"Go there we will," rapped General Wheeler. "Land there we will. And at the station. Major Gann! I told you I intended to go to the Reefs at once and wanted you with me. I had a reason. See here! This dropped to the ground before me as I was leaving the Planner's chambers after my—ah—episode with the guns."
Wordlessly Boysie Gann took the document. It was a creamy square, without signature, and on it were the words:
If you would save yourself, your people, and your worlds, bring Machine Major Boysie Gann and yourself to the Togethership on the Reefs of Space. The gateway will be found at the Plan of Man solar observatory on Mercury, Terminator Station Seven.
"The Starchild!" cried Gann.
General Wheeler nodded with a harsh, mechanical up-down, up-down.
"A message from the Starchild, yes. And the same message from the Planning Machine. Major Gann! Do you realize what this means? The Planning Machine is the Starchild!"
13
At some point they transshipped into a Plan of Man jetless-drive cruiser. Gann paid little attention.
He was using the time in the best way he could, to rest, to try to recover from the shocks and stresses of the last few weeks. And how fast they had accumulated, how violently they had drained him of strength, and of peace of mind!
He could still feel the distant ache in his forehead, in the bones of his skull, behind his eyes, in his sinuses—the track of the probes of the surgeons who had implanted the communion electrodes in his brain.
He could feel the aches and bruises of his working over by the Planner's guards. How long ago?
He was exhausted still from the battle with the pyropods and the long drop to Earth. His weary muscles still bore the fatigue poisons of his fight on Harry Hickson's reeflet. . .
He closed his eyes, and Quarla Snow came into his mind. He opened them, and Sister Delta Four sat quietly unmoving, her eyes fixed on him, before him.
He was beginning to feel himself again. With the return of strength there returned the question of the two women, so unlike yet so much in his thoughts. He said, "Julie, Sister Delta Four, if you'd rather. Do you know that what General Wheeler said is true? That the Machine is mad?"
Her perfect face, half hidden in the cowl, did not change expression. "I know that is what the general said," she sang.
"But it is mad, Julie. The Starchild has wrecked it. Now it is wrecking the Plan planets. Do you still want to serve it?"
"I serve the Planning Machine," she chimed sweetly, her dark eyes cool and empty.
"Because of the bliss of communion? I understand that, Julie. Don't forget"—he touched the glittering plate in his forehead—"I've felt it too."
There was a flicker in her eyes, almost an expression of indulgent amusement as she looked at him. But she only said, in her voice like the sound of bells, "What you felt, Major Gann, is only a shabby imitation of what the Machine gives its true servants. For you are only half a servant. The Machine has not opened its mind to you."
Puzzled, Gann asked, "You mean . . . mind-to-mind linkage? Communication with the—what could you call it?—with the thoughts of the Machine?"
She only shrugged. "It is something of that sort, perhaps," she said indifferently. "You cannot know." She sang a quick chiming chorus of tonal morphemes. Gann tried to follow, but was lost almost at once.
"You said something about the . . . the soul?" he guessed. "The soul of the Machine?"
"You see? I am sorry for you, Major Gann," she said. "More for you than for myself. Since you have destroyed my linkbox I cannot reach the Machine, but some day perhaps I will find another linkbox. You will never attain it."
Machine General Wheeler had been dozing while they spoke. Now Gann became aware that the general was awake and listening to them. When he saw Gann's eyes on him, the general sat up and laughed rasp-ingly, like an ancient, ill-kept machine.
"A fool," he said, hurling one bright, contemptuous look at the girl. "And you're another, Gann. You're not fit to survive, either of you."
"I survive if the Machine desires it," chimed the girl clearly. "I will cease when the Machine no longer needs me."
The general ticked off a nod and turned to Gann. "You see? And what is it that keeps you alive?"
Gann said seriously, "I don't know." He got up, moved restlessly about the cramped quarters of the Plan cruiser, his step light and imprecise in the tiny gravity its jetless thrust supplied. He said, "Out on the Reefs they talk about freedom. I'm not sure, but . . . Yes. I think it is that hope that keeps me going now, the hope that freedom is real, and good."
The general laughed again. Without passion, as if playing back an ancient tape recording in his brain, he said, "The Planner I just killed understood freedom. He called it 'the romantic fallacy.' Freedom is what permits the dirty, Planless nomads of the Reefs to eke out their wretched lives. It is a myth."
"I saw happy men and women on the Reefs," said Boysie Gann softly, less to the general than to himself.
"You saw animals! They believe that men are good. They believe that mere human men and women, left to their own un-Planned devices on any drifting rock somewhere in space, can somehow find within themselves the natural springs of morality and intellectual enlightenment and progress. They are wrong!"
He blinked at Gann and the silent, composed girl. "Men are evil," he said. "The givers of laws have always known that men are essentially bad. They must be goaded into whatever good they display. Our Plan of Man was created to defend this classic philosophy—the cornerstone of all civilization. The Plan recognizes the evil in man. It forces him to goodness and progress. There is no other way!"
Mercury, the hell planet, lay before them.
The guiding sensors of their Plan cruiser reached out with fingers of radiation to touch-the planet, the Sun; sought reference points by optical examination of the fixed bright stars; scanned the limbs and poles of Mercury, and accurately fixed the proper point on the terminator line of the Sun's radiation. Then, satisfied, or in whatever state passes in a machine for satisfaction, it completed its landing corrections and directed the cruiser into a landing orbit.
The great naked fire of the Sun hung only thirty-odd million miles away—three times as close as to Earth, its mighty outpouring of light and heat nine times as great. Its surface was mottled with great ugly spots, leprous with the scaly markings called faculae and granulations. It was painful to watch, bright and blinding. Machine General Wheeler moved a hand angrily, and the vision screen obediently blotted out the central disk, like a solar eclipse; then they could see the somber scarlet chromosphere, the leaping red arches of prominences, like slow-motion snakes striking at the void and, surrounding all, the white blazing radiance of the corona.
In that mighty furnace, each second, lakes of solar hydrogen flashed into helium, pouring out energy. Each second, every square centimeter of its enormous surface hurled six thousand watts of power into the void.
On the sunward side of Mercury, molten tin and lead ran like water in fissures of baked and ovenlike rock. On its dark side the thinnest of atmospheres, boiled from the rock by the solar radiation, smashed free of it by the impact of meteorites, carried some tiny warmth to relieve what was otherwise a freezing cold nearly as absolute as that of Pluto.
On the terminator line the Plan of Man's string of observatories maintained a precarious existence, the searing heat before them, the killing cold behind.
"There!" rasped General Wheeler, stabbing a finger at the screen. "Terminator Line Station Seven! Now we'll see about this Starchild!"