But by the same token, it was highly dangerous for them to wander around. Ryeland stopped short and waited until someone else came by. "Sir!" he called. "Excuse me!"
It was a straight, gray-haired man in the blue of the Planner's guard, wearing the silver mushrooms of a Technicorps colonel. "What is it?" he demanded impatiently.
"We're ordered to compartment 93," Ryeland explained.
The colonel looked at him thoughtfully, "Name," he snapped.
"Ryeland, Steven. And Oporto."
"Umm." Presently the colonel sighed. "All right," he said grouchily. "Can't have you messing up the Planner's car with your blood. Better get secured. This way." He led them to a tiny room, ushered them in. "Look," he said, flexing the knob of the door. "No lock. But I should warn you that most of the corridors are radar-trapped. Do you understand?" They understood. "All right."
He hesitated. "By the way. My name's Lescure, Colonel Pascal Les-cure. We'll meet again." And he closed the door behind him.
Ryeland looked quickly around the room, but it wasn't the splendor of its furnishings or the comfort of its appointments that interested him. It was the teletype. Quickly he reported in for himself and Oporto.
The answer came:
R. Action. Await further orders.
Oporto was beginning to look flushed and to tremble. "Always it's lige this," he said thickly. "I ged a cold and if I don't tage care I'm sick for weegs. I'm feeling lighdheaded already!" He stood up, tottering.
Ryeland shook his head. "No, you're not lightheaded. We're moving." The hand at the controls of the sub train knew whose private car he was driving down the electrostatic tubes. The giant sphere was being given a feather-bed ride. They had felt no jar at all on starting, but now they began to feel curiously light.
That was intrinsic to the way of travel. The subtrain was arrowing along a chord from point to point; on long hauls the tunnels dipped nearly a thousand miles below the earth's surface at the halfway mark. Once the initial acceleration was over, the first half of a trip by subtrain was like dropping in a super-speed express elevator.
Absently Ryeland reached out an arm to brace Oporto as the little man weaved and shuddered. He frowned. The helical fields which walled the tunnels of the subtrains owed part of their stability to himself. On that Friday night, three years before, when the Plan Police burst in upon him, he had just finished dictating the specifications for a new helical unit that halved hysteresis losses, had a service life at least double the old ones.
And yet he could only remember that much and no more.
Had something been done to his mind? For the thousandth time Ryeland asked himself that question. He could remember the equations of his helical field theory that transformed the crude "magnetic bottles" that had first walled out the fluid rock, as early nucleonicists had walled in the plasma of fusing hydrogen. Yet he could not remember the work that had led him to its design. He could remember his design for ion accelerators to wall the atomic rockets of spaceships, and yet the author of that design—himself—was a stranger. What sort of man had he been? What had he done?
"Sdeve," Oporto moaned. "You wouldn't have a drink on you?"
Ryeland turned, brought back to reality. A drink! Oporto was feverish. "I'd better call the machine," he said.
Oporto nodded weakly. "Yes, call in. I'm sick, Sdeve."
Ryeland hesitated. The little man did look sick. While he was standing there, Oporto blundered past him. "I'll do id myself," he grumbled. "Get out of my way."
He reached with fumbling fingers for the keyboard, his face turned angrily toward Ryeland. That was a mistake; he should have been watching. In the unsteady footing he lurched, reached for the keyboard, missed, stumbled and fell heavily against the teletype.
It toppled with a crash. There was a quick white flash from inside it and a sudden pungent smell of burning.
Oporto got slowly to his feet.
Ryeland opened his mouth and then closed it without saying anything. What was the use? Obviously the teletype was out of commission; obviously Oporto hadn't done it on purpose.
Oporto groaned: "Oh, dabbit. Steve, where'd thad colonel go? Maybe he could ged me something . . ."
"Take it easy," Ryeland said absently. The little man's condition was clearly not good but, in truth, it was not Oporto that was on Ryeland's mind just then. It was the teletype.
Always, since the first days after school, there had been no move Steve Ryeland made, no action he performed, without checking in with the Machine. Even at the maximum-security camp there had been a teletype on direct linkage with the Machine, standing in one desolate corner of the bare barracks.
He felt curiously naked, and somehow forlorn.
"Steve," said Oporto faintly, "could you ged me a glass of water?"
That at least was possible; there was a silver carafe and crystal tumblers, fired with gold designs. Ryeland poured the little man a glass and handed it to him. Oporto took it and sank back against a huge, richly upholstered chair, his eyes closed.
Ryeland roamed around the little cubicle. There wasn't much else for him to do. The colonel had warned them against radar-traps in the corridors; it was not to be thought of that they would go out and take the chance of being destroyed by a single wrong move.
For they were Risks; and the iron collars they wore contained eighty grams of a high explosive. A step into an area proscribed for Risks (and such areas were common all over the world) meant that a triggering radar beam would touch off the explosive. Ryeland had seen that happen once. He didn't want it to happen to him.
Brig or no brig, this room was part of the Planner's private car and it was furnished in a way that Ryeland had not seen in three years. He fingered the drapes around a mock-window and reached out to touch the polished mirror of a hardwood table top.
Three years ago Ryeland had lived in a room something like this. No, he admitted, not quite as lavish. But a room that belonged to him, with furniture that no one else used and a place for his clothes, his books, the things he kept around him. But in that life he had been a cleared man, with a place in the* Plan of Man and a quota to be met. That life had ended three years ago, on that fatal Friday afternoon.
Even now, after endless sessions of what was called reconstructive therapy, Ryeland couldn't understand what had happened to him. The vaguely worded charge was "unplanned thinking," but all his merciless therapists had failed to help him recall any thoughts disloyal to the machine. The only material evidence of unplanned activities was his collection of space literature—the yellowed old copies of books by Ley and Gamow and Hoyle and Einstein that he had saved from his father's library.
Of course he knew that the books were not on the list approved by the Plan, but he had intended no disloyalty with his hobby. In fact, as he had many times told the therapists, the special equations of the helical field were related to the mathematics of the whole universe. Without knowing the equations for the expansion of the universe and the continuous creation of matter in the space between the galaxies, he could not have improved the helical units for the subtrain tunnels.
But the therapists had always refused to specify exact charges. Men under the Plan no longer had rights, but merely functions. The purpose of the therapists was not to supply him with information, but to extract information from him. The sessions had failed, because he couldn't remember whatever it was that the therapists had been attempting to extract.