He opened the switches again, glanced at his communications screens, nodded, tapped out an answer, and turned once more to Gann.
"You will go now to Sister Delta Four," he stated. "There your direct link questioning to the Machine will begin. Major, look at this!"
Unexpectedly he raised his right fist. It clenched like a remote manipulator into a brojize hammer. "This hand," he droned somberly, "once belonged to someone else, an unplanned traitor who threw a bomb at the Planner. His aim was poor. He missed the Planner but his bomb shattered my own right hand.
"My hand could not be repaired by the surgeons, so it was replaced. With the hand of the would-be assassin;" The bronze fist slammed against the console.
"Gann, remember this! If you fail to serve the Machine in the way that is first required, you will serve it in some other way—more than likely in the Body Bank!"
7
The radar-horned guards were waiting.
"Come on, Risk!" growled the NCO in charge, and once again Boysie Gann was thrust and dragged through the long gray halls, into the elevators, out again—and left to wait in a bare gray room.
Only for a moment. Then the guards came back, looking angry and confused. "Come on, Risk!" growled the NCO again—he seemed to know no other words, be able to speak in no other way—and Gann was taken out again.
A girl was standing in the doorway, telling her sonic beads, her head bent. She wore the robe and cowl of one of the Machine's communing acolytes, one of those adepts who had learned the Mechanese that the Machine now spoke in preference to any other language, whose very brain centers were open to the touch of the Machine. As they passed she spoke to one of the guards. "Orders changed!" he said roughly. "Come along if you like—we're going to the Planner!"
Gann hung back, trying to turn and see her, but the NCO shoved him ahead. He could hear the girl's oddly melodious voice, not so much speaking as chanting Mechanese in the quarter tones of her sonic beads, but could not make out her words.
She would be—what had General Wheeler called her? Sister Delta Four. The one who was to interrogate him.
But he was going instead to the office of the Planner himself!
In all his years of life under the Plan, Boysie Gann had never seen the Planner in the flesh. Few had. There was no need, with communications reaching into every home, even every room under the Plan—and the Planner was something more than human, removed from even the condescending social intercourse of emperors.
Gann shivered slightly. He was already assuming the attitudes of the convict of any land or time. He feared change. He dreaded the unknown. And the Planner represented a very large unknown quantity indeed.
Again the tunnels, again the high-velocity drop of the elevators. Again Gann was thrust into a tiny room and left there.
He was somewhere far underground. Listening, he could hear no sound except the muffled murmur of air from the duct overhead. The walls were an unpleasant yellowish gray—no longer quite the sterile Technicorps color, but tinged with Planner's gold. Gann wondered if it was deliberate, or if it was merely that this cell was so old, its occupants viewed with so little favor, that the baked-in coloring of the walls had yellowed with age. The ceiling gave a cold gray light. There was only one bare metal table and one bare metal chair.
The security collar was hard against his throat.
Gann sat down and laid his head on the table. His bruises were beginning to stiffen and ache. His brain was whirling.
Confused images were filling his mind. General Wheeler and his menacing hints of reward. Quarla Snow's spaceling, and the pyropods. Julie Martinet. A daytime sky with the sun somehow gone out ... the sunlike fusorian globules in Colonel Zafar's blood . . . Julie Martinet again, and Quarla Snow.
He lived again the endless frightening drop that landed him in the bowels of the planet Earth, among the memory banks of the Machine. He saw again sterile Pluto's vistas of ice, and the great slow spin of Polaris Station. He thought of the Writ of Liberation and wondered at the love for freedom of the Planless men of the Reefs—the love for freedom—the freedom to love . . .
He thought again of Julie Martinet, and submerged himself in memories of the Togetherness resort at Playa Blanca, the slight, dark girl he had heard singing, their golden dawn together on the beach, with the taste of salt spray on her lips. He could see her face as clearly as if she were in the room with him.
"Julie," he whispered, and she opened her lips to reply . . .
"Come on, Risk!" she said queerly—roughly. "Get up! Move!"
The radar-horned NCO was shaking him angrily. "Risk! Wake up!"
Gann shook himself. He had been asleep. His arm was numb and tingling where his head had rested on it.
He was still dazed as they dragged him out of the cell, into another room—larger, brighter, furnished in splendor. It was all gold. Gold tapestries on the wall, showing the spinning worlds of the Plan of Man. Gold light fixtures, and gold trays on the golden tables. The floor a carpeting of gold, the furniture upholstered in a golden fabric.
A guard stood by him at each side, gripping his arms. They brought him to the center of the room and stood there, waiting, while the NCO went to a gold-arched door and whispered to a Technicorps officer in the uniform of the Planner's guard who stood there. The officer nodded impatiently and held up a hand.
The radar-horned guard turned and signaled to his men. Wait.
Boysie Gann was very sure, without being told, of where they were. Beyond that door was the Planner himself.
They were not alone in the room. Turning his neck—the grip of the guards did not allow him to turn his body—he saw that the acolyte girl, Sister Delta Four, was in the room, kneeling on a golden hassock, telling her sonic beads. She was slight. What small sight he could get of her face, under the great soft cowl, was oval, grave, and pale. Her loose black robe fell to the floor around the hassock. Her cape bore the luminous emblem of those who had undergone communion with the Machine—the symbolic ellipses of electronic orbits intertwined.
The guards wrenched him straight again. One whispered to the other across him, "Watch! She's going to go into communion."
Even in his precarious position Gann could not help wanting to see. He had never before been with an acolyte during communion. It was something to be desired—and dreaded.
If the deadly security collar around his neck was the stick that the Machine had invented to enforce the Plan of Man, the communion plate was the carrot that rewarded faithful service.
Gann knew what it looked like. He thought he had caught a glimpse of it in the forehead of Sister Delta Four, the bright metal disk grafted into the skin, starred with its black pattern of holes that accepted the prongs of the communion plug.
He knew that communion was supposed to be the perfect experience. The communion plate was only its exterior symbol. It was in the brain itself that the delicate stereotaxia of the Machine's neurosurgeons had done their finest work. Through electrodes wired to the plate in the forehead, the Machine requited its deserving servants with tuned electronic stimuli. Its messages flowed directly into the pleasure centers of the brain.
The perfect experience—for it had no taint of reality to corrupt it, no bill presented in the form of exhaustion or physical damage—no substance! It was the quintessence of pleasure. Stripped of tactile, visual, olfactory—of all sensual complications—it was the great good thing that men had always sought, and found imperfectly as a side effect of eating, or drinking, or inhaling the crisp air of a mountain morning, or sex. It was all of them, distilled and served up in a tidy package, received through a bright metal plate.