Ryeland set down his untouched glass violently, slopping it over. "What organisms live in space?"
"Why," the colonel said seriously, poking at his plastic toys with a finger, "creatures very much like these. They were modeled from life. And before that—the creators of the reefs themselves, simple little one-celled organisms, originating—everywhere!"
Ryeland forced himself to speak slowly, methodically: "The Machine's orders came this morning. I'm to investigate the steady-state hypothesis. And ever since then I've been thinking—about Hoyle's steady-state theory, and about another speculation he made. That life was born before the planets were, created by the chemical action of ultraviolet light in the cooling clouds of gas and dust around the sun. But how could it survive? The clouds disappear as the planets form."
"Life adapts," the colonel said heavily, and poked at his dragons.
He took a fresh drink. "Leaving out the intangibles," he lectured, "life is a phenomenon of matter and energy. The Hoyle Effect provides the matter, in the clouds of new hydrogen that are always being born between the stars. And life makes its own energy."
"How?"
"By fusing the hydrogen into heavier elements," the colonel said solemnly.
He flicked a switch. A screen slid down out of the ceiling. An image appeared on it, the image of little darting bodies, flashing with light, crossing the field of vision. The picture might have been one of pond life under a microscope, except for the difference in shapes . . . and for the fact that these creatures gave off a light of their own. "The fusorians," said the colonel somberly. "Hardy little things. They fuse hydrogen atoms and generate energy, and they live in space."
Fusorians! Ryeland felt his body tense as though an electric shock had passed through it. He was conscious of the colonel's gaze on him, and tried to relax, but the colonel studied him thoughtfully for a moment.
He said only: "No wonder you're excited." He blinked at Ryeland mildly. "This thing is big. It means that the planets are not lonely oases in a dead desert of emptiness. It means that they are islands in an infinite ocean of life—strange life, which we had never suspected."
"But why haven't any of them ever appeared on Earth?" Ryeland demanded. Infuriating how slowly Lescure spoke! It was life and death to Ryeland—perhaps it was the answer to all his questions—but the colonel treated it only as another lecture, and a rather dull one.
The colonel shrugged. "Perhaps they drown in air. I suppose the heavier elements are their own waste products, and therefore poisonous to them." He took another pull at his drink. "Perhaps these creatures built the Earth," he said meditatively. "It accounts for the proportions of heavy elements better than the theories of the cosmologists. But of course it doesn't really matter—not to the Plan, I mean."
Ryeland frowned. There had been something almost disloyal about the colonel's tone. He changed the subject. "These things—" touching the plastic models—"they aren't fusorians?"
"No. They're pyropods. They live in the reefs." Irritably the colonel waved a hand. The screen glowed with another picture.
Ryeland leaned forward staring. "Fairyland!" he breathed.
The colonel laughed harshly. The view on the screen was of a delicate tracery of glowing vines and plants, where birdlike things moved effortlessly among the branches.
"Call it that," said the colonel. "I called it other things when I was there. You see, there is a constant new flow of matter into the universe. There is a steady rebirth of hydrogen between the stars. I know—I've seen it!"
Nervously he took another drink. "It was a few years ago. The pyropods had been seen, but none had been captured. The Planner ordered me out on a hunting trip to catch one."
Ryeland frowned. "Hunting? But the Plan of Man has no energy to waste on that sort of thing! Every calorie must go to some productive use!"
"You're an apt pupil," the colonel said wryly, "but it was the Machine's decision, not mine. Or so the Planner said. At any rate, we took off for the planet beyond Pluto. Was there one? It was necessary to assume one, to provide a home for the pyropods—or so we thought. We knew they had no home from Pluto sunwards ....
"It was a long trip. You know why interstellar flight has never been possible. There's power enough for us to reach the stars, but the difficulty is in finding the reaction mass to hurl away. Once you pass Orbit Pluto you begin to face those problems in practice. We were in the old Cristobal Colon, with hydrion jets. Our reaction mass was water. All we could carry was barely enough to land us on the hypothetical planet. We were to reload there for the flight home, if we found it." The colonel chuckled dryly. "We didn't find it," he said.
"Then—how did you get back?" Ryeland demanded, startled.
"We blundered into something. What we called the Rim. Don't confuse it with the Reefs of Space—it wasn't them, not for billions of miles yet. It belongs to the solar system, a scattered swarm of little asteroids, strung in a wide orbit all around the sun. A ring of snowballs, actually. Cold snow—mostly methane and ammonia; but we found enough water to refill our tanks. And then we went on. The Machine's orders had been definite."
The colonel shivered and finished his drink. "We went out and out," he said, mixing a fresh one, "beyond the Rim, until the sun was just a bright star behind—then not even particularly bright. We were braking, on the point of turning back—
"And then we saw the first Reef."
Colonel Lescure waved at the strange scene on the screen. He began to look alive again. "It didn't look like much at first. A mottled, lopsided mass, not much bigger than the snowballs. But it was luminous!"
Ryeland found himself gulping his drink. Silently he held out the empty glass and the colonel refilled it without pausing.
"An unearthly place. We came down in a brittle forest of things like coral branches. Thickets of shining crystal thorns snagged at our space-suits when we went out exploring. We blundered through metal jungles that tripped and snared us with living wires and stabbed at us with sharp blades. And there were stranger things still!
"There were enormous lovely flowers that shone with uncanny colors —and gave off deadly gamma rays. There was a kind of golden vine that struck back with a high-voltage kick when you touched it. There were innocent little pods that squirted jets of radioactive isotopes.
"It was a nightmare! But while we were reviving and decontaminating our casualties we worked out the natural history of the Reef. It was a cluster of living fusorian colonies!
"We counted almost a hundred species. They must have grown from a few spores, drifting in the interstellar hydrogen. The rate of growth must be terribly slow—a few inches, perhaps, in a million years. But the fusorians have time.
"We looked at each other. We knew we had found something more than we had been sent for.
"We had found a new frontier."
Ryeland was on his feet, a sudden uncontrollable surge of emotion driving him there. "Frontier? Could—could people survive out there?"
"Why not? They're rich with everything we need. There's hydrogen for power, metal for machines, raw materials for food. We brought treasures back with us! We loaded our ship with every sort of specimen we could carry. Fantastic diamond spikes, and masses of malleable iron in perfectly pure crystals. Living prisms that shone with their own cold glow of fusion. Spongy metal mushrooms, in hundred-pound chunks, that tested more than ninety per cent uranium-235. Much more than critical mass! And yet they didn't explode, while they lived. But one chunk did let go after we had jettisoned it in space, and after that we were careful to divide the masses."
"So that's why the Machine needs a jetless drive?" Ryeland saw a ray of understanding, stabbing through the gray fog of confusion which had followed him from his suite in the maximum-security camp. "To reach the reefs of space—because they're beyond the range of our ion drives!"