The Reefs of Space

by Frederik Pohl

  In the morning the conversation was less placid, less polite than at night. It was odd too, thought Ryeland, listening carefully. In the morning the one universal topic was Escape. Perhaps it was only the wake-up irritability of the normal human, but even the advanced basket cases from the huts next door laid their plans and carefully measured the daily patrol of the guard helicopters. Alden muttered for twenty minutes about the chance of swimming to a miraculously borrowed fishing submarine that some incredibly loyal friend from Life might arrange to have out beyond the breakers. It was foolish, it was pathetic. There was hardly enough left of him to bother escaping with. And his tone the night before had been bland resignation: "You'll learn, my boy," he told Ryeland, "we're here for a reason. It's right." It was puzzling.

  In the night Ryeland had been bothered by something sticking him in the ribs.

  Once Alden was wheeled away he searched, and there, thrust under the seams of the mattress, was a flat aluminum case. He opened and spilled out lump sugar, maps, terribly amateurish faked travel orders from the Machine. And a journal.

  The journal was the work of some previous occupant who signed himself only by initials—D.W.H.—and it covered a period of almost three years. The first entry was sober self-appraisal:

  June 16.

  I arrived in Heaven this morning. I can't get out. If I did get out, there would be no place to go. But if I let myself give up the hope of somehow.. getting out I might as well be dead. Therefore I will try to escape. And I will not brood.

  The last entry, in a palsied hand, was less sober, less analytic:

  May the—what? 9th, maybe.

  Just a min. bfr shape-up.

  I think I've got it! Nbdy ever looks at the scrap-heap carcasses! I've seen some that look better than I do now and, whoosh, they're down the chute & out on the barge when they clean up. So tonight's the night. All I have to do is pass one more shape-up. I've plenty left. Apraces don't matter. If I can just—There's the bell. More ltr.

  The remaining pages were blank.

  Breakfast came before the morning shape-up and Rye-land, stuffing the journal back in the mattress, went thoughtfully out to eat.

  The food was all Whitehurst had promised! There was no rationing here, none at all. Sugar. Coffee. Real, thick cream. Ham with red gravy; cereal with more of the thick cream; fruits and hot biscuits. '

  Ryeland ate until his stomach bulged. He began to feel better. The world seemed calmer, brighter; his housemates left off grumbling and plotting and began to laugh and shout along the long tables.

  Ryeland sat next to Whitehurst and brought up the subject of the previous occupant of his bunk.

  "Oh, him," said the one-eyed man. "Old Danny. He was here for ever, considering. I mean, he must have been a very popular type, they took so much of him. I thought they'd never salvage him total, though all he had keeping him going at the end was a whirl-pump heart and twice a day filtrations on the kidney machine. Funny thing about Danny, his bidding was good enough but when he played a hand—"

  "What happened to him?"

  Whitehurst scowled. "Took both lungs at one time. Pity, too. He still had two arms, clear down to the fingers."

  The bell summoned them out to the morning shape-up.

  There were three of them a day, Whitehurst whispered, and you had to be present. Otherwise total salvage, right away. The white guards with red hearts appliqued on their tunics moved up and down the ragged lines, checking the tattooed identification against lists. "Gutnick, Fairtweather, Breen, Merchant," the one at the house of the Dixie Presidents chanted. "Nothing for you boys. You can fall out. Alden, Hensley—Hensley? Say, how did that name get on the list? Wasn't he scrapped last week?" Half a dozen voices agreed he had been; the guard scratched the name off his list. "Lousy administrative work. Say. Who are you?" He took Ryeland's arm. "Oh, Steve Ryeland. Welcome to our little community. Nothing for you today, though. Whitehurst. Oh, yes. Come on, Whitehurst, you're hi business."

  Ryeland got away as soon as he could. The others were laughing and relaxed, but seeing Whitehurst led away had chilled the soft warmth that had spread over Ryeland at breakfast. At any moment it might be his name that was on the fist; if there was anything at all he could do about it, the time to do it was now.

