by Ben Bova
“Ahah!” Monel’s frown vanished and he was all toothy smile. “Since Peta broke the pump, we have a problem: not enough food for everybody.”
“Not yet,” Linc said. “We have enough for the time being.”
Monel shot him a nasty glance. “But when the next crop is harvested, we’ll only have half of what we need. Somebody’s going to go hungry… lots of people, in fact.”
“We all will,” Magda said. “We share the food equally.”
“We always have,” Monel agreed, “up to now. But that doesn’t mean we have to keep on doing things the old way. With these little chips, we can decide who should get food and how much he or she should get.”
“But everybody needs food,” Linc said.
Monet’s answer was swift. “But not everybody deserves it.”
“Deserves…?”
“You know people are always doing wrong things.” Monel said. “Not working hard enough, getting angry, not meditating when they’re supposed to… my guards see a lot of wrongs being done, and so do you, if you keep your eyes open. With these chips, we can put a mark down on a person’s chip whenever he does something wrong. The more marks he gets, the less food we give him.”
Linc felt his jaw drop open, but before he could say any thing, Magda’s voice cut through the room like an ice knife:
“And who decides when someone’s done something wrong?”
Monel smiled again, and it was enough to turn Linc’s stomach. “Why, the priestess will decide, of course,” Monel said. “Assisted by these chips and those who know how to work them.”
“You can’t—” Linc began, but Magda waved him silent.
“And suppose,” she asked, “that the priestess is unwilling to do this? Suppose that the priestess decides that this is an evil scheme, to deprive people of food deliberately?”
The smile on Monel’s thin face stayed fixed, as if frozen there. Finally he said, “When the people get tired of having so little to eat, they will see that this scheme is better for them.”
“Some of them.”
“The good ones among us,” Monel said. “Once they are convinced that this plan is better than letting everyone go hungry, they will decide that the priestess is wrong to oppose it.”
“And then?” Magda asked.
“Then we will get a new priestess.” He turned, ever so slightly, toward Jayna. The girl stared at Magda with bright eyes.
“It’s wrong!” Linc shouted. “We’ve always shared all the food equally. This plan is just plain wrong. It’s against the rules that Jerlet gave us.”
“Then ask Jerlet what to do,” Monel snapped.
For the first time, Magda looked shaken. Her voice almost trembled as she said, “You know that Jerlet doesn’t answer every little question we put to him.”
Monel said acidly, “I know that Jerlet never answers any questions that you put to him. He only says the same thing, over and over again.”
“But if we had a new priestess…” Jayna whispered.
“…maybe he would answer her,” Monel finished.
Linc suddenly felt rage. He wanted to smash his fists into something: the dead wall screen, the desk, the door… Monel’s-twisted smiling face. Violence! Mustn’t commit the sin of… Yet his fists clenched, and he took a step toward Monel.
Magda grabbed at his arm. “Linc! Come with me. We’ve heard enough of this.”
He stared at Monel with hatred seething inside him, but Magda’s hand on his arm and her voice were enough to turn him. Without another word he followed her out of the room and into the passageway.
She pushed the door shut. It was cooler out in the corridor. Linc could feel the flames within him damping down.
“That’s just what he wants,” Magda said. “If you attack him he’ll have you cast out. Now I understand what happened to Peta… Monel used him as a test. If he could make poor little Peta attack him, he knew he could get you to do it.”
“I’ll kill him,” Linc muttered.
“You will not,” Magda commanded. “If you even try, you’ll be killing yourself; and me, too.”
“Then what can we do?”
She let herself smile. “You were going to show me the yellow star. Let’s do that.”
“Now?”
“Yes. Now.”
They stood together at the wide observation window, his arm around her shoulders, hers around his waist. They gazed out at the stars that scattered across the darkness in an endless pattern of glory. And when the yellow star spun into view, they turned their faces and watched their shadows creep across the floor and walls of the passageway.
