Like the energy of the spaceling . . . Ryeland determined to recreate the nuclear reactions which were involved.
Until the morning that the Togetherness girl woke him with news: "Rise and shine, Steve," she sang, bringing him his breakfast. "Guess what! General Fleemer's going to be at the Teamwork conference today."
Steve got groggily to his feet. "That's his privilege," he said thickly, and looked at her, young, pretty, fresh—though she had been with him, tirelessly running errands, through half the night. "Don't you ever get tired?" he asked sourly.
"Oh, no, Steve! Eat your breakfast." She perched on his chair, watching him, and said earnestly: "We're not here to get tired, Steve. We have our job! We Togetherness girls are the connecting wires that hold the Plan of Man's circuit together."
He gaped at her, but she was serious. "That's right," she nodded. "The Plan of Man depends as much on us as on the transistors and condensers and capacitors—that's you and the other brass. Everyone is important! Don't forget, Steve: 'To each his own job—and his own job only.'"
"I won't forget," he said, and wearily drank his citrus juice. But the girl had something on her mind, he saw. She was waiting for an opportunity to speak to him. "Well? What is it?"
She seemed embarrassed. "Oh, Uh—it's just that—well, there's talk, Steve. The girls were wondering about something."
"For heaven's sake, say it!"
"We wondered," she said primly, "if our Team really had anything to do with these accidents."
Ryeland blinked and rubbed his eyes. But rubbing his eyes didn't change anything; the girl still sat there with the mildly embarrassed, mildly apologetic expression. "Accidents? Faith, what are you talking about?"
"The Paris-Finland tube," she recited. "The Bombay power plant explosion. The cargo-jet crash in Nevada. You know."
"No, I didn't know. Half those things I never heard of. Oporto's been falling down on the job."
"There are others, Steve. And what the girls are saying—" She paused. "I only wondered if it was true. They say our Team project has caused them. They even say that you, Steve—"
"That I what?"
"Oh, I suppose it's ridiculous. General Fleemer said it wasn't really true, anyway, that you had something to do with it. But they say you were involved in planning the subtrains. . ."
He grumbled, "They say some weird things. Excuse me while I dress, will you?"
He couldn't put it out of his mind. It was foolish, he thought testily. How did rumors like that start?
At the day's Teamwork conference, sure enough, General Fleemer had done them the unusual honor of attending. Ryeland scowled at him thoughtfully, then remembered the silly rumor. "Before we get started," he demanded, "has anybody heard anything about our work causing accidents?"
A dozen blank expressions met his stare. Then the head of the computer section coughed and said hesitantly, "Well, there was some talk, Mr. Ryeland."
"What kind of talk?"
The computerman shrugged. "Just talk. One of the data-encoders had heard from a cousin who heard from somebody else. You know how it goes. The story is that our work here has upset the radio-control circuits, heaven knows how."
"That's preposterous!" Steve exploded. "What the devil do they mean by that?" He stopped himself. It wasn't the computerman's fault, after all. "Well," he said grimly, "if anybody hears anything else like that, I want it reported to me!"
Heads nodded; every head but General Fleemer's. He barked testily: "Ryeland! Are we going to gossip about accidents, or is the Team going to chart its course for the day?"
Ryeland swallowed his temper. In spite of the fact that Donna Creery had put him in charge of the Team, General Fleemer's seniority made him a bad man to tangle with.
"All right," said Ryeland, "let's get on with it." Then he brightened. "I saw your report, Lescure. Want to elaborate on it?"
Colonel Lescure cleared his throat. "After a suggestion by Mr. Ryeland," he said, nodding, "we instituted a new series of X-ray examinations of the spaceling. By shadow-graphing its interior and using re-mote-chromotography analytic techniques I have discovered a sort of crystalline mass at the conflux of its major nervous canals. This is in accordance with the prediction made by Mr. Ryeland."
Fleemer demanded harshly: "What does it mean?"
Ryeland said eagerly: "It means we're making headway! There had to be some sort of such arrangement for controlling and directing the jetless drive. After yesterday's computer run, and some further calculations Oporto did for me, I asked Colonel Lescure to make the tests. He did—on overtime, as you see.
"What this means," he said, beginning to lecture, "is that we have found where the spaceling's force is generated and directed. And there's one other thing we learned from yesterday's calculations. Phase-rule analysis indicates zero possibility of any electromagnetic or gravitic force. I have the report here, ready for transmission to the Machine."
General Fleemer nodded slowly, looking at Ryeland. After a moment he said, "Does it account for what happened to the mining colonies in Antarctica?"
Ryeland was puzzled. "I don't understand. . ."
"No? I refer to the explosion of the power reactor last night, which destroyed them, at a very great loss to the Plan of Man. Not the only loss, Ryeland. A spaceship has been lost through a failure of its helical field accelerator. The same helical field which was involved in the reactor explosion—and in other accidents, Ryeland. The same field which you helped to design."
"The design is not to blame," Ryeland protested desperately. "If there have been accidents, they must be due to mechanical failure or human error or deliberate sabotage—"
"Exactly!"
"How could I be to blame for accidents in Antarctica and a hundred miles down and out beyond the Moon?"
"That's exactly what the Machine will want to know."
"Perhaps it is only chance," he suggested wildly. "Coincidence. Accidents have happened in series before—"
"When?"
"I don't remember. I—I can't recall."
He stammered and gulped, and walked away. The veil of gray fog across his past was thicker. Everything except his science was a swirl of unreality and contradiction.
Alone in his room, he tried again to come to grips with that old riddle of the three days missing from his life. What had the therapists suspected that he had done in that lost interval? Why had they expected him to know anything about a call from Dan Horrock, or about fusorians and pyropods and spacelings or about how to design a reac-tionless drive?
Lescure's story had given him clues, but they were too fragmentary to make much sense. Horrock had left the Cristobal Colon with unauthorized specimens and descriptions of the life of space. Did the Machine suspect that he had been in contact with Ryeland, before he was recaptured and consigned to the Body Bank?
Ryeland turned the puzzle over, and saw no light.
According to Donna Creery, there had really been three days between the knocking on his door and the arrival of the Plan Police. Had the knocking he remembered really been Horrock?
If so, what had erased his memory?
He stared at the wall and probed through the fog in his mind. He tried to remember Horrock, still perhaps in his uniform, soiled from his flight, perhaps bleeding from some vtound, panting with terror and exhaustion, lugging the black canvas space bag that held his stolen notes and specimens—