Ryeland paced about. The girl watched him solemnly, her eyes large and compassionate. He said at last, unwillingly: "And you are willing to serve the Machine, even after it lops your arms and legs off?"
"I'm willing."
"Then you're crazier than Oporto!" he roared. "The Machine is a monster! The Plan of Man is a hoax!"
She refused to be shocked. "It keeps thirteen billion of us alive," she reminded him.
"It keeps thirteen billion of us enslaved!"
"Do you have another way!"
He scowled. "I don't know. Maybe—out in the Reefs of Space—"
"The Reefs of Space are no longer of any importance to you, my dear. Just like Ron Donderevo. Oh, he was a real man—and maybe there are Reefs, I don't know. But there's nothing there for us." She moved her head, and the obedient wheels brought her closer to him. "And is it so bad, Steven? Being slaves? I know you have ideals—I respect you for them, truly I do! But this is a matter of life and death for Mankind. And isn't it true that, for almost all of us, under the Plan of Man there is happiness?"
He laughed shortly. "It comes in the drinking water!"
"All of it?" She leaned back lazily, looking at him with candid huge eyes. "What about me, Steven. Don't you want me?"
It caught him off-guard. He flushed. "I—I don't know what—"
"Because I'm here, Steven," she went on softly. "If you wanted me, I'm here. And I'm helpless; I can't resist you."
He swallowed. "You—You could scream for help. The guards would —Damn you!" He leaped away from her. "I'll never forgive you that, Angela! You've dragged me down to your level, haven't you? But you can't do the same trick again!"
She said, calm, real regret in her voice, "I don't know what you mean, dear." And after a moment Ryeland realized that there was truth in what she said. She meant it; she was his to take, if he chose, and she would not have blamed him. He said brutally:
"You're a high-voltage test circuit, Angela, yes, indeed! But you've already burned me once. I don't intend for it to happen again!"
There was no longer any doubt of what he had to do in his mind. He was inside a wall; well, a wall had two sides. He would reach that other side! Perhaps he would be alive; more likely he would be a cadaver, stripped of useful parts. But he would reach it.
Because . . . because, he thought, on the other side of that wall were many things. There was freedom—maybe—in the Reefs of Space. There was, perhaps, the man who knew how to remove collars.
And there was Donna Creery.
Abruptly he turned to Angela again, surprised at his own thought of the Planner's daughter, unwilling to think farther in that most dangerous of directions. He said, "I—I didn't mean—"
"Don't apologize, Steve. You of all people—"
He became conscious that she had stopped in the middle of a thought. "What were you going to say?"
"Oh . . . nothing. Nothing much. Just that. . ."
"Angela!" he said angrily. "You've always kept secrets from me! Please don't keep on with it—not here! Now, what were you going to say? Something about me 'of all people'? Am I any diSerent from other people?"
Her wide, lovely eyes studied him serenely. Then she said: "Don't you know that you are?"
Her cool regard made him uncomfortable. He had to gulp before he could ask what she meant.
"Haven't you been aware of anything strange about yourself?"
He was about to shake his head, when something froze him. He recalled the riddle of the three days he had lost. Suddenly he remembered a time when he thought he had heard her voice, from the dark outside the circle of pitiless light that blazed down on the therapy couch, before she had sacrificed her limbs to the Plan.
"You must have noticed that you are different, Steve," her soft voice taunted him. "Have you ever wondered why?"
For a moment he wanted to strike her. The iron collar was suddenly tighter around his neck, so tight that he could scarcely breathe, so tight that he felt the veins throbbing at his throat. He sat numb and silent, staring at her.
"Did you think you were human?" Her voice was contemptuous, merciless. "I thought you might guess, when I was telling you how Donderevo got away. You are the junk man."
"Junk—what?"
The hair stood up at the nape of his neck. He shuddered in the sun. The collar was heavier than lead, colder than ice.
"I told you that a thing was patched together out of waste parts. A decoy for the guards to watch while Donderevo got away. Well, Steve, that's what you are."
He sat still, breathing carefully through the cruel constriction of the collar.
"If you're good-looking, Steve, that's because the surgeons were trying to put together a reasonable likeness of Ron Donderevo, who was a handsome man. If you dislike the Plan, it is because your brain and your glands were patched together from what was left of several of its most distinguished enemies. If you have an unusual mastery of helical field theory, it is because one lobe of your brain belonged to the man who invented it. If the rest of your memory is somewhat blurred or contradictory, it is because the rest of your brain was stuck together from odds and ends of tissue."
"No!" he whispered hoarsely. "That can't be true-"
But the collar choked off his voice. He felt weak and numb with a hideous feeling that it could be true. "If I was ever here before," he argued desperately, "I can't remember anything about it."
"That goes to prove it." Angela's slow smile was innocently sweet. "The men who assembled you were research scientists, as well as enemies of the Plan. They had been using bits of waste brain tissue in efforts to improve upon nature. When they were putting your brain together, they seized the opportunity to create a mental mechanism dangerous to the Plan."
Dazed, he could only shake his head.
"There's proof enough, if you don't believe me," she said. "Look at all your feats of sabotage. The subtrain tubes and fusion reactions and ion-drive accelerators that you have demolished with your improved designs—"
Agony wrenched him.
"I don't remember—"
"That's the final perfection of your mental mechanism," she said calmly. "The disloyal surgeons equipped your new brain with a self-erasing circuit, to protect you from any temptation to reveal your secrets under torture. Aren't you aware of the blank in your past?"
"I—I am." Shuddering, he nodded.
"That's all you are." A lazy malice glinted in her smile. "All the special attention that you have been receiving for the past three years is proof that you functioned remarkably well as a sabotage device, but your function has been performed. I suppose you are setting some sort of precedent, now that all your organs are about to be salvaged for the second time. But in spite of that, Steve, I can't help feeling that you are trying to carry your head a little too high. Actually, you're nothing more than a hundred and sixty pounds of bait that those traitors filched from the sharks."
Shark meat! If that was all he was, then this was the place for him!
Ryeland lurked in a clump of the bougainvilleas near the garbage pit, watching the guards on the roof, while the sun went down and the sky purpled and the stars began to find pockets in the cloud cover through which they could appear.
The searchlights—or whatever—were not turned on.
Numbed, Ryeland watched and tried not to think. That was one less worry. Still, there were guards on the roof; he would have to wait until it was darker. The guards were idly looking out over Heaven to the sea. It was a warm night, a fine tropic night.
But what was before him was an ugly spectacle.
It was odd, Ryeland thought dreamily, that the Plan of Man permitted itself this touch of natural human horror. The world was so cuddled in cotton batting, so insulated against shock, that it would seem this sight should have been hidden away. Before him lay some tons of meat and bone—amputated, exsanguinated, raped of corneal tissue and bone grafts, of healthy arterial sections and snips of nervous tissue.