"Fool!" shouted the Planner. "Bring him to me! Never mind what you don't know. Bring me Boysie Gann!"
And that too was how it began; but in fact, some parts of it began earlier.
For Boysie Gann it began many months earlier, when he was a spy.
2
For Boysie Gann the beginning was on Polaris Station, that great metal wheel that floats in the icy space past Pluto, one link in the Spacewall between the Plan of Man planets and the Reefs.
Boysie Gann was twenty-six years old and already a Machine Major.
Boysie Gann was six feet tall, brown-haired, blue-eyed. He was broad through the shoulders and slim at the waist. He moved like a cheerful cat. He looked like a fighter, and he was.
He reported aboard the Polaris Station with a grin and a disarming look out of his bright blue eyes. "Boysie Gann reporting, sir," he told the deck officer. "Technicadet Gann, at your service." And that was a cheerful lie. He was no cadet, but at the spy school on Pluto the briefing officers had given him a new rank to make his job easier. A Machine Major was a man of importance. He would be watched. A cadet could go anywhere, see anything.
The deck officer assigned him quarters, procured him help in stowing his gear, shook his hand to welcome him aboard, and ordered him to report to the commandant of the Station, Machine Colonel Mohammed Zafar.
Gann's assignment was to investigate rumors of strange anti-Plan activities on the Polaris Station. Gann was a soldier of the Plan, and he could hardly conceive of anything anti-Plan that was not at the same time corrupt, slovenly, evil, and wrong. He had come to the station expecting to find it rundown and rusty, manned by surly malcontents.
Yet the discipline was good. The men were on their toes. On the way through the plastic passages of the wheel, stepping high in the light gravity of the station's spin, he saw that the metalwork was bright. Confusing, thought Gann, mildly perplexed; but he knew his duty and he knew how to do it.
He knocked on the door of the commandant's office and was ordered inside. He came to full attention and a brisk salute.
"Technicadet Gann reporting as ordered, sir!"
The Machine Colonel returned his salute methodically. Here, too, Gann was faintly surprised, though he allowed none of the surprise to show through his military bearing and engaging grin. Machine Colonel Zafar was a short brown man in meticulously pressed dress whites, who looked as solid and enduring as the Plan itself. "Welcome aboard, cadet," he said. "Give me your orders, please."
"Yes, sir!" Gann's orders were also a lie. They showed him to be a relief laser operator fresh out from Earth. They did not mention his true rank, or his intensive training on Pluto. The commandant read them carefully, then nodded.
"Cadet Gann," he said in his soft, precise voice, "we are glad to have you on Polaris Station. As you know, this station is a major unit in the Spacewall. Our primary job is to detect and intercept any unauthorized traffic between the Plan of Man and the areas beyond Pluto—the wastes that are called the Reefs of Space. Our secondary job is to monitor as much activity in the Reefs as possible. Our radar, laser, and optical systems are the heart of our mission—and so, Cadet Gann, what you do is the most important part of our work here. Don't fail us."
"Sir," said Boysie Gann earnestly, "I won't fail you! I serve the Plan of Man without question or pause!" And he saluted and left.
But before he left he dropped his orders and retrieved them, with a flashing grin of apology to the colonel.
He left with his shoulders high. For in the instant when he was bent out of the commandant's sight, picking up his papers, he had planted a listening bug under the projecting rim of Machine Colonel Zafar's desk.
Within an hour of Gann's arrival on Polaris Station he was fitted, with an iron collar.
He had expected it. In so sensitive an installation as the station, every man wore one of the Machine's collars, so that at any instant, wherever he might be, any one of them could be destroyed. There was no other way. A space man gone amok—a traitor loose in the fuel stores—a drunken armorer at the studs of the station's mighty missiles—any individual could do so much harm that it was necessary to have instant control over every man aboard.
Still, it was an uncomfortable feeling. Gann touched the collar lightly, and for once the smile was gone from his cheerful face. It was disturbing to know that someone somewhere—the distant Machine on Earth, or one of its satellites nearby, a security officer on Pluto, or the commandant here on the station—could at the surge of a radar pulse detonate the decapitation charge.
His bunkmate was a tall, lean Nigerian, Technicadet M'Buna. Lounging in the security office waiting for Gann, M'Buna saw his involuntary gesture and laughed. As he held the door and they started off to their duty post M'Buna said, "Makes you nervous, eh? Don't worry. If it goes off, you'll never know it!"
Gann grinned. He liked M'Buna, had at first encounter already realized that here was an intelligent, patient friend. Yet he said at once, "Nobody likes a collar. And—" he acted a pause, glancing around—"I hear there are people somewhere who do something about it. Out on the Reefs. Men who know how to get the collars off. . ."
M'Buna said uncomfortably, "I wouldn't know anything about that. Here's our station."
Gann nodded and let it pass. But he had not failed to notice that M'Buna had overlooked one essential act. What Gann said hinted at treason to the Plan. M'Buna's duty was clear: he should have called Gann on it and established exactly what was meant by the hint. . . . And then reported Gann at once.
Huge as an ocean liner, flimsy as a dragon kite, Polaris Station was a big plastic wheel. Its spin was just fast enough to keep the crew's soup in the plate and the plate on the table. The hub was stationary, with the radar-laser search dome on the north face, the entry locks on the other.
The station had been set up first, more than a quarter century before, as a base for exploring the Reef cluster immediately to the galactic north of the sun. The snowball that had supplied reaction mass for the old nuclear rockets was still in detector range, swinging a hundred miles from the station in their coupled orbits. Now there was no need for reaction mass, but the snow-asteroid still had its uses. It served as a cosmic garbage dump, the unreclaimed wastes and offal of the station hauled out there after every watch and left on its surface so that free-orbiting particles of trash would not return false signals to the search instruments back at the station.
Within forty-eight hours of reporting aboard the station, Machine Major Boysie Gann had bugged the offices of the commandant, the executive officer, the quartermaster, and the intelligence chief. Each tiny instrument was broadcasting a sealed-wave pickup of every word that was uttered in those sacrosanct chambers. Gann himself spot-monitored the transmissions when time allowed. The rest of the time the great records machine on Pluto received the signals, taped them, and transmitted them to Earth and the buried citadel of the Planning Machine itself.
But all his bugs produced nothing.
Gann's orders had been less than explicit: Seek out and identify enemies of the Plan. Beyond that there had been only rumors. A vast smuggling enterprise, shipping valuable strategic materials from the inner Plan Worlds to the Reefs. A strange new cult that threatened to unite the Reefs against the inner planets. A leader preaching a hegira, a security leak . . . But which of these was true, if any, Gann had not been told. It was not security doctrine to tell agents precisely what they should be looking for, on the grounds that their time was most productively employed when they could develop and follow up on many of their own leads.