“It’s strange,” Magda murmured. “The yellow star brings warmth… it drives away the cold. It feels good.”
“Only for a while,” Linc said. “It will get hotter and hotter. It will turn everything to fire.”
“Too much warmth and we die,” she said.
Linc nodded.
“Too little food and we die,” she added.
He still said nothing.
“Linc… Monel is right, isn’t he? I’ll have to decide on his way about the food?”
“You can’t do that,” said Linc. “We’ve always shared everything equally. You can’t just decide that one person will starve while another eats.”
Her dark eyes seemed to cut right through him. “The priestess can decide such things,” she said.
“It would be wrong—”
“I decide what’s wrong! No one else. Only the priestess.”
“With Monel telling you what to do,” Linc shot back.
She nearly smiled. “No one tells me what to do…except Jerlet.”
The anger that Linc had tried to keep bottled up inside him came boiling out. “Jerlet never says anything new to you or anybody else. He always says the same thing!”
Magda remained icy-calm. “Of course. That’s because he’s told us everything that we need to know. Don’t you see? Jerlet has given us all the rules we need. It’s up to his priestess to use those rules wisely.”
“By letting people starve?”
“If I find it necessary.”
“If Monel tells you it’s necessary!”
“Linc… there are so many things you don’t understand. If I must decide that certain evil people must starve, and the people accept it, what’s to stop me from deciding one day that Monel must starve?”
“You…” Linc had to take a breath, and even when he did, his voice was still high-pitched with shock. “You would do that?”
“If I find that Monel is evil.”
He stared at Magda, as if seeing her for the first time in his life. This slim, lovely girl was in command of their lives. “You’d kill him?”
Magda smiled. “It will never come to pass. Sometimes I can see into the future… well, maybe see is the wrong word. I get feelings, like a cold draft touching me—”
“And?”
Turning slightly away from Linc, staring off into the darkness of the corridor, Magda said in a strangely hollow voice, “I’m not sure… I don’t see myself sentencing anyone to starve…not even Monel. I… it feels as if a miracle is going to happen. Yes, that’s it!” She fixed her gaze on Line. “A miracle, Line! Jerlet’s going to make the pump work again! He’s going to bring it back to life!”
Line couldn’t pull his eyes away from Magda’s brightly smiling face. But his mind was telling him, Jerlet’s not going to do a thing… unless you do it for him.
5
They slept right there in the passageway, next to the big observation window, huddled together to keep the chill away. The yellow star’s radiance wasn’t enough to really warm them, but that didn’t matter.
Linc woke first.
He sat up and watched Magda breathing easily in her sleep. Just like when they had been children together, and there were no worries or fears. Jerlet had been with them then, and he had strange and wonderful machines that did everything for all the children: kept them clean, even kept their clothing
clean; fed them; taught them how to speak and walk; everything.
One by one, the machines broke down or wore out. A few of the cleaning machines still worked. Something Jerlet had called ultrasonics. You stepped in and a weird trembly feeling came over you for an instant. Then you were clean. But even those machines were wearing out.
Linc frowned at the memories playing in his head. He had fixed one of the cleaning machines once, a long time ago. It wasn’t working right, and Linc poked into its strange humming heart one day when no one was looking. There was a lot of dust and grime inside. He cleaned it out and the machine worked fine afterward.
He never told anyone about it. It would have made Jerlet angry.
It’s a strange rule. Linc thought. Why would Jerlet give us a rule like that? If the machines don’t work, we’ll all die. But if we could fix them, fix the heaters and the farm tanks and the lights…
He glanced down again at Magda. She was stirring, beginning to wake up.
If I could fix the pump, then Monel’s game with the chips wouldn’t be needed.
He had told himself that same thing a thousand times since Magda had spoken of a miracle.
If I can fix it.
And if I don’t get caught.
