unplanned talk."
Ryeland shrugged and gave it up, and Chatterji at once reverted to his cheerful bustle.
"We've got to get you settled," he beamed, his gold-rimmed glasses flashing. "Faith! Come in here, girl."
The door opened. A tall blonde strutted in. She wore tight scarlet pants and a brief scarlet jacket. Two centuries before she would have been a drum majorette; under the Plan she had a more important role to play. "This is Faith, Steve. She's one of our Togetherness girls. She'll help you get adjusted here, I promise!"
The Togetherness girl smiled a lacquered smile. She piped: "'Perform your own function perfectly—and your own function only.' That's our motto here, Mr. Ryeland." It was like a doll talking.
"And a splendid motto it is!" Major Chatterji endorsed, beaming. "Get him started, Faith. And don't forget the Togetherness meeting at nineteen hundred hours."
Ryeland's mind was teeming with jetless drives and the steady-state hypothesis and three missing days and Major Chatterji is authorized to reconsider and the fact that the Planner had known about his interview with Donna in her bath. But this was important too; he swept the other things out of his mind and tried to pay attention to what the Togetherness girl was saying.
"You'll like it here, Steve," she whispered, solemnly squeezing his arm. She smiled up at him, and steered him down a gray-walled concrete tunnel. There were no windows. "This is Point Circle Black. Sounds confusing, doesn't it? But you'll learn. I'll teach you!" Point Circle Black was the headquarters office, where Major Chatterji, the administrative officer, fussed endlessly over his problems of supply and personnel. "Point Triangle Gray." Faith sang, waving at an intersection ahead. "That's the medical section. Tests and diseases, injuries and—" she giggled naughtily—"supply depot for the Body Bank."
Ryeland grunted.
"Oh, that's nothing for you to worry about, Steve," she said reassuringly. "Trust Major Chatterji. You do your part and he'll do his; that's Teamwork."
Ryeland mumbled, "I understand. It's just that—well, I've had to face the chance of the Body Bank for three years now. I admit I don't like the idea of being butchered."
She stopped, scandalized, her perfect eyebrows arched, her clear eyes wide. "Butchered? Steve, what an unplanned word!"
"I only meant—"
"The Planned term," she said firmly, "is 'salvaged'. And you can't deny the logic of the Machine, can you?" She didn't wait for an answer. She was well into her set speech. "The Body Bank," she parroted, "provides the attack team with the necessary stimulus to insure maximum effort. If the effort is successful, the team has nothing to fear. If the effort fails-"
She shrugged winsomely. "The welfare of the Plan of Man," she said, "requires that they must make their contribution in another way. That is, their physical organs must contribute to the repair of more useful citizens. That's Teamwork!"
"Thanks," said Ryeland grumpily. The isolation camp on the rim of the Arctic Circle, he thought wistfully-it had been hard and dull and uncomfortable; but at least he hadn't been exposed to lectures from teen-aged girls!
Point Triangle Gray was a Security designation; all the names were. The whole area was called Team Center. It might have been under Lake Erie or the Indian Ocean; Ryeland never learned.
At Point Triangle Gray he was given his tests. He caught a glimpse of Oporto, looking healthy enough but somehow crestfallen; they waved, but there was no chance to speak as Oporto came out of one laboratory room while Ryeland was going into another. At least, Ryeland thought, the little man hadn't been salvaged.
Then he forgot about Oporto for five rigorous hours. Point Triangle Gray measured his functional indices and his loyalty quotients with every test that he had ever undergone before and one or two that were brand new to him. The lab men stripped him and clamped him in their metering devices, while the interrogators demanded every detail of his life, back to the toys his mother had given him for his third birthday.
In these tests he tasted the after-bitterness of those sessions in the therapy room at the "recreation center"—those long, endless ages when he was punished and punished again because he could not make sense of the crazy questions the therapists flung at him. He dreaded, each moment now, that in the next moment it would start again. Someone would fling him a question about pyropods or Ron Donderevo. Someone would ask him about the missing three days in his life, or demand that he draw them the plans for a device he'd never heard of.
But it didn't happen; the questions were all routine.
In fact, every one of the questions had been asked him before—some of them a hundred times. Every answer had long since been recorded for the memory drums of the Planning Machine. But the interrogation went on. His reactions were studied in blinding actinic light, and photographed by infra-red in what to him was utter dark. His body fluids were sampled again and again. Whole salvos of injections stimulated and calmed him, and for a short time put him to sleep—while heaven knew what pokings by scalpel and probe investigated the muscle tensions of his innermost system.
But at last it was over.
He was dressed in new crisp scarlet slacks and tunic and propelled into the gray concrete corridors where Faith was waiting, the lacquered smile on her face and her eyes glad.
"You've passed!" she sang. "But I knew you would. And now you're a full member of the Team."
She led him caroling: "Next I'll show you your quarters. They're nice, Steve! And then, oh, there's so much here! You'll like the Togetherness Canteen. You'll have wonderful work facilities. Everything is fine —and, of course, that's only fair, isn't it? Because so much is expected of you people on the Attack Team. You're entitled to a great deal in return; that's Teamwork!"
She led him about for an hour, and she did not stop chattering once. She took him to a sort of mess hall to be fed—alone; he was late for dinner, due to the tests at Point Triangle Gray, and the others were all through. The food was General Workers A-Ration—about the same as at the maximum-security camp, though somewhat less of it in terms of calories. But it was pleasant to be allowed to sit and smoke after the meal. And she showed him his quarters.