But he was alive.
A Togetherness nurse was bending over him. He said clearly, "I thought the tube collapsed."
"Hush," she said gently. "It did. But you were almost at the surface, and the wrecking squads dug you out."
"Almost at the surface?" He squinted past her at the second figure standing by his bed. For one crazy instant on waking he had thought it was the Angel of Death come to take him away. Now he saw it was an acolyte of the Machine, the linkbox in her hand, whispering tinkling notes to the microphone it contained. "I—I guess I'm at the training center," he said.
The nurse nodded. "Sleep if you can," she ordered. And Boysie Gann was glad to comply . . .
For three days Boysie Gann had the status of a convalescent. It was a considerable improvement over his status as a major public enemy.
The immediate guard detail was withdrawn—several had been killed in the tube implosion and were going through the messy business of resuscitation and repair at the Body Bank. Gann was free to wander within the limited confines of one wing of the hospital in which he was a patient.
He was even allowed access to the recreation lounge, run by a young Togetherness girl who reminded him of Quarla Snow. Her disposition was like Quarla's, too. She did not seem conscious of his collar. Most important, she let him watch the news-screens to his heart's content.
Boysie Gann had been away from Earth, off on the Reefs or in intensive custody, for so long that he had lost touch with the running news stories.
He sat and dreamed. What was happening on the screen soaked slowly into his mind and heart. He watched, and loved, the gold-haired, long-legged choruses of Togetherness girls cooing their gentle threats: "Work for the Plan! Live for the Plan! You don't want to go to Heaven and make spare parts for the Plan!" Though he knew his chances of winding up in the Body Bank called Heaven and making "spare parts for the Plan" must be rated pretty high, there was no fear in what the girls were singing. It was a part of a life that he had lost, and he wanted it back.
Above all, he wanted to find himself again.
Boysie Gann could not recognize himself in the enemy of the Machine who had been castigated by the Planner himself, denounced by Machine General Wheeler, interrogated by Sister Delta Four. That Boysie Gann was a creature who had been born on Polaris Station, a man who lived with undead Reef rats and queer creatures called spacelings and pyropods. Gann could not fit the strange, rebellious shape of this other Boysie Gann into his personality, could not add the two identities and produce a vector sum of his future life . . .
He sat up straight and glared at the viewscreen.
He had been watching a worldwide news broadcast with half his mind, hardly conscious of what he saw, although in fact what he saw was exciting enough. The news broadcast was almost a catalogue of disasters—a crashed Plan cruiser that destroyed half a city, earthquakes in Antarctica, a runaway nuclear reactor on the Indian subcontinent. Then there had been a nearer disaster. The screen had shown the very subtrain catastrophe that had put him in this place.
And called it sabotage!
Gann blinked. He hardly recognized the accident. The bland, fat Technicolonel puffing out his gruff charges of criminal conspiracy seemed to be talking about some other disaster, on some other world. Malicious sabotage? A bomb planted in the subtrain to discredit the Planner and the Planning Machine? Most incongruous of all, himself as the archvillain, with the radar-horned guard sergeant as his accomplice?
Gann put down his glass of vitamin-laced fruit juice and hobbled over to the Togetherness girl in charge of the lounge.
He was shaking. "Please," he begged. "Did you see that? What is it all about?"
She scolded him sunnily. "Now, now! Your duty under the Plan is to get well! You must prepare yourself to return to serve. No questions, no worries—nothing but healing and rest!"
He said with difficulty, "It said on the newscast that I was responsible for the subtrain accident. It isn't so! And the guard sergeant who was in charge of me—what happened to him?"
Her large, clear eyes darkened for a moment in puzzlement. But only for a moment. She would not question her orders; if her orders said that she was to care for an enemy of the Plan, she would care for an enemy of the Plan. She shook her head and, smiling, led him back to the couch. "Drink your juice," she said with playful severity, and would say no more. To her, what the Plan of Man ordained was necessarily right and true—because "right" and "truth" were defined by the Plan of Man.
Or so thought Boysie Gann.
So thought Boysie Gann, and was aware in some part of him that there was something in that thought which was dangerous—dangerous to him and to all mankind—for if the sweet and empty-headed Togetherness girl accepted the Plan so unquestioningly. . .
He could not put the thought together. It almost seemed as if he himself, and General Wheeler, and even the Planner—as if all the human race within the Plan were in some sense no less empty-headed than a Togetherness girl.
But he could not complete the thought. And then time ran out and he no longer had leisure for such thoughts, for he began the course of training that would lead him to communion with the Machine.
Dyadic relation: I hate spinach. Ternary relation: I hate spinach except when it is well washed. Quaternary relation: I hate spinach except when it is well washed because the sand gets in my teeth.
With instructor and book, with constant subliminal tapes droning while he slept and teaching machines snapping at him awake, Boysie Gann began to learn the calculus of statement, the logic of relations, the geometries of Hilbert and Ackermann and Boole. Conjunctions and disjunctions, axioms and theorems, double negations and metastatements . . . they all surged through his brain, nesting with destructive dilemmas and syllogisms in the mood of Barbara. He learned to transpose and commute. He learned the principle of exportation and the use of dots as brackets. He learned the unambiguous phrasing and inflec-tionless grammar of machine programming; he learned the distinction between perceptual symbols and motor symbols, and learned to make the auditory symbols that bridged the gap. For hours with an oscillator squeal beeping in his ear to guide him, he sang endless quarter-tone scales. He studied the factorization problems of the General Problem Solver and learned to quantify relationships. He learned the construction of truth tables, and how to use them to track down tautologies in a premise.
There were neither classes nor schoolrooms; there were only study and work. It went on and on, endlessly. Gann woke to the drone of the tape-recorded voice under his pillow, ate with the chime of sonic bells in his ear, fell exhausted into his bed with schematics of shared-time computer inputs racing through his mind.
There was a world outside the training center, but he had lost touch with it completely. In stolen moments he caught snatches of conversation between his few human contacts—the Togetherness girls who served him at table, the guards who roamed the halls—that his mind was too hard-pressed to fit together. The Starchild. The Writ of Liberation. Disasters under the earth; rocket explosions in space. They did not matter; what mattered was null hypotheses and probabilistic calculus. If he had time enough, and thought enough, to probe beyond the demands of the training, his mind always reached one step ahead—to the moment when training was over and he would receive the metal badge of communion in his flesh—and it recoiled, and returned to Hilbert and Boole.