It was so perfect, thought Boysie Gann wildly, that it seemed somehow wrong . . .
"She's getting ready!" whispered one of the guards, and Gann ventured to turn his head again to see.
He succeeded—only for a moment, but he succeeded. The guards were watching too, and loosened their grips just enough for him to turn.
Sister Delta Four lifted the black hood to uncover her forehead. There on the smooth white skin he saw the bright metal disk—saw it, trembled, looked away—looked back again, and saw clearly what his mind had rejected.
He saw the face of Sister Delta Four.
There was a hoarse whisper from the doorway. "Let's go!" The guards started, and jerked him away, thrust him facing forward so that he saw the radar-horned NCO with a face like fury, beckoning them angrily, signaling that the Planner was ready for them now.
But Boysie Gann fought them, struggled like a wild man. "No!" he shouted. "Wait!" And he battled the astonished guards, trying to turn, to go back to the girl whose serene face he had seen, eyes closed, lifting the communion plug to her forehead.
The guards lashed out at him, struck him. He hardly felt the blows. He turned, breaking free of one of them, colliding heavily with the other so that they fell sprawling on the thick golden rug, the other guards leaping toward them. But as they fell, Gann saw the face again.
He had been right. There was no doubt. Sister Delta Four was Julie Martinet.
The girl he loved was now no longer entirely human. Her vows were no longer to him. She was an adjunct to the Machine, as dependent on it for her every bit of life and thought as some remote-directed subsea mining dredge . . . and as little a part of the race of men.
Julie Martinet had become a part of the Machine.
8
If the catacombs of the Machine were the nerve center of the Plan of Man, then the great State Hall of the Planner was its heart. Huge as a hangar for jetless spacecraft, ornate as a Pharaoh's tomb, it housed the most powerful man in the history of the human race, and it was worthy of him. The walls were paneled in gold. Crescent-shaped lunettes were frescoed with scenes of the nine planets and a thousand lesser worlds on which the Plan of Man reigned supreme.
In the great hall, a score of attendants waited on the Planner's wilclass="underline" his personal physician, three black-robed Mechanese acolytes with their linkboxes and tonal beads, a dozen guards. The Vice-Planner for Venus was there, an efficient little engineer whose nose and ears were out of scale, seeming to have come from some gigantic donor. So was Machine General Wheeler, fixing Boysie Gann as he entered with a steel-gray stare.
No one spoke.
Dominating the great hall, on a huge golden chair, was the Planner himself. He was staring, lost in thought, at a great quartz table on which stood scores of fantastic metal and crystal toys.
Gann found himself standing in the center of a great tesselated floor, alone. His guards had halted behind him. He waited for the Planner to notice him.
But the Planner's eyes were on his toys. He sighed and stretched out a hand to them, stacking them in military rows as absorbedly as any five-year-old with his lead soldiers; he formed them in columns and marched them across the clean gleaming quartz.
The figures were dragons. They were monsters from storybooks, and creatures too incredible ever to have been in a story. Some were mirror-bright, some black. Many were in gorgeous rainbow hues. They had no wings, nor had they legs. Their heads were the heads of monsters, some with teeth like sabers, some with curious frayed flower-petal faces, like the muzzle of a star-nosed mole.
Boysie Gann had never been close to the Planner before. He could not help being a little disappointed. The Planner was only a man! An old, fat, flabby man at that—and, thought Gann privately, a bit of an eccentric too.
Yet the Planner was the voice of the Planning Machine itself. It was impossible for the Machine to falter in its judgments, impossible that its chosen instrument be anything less than perfect. Of course, there were the recurrent rumors about the present Planner's predecessors—old Planner Creery, for example, who had fallen into error in attempting to allow the Reefs of^ Space entry into the Plan of Man under their own conditions . . . Swiftly Gann rejected that thought. This was no place to be thinking treason!
He turned his mind to the stabbing pain that had pierced him in the anteroom when he had found the girl he loved, Julie Martinet, changed into a priestess of the Machine, Delta Four. How had it happened? Why had it happened? . . .
The Planner raised his great round head and stared at Boysie Gann. "You," he rasped. "Do you know what these are?"
Gann swallowed and stuttered. "Y-yes, sir," he got out. "I mean, I think so. I mean, some of them look like pyropods. The creatures that prey on the life in the Reefs of Space, sir. . ."
But the Planner was nodding his great bloated head. "Pyropods, yes," he boomed. With a sudden motion he swept the delicately carved pieces off the quartz table, sent them crashing to the floor. "I wish I had a thousand pyropods!" he shouted. "A million! I wish I could send them out to the Reefs to kill and destroy every living thing on them! What insanity that these reef rats should dare talk to me of freedom!"
He broke off and glared at Boysie Gann, who stood silent, unable to speak. The Planner said, "I stand for classic truth! What is it that animates the Reefs of Space, Gann? Tell me, for you have been there. It is the romantic fallacy," he roared, not waiting for an answer, "the eternal delusion that man is perfectible, that there is a spirit of goodness that can grow and mature in crass organic creatures! What insanity! And now they threaten me in my own Hall—blot out my sun—boast of more deadly measures still!" He pressed his plump arms against the carved golden arms of his chair, half lifted himself, leaned forward to Gann and shouted, "Who is this Starchild, Gann? It is you?"
Boysie Gann was galvanized into shocked speech. "No, sir! Not me! I've never seen him. I know nothing about him—oh, except what I've heard here, when General Wheeler's men interrogated me. And a few rumors. But I'm not the Starchild!"
"Rumors. What are those rumors, Gann? I must know!"
Gann looked helplessly around the great hall. All in it were watching him, their eyes cold, their faces impassive. He was on his own; there was no help for him from anyone there. He said desperately, "Sir, I've told all I know a hundred times. I'll tell it again. I'll tell you all I know, but the truth is, sir, that I know almost nothing about the Starchild!"
"The truth," boomed the Planner, "is what / say it is! Go on! Speak!"
Gann obediently commenced the old story. "I was detailed, sir, to investigate certain irregularities on Polaris Station . . . ." As he went through the long, familiar tale there was dead silence in the hall, the Planner listening impassively, leaning on one arm in his great golden chair, the others taking their cue from him. Gann's voice fell on the enormous hall like words shouted down a well. Only echoes answered him, only the narrowing of an eye, the faint shift of a position showed that his hearers had understood. He finished with his arrest in the catacombs of the Machine, and stood silent.
The Planner said thoughtfully, "You spoke of a sign. The sign of the Swan."
"Yes, sir." Boysie Gann demonstrated as best he could the supple motion of forearm and hand that he had seen in Harry Hickson and the dying Colonel Zafar. "I believe it refers to the constellation Cygnus, in which the main star, Deneb, is some sort of object of worship to what is called the Church of the Star. . ."