"They're all mixed up here, Mr. Babylon," the boy said. He was a nice-looking kid, with startling green eyes undef the long lashes of childhood. "Are you scared?"
"What?" Babylon's full attention was caught at last. He frowned at the boy, then shrugged. "You know," he said, "I think I am, a little. You see, I'm going to be transmitted by tachyon beam to another planet—"
"I know," the boy said scornfully. "Who doesn't know all that? I wouldn't be scared."
"You wouldn't?"
"You bet I wouldn't! Boy! Going off to another planet, way outside the Galaxy, meeting all those great alien races and all—boy!"
"You make it sound pretty nice," Babylon said wryly. And, the way the boy described it, it really did. The part that was far from nice was that, for at least one of him, it would be a one-way trip.
"I hope David isn't bothering you too much?"
Babylon looked up, startled. The voice had been attractively, huskily feminine. The face matched it, and it had the same arresting green eyes and long lashes as the boy. "This is my mom," the boy introduced them importantly. "Not only is she a newscaster, she's been tachyon- transported herself. Twice!"
Babylon fished the name from his memory. "Zara Gentry. Of course! I've seen you many times on the stereo. Your son isn't bothering me at all, honestly."
"I only talk to him when he isn't doing anything else," the boy explained to his mother. "Can I go get a drink of water?"
Zara Gentry looked around the great hall, now relatively quiet. "All right, but don't get in anybody's way." She watched him trot away and then turned to Jen Babylon. "Aren't you the one who's going to Cuckoo to investigate something mysterious?"
"I guess so. I don't know how mysterious it is—except that it's mysterious to me, anyway. My specialty is linguistics. They seem to think I can help them."
"Mmm." She looked at him speculatively, and Jen Baby- Ion realized she was trying to assess whether interviewing him would be a waste of tape. Evidently she decided it would, because she relaxed and said, "Isn't this awful? I've covered Base events a hundred times before, and they usually just go like clockwork."
"Do you know what's holding things up?"
"The Civil Liberties lawyers have asked for an injunction—they want to keep the Purchased Persons from being transmitted—and they're waiting to hear. Of course, that mob of Kooks out there means that the messenger from the judge's office probably can't get through anyway, so we may be here for some time."
Babylon laughed. "Hurry up and wait. They dragged me back from Polynesia at top priority for this—and now I just sit here."
"Polynesia?" The woman looked at him as if she were reassessing. "Were you there when those crustaceans came ashore?"
He shook his head. "After I left, I guess. I just heard some rumors, nothing more."
"Pity," she said, losing interest again. "It's quite a story. They're not the same sort of crabs that are local there. Something special. Quite large, and— Oh! Excuse me! Time to get back to work."
And she was up and away, toward the great central doors of the foyer. Metal heeltips clicking against the terrazzo floor, the militia squad paraded into the Base and formed a double file across the foyer. Between them, the ragged line of convicts shambled haltingly toward the transmission chamber. The noise outside showed that the Kooks were still there, but evidently the militiamen had managed to get through. And, judging from the fact that the ACLU lawyers were standing silently to watch the procession, the request for an injunction had been denied. Babylon saw Zara Gentry excitedly directing her cameramen to cover the scene, and himself moved closer for a better look.
They did not seem as if they needed a squad of militiamen to keep them in order. They had the blank faces and preoccupied stare of all Purchased People, the convicts whose bodies were sold to whatever bidder chose to make use of them. They came in all shapes and sizes, as various as the gaping onlookers or any other random ordinary clutch of human beings. There was a young girl with flowing blond hair between two immense, squat, dark-skinned men, a stout grandmotherly woman of at least sixty following a scar-faced boy surely still in his teens. The militia squad did not seem to be earning their pay. Society did not appear to need much protection from the stumbling, slack- jawed convicts. Not a spark of volition was visible in any of them.
They came quite close to Jen Babylon as they lined up for their transmission. How many of them were there? Fifty-seven, someone had said, with fifty-seven individual life sentences at least among them, for no fewer than fifty- seven separate terrible crimes. Babylon wondered what the crimes might have been. Only doers of victim crimes or unforgivable crimes against the state—murder, rape, kidnaping, terrorism, and the like—were sentenced to be sold as some other creature's puppets. And then only if the convicted criminal refused psychiatric help or was a multiple recidivist.
It struck Babylon that he was looking at people who would be his neighbors in a very short time, for they were destined for Cuckoo.
But that was wrong. Whatever made these fifty-seven creatures individual would be blanked out by the power of the creatures who purchased them. They would be no more than containers for alien personalities. Babylon wondered uneasily what their new owners might be like. They could be almost anything. With all the races of the Galaxy exchanging representatives, there were a great many who could not survive in such appalling stews as the damp, oxygen-rich air of human birthright. The opposite was equally true, to be sure, but humans were not made welcome on some of the more advanced planets, whereas nearly every race had sent at least a few observers to see quaint, primitive Earth. Some came in edited forms, rebuilt to adapt to terrestrial conditions. Others bought convicts like these from the penal authorities, and impressed their own wills on the human bodies.
So whatever these fifty-seven might have been in their own persons, when he met them again on Cuckoo they would be Other. They would become alien in their drives and motivations, whatever their physical forms might have preferred, and every act and thought and sensory impression would be relayed to their distant owners, on whatever chlorine-aired or stormy liquid world they inhabited. There was a superstition that long-term Purchased People came to resemble their owners—whether primate or lizardlike, energy beings or dissociated swarms. This was nonsense, Babylon thought. Probably it was nonsense . . .
But he was glad, all the same, that he was not one of the fifty-seven.
"Hey, you—hold it!" It was a militiaman's voice, but there was more laughter in it than threat. The knot of Purchased People clotted to a stop, and a small figure darted through them and past the laughing militiamen. It catapulted into Jen Babylon and stopped.
"Excuse me, Mr. Babylon," it said. "Mr. Babylon? Have you seen my mom?"
It was the kid, David Gentry. Babylon turned him around by the shoulders and steered him toward his mother, vivaciously speaking into her microphone while her cameramen were shooting the Purchased People, and as he watched the boy scurry toward her a hand fell on his shoulder. It was the man in the red jumpsuit.
"Mr. Barnaby?"
"That's 'Babylon.'"
"Yes. Come with me for briefing, and don't get mixed up with that lot. You transmit right after them."
"And about time," said Jen Babylon.
The official stiffened. "Do you think I don't know that? Shocking how these people interfere! The traffic that's piling up—the schedules that have to be rerouted—shameful! I've always said it's a mistake to coddle these jailbirds," he said, glaring at the Purchased People as he led Jen past them. "Scan 'em and file 'em, use 'em when you need 'em—what's the use of letting them walk around when they're not being used for anything? I tell you, Mr. Barab- bas, criminals ought to be treated like criminals and not like regular full-fare paying passengers like yourself! No wonder the country's going to the aliens!"