  He retrieved the journal from his bed, escaped the back way and found a sunny spot on a hill. He sat down against a stone retaining wall and studied the diary of the late D.W.H.

  There was nothing about the man's life-in-Life in his journal. But whatever he had been he was a man of method and intelligence. He had begun by systematically investigating his surroundings. From the first month's entries Ryeland learned a number of possibly useful statistics. There had then been 327 inmates in Heaven, counting twelve children under the age of eighteen (and what had they done to be here?) This was not the only Heaven; there probably were a number of others; twice shipments of inmates had gone out through the gate, to replenish another Heaven temporarily low in stock. There were never any guards inside the walls except at the shape-ups. Usually about a-dozen came in then, and D.W.H. had once been able to count the outside guards at fifteen more. Heaven roamed over nearly a hundred acres, and there was a map, heavily erased and redrawn, tucked into the journal. A note on the map told Ryeland that the walls were electrified and impenetrable, even down to a depth of fifty yards under the surface. Apparently someone had actually dug that farl

  The beach was not fenced, but there was a heavy steel net and, beyond that, a persuasive tradition of sharks. The only other break in the wall was the building through which he had entered, and its satellite structures—the clinic, the administration building, the powerhouse. And the sanitation building. It was there that the "scrap-heap" had attracted D.W.H.'s attention, It was near the beach, and a chute led to a barge which, towed to sea, disposed of the left-over parts of the inmates as well as the more ordinary wastes of a community of several hundred.

  Ryeland mused thoughtfully over the map. Only the scrap disposal chute looked promising. Yet the writer had not thought of it until after some months and, judging by the increasingly panicked and incoherent quality of his notes, his judgment must by then have begun to deteriorate. Still, it was worth a thought. He said a man could escape that way. Perhaps a man could ...

  If he had a place to escape to.

  Ryeland put that thought out of his mind and read industriously in the journal until movements outside the cottages revealed that it was time for the mid-day shape-up.

  Chapter 10

  No Dixie President was called at noon. Only when they were dismissed did Ryeland realize he had been holding his breath almost continuously. Gutnick, the man next to him in line, winked and said: "It gets you that way at first. It keeps on getting you that way too."

  Ryeland said only: "What's that?"

  Gutnick turned and looked. Down the gravel path two guards were solemnly pushing a wheelchair and a hand-truck of appliances. All were connected to the occupant of the wheelchair. There was little left of the man, if it was a man. All of his head was swathed in bandages—if that was his head. Only a little gap showed where the mouth was. The auxiliary handtruck carried a considerable array of pumps and tubing, stainless-steel cylinders and electric equipment.

  Gutnick said, "Oh, him." Gutnick could not wave, as both his arms had been needed elsewhere, but he inclined his torso and called: "Hi, Alec. What did you lose this time?"

  The bandaged head moved faintly. Nothing else moved on the man. The nearly invisible lips parted to gasp, in words like puffs of smoke. "That you, Gutnick? Just the other kidney, I think."

  "You've got plenty left," lied Gutnick cheerfully, and they went in to lunch. Ryeland could not get the basket case out of his mind.

  "I didn't think they bothered to keep us alive, with that much gone."

  "I guess Alec's something special. He's senior in all Heaven. He's been here—" Gutnick's voice was respectful—"almost six years."

  Ryeland didn't have much appe
tite; but after he'd taken a few bites he had to stop in order to feed Gutnick anyway; and then he himself began to perk up. It was astonishing, he marveled after lunch, trudging aimlessly around the walks of Heaven, how the food here made life so bearable. It showed that a good diet made a happy man. It showed—why, he thought with a sudden miserable Rash of insight, it showed nothing at all except that even a doomed creature like himself could submerge the fore-brain in a wallow of physical pleasures. He determined to go right back to the house and get the diary, study it, plan—

  Someone was calling his name.

  He turned, and Oddball Oporto was rushing toward him. "Gee! Ryeland! It's you!"

  Oporto stopped. So did Ryeland; and then he realized that what they were doing was appraising each other, looking for missing parts. So soon it had become a habit in this place.

