He was sitting on a bench in one of the many parks in the capital city of the planet he Was working on. An older man came up to him and sat down next to him. Both of them were wearing coats because it wag a chilly afternoon, and the night would be much colder.
"Why are you sitting here?" asked the man.
"I'm busy being amazed," Garol answered with a smile.
"At what?"
"Plants growing right out of the earth without anything between them and bedrock but the soil. A wind that chooses its own direction to blow and sometimes has an uncomfortable temperature. A sky with no ceiling to block the view. A space so large that I can't see the end of it."
The older man nodded. "You're from Capitol."
"I guess there's no hiding that."
"Are you a sleeper?" the old man asked.
"At the moment I'm very much awake, and loving it," Garol answered, with the courtesy of somec-users, who tried to avoid mentioning their virtual immortality around those who did not use it-- why cause hurt feelings?
The older man nodded, and thrust his hands into the pockets of his coat. "You're the genius, aren't you?" he asked. "The man who made the machines they're testing."
His picture had been in every newsloop for weeks-- a visit from a man of his stature and interplanetary fame was a major event, overshadowing all the local happenings. "Yes, I'm Garol Stipock."
"Then you are a sleeper."
Garol nodded absently. "Yes," he said, "I am."
The man lifted his hand out of his pocket and a needle was in it. It was obviously set on full. Garol struck out at the man and that was why the needle tore his arm apart and did not do any damage to his nervous system. He would live.
It took weeks in the hospital, however, before his arm had healed enough that he could leave. Visitors from the project came from time to time to report on progress-- so far his machines had been invariably accurate-- but the first item of business after he could leave the hospital was an appearance in court.
It was a small, private interview. The judge, the lawyers, and the defendant made a small group, comfortably gathered on soft furniture, and they all asked Stipock and the older man questions.
"Why did you try to kill Dr. Stipock?" they asked.
"He's a sleeper," the older man said.
The judge nodded. "You're an Equalizer, then?"
The older man sneered. "An Abolisher, now, even if I was an Equalizer before!"
Stipock caught the judge's eye. The judge explained. "Equalizers want to dismantle the merit system and make somec available for everyone. Abolishers simply want to kill everybody who uses somec."
"No!" the older man said, his face lit up by rage. "No!"
"Whom do you want to kill, then?" Stipock asked. "And why me?"
The older man narrowed his eyes. "I don't want to kill anybody."
Stipock smiled, though his arm suddenly throbbed as if to remind him of how close he had come to death at the hands of this man. "You only want to tear their arms off?"
"I kill where I must."
"I was no threat to you, sir." Stipock was no longer smiling. He recognized something in this man's eyes. "Why did you have to kill me?"
"Somec is the enemy."
"But I'm not in charge of somec. I just use it. Like millions of other people."
"Millions of other people!" the man said scornfully. "To a universe of trillions, they decide who deserves eternity and the rest of us deserve to die like worms!"
"I didn't make the system," Stipock said lamely.
"Yes you did," the older man said. "You keep it alive. You. Single-handedly. And as long as you and people like you live, it will stay alive!"
Stipock looked around at the others in the room, puzzled. The prosecutor leaned over and touched his good arm reassuringly. "Don't expect them to make sense. They're just fanatics, like a religion."
The word religion stirrred a memory, and Stipock turned back to the old man. He remembered those eyes, that expression, now: They were Amblick's eyes, his earnest look.
"This man isn't crazy," Stipock said. "He just believes something."
The older man nodded. "That's right. The truth. I knew that you could see it. Even the liars know it's true, but you're not a liar. You're a man with true greatness," he said.
The judge was exasperated. "Why in the world did you try to kill him, then?"
"Because," the old man said impatiently, as if they should already have known, "as long as great men are on somec, everybody can point to the merit system and say, 'A man like that proves that we need somec-- he proves that the merit system lets the great men live forever.' While most of the somec users are venal little power-hungry bastards like you." And he stared the judge in the, eye, until the judge looked away, his face rigid with anger.
"The proof is obvious, and this questioning is doing nothing but letting a madman have a few listeners to his madness. Guilty. Sentence is prison for five years and then transshipment to another world. Got to stop this cancer before it spreads."
The defender said, "Sir, if you wish to stop the cancer, why do you send him as an emissary to another world?"
"To get him off of this one," the judge answered curtly. And then both the judge and the defender were startled by the older man's laugh.
"What's so funny?" the judge snarled.
"You dig a cesspool and then you swim around in it, complaining of the smell! They'll tear you up, someday! They'll rip you to pieces!"
"Who?" asked Stipock. "Who'll do this?"
"Don't bother, Dr. Stipock," the prosecutor said. "They never admit there's an organization. Even under drugs. I've never seen control like it."
"There is no organization," the old man said. "Who needs an organization? I mean that everybody, all the real people, all those who don't get somec and know they never will-- all of them will rise up and tear you sleepers out of the walls and rip you to pieces and feed you to the animals. They'll kill the starship captains and the scientists and the politicians and the businessmen and the society ladies and the lifeloopers and all the other bastards who think they can live forever while the rest of us die, and there won't be any more somec and people will be human beings like they were meant to be!"
The old man's face was red; he was standing up; he was trembling, and a shaking finger was pointed at Stipock's heart, and the embarrassed judge had them take him out. "I'm so sorry," the judge kept telling Stipock. "But you see how hard it is to keep them under control."
Stipock shook his head, insisting that he was not distressed. "There are criminals everywhere," Stipock said. And then he asked, "What if the man's right? What if everybody who wasn't on somec did revolt?"
The Judge laughed off the idea. "There's no chance of that. There's hardly a soul alive who doesn't live in hope of someday getting enough money or enough power or enough prestige to get on somec. And most of the old people who'll never get on somec are working to help get their kids a chance. They're all the part of the system, and it's only a few lonely old fanatics like this who go crazy. But we can't prevent them. We'd have to watch every single old man and woman in the world, and we just can't do that. Sorry." And the profuse apologies went on.
But Stipock had taken the old man more seriously than he could have imagined. He had never known that anyone but his small and now dead religious group hated somec. But now he remembered all his childhood training-- training he had overcome so well. Somec was evil, but not because God forbade it. It was evil because it formed the universe of people into two groups: the few with eternal life, and the rest condemned to die.