Quiveras said cheerfully, "That one looks the most used, Mr. Ryeland. If we only knew when, eh? Well, I'll try it—asking you, if you please, to remain here on guard." He turned away, hesitated and said solemnly: "You see, it is you who must take the post of danger. For if a pyropod should come from one of the other passages while I am gone . . ." He made a grave face, spread his hands politely and left.
Ryeland clung to a projection of rock and waited.
Pyropod . . .
He heard the word again, in the soft, apologetic, wheezy voice of Dr. Thrale. He was lying again on the therapy couch in the recreation center, clamped into the cold electrodes, helplessly enduring the merciless probing into his blank memory. He shuddered again, flinching from the pitiless pressure to make him reveal the secret he had never known—
Or had he really ever known how to build a jetless drive? That haunting fog of black oblivion and insane contradiction flowed into his brain. Through it, he heard the lazy malice of Angela's voice, mocking him with her explanation of the riddle. He was a junk man, a meat machine designed to sabotage the plan, without a memory because he lacked a past.
A queer companion for the Planner's daughter. He resolved again not to tell her what he was. Now when they were alone, when he and Quiveras were the only human beings in her world—could she stand the shock of learning that even he was no real human being?
He shook himself impatiently, as if mere motion might dispel that paralyzing fog and reveal his true identity. That old riddle would have to wait—perhaps until the timing mechanism detonated the collar, and answered it forever. The problems of the present were more urgent now.
It was warm in the cavern, far from the surface of the little deformed globe, where the fusorian cells poured endless heat and light into the atmosphere. But he found himself shivering. Pyropod? Yes. He had heard the term. He did not want to recall just what he had heard about it.
Quiveras disappeared, the needle-sharp crystal blade giving a strange light. It disappeared around a bend in the passage, and then for a time there was no light at all.
Time passed.
It was dark . . . silent . . . empty. Ryeland felt as though the dead walls around him were closing in. He wiped slippery sweat from his palms, listening, reaching out, because he could not help himself, to touch the walls to make sure that they were not about to squeeze him . . . Then involuntarily he felt himself grinning. Claustrophobia—here! Billions of miles from the Earth, a floating dust mote in the middle of absolute emptiness! The incongruity reassured him; and he was calm and cheerful when, at last, he saw the glow of light appear again in the passage Quiveras had taken.
The crystal sword came into sight and Quiveras hailed him cheerfully. "A dead end, and nothing there. Very well.,, He drew even with Ryeland and gazed at the other passages. "I think," he said, with some doubt, "that we will leave these others for now. They do not seem occupied, and it would take us weeks to explore them all. Consider yourself fortunate, my friend. You have not yet been introduced to a pyropod."
At Quiveras's hail the spacelings came swimming gracefully down the tunnel, their red noses blinking as they probed its depths with infrared. Donna Creery followed more slowly, exploring the caves with a child's wonder and awe. "Is it safe?" she asked.
Quiveras said calmly, "We will never be safe while Ryeland's collar is with us. If you mean are we safe from pyropods, I do not know. From a full-grown one, yes. I do not guarantee there is not a cub lurking somewhere, but if there is we will find it out and meanwhile shall we not try to make this place into a home?"
They worked for three hard days, while the spacelings fluttered and mewed restlessly—because, Quiveras said without emotion, the Plan cruiser was still somewhere about. As there was nothing they could do about it, they did nothing. To their little world they did a great deal.
They carried aerial fusorian vines into the caverns, choosing cubicles for sleeping, for eating, for rest, curtaining and cushioning them with the vines, bringing shining crystals of ruby and topaz for heat and illumination. Donna cried out at its beauty. Indeed it was beautiful; and they were not finished. With Quiveras for a teacher, Ryeland learned how to weave nets and ropes out of the fiber from the vines. The surface of the Reef provided crystal and great branching arms of metal, pure copper, pure aluminum, pure silver. They hammered the metal into crude tools.
And finally they made a sort of curtain, woven from the vines and crusted with broken pieces of crystal, which they stretched across the mouth of the cave to conceal it.
Quiveras stood back and regarded it.
"Well," he said doubtfully, "it could be thicker and it could look more natural and those gadgets of yours could be hidden in better places. But if the Plan cruiser sniffs around here it might miss you, at that."
"Miss us? What about you?"
"I, Miss Creery, will go out to the main Reefs." Quiveras's gnarled face looked eager. "I'll get help, more spacelings. And I'll bring back Ron Donderevo!"
Ryeland and the girl were sorry to see him go, but their sorrow was nothing compared to the unhappiness of the two spacelings at being separated. Adam would carry Quiveras; Chiquita would have to stay with them, to maintain their atmosphere and to be ready to carry them away in desperate flight if the Plan cruiser should grow too inquisitive.
They watched him leave, all three of them, Ryeland, Donna Creery and the spaceling. He was gone out of sight in a moment. Ryeland thought he caught a single reddish wink from Adam's nose—perhaps the male spaceling turning restlessly as it drove away, to bid a last farewell to Chiquita. Then there was nothing. They stared till their eyes watered, but it was useless. The Plan cruiser could be lurking a mere hundred miles away—a thousand men on spacelings could be within ten miles. Without radar gear they were blind. Out there were only the stars.
Ryeland's mind drifted out among those stars wonderingly. He tried to imagine the clouds of new hydrogen, constantly being bora of the Hoyle effect, and the myriad drifting fusorians that built the hydrogen into heavier elements that might someday be planets. There were other Reefs out there, the first concentrations of matter like the one they occupied, the larger ones that provided a home for the exiles of the Plan-great ones, even, that might in some remote millennium become the cores for first condensations of titanic new suns. They were all invisible.
Donna Creery touched his arm. "It's-lonely," she whispered. "Let's go back inside."
"Inside our cave!" he said harshly. "Back to the stone age! Is this the sort of life that's fit for a princess of the Plan?"
She shrank away from him, and in a moment went with the spaceling silently inside the sheltering drift of vines. Ryeland roamed about, trying to work off the sudden storm of anger and helplessness that was besieging him. He tried to calm himself.
But calm was impossible to him. Calm, he knew, was a sensation he would not be likely to feel, until he had managed to rid himself of the choking, threatening thing about his neck—and until he had managed to bridge that gap in his past, until he had escaped that dreadful, creeping cloud of forgetfulness and contradiction—
Or until the collar's explosion brought him the permanent calm of the grave.
Time passed. They both found plenty to do. Alone now, except for the spaceling, they were queerly constrained in each other's company. Ryeland hardly recognized the bright, sure brat of the bath, with the angry Peace Dove and the fighting guard within instant call. Donna was quieter and younger now. They spoke of her father, and for the first time Ryeland was able to think of that semilegendary Olympian figure as a human being. Donna was terribly worried about her father. "But we couldn't wait for him, Steven. Only—I wish we had."