The nurse turned, and Ryeland had his third shock. For it was not Donna. "Where is she?" he demanded.
"Safe," rumbled Donderevo. "Or as safe as any one under the Plan. Her father was in the cruiser. She's with him now."
"May I—" Ryeland had to stop and gulp, because a memory of agony had paralyzed his throat. "May I see them?"
"I'll tell them you're awake," Donderevo said. He moved toward the doorway, and turned back with a hesitant expression. "I had better warn you that you can't expect much help from Creery. You see, he's not the Planner any longer. In fact, he's wearing a collar of his own."
Ryeland was sitting on the edge of the portable cradle with a sheet wrapped around him, when Donna brought her father into that crystal-lighted cave of space. Though the former Planner was smiling tenderly at his daughter, his face looked pinched and gray. He wore the thin denim of a Risk. The chrome-steel collar shimmered with reflected crystal glints.
Two officious men followed Creery. One was a stocky Technicorps colonel, who looked bleakly Satanic with his radar horns. The other was a communications sergeant, with a gray-cased portable teleset slung to his1 body.
Donna nervously repeated what Donderevo had already told Ryeland about her father's arrival.
"I was hoping," she finished wistfully, "that Father could unlock your collar."
"Not even my own." Creery's stiff smile faded. "You can see that things have changed. Our old friend General Fleemer is acting Planner now. I have been reclassified, and assigned to this hazardous special mission." He glanced uncomfortably back at the colonel.
Donna's face twitched. She whispered, "What's your special mission, Father?"
"It is concerned with the Plan of Man," he said. "You see, since the Machine had been reliably informed of the limitless extent of the Reefs of Space, it has been projecting a new phase of the Plan. In this second phase, the abundant resources of the space frontier will end any need for the strict regimentation of the original Plan. Unfortunately, this second phase cannot begin until the new frontier is actually open to the masses of mankind. Obviously, that requires a reactionless space drive."
The former Planner paused. His haggard eyes looked sharply at Donderevo, regretfully at Ryeland, blankly at the Technicorps colonel.
"General Fleemer managed to convince the Machine that I was no longer competent," he said. "I suppose you know about the numerous failures of the helical field equipment that you had designed." His dull stare came back to Ryeland. "Fleemer laid all those disasters at my feet. As a result of such apparent executive errors, I was replaced.
"I insisted on one last chance to find a reactionless drive. I had enough power left so that Fleemer was unable to block the assignment. That's my mission now. I saw the spacelings that came out to meet the cruiser. I must learn how they fly!"
His voice was hopeless.
"If Ryeland couldn't find the answer," Donderevo said, "I doubt that it exists."
"But—I found it!"
The collar was very tight. For a moment Ryeland's throat was paralyzed again. The old fog of agony and contradiction thickened in his mind. He looked* at the man and at Donna. Her smile was sunshine, clearing the fog.
He remembered. He could speak.
He explained his theory of the equivalence of momentum and new mass, which related the flight of the spacelings to the expansion of the universe. He recited the specifications that he had memorized before the Plan Police burst into his office on that lost Monday.
The colonel watched, a skeptical Satan, while they discussed the design and dictated the specifications to the sergeant at the portable tele-set. They waited, while the message was digested by the special section of the Planning Machine aboard the cruiser.
Time passed—while slow radio pulsed the message to Earth.
Ryeland looked at Donna Creery's anxious face—and remembered the bandaged patchwork man who had raved and died in the therapy room down the tunnel from his suite in the recreation center.
Then he himself was not the junk man!
That part of Angela's story had been a malicious lie!
The teleset clattered.
Ryeland crowded with the former Planner and Donderevo and the girl to read the tape. Officiously, the colonel waved them back. He peered at the tape, and reached to finger the buttons of his radar gear.
But his expression changed.
"I knew it, Mr. Planner." His voice was suddenly smoothly affable. "I knew that Fleemer was nothing better than a conniving traitor, who will certainly get his comeuppance now! Any man with a spark of wit knew that jetless flight had to come."
Grinning, he offered his hand to Creery.
"I want to be the first to congratulate you, Mr. Planner. And you, too, Mr. Ryeland. The special section of the Planning Machine in the cruiser has completed its preliminary evaluation of your invention.
"It has relayed a message to the master complex of the Machine on Earth, alerting it to prepare the Plan of Man for transition to the second phase, in which the freedom of the space frontier will render our present strict security controls both impossible and unnecessary.
"As a first step toward the effectuation of that second phase, it is propagating a radar pulse—"
Ryeland heard a click at his throat.
His collar snapped open.
As if moved by the same pulse, the girl stepped forward and into his arms. Together they moved out of the cave into the faerie shimmer of the reeflet. To one side hung the great gray mass of the Plan cruiser, no longer an enemy. Beyond lay the stars.
The stars. The limitless frontier for mankind—the space between suns, where hydrogen is constantly born to make new worlds, as freedom is constantly born in the hearts of men.
"A billion billion new worlds," whispered Ryeland.
And the girl said firmly: "Our children will see them all!"
STARCHILD
1
It was the day, the hour, and the moment of Earth's vernal equinox. . . and the near stars blinked.
A dozen of them flickered at once. Blazing Sirius and its dense dwarf sister. The bright yellow twins of Alpha Centauri. Faint red Proxima . . . the distant sparks of Eta Eridani and 70 Ophiuchi A ... the bright Sun itself.
The vast cosmic engines declared a vacation in their processes: the fusion of smaller atoms into large, the flow of surplus mass into energy, the filtration of that energy through layered seas of restless gas, the radiation of their atomic power into space.
By the shores of Earth's oceans, within the crater walls of Luna, on the sands of Mars and the ringed satellites of Saturn, out past the Spacewall to the Reefs, the great billion-headed human race stirred and shook and knew fear. The whisper spread out into the galaxy, propagated at the speed of light: "The Star child!"
That was the way it began.
The flickering of the neighbor stars lasted only a moment, and it was seen first on the Reefs nearest each star. Then slow Pluto caught the twinkle of 70 Ophiuchi A while Neptune, lumbering in its dark orbit on the far side of Sol, was the first to catch the dimming of white-hot Sirius. On Earth, where the fat old Planner sat chuckling on his golden chair, every momentary pulse of darkness arrived at once. His chuckles stopped. His pouchy face darkened. As his astronomers reported in, he exploded in wrath.
His first reports came from a hardened station in the zone of twilight on the planet Mercury, where sliding concrete doors uncovered a pit beneath a saw-toothed crater rim.