Magda finally awoke and they went down to the Living Wheel together. People were up and about. Monel was hissing orders at everyone as they lined up for firstmeal. He browbeat the cooks and made sure that everyone stayed in Linc. He checked the worn and faded plastic dishes that each person carried, and made sure no one took any extra food. He made a general nuisance of himself.
But no one complained. A few smiled. A mild joke here and there. That was all. They were accustomed to Monel’s fussing about. And afraid of his guards.
Then the workday began. Linc’s task was in the electrical distribution center. He stood by a flickering wall screen, just as Jerlet had taught him to do when he had been only a child, and watched the colored lights flash on and off. There was little else to do. The screen flashed and flickered. Once in a whole a light would flare red and then go blank. It would never light up on the screen again.
Over the years, Linc had gradually figured out that each little light on the screen stood for different rooms of the Living Wheel, and even different machines within the rooms. Whenever a symbol disappeared from the screen, a machine went dead somewhere. It could be a heater, or an air fan, or a cooking unit… anything. Which one stands for the pump Peta broke? Linc studied the section of the screen that represented the farming chambers.
One of the biggest thrills of Linc’s life had been the moment he realized that the straight lines on the screen stood for the wires that stretched along the passageways behind the plastic wall panels. The lines were even colored the same way the wires were: yellow, green, red, blue, and so forth. Once he had even fixed one of the wires; he found the trouble spot by noticing that one of the lines on the screen suddenly showed a flashing red light on it.
It had taken a long argument and nearly a day’s worth of meditation by the priestess before she decided that a wire was not a machine, and therefore could be touched by human hands. Linc fixed the faulty wire the way he had seen Jerlet and the servomechs do it years before, and a while room that had gone dark and cold suddenly became light and warm again.
Can I fix the pump? he asked himself, over and over again, all through the long day.
At the end of the workday he was still asking himself. He wondered about it all through lastmeal… which was noticeably skimpier than most lastmeals. And Monel was still there at the food Linc, wheeling his chair back and forth, badgering everybody.
Magda was nowhere to be seen. Which meant she had retired to her shrine to meditate.
She’s trying to reach Jerlet, Linc knew.
With Monel’s voice yammering in his ears, Linc took his food plate back to his own compartment and ate there alone. In silence.
The lights dimmed for sleeping as they always did, automatically. Linc stretched out on his bunk and felt the warmth in the room seeping away; the heaters were turned down, too, at sleep time. But Linc had no intention of going to sleep.
Now the question he asked himself wasn’t: Can I fix it? It was: Will they catch me?
He stayed silent and unmoving on his bunk for a long time, eyes staring into the darkness. Jerlet didn’t want us to tamper with the machines because we were just kids when he had to leave us. He left the servomechs to fix the machines. He didn’t want us to hurl ourselves, or mess up the machines.
Linc rose slowly and sat up on his bunk. The servomechs were supposed to keep all the machines working. But they themselves broke down and died. So there’s nobody here to fix machines. Except me.
He went to the door of his compartment and opened it a crack. The corridor outside was darkened, too. No sounds out there. Everyone was asleep.
I hope! Linc told himself.
Swiftly, he made his way down the corridor that went through the sleeping compartments, through the kitchen and the bolted-down tables and chairs of the galley, and up to the metal hatch that opened on the main passageway.
Magda and the others are wrong when they say Jerlet doesn’t want us to tamper with the machines. He wouldn’t mind if I tried to fix the pump. He wouldn’t get angry at me.
Still, Linc could feel a clammy sweat breaking out all over him. Gathering his strength, he pushed the hatch open and stepped out into the main passageway of the Living Wheel. Down at the end of the passageway loomed the huge double doors of the farm area. They were called airlocks, although Linc could never figure out how anyone could lock up air.
So far, all you’ve done is take a walk. But if they find you inside the farm section, Monel will know what you were up to.
Then he pictured Monel’s smug face with the plastic chips, smiling at Magda and telling her that she was a failure as priestess. Linc pushed down on the heavy latch that opened the airlock door.