  "You don't seem to be missing anything," said Ryeland. "I've only been here two days. Got here right ahead of you—I saw you come in. I guess you stopped to turn in your gear? They didn't bother with that, with me ... I should've stayed in Iceland, hey? Not that I hold it against you," he finished glumly.

  "Sorry."

  "Yeah. Well, where you living?" Ryeland told him about the Dixie Presidents, and Oporto was incredulous. "Gee! Those moldy old creeps? Say, why not come over to our place? There's two vacancies right now, and some of the boys are real sharp. You know, you lose a few parts and there isn't much left but the brain; so what you want is a few little problems to work on. Well, fellow next to me, he has a whole bunch of stuff from the Lilavata— old Hindu math problems, mostly diophantine equations when you come down to it, but—"

  Ryeland said gently: "I'm working on a different problem right now."

  Oporto waited.

  "I want to get out of here."

  "Oh, no. Wait a minute! Steve, don't be crazy. A fellow like you, you've got years here. Plenty to look forward to. You don't want to—"

  "But I do want to," said Ryeland, "I want to get away. It isn't just my life, though I admit that's got a lot to do with it."

  "What else? Oh. You don't have to tell me. That girl."

  "Not the girl. Or not exactly. But she's part of it. Something bad's happening with the spaceling and Colonel Gottling. It ought to be stopped."

  Oporto said dismally. "Gee, Steve. You don't want to talk like that. Anyway—" He stopped.

  Ryeland knew Oporto well enough to wait him out. He prompted: "Anyway what?"

  "Anyway," said Oporto with some hesitation, "I don't know why you want to bother with her. I thought that other girl was more important to you. You know, 837552 —I forget her name."

  Ryeland took it like a blow between the eyes. That number—he didn't have Oporto's queer memory for any arithmetical function, but surely it was the number of ...

  "Angela Zwick," he whispered, remembering blonde hair, blue eyes and a mouth that testified against him at his hearing.

  "That's the one. Well, now! So you didn't forget her?" Oporto was enjoying his bombshell. "Why not go see her? She's been here quite a while—over in a cottage by the lake."

  "She's really here? But she was with the Plan Police." Ryeland was dazed. Had the Plan come to this, that it scrapped its own undercover agents?

  "Well," said Oporto-judiciously, "I guess you'd say she's here. Anyway, there's a quorum present. Why not go see for yourself?"

  The first sensation was shock, and a terrible embarrassment. Ryeland scraped one foot against another, staring at the girl in the wheelchair. He said her name gruffly, and then he met her eyes and could say nothing else. Angela? This thing in the chair, was it the girl he had known? She had no arms and, from the flatness of the lap robe that draped her, no legs either. But her face was intact, blue-green eyes, golden hair; her husky, warm voice was the voice he had known.

  "Steve! It's good to see you!" She was not embarrassed at all, only amused. She laughed. "Don't gawk. But I know how you feel. You've only just arrived, and I've been here twenty-one months."

  Ryeland sat awkwardly on the grass before her. Her cottage lay in a little clump of woods, and there were neatly tended beds of flowers around it. Flowers! Ryeland could not remember ever having seen flowers around a dwelling before, only in parks. Though this was a kind of a park, at that.

  Angela said softly: "I wondered if I would ever see you again, after what happened." She cocked her chin, and a tiny motor droned; the velvet-covered chin rest that supported her head seemed to have switches in it, so that she could move the wheels of her chair. Facing him, she said seriously: "You don't blame me, do you?"

  Ryeland muttered: "You did your job under the Plan."

  "So wise of you to say that, Steve. Ah, Steve! I'm glad to see you again." She lifted her lovely chin. "We've got so much to talk about. Take me down by the lake," she commanded ...

  For nearly three years Ryeland had rehearsed the speeches he would make to Angela Zwick if ever they chanced to come together, but in this place they were all wrong, he forgot the words. He had raged silently in his bed, he had pleaded with the stony fields of the isolation camp; now, facing the girl, he found himself engaged in a little conversation. They chatted. They laughed. It was pleasant. Pleasant. And she had put the collar around his neck.

