Angela writhed carelessly, angling her head to start the motors that turned her chair away from the sun. She frowned thoughtfully, then said, "Well, I don't suppose it would do any harm. You can't possibly duplicate his escape. No one can."
"Angela! How did he do it?"
"Not by any method you can follow, Steve." Her smile teased him. "He found a group on the staff here who could be tempted into unplanned thinking—and he tempted them, with talk of space outside the Plan. He managed to corrupt them, with promises of freedom and wealth in the reefs of space. He bribed them to remove his collar—surgically."
"Huh?"
"The thing was expertly planned," she said. "The disloyal surgeons forged the requisitions, and issued false documents. Donderevo was called out of the lineup one morning, exactly in the ordinary way. In one operating theater, he was disassembled, down to the head and the spine. All the parts were rushed into the adjoining theater—and put back together, without the iron collar.
"But don't go getting any ideas," she warned him. "Because the plot was eventually discovered. The surgeons who had participated were promptly junked. Unfortunately, by that time Donderevo had escaped."
"How did he get away?"
"That was the most important part," she said. "You see, the surgeons made a rather ingenious effort to cover their tracks. They used junk parts to assemble a complete patchwork man inside the collar. This junk man took Donderevo's place, until it was too late to trace him."
Ryeland shivered in the warm sunshine. That method of escape seemed gruesomely drastic, even if it had been open to him, which it was not.
"Let's do something more amusing," Angela urged him.
"There's one more thing I want to know." He looked at her, caught with an unpleasant fascination. "How did you happen to know all this?"
She stretched her torso lazily in the sunshine, with a slow, graceful, serpentine movement.
"I suppose I can tell you, Steve." She smiled at him confidentially. "After all, it's no secret between us that I once worked for the Plan Police. The fact is that I first came here on the Donderevo case. It was not broken until I had managed to persuade one of the guilty surgeons to use the same method to help me escape."
She yawned, smiling with a feline satisfaction.
"If you came here as a spy, why are you—"
He stopped, feeling a horrified embarrassment.
"Why am I still here? Don't be ashamed to ask that, Steve. I'm here because by the time I finished my task I was—well—as you see me. Naturally the Plan could not divert resources for my sake ... so ... I was declared surplus. Oh, I won't deny it disturbed me a little, at first. But I came to accept it. And you will too, Steve. You see, you have no other choice."
12
Accept the fate he would not, though he was powerfully tempted. A rain shower in the middle of the night woke him and he ran out, careless that he woke his cabin mates and left them staring, to find a standpipe under the eaves and drink, drink, drink. It gave him the strength he needed. The next morning he could see a difference. He held out his hand before him and it shook. It shook! He was nervous.
He was also very hungry.
Water was not, for the moment, a problem. He had found a jug that would do and carefully filled it from the drain of a dozen roofs. It tasted of zinc and tar. But he was off the drug. . .
And hungry.
He did not dare to eat in the commissary.
Oporto came to see him at breakfast and that little dark face missed nothing. "Not hungry, Steve?"
Ryeland pushed aside his untouched plate—ham hash! lovely, irresistible coffee!—and said, "No. I'm not hungry." Later, in the hut of the Dixie Presidents, Oporto still tagging along, the little man pointed at the jug of rain water. "What's that?"
"It's water. In case I get thirsty," said Ryeland, allowing himself a small drink.
Oporto's face remained thoughtful.
Ryeland found a sense of doom pressing in on him, a fear that dried his mouth and bothered his digestion—damaged already by the curious nature of the few substances he dared eat. He enjoyed it. He welcomed the fluttering of terror between his shoulderblades. He looked around him at the other cadavers of Heaven, and they were zombies, dead-alive, the victims of asphodel. They laughed and smiled and walked about (when they had what was needful to walk with), but they were dead men. Not Ryeland. He was alive, and in a panic. And very hungry.
He managed to shake Oporto just before the second shape-up, and seized time to study some of the entries in the journaclass="underline"
Oct. 16. The only examination given to the discarded parts in the trash pile is visual. They are under the observation of a guard stationed on the watch balcony of the North Clinic. Sometimes he isn't there, but I do not know why.
Nov. 5. Today I was in the North Clinic on the fifth floor, where the guard is stationed. I found out why he is sometimes absent, I think. Twice he was called in to help move patients; apparently this is part of his job. Since I was strapped to the table with a spinal tap I couldn't watch closely, but it seems evident that each time he is called inside he will remain there for at least half a minute, and that the periods at which he is most likely to be called are those when the operation schedule is heavy. Probably the three hours or so following each shape-up would be the best time. The morning and lunch shape-ups are no good. First, I would not be able to conceal my absence for more than a couple of hours; second, they don't usually dump the scraps until night anyway. That leaves only the night. Unfortunately not much operating is done then . . . Today it was the left leg, including the femur.
Dec. 3. Unusually heavy call-outs at the shape-up this morning. The rumor is that there was a nuclear explosion in Baja California and a great many spare parts will be needed. I wonder. Tonight?
Ryeland turned the page, but he already knew what he would find. The next entry was the last. It had been close for D.W.H., but not quite close enough.
Hunger was beginning to prey on him seriously. His system began to refuse the sugar.
Oporto was openly suspicious now. He walked with Ryeland all over Heaven. Dov^i by the palm-fringed lake he sat with his back against a boulder and watched Ryeland grimly hurling rocks at the hanging coconuts. Ryeland did not succeed in knocking one down, but he did, after visiting a few clumps of palms, find one that had fallen. "I guess you like coconut milk a lot," Oporto said sulkily, seeing how greedily Ryeland hammered off the outer husk and bashed in the shell.
"I love it." Actually the nut was overripe, and the milk had a foul taste.
"Tastes good with garlic, huh?" Oporto was referring to some wild roots Ryeland had found, dark green spears thrusting out of the grass with a cluster of muddy little strong-flavored knobs underground; Oporto had found him nibbling them experimentally.
Ryeland said: "Leave me alone, will you? I—ah—don't feel very well."
Oporto sighed. "I'm not surprised." But he wandered away after a while.
Ryeland dismissed him from his mind. He felt weak and starved. It was only psychological, he told himself; why, shipwrecked mariners had lasted for months and years on little more than what he had so easily come by!
But they had not, it was true, been subjected to the thrice-daily temptation of a loaded table from which they dared not eat.
And there was another consideration. He looked longingly at the little fish in the lake, for example. He could easily catch one. What was to stop him from broiling it over a fire?
But he had already attracted enough attention, he dared no more. Surely the guardians of Heaven would know what to do with a cadaver who had stumbled on the necessity of avoiding their drugs. Once they found one such it would be only a name on the shape-up list, a needle in the arm, and all the drug his system could absorb thrust into him at one moment. Will power would not help him then.