Her warm smile tantalized him.
"If you study well, perhaps we can take that swim—"
He tried—the third law of mechanized education forced him to try-but they never took the swim.
A time came when Julie vanished. He heard a hiss of air and felt a sudden icy draft against his sweating nakedness.
Back in the training center, he squirmed across the slick pink membrane of the sensor-effector sheath, climbed into his cold coveralls, and scrambled down the flimsy metal ladder.
"Good night, sir." The plump young Techtenant looked bored and sleepy now. "See you next shift, sir."
He wanted terribly never to see the Techtenant or the trainer again, because they meant that he was going to be wired for communion. He wanted desperately to run away—somehow to get back to Quarla Snow and the clean Reefs of Space.
But he was exhausted and guarded and imprisoned ... he didn't know where . . . perhaps beneath a mile of solid rock . . . perhaps beneath the sea. He did his stint of calisthenics and took a steaming shower and sweated out the chow line and went to his tiny, tile-walled room to sleep.
Suddenly a gong was thundering. It was time to get up, to let them shave his head again, to strip and smear himself with that sticky jelly, to return to the womb of the Machine. . . .
And a time came, in the trainer, when Julie Martinet—or the projected image of her—gave him a test and, smiling, told him that he had passed.
"You have earned communion now. You are ready to be born again."
He almost gasped that he didn't want communion. But he bit his lip. He kept silent until Julie's bright image vanished and air valves roared and a cold wind caught him as he was finally born from the Machine.
Half-dazed and reeling—Doped! his mind whispered despairingly to him—he found himself in his cot. He did not know how he got there. He knew only something was wrong: there was some new scent in the atmosphere, some hardly perceived whisper of motion, as if someone were waiting outside his room for him to be asleep.
Then the anesthetic gas that had been piped through his pillow took effect. He slept. Deeply.
When he woke he felt a minor but nagging ache in the skin and the bone of his forehead. He was in another room—green-walled, surgical.
He did not have to touch his forehead to know that while he slept the surgeons had been at work, the hair-thin electrodes slipped into the micrometrically located centers of his brain, the bright badge of communion implanted on his brow.
In the mammalian brain exist bundles of nerves and specialized tissue which control mood and emotion, as well as those which control motor activities, homeostatic regulation, conscious thought, and the various other activities of that three-pound mass of hypertrophied tissue.
One such area is the pleasure center. Slip a fine platinum electric wire into it by stereotaxic surgery. Feed it a carefully measured, milliampere-tiny surge of electricity. The result is ecstasy! Fit a laboratory animal with such an electrode and with a key it can operate, and it will go on pressing the key, pressing the key, pressing the key ... it will not pause for food or drink or fear ... it will sear itself with delight until it collapses of exhaustion, and will awake only to press the key once more.
The jolt of ecstasy that tore through Boysie Gann's being in that first moment of awakening with the communion plate in his forehead and the electrodes embedded in his brain was like nothing he had ever imagined. It was taste, feeling, odor, and light; it was the wild delight of sex and the terrifying joy of daredevil sport; it was all the things he had ever known at once, magnified unbearably. Time stopped.
He was adrift in a turbulent sea of sensation. . . .
Eons and lifetimes later, he became conscious of humanity again. He was back in his body. The tides of quintessential pleasure had receded from around him, and left him aching and dry.
He opened his eyes, and saw a Technicorps medical orderly retreating from him, the communion probe wires in his hand. He had been cut off from the joy of the Planning Machine.
Gann took a long shuddering breath and reconciled himself to being human again. He could understand Sister Delta Four. He could accept his destiny in communion with the Machine. No other reward could be half as great as this, no other purpose as important. . .
Dazedly he became aware that something was wrong. The Technicorps man's face was pale with fear. Voices shouted from outside, and one of them was queerly familiar.
Gann struggled to his feet, apprehensive and wary. When the door burst open, it was Machine General Wheeler who came into the room like a raging typhoon. "Gann!" he roared. "Starchild! You devil, what have you done?"
"I? Done? Nothing, General—and I'm not the Starchild, I swear it!"
"Filth!" howled the general. "Don't lie to me! What have you done to the Planning Machine?"
Gann started to reply, to defend himself. The general gave him no chance. "Lies!" he raged. "Starchild, you've destroyed us all! Admit it! Admit that it was you who has driven the Planning Machine hopelessly mad!"
The Plan of Man had gone amok. All over Earth, out into the asteroid belt, in the refrigerated warrens on Mercury, in the sunless depths of Pluto and on the slowly wheeling forts of the Space-wall, the terror had struck.
Routing orders crashed one subcar ball into another two thousand miles below the surface of the earth. Six hundred persons died in a meteor-like gout of suddenly blazing gases that melted the subcar shaft and let the molten core pour in.
On Venus a Technicaptain received routine programming instructions from the Machine and, obediently, set a dial and turned a switch. It flooded forty thousand hard-won acres of reclaimed land with oily brine.
A "man of golden fire" appeared on the stage of the great Auditorium of the Plan in Peiping, where the Vice-Planner for Asia had been scheduled to speak to his staff. The golden man disappeared again, and twenty raging pyropods flashed out of nowhere into the hall, killing and destroying everything within reach. The Vice-Planner, minutes late in keeping his engagement, had his life spared in consequence.
In short, sharp words, Machine General Wheeler barked out the story of the catastrophes that were overwhelming the Plan. "The Starchild! Seen in the vaults of the Planning Machine—and now the Machine's gone mad. Its orders are wrong! Its data can't be trusted! Gann, if you are the Starchild-"
Boysie Gann had been pushed too far. In a shout louder than Wheeler's own he roared, "General! I'm not the Starchild! Don't be a fool!"
Suddenly the machinelike face of the general seemed to wilt and crack. It was in a very human voice that he said, after a moment, "No. Perhaps you're not. But what in the name of the Plan is going on?"
Gann snapped, "I thought you were telling me that. What's this about the Starchild being seen in the Machine itself?"
"Just that, Gann. Guards reported someone there. A squad was sent down, and they saw him. He was at the manual consoles—changing the settings, erasing miles of tape, reversing connections. The Machine is mad now, Gann. And the Plan is going mad with it. All over the world."
"Never mind that! What did he look like, this Starchild?"
Machine General Wheeler squared his shoulders and barked crisply, "A man. Golden, they say. Almost as if he were luminous. Photographs were taken, but he was not recognized. It . . . didn't resemble you, Gann. But I thought-"
"You thought you'd come here anyway. Use me as a scapegoat, maybe. Is that it? The way you did when you pretended I shot Delta Four?"
The general tried to protest; then his lips smacked shut like the closing of a trap. He nodded his head twice, briskly, like a metronome. "Yes!"