  "There is always peace in serving the Plan," she told him wisely, reading his mind.

  They stopped by the lake and be sat down. "I don't even mind the collar anymore," he murmured, suppressing a yawn.

  "Of course not, Steve."

  He scratched his shoulderblades against the bole of a palm. "I never thought I'd stop minding that. Why, I remember talking to a fellow about it in the isolation camp. He said I'd get over it. I said—"

  He stopped, and frowned faintly.

  "What did you say to him, Steve?"

  "Why," he said slowly, "I told him that I'd never stop hating the collar unless I was dead, or drugged."

  She smiled at him with mandarin calm.

  Back at the cottage of the Dixie Presidents, Ryeland thumbed through the journal that had once belonged to his predecessor in the bunk. There was an entry that he wanted to read again.

  He found it:

  This place is insidious. The atmosphere is so tranquil—God knows how!—that it is very tempting to relax and let what happens happen. Today Cullen came back from the clinic giggling because a nurse had told him a joke. He had lost both eyes!

  And two days later:

  Yesterday I lost my other leg. It is painful, but they gave me shots for that. I wonder why it doesn't bother me. I keep thinking of Cullen.

  Frowning, Ryeland closed the book and went out to stand in the afternoon shape-up. The other Dixie Presidents were already there, and their greetings were chill. Ryeland paid very little attention, although he knew they were annoyed because he had spent so little time conforming with the customs of the cottage. He hardly even noticed the guards, with their scarlet hearts blazoned on their white tunics, as they came droning down the line with their rolls.

  There was something more important on his mind.

  Ryeland was reasonably sure that his mind was functioning as well as it ever had. But he was finding it hard to think this matter through. He didn't mind the collar. That was the first term in the syllogism. Something in the diary supplied the second term. What was the conclusion?

  "Come on, I said!" said a guard's voice, annoyed, and Ryeland woke up to the fact that his name had been called.

  He gawked. "Me? Are you calling me?"

  "You. That's what I said, man! You're on orders today.' Come on to the tissue bank!"

  Chapter 11

  The group of scrapped men waited for the elevator.

  The man next to Ryeland was whispering feverishly under his breath, his eyes fixed on the elevator door as though it were the gate to hell, He caught Ryeland looking at him and threw him a wild smile. "First time for you? Me, too, But I figure it won't be much, you know."

  "All right, all right." The guards began to herd them into the open
ing elevator door. "Move along, now!"

  The elevator dropped swiftly and let them out in an underground hall. Blue asepsis lamps winked on the walls, a hum from the air ducts told of purifiers at work. The guards ordered them to sit down. There were a dozen long, wooden benches. The waiting room was not at all crowded, though there were twenty or more walking cadavers in it. Ryeland looked around at them. Some seemed to have all their faculties and parts; if there was anything missing, it was not such as would appear on the surface. Many showed signs of being nibbled away—a leg missing, an ear, a finger or two. And some were so much prosthesis, so little flesh and blood, that it was a wonder that the surgeons could find anything left to take from them.

  The nervous man switched seats to join Ryeland and hissed in his ear: "See, the way I see it, they're not going to take much the first time. Why should they? For instance, your body might not transplant right. They can't tell. They'll have to do a couple little jobs first and see how they take, before they try anything big. I'm positive of that, friend ..." He stopped as the door opened, his eyes like a tortured kitten's. But it was only a nurse walking through, and she paid no attention to them. Ryeland took time from his own worries to comfort the man. "That's right," he said. "That figures." It didn't, of course; the Plan knew all it had to know about them already. But the nervous man seized at the reassurance.

  He babbled: "Now, all we have to worry about is something little. Maybe some clumsy oaf lost a couple of fingers somewhere. Well, they'll take a finger. Or a couple of fingers , . ." He glanced wonderingly at his hand. "A couple of fingers. They'll take—But what's that? You can spare them. Or a foot, maybe. But they aren't going to take anything big the first time, because—"