"Yes," she answered. "Though how anyone could expect emotional involvement from you I'll never know."
If any of those observing him had had a religious background, they would have seen the pattern he was following. But how could any of them know that there was something unusual about Garol immersing himself briefly in thestudy of business and then systematically turning the millions he earned from royalties on his Low-Density Radiation Counter into billions by investing wisely but daringly in the marketplace.
He briefly played wargames, until he won enough that he got bored. He tried every liquor made and got drunk several times, until he decided that he didn't like it much and quit again. He watched lifeloops to an extent that brought ridicule from fellow students (they briefly nicknamed him Soapwatcher). He even tried homosexuality, though it wasn't fashionable then, and he soon gave it up.
If anyone had understood the meaning behind his behavior, had thought it was anything more than adolescent experimentation coupled with a brilliant mind, his continuing refusal to go on somec would have caused some alarm. His religion was still, to some degree, controlling him. He knew it; but the fear of somec was not easy to overcome, and so he played hard and worked hard and still had half his mind unused so it could worry constantly about his appointment with the Sleeproom.
"Your contract, Mr. Stipock, says you must enter the Sleeproom in four days. We thought it would be good to remind you so you'd be certain to have your affairs in order."
"Thank you," Garol said, and celebrated his nineteenth birthday by burning the copy of the Word that he had kept all these years. It set off a smoke alarm in his apartment because he was known to be a nonsmoker, and it took three hours to convince the firemen that not only were they not needed, but the damned sprinklers had ruined his furniture.
"Just step in here," said the young woman, "and take off your clothes."
Stipock followed her into a room in the Tape and Tap that was equipped with a soft chair and a wheeled bed and several hooks to hang his clothing. He stripped, and the woman told him to sit in the chair. But he was trembling; he couldn't hang his clothes up. They kept falling.
"First time?" asked the young woman.
He nodded.
"Nothing to be afraid of. The taping is painless, and somec puts you right to sleep like a pleasant dream."
He smiled. He couldn't tell her that despite his stunning record of achievement in science, the God of his childhood was still leaning over his shoulder, forbidding him to eat the fruit of the tree of life.
The young woman put a helmet on his head, and Stipock began to sweat. My mind is being drawn out of my head, he thought, at the same time criticizing himself for being so irrational. His hands were cold; he had to will his legs to relax, so they would stop trembling so visibly, almost violently.
"That's it," the woman said. "Braintape is ready to go."
Stipock's mouth was dry, and he stammered as he asked, "What if something goes wrong with the tape?"
"No chance," she said. "The first time, we make four tapes. The first one is already played back and analyzed to make sure all your brain patterns are present. Another one is sent to the permanent tape archive. Another one is stored here, near where you'll be sleeping-- that's the one we'll wake you with. And the fourth is kept by the government, in case you should commit a crime and have to be awakened with an earlier tape. So, you see, there are four completely separate places where your memory is being stored. Nothing can happen."
Stipock felt somewhat reassured. "Thanks."
"Don't mention it. Of course, you won't remember a word of this conversation when you wake up, since it isn't on your tape. So I'm leaving a note with your records to make sure this is all explained to you. The last thing you'll remember is worrying about it!" She said it with a charming smile, and Stipock gave her one of his rare smiles back.
"Lie on the table now, and the somec will be ready in a moment."
He lay on his back on the table and looked upward at the hidden lights and the aging acoustic tile. He remembered Amblick lying on his back twelve years ago, and suddenly he was afraid again. Not worry this time, though-- naked panic, and his legs stiffened and he wanted to urinate.
"I need to go to the bathroom," he said, and his voice shocked him by its calmness.
"No you don't," said the young woman. "Because in exactly three minutes all your bodily functions will be stopped, or nearly stopped, for several years, and when you wake up then you can go to the toilet." The needle slipped into his palm.
But it was not painless. The sleep came not with a pleasant dream, but with a nightmare. The fires of hell burned in his veins, and God's Voice throbbed in his head, crying, "Treason! Treason!" You have killed God, cried the voice in his head. You were the death of the Undying Voice. If only you had listened, you would have heard him call you! And now you take Souldestroyer into your body and negate your soul.
He screamed, and the young woman was afraid, because though she had seen countless others writhe and perspire and moan on the bed as the somec worked its hot destruction, she had never seen anyone lie so rigidly, have such an expression of terror, and scream as if life itself were being taken from him.
But soon he quieted, and soon he slept like a corpse, and she connected him to the lifesupport mechanism and wheeled him to where the attendants waited. They would put him in his coffin and slide him into his place on a shelf and leave him there until he was revived in seven years.
When he awoke, he remembered nothing of the agony of going to sleep. He remembered only that he had been afraid of somec, and he had come out of it perfectly all right.
In his mind he heaved an enormous sigh of relief. And then he settled down to doing the final work on his colony-support machines, making sure the programs did the work they were supposed to do. No more overcompensation for his early inhibitions about sex and fun and profit. His life steadied out. He became stable. He was prepared to let somec keep him alive forever.
He was thirty subjective years old when the starship captain awoke him and brought him into the control room. It was the first field test of his machines, and he had insisted on being sent along. They were already in orbit around a planet that had been settled for years, and he had only had to sleep for eleven years to get there, since a child genius on Capitol had recently discovered a way to make starships that went ten times faster than they had before-- now to eighty or ninety times the speed of light. I, too, was a child genius, he remembered wistfully. It had been a lonely time, but now genius was merely expected of him, while before it had been exciting to watch how his discoveries brought a gradual increase of power and respect.
The test was easily performed-- a single orbit for each of the analyzers (though in practice, all three could perform their work in the same orbit). The program fed out dozens of maps, and on request could provide thousands more, each map providing detailed information about a particular mineral, a particular species, the weather patterns likely in a particular year.
With the survey done, they descended to the planet in a landing craft and began the painstaking work of comparing the charts with known deposits, and insisting that where the maps revealed new sources of any metal or unusual information about any species the data should be checked meticulously against the facts on the planet.
Soon the business settled into a routine mostly performed by onplanet scientists and students, and Garol had time to himself. And that was why he was alone when the madman tried to kill him.