"Cliff Hawk, perhaps." Quamodian scowled uncertainly. "I can't think of anybody else. But he's a good many galaxies away from here. The whole thing baffles me."
The flyer hummed for two seconds.
"The guardians will continue working on the case," it said. "They report many factors which still resist logical resolution. However, they do have advice for you, based on a first analysis of the available data."
"So?"
"If you return to your dwelling and remain inside, the computed probability of your premature termination is only point-o-two. If you continue your trip to Earth, however, the computed probability of an illicit termination of your life is point-eight-nine. The guardians advise you to go home."
"Thank the guardians," Quamodian said. "But Molly needs help." He sat up straighter. "Call the dome," he said. "Ask about my priority to Earth."
4
The control dome reported that his priority request had been duly transmitted to Almalik, spokesman star for the citizen Cygnus. No priority had yet been issued.
"Be patient, sir," the flyer added sympathetically. "The sentient suns are hard to hurry. With life spans of many billion years, they have their own scale of time."
Quamodian grumbled and waited, watching the robot guardians remove the dead man and his rusted spacecraft. Contemplating the computed probability of his own early termination, he grappled with the riddle of Solo Scott.
Scott's little sermon about association, taken by itself, made a weird kind of sense. Thinking back to his boyhood, Quamodian could see its truth in his own experience. The arrival of the fusorians on Earth had ended ages of competition and opened a new era of association. All his life, Quamodian had been torn between the two.
It struck him now that Scott was probably right. Self-interest may have been a necessary law of the jungle, but even the most primitive hunters had learned to work together. Competition had become a deadly sickness of higher civilization. The harshest therapy of the old Plan of Man couldn't cure it—not even with an explosive iron collar around the neck of every self-directed individual. When the fusorians came, most men welcomed them.
But Quamodian had elected not to join his parents in the new symbiotic union. Growing up in the disturbing transition years, he had come to love both ways of life. He yearned to keep his own individual freedom, however dangerous. But he also yearned, just as keenly, for the absolute security and peace the fusorians had brought.
With a sharp conflict of emotions, he had watched the end of man's old civilization. Sometimes sadly, he had seen almost every feature of it —religion and philosophy, politics and business, social custom and private habit—proved needless or silly or just plain wrong. Often approving, he had observed the end of war, of want, of man's old cruelty. He found that he loved both the old and the new too much to abandon either.
Forced to make his own decision when his parents accepted membership in Cygnus, he chose at first to compete. Struggling for academic marks, he won a Starscout scholarship that lifted him off the confused and crowded Earth into a more intense and complex existence in the transgalactic civilization—that must have been twenty years ago, if he converted universal time into the old solar periods.
In his own life, he reflected, the old jungle law had clearly gone wrong. Competing with robots and multiple beings and human symbiotes, he had failed his graduate finals. He had failed in a dozen pathetic little business enterprises. Reaching Exion as a sort of experimental animal, he had failed to beat Cliff Hawk, failed to win Molly Zaldivar.
Only now, working with the Companions of the Star, had he found his own small but satisfying place in society. Not so final as the total self-surrender of symbiosis, it was still a useful social service. It was association enough for him—unless Molly changed her mind.
"Attention, sir." The flyer's drone broke into his brown introspection. "The control dome is calling us back to the ramp."
"Oh, sorry." Relieved, he gave instructions. The flyer swam back into the stream of traffic. A stalked horror of a citizen with members like bamboo shoots and a frond of brain tissue like a skirt around its waist had paused to let him move into the line of traffic on the ramp.
"Traffic control to Andreas Quamodian," the dome was flashing. "The multiple citizen Cygnus is fully qualified to issue priorities for in-tergalactic transits. Almalik, spokesman star for the citizen, has approved your application for a reservation number. You may enter the transflex cube."
Quamodian grumbled his thanks, and the flyer carried him toward the cube. The veteran of a good many intergalactic transits, he had never learned to enjoy them. The effects of transflection varied with the individual. Some felt nothing; a few reported pleasure or exhilaration. Most, to whom transit was unpleasant or terrifying, eased the strain of passage with drugs or hypnosis. Quamodian merely endured it.
Before they reached the cube, the flyer paused.
"Sir, the guardians are calling again. On the basis of a new analysis they have recomputed the probability of your early termination at point-nine-three. They still advise you to go home."
"Thank the guardians," Quamodian said. "Tell them I'm going on to Earth-and Molly Zaldivar."
"At least you are statistically safe until we reach our destination," the flyer assured him brightly. "A billion passengers arrive safe for only six who don't. Three of the six suffer nothing worse than dimensional rotation, with left sides exchanged for right. Two others undergo displacement of body tissue or prolonged psychosis. Only one passenger per billion is unaccountably lost. Even that one is statistically replaced. One passenger per billion is physically reduplicated through anomalous subspace refraction, so that the net loss is zero . . ."
"Shut up!" Quamodian growled. "I'm quite familiar with those statistics. As a monitor, I was once assigned to discover what becomes of that one lost passenger. I never solved the problem, and I prefer not to think about it now."
Sulkily silent, the flyer swam into the cube. Quamodian watched the diaphragm contract behind him, shutting out the endless file of waiting citizens. At once the flyer rocked and veered. Rotated out of space and time, routed by computation through a dozen or a hundred congruent folds of hyperspace, he felt as he always did: lost, stunned, and queasy.
The blue walls flickered and dissolved into a darkening, grayish haze. A queer roaring came hollowly from nowhere, swelling in his ears. Numbing cold drove through him, as if every tissue of his body had somehow been plunged into the dark zero of the space between galactic clusters.
Quamodian sweated and suffered. Transcience flight always did something to his location sense—researchers had experimented with the effect, but never explained it.
"Here we are, sir!" the flyer piped at last. "Was that so bad. . ."
Its cheery voice was cut abruptly off. It spun and pitched and fell. Quamodian saw streaks of blood-colored fire. He buried his wet face against his quivering knees and waited for his sense of place to adjust itself. It didn't. But after endless sickening seconds, he felt the flyer break out of that wild dive, and into level flight.
"Reporting trouble, sir," it whined. "Malfunction in all communication and navigation gear." It whirred and clicked and added blackly, "If somebody wished to keep us off the Earth, they have scored a point."
5
Quamodian raised his head and saw the sun. An unfamiliar star, blood-red and huge, too dull to hurt his eyes. It floated law in a dead-black sky, swelling across many degrees. Dark spots and streaks and convolutions covered its two enormous hemispheres, with almost the pattern of a naked human brain. Thick ropes of red plasma coiled away from both its polar coronas, brighter than its mottled face.