Yet he could not avoid suspicion entirely, not as long as he continued to reject the all but irresistible food of Heaven. Already he was concerned over his mates in the Dixie Presidents, not to mention Angela Zwick and, above all, Oporto, whose behavior was no longer suspicious but sure. There was no doubt; Oporto knew.
The next morning he got away from the others and scouted the periphery of Heaven. Reluctantly he decided that what everyone said was true; the fence was impassable. It would have to be the garbage heap.
The leftover bits from the cadavers in Heaven were deposited in a stainless steel sump next the North Clinic. The pit was empty at this hour; it had been sluiced clean, its tons of abandoned humanity chuted into a barge and towed away. The hot sun had baked it gleaming. It was surrounded by a wire fence, and that in turn screened by red-flowered bougainvillea bushes. Ryeland wondered if the fence was electrified. Probably not. . .
It would, he thought, be wise to make his bid for freedom soon. The quicker he tried, the more likely that he would retain all his parts. Even now, he saw, there was some sort of activity going on; guards \yere on the roof of the North Clinic, working around what looked like searchlight projectors. Ryeland scowled. If they flooded the garbage heap with light, that would make things more difficult. Still the projectors were peculiar; they had reflectors but no lenses, and they seemed to be rather small for the task involved. Ryeland crossed his fingers. Perhaps they would be for some other use entirely. He could only hope.
"Sdeve! Sdeve Ryeland!" a familiar voice called loudly. It was Oporto —shouting, waving, smiling.
Ryeland waited, suddenly wary. How had the little man known he would be here? And what was this sudden excitement in his manner? Oporto was sniffing, almost quivering. "Whad a mess, hey, Steve? You hear about id?"
"About what?"
"Another tube collabze! Eighdeen hundred people this time. You know whad I think? Sabotage. Thad's whad I think."
Ryeland shook his head. He was not feeling overfriendly to the little man; he was still wary. Still, there was the chance that Oporto knew something, even here, cut off from the world as they all were. "Sabotage by whom?"
"Anti-Plan elemends," Oporto explained cheerfully. "They've been happening all over the world, you know. Thousands dead! Commudica-tion wrecked!" He glanced over his shoulder, smiled, and said quite loudly: "Or don'd you think so, Steven Ryeland?"
Ryeland's nostrils flared; he smelled danger. He looked where Oporto had glanced, and saw what Oporto had seen. Three big men in the white uniforms, coming toward them with purpose. He understood why Oporto had spoken his name so loudly; and the little man nodded, quite unabashed. "Yes, Steve, Judas Isgariot, thad's my other name."
The guards looked as though they were spoiling for a touch of resistance from him. He didn't offer it. He let them take him to the clinic, and when the needle was presented to his arm he stared at it without emotion. The shot was painless enough, even though he knew what it was. It was asphodel again, but this time he was ready for it. "Don't give us any more trouble, Zero-Dome," growled the guard, and released him at the gate of the clinic.
Ryeland's body responded at once to the shot. He accepted it; it was warmly comforting; it would not matter now. He almost laughed out loud. He could not feel betrayed by Oporto, even; Oporto could no longer commit betrayal; he was no longer trusted. And meanwhile . . . Ryeland could eat!
There was a guard brooding over the tables assigned to the Dixie Presidents at lunch. Ryeland conscientiously gorged himself on roast pork and sweet potatoes, with three cups of coffee. It tasted very good. Why not? It didn't matter any more. Meprobamate is not a narcotic; it doesn't keep you from thinking. It only eases jitters—that sovereign incentive to action!—and for Ryeland the worrying fear had already served its purpose. He had his plan. He would carry it out that night, if he could; the next night certainly. He recognized quite calmly that, now that Oporto had told the guards he was avoiding food, he would no longer serve any purpose by not eating; they would pick him up and inject him. All right. It didn't matter, nothing mattered, he was on his way out.
He could hardly wait for sundown and escape.
It was time, too. There were heavy callouts that day. Ryeland's bunk-mate had gone at breakfast and had not returned by lunch—wouldn't ever return, now, said the wise old heads; if you didn't come back by the next shape-up, you weren't coming back at all. Five names were called at noon. At dinner, seven more—why, thought Ryeland through his comfortable haze of meprobamate, that left only three in the entire cottage who had not been called for some donation that day, and Ryeland was one of them..Clearly he was pushing his luck.
After the evening shape-up he looked one last time around Heaven and strolled away. Just in time.
For as he was almost out of earshot in the gathering dark, a white-clad guard came down the shell path. Ryeland paused, listening. "Ryeland," the guard was saying, and something with the word "clinic."
Rumble-rumble; the bass voice of one of the few survivors of the Dixie Presidents, answering.
"Oh." The guard again, not very interested. "Well, when he turns up, tell him to report. She can wait."
Ryeland hid himself in the night. What they wanted with him he could not know; but he was very sure that his time was even shorter than he had thought. But who was the "she" who could wait? Angela?
He could hardly think so, but—well, why not go to see her? If it turned out to be Angela, who had somehow inveigled a guard into being messenger-boy for her, there was no reason he should not find out why. If it turned out not to be her ... he was surely all the better off for being as far as possible from the cabin of the Dixie Presidents.
It wasn't Angela. She was completely ignorant of why the guard had been looking for him, and completely disinterested.
Uneasily, keeping an alert eye open for any possible guard who might come their way, he sat down beside her in the warm tropical evening. More to see what she would say than to relieve his feelings, he told her about Oporto's reporting him to the guards and his consequent new dose of tranquilizer. "Very right of him, Steve. You shouldn't go against the Plan!"
He shook his head ruefully. "I can't understand you," he admitted. "To work for the Plan—yes. That's duty. But to betray a friend—" He stopped, and looked quickly at her, but she only laughed.
"I know, Steven. But you're wrong. Do you remember what I was doing when we first met?"
"Running a computer."
"That's right! And we would set up problems—oh, enormous problems. I loved that job, Steven! And the computer would solve them, one-two, click-click, ting-a-ling! It could do it without fail; well, it was part of the Plan, you see. Only one unit in the master Plan of Man that the Machine itself runs. Do you know why it was never wrong?"
"You tell me," he growled. She was so calm!
"Because we tested it!" she cried. "There was a special test-circuit switch. After a big problem we'd send a charge—oh, five times normal voltage!—through every last tube and transistor and relay. If anything was going to fail, it would fail then—and we'd know—and we could replace it. And . . . well, Steven," she said, quite serious, "that's what I am, you see. I'm a test charge."
She leaned forward against the high restraining chairarms that kept her limbless body from toppling. "You can't be allowed to fail the Plan!" she cried. "You must be found if you are weak . . . and replaced. Oporto and I, we have one purpose under the Plan of Man: to find and report the bad tubes. Did I trick you? I don't know; is the excess voltage flushing out a computer a 'trick?' You were a bad tube. Admit it, Steven; you could fail. You did fail! And the Machine is better without you!"