Ryeland said to the nurse: "Excuse me. That fellow. What happened with him?"
The nurse peered past him. "Oh, that one." A shade came down over her eyes. "That was a big one. Did you know him?"
"Yes."
"I see." After a second she said briskly: "We needed a whole spine. There wasn't much point in trying to salvage any of the rest of him."
Ryeland stumbled out into the corridor, following the corpse of the nervous man, who never again would have to be nervous. He glanced over his shoulder at the nurse and said: "Good-by."
She said: "I'll be seeing you."
Outside Heaven, thirteen billion human beings worked, studied, loved, quarreled and in general fulfilled their tiny assigned missions under the Plan of Man. In Saskatchewan an engineer turned a switch and the side of a mountain lifted itself, grumbled and slid into a lake, revealing an open vein of low-grade uranium ore, one of the last deposits left to tap. In the hillside town of Fiesole, in Italy, a Technicorps colonel made a field inspection of the new reservoir. The water level had risen a gratifying nineteen inches since his last report. He observed, from his flat-bottomed boat, how a certain jumbled pile of masonry he remembered seeing was now almost entirely submerged; it was the Pitti Palace, but he had never heard the name. (The Ponte Vecchio was already twenty feet under the bottom of his boat.) Under Honduras, a subtrain shaft collapsed and eighteen hundred migratory agricultural workers were simultaneously cremated and dissolved in molten rock. The Planner, returned from the Moon, signed an order which would ultimately lower the level of the Mediterranean sea ninety feet, creating thousands of miles of new land around its dwindled shores and providing an enormous hydroelectric station at the Straits of Gibraltar. . .
But on the isle of Cuba, no echo of these rumblings penetrated. Everything was calm. Everything was pleasant. And Steve Ryeland fought against it as hard as he could. He quarreled vigorously with his Dixie Presidents. The senior cadaver was hurt, shocked and mortified; as a consequence, half an hour later he lost count of trumps and suffered an eight-hundred point penalty in the afternoon's bridge game. Ryeland was well pleased. Quarreling stimulated his adrenals. He went out to find someone to quarrel with.
His logical candidate was Angela, and he found her where he had left her, sunning herself in front of her cottage. "Steve, dear," she whispered, but he did not want to be charmed.
He said brutally: "I just made my first donation. Guess what it was?" He gave her a chance to scan him and look perturbed, then said: "Nothing much, only blood. Lucky, eh?"
It was terribly bad manners. She said, "Yes, Steve, that's lucky. Must we talk about it? Oh, I know! Let's go down to the lake again. It's warm today, and there's bound to be a breeze at the fountains—"
"That's all you care about, isn't it?"
"Steve!"
"Food and comfort. Are those the only things that matter to you?"
Angela said petulantly, "Steve, you're in an unpleasant mood this afternoon. If you don't want to come with me I'll go alone."
"Do you care?"
She opened her mouth, closed it, looked at him and shook her head. She was angry; but she was also untouched by it. As Ryeland was an irritation, she removed herself from it.
He stood there thoughtfully. Even after Angela had flounced away, as best a woman with neither arms nor legs can flounce, he stood there, thinking. Knowing that there were tranquilizers flooding his bloodstream was one thing, knowing what to do about it was something else. He could keep his adrenal glands combating the drug by quarreling, even by exercising, but it was wearing. It would be better to keep the drug from his system in the first place. . .
It was very simple.
It needed only one thing, Ryeland saw. He would merely have to stop eating and drinking entirely.
By lunchtime the next day he began to see the flaws in that scheme.
He had worked it out very carefully. He had to eat something, otherwise he would die, and that would be no improvement at all. He settled on eating sugar. That day after the noon formation he entered the mess-hall, carried his tray to a corner—and abandoned it there, untouched. He filled his pockets with sugar, as inconspicuously as he could. It was a calculated risk. All foods were suspect, sugar included. But even the thorough Machine would not be likely to bother with sugar.
Of course, water was out of the question. Already Ryeland was beginning to feel parched. He thought of making a still, somehow, and purifying the water from the lake. It would attract attention . . . but he was getting very thirsty.
He went to see Angela and tried to take his mind off his thirst. They roamed about, the girl in her remarkably agile wheeled chair. She found him hard to endure that day. They sat by the lake and Steve Ryeland stared at it longingly. Water, lovely and clear. Beautiful water. Sweet water! But it was the source for all the drinking water in Heaven, and undoubtedly it was already treated. He talked about swimming and clinking ice in a glass and the spray from the prow of a boat until Angela, faintly exasperated, said; "Go swimming, then. No, don't worry about me." Gentle smile. "I'd rather not, for reasons which are apparent, but you go ahead. It's what you want, isn't it?"
And it was; but Ryeland refused vigorously until he thought of something and then went to get a pair of trunks. Why not go swimming? It was a trick torpedoed sailors had learned centuries before. If one merely lay in the water and relaxed, it would help control thirst. It wouldn't help much. But it would help a little—perhaps it would keep him alive until his brain was clear and he could think surely enough to find a way out. But, oh, that water was tempting!
He lay in the shallows and played a sort of game. It was for high stakes, his whole life riding on the turn of the wheel. He let the water come up to his chin. He let it touch his lip. He even let a few drops of it into his mouth; then he filled his mouth and held the water there.
It would be so easy to swallow! So simple to ease his thirst! And surely, he said reasonably to himself, his eyes closed against the thirst, swishing the water back and forth with his cheeks and enjoying the sensation, surely one little drink would be of no real importance. . .
Sputtering and coughing, he floundered out of the lake.
That had been a close one. But he had learned something; the thirst was a counter-irritant; already he was fully aware of things that had been tempered and dull even an hour before. The puncture inside his elbow hurt. The nurse had been clumsy with the needle. The denims had chafed his thighs raw—a poor fit, miserably poor—and what a joy, he exulted, to be able to realize it.
Angela was looking at him suspiciously. "What's the matter with you?" she demanded.
"Nothing."
"You act—oh, I don't know. As if the Machine canceled your orders here. As though you were going to get rid of your collar."
And even that was not impossible, thought Ryeland. If only he could hold out until somehow, some way there was a chance. He toweled himself dry and said, "Why not? Donderevo did it."
"Steve," she scolded, "that's unplanned thinking! I'm disappointed in you. Nobody else can escape the way Donderevo did, and even if you could, your duty to the Plan—"
"Wait a minute." He stopped toweling and turned to look at her. "What did you say? What do you know about Donderevo?"
"I know how he escaped. After all, this is where he escaped from."
Ryeland heard a ripping sound, and glanced down to see that his hands, without command from his brain, had clenched so tightly on the towel that it had parted. He dropped it to the ground and whispered: "How?"