The farms were fully lit, and the vast room was warm and pungent with green and growing smells. The air felt softer, somehow. Linc squinted in the sudden brightness and let the warmth soak into his bones. It felt good. The crop tanks stood there, row after row of them, huge square metal boxes glinting in the glare of the long overhead light tubes. The only sound in the vast high-domed chamber was the gentle gurgle of the nutrient fluids flowing through the crop tanks. The pigs and fowl and even the bees were asleep in shaded, shadowed areas across the big room.
Linc went straight to the pump that had been damaged. It looked completely normal from the outside: a heavy, squat chunk of metal with pipes going into it and out of it. But it was silent. The floor plates around it were stained, as if there had been a flood of nutrient fluid that the farmers had mopped up.
He clambered up the metal ladder to the rim of the nearest crop tank and peered in. Young corn was growing in the pebbly bed, together with something else green that Linc couldn’t identify. Nothing seemed to be wilted yet, but Linc was no farmer. Slav had said the crops would die without the nutrients that the pump provided, and the troughs criss-crossing the plastic pebbles of the tank were completely dry. The crops’ roots were sunk into those pebbles, and they were getting no nutrients.
Frowning, Linc clambered down again and stared at the pump. All right, brave hero. Now how do you fix it? Linc realized that he didn’t even know how to get the pump’s casing off so he could examine it.
Jerlet would know. But Jerlet never answered Magda’s questions; he only spoke the same old words. Linc squatted down and stared at the pump. It sat there, silent and dead. Beyond it, on the far wall of the chamber, Linc could see a dead viewing screen. No one had used it since Jerlet had left them; it was a machine that only Magda could touch.
Linc focused his eyes on the distant screen. Suppose I called Jerlet and just asked him how to fix this pump? If he didn’t want me to touch it, he could tell me. He frowned. Another voice in his head asked, What makes you think Jerlet will answer you, when he doesn’t answer the priestes
s?
“If he doesn’t answer,” Linc whispered to himself, “that means he doesn’t want me to touch the pump.”
Yes, but to try to reach him means that you’ll have to touch the viewing screen controls. That’s just as bad as tampering with the pump.
Linc had no answer for that. He walked across the big empty room and stood in front of the wall screen. A tiny desk projected out from under the screen. It had three rows of colored buttons on it. Some of the colors on the buttons had been chipped away. That’s where Monel got his colored plastics!
There was no chair at the desk. Linc looked down at the buttons, then up at the screen, then down at the buttons again.
“Jerlet wouldn’t mind me calling him,” he told himself. “Besides, if Monel can touch the buttons, why can’t I?”
Still, as he reached out for the biggest of the buttons, his outstretched hand trembled. Swallowing hard, Linc jabbed at the button.
The screen glowed a pearly gray.
No face showed on it, no picture of any sort, nor any sound. But it was alive! It glowed softly.
“Jerlet,” Linc blurted. “Can you hear me?”
The screen did nothing. It merely kept on glowing. Frowning, Linc called Jerlet’s name a few more times. Still no response. Impatiently, he started pressing the other buttons, jamming them down in haphazard fashion. The screen flashed pictures, lights, swirling colors. But no Jerlet. “Jeriet! Jerlet, answer me! Please!” After a few frantic minutes, a booming voice said:
“UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ARE NOT PERMITTED TO USE THIS TERMINAL.”
Linc staggered back, startled. “Wha… Are you Jerlet?”
“UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ARE NOT PERMITTED TO USE THIS TERMINAL.”
“Jerlet! I need help!”
“UNAUTHORI—” The voice stopped for an eyeblink. “WHAT SORT OF ASSISTANCE DO YOU REQUIRE?”
It didn’t sound at all like Jerlet’s voice. But it was somebody’s voice.
“The pump… the main pump for the crop tanks,” Linc said. “I need help to fix it.”
