The Reefs of Space

by Frederik Pohl

  Dec. 3.

  Unusually heavy call-outs at the shape-up this morning. The rumor is that there was a nuclear explosion in Baja California and a great many spare parts will be needed. I wonder. Tonight?

  Ryeland turned the page, but he already knew what he would find.

  The next entry was the last. It had been close for D.W.H., but not quite close enough.

  Hunger was beginning to prey on him seriously. His system began to refuse the sugar.

  Oporto was openly suspicious now. He walked with Rye-land all over Heaven. Down by the palm-fringed lake he sat with his back against a boulder and watched Ryeland grimly hurling rocks at the hanging coconuts. Ryeland did not succeed in knocking one down, but he did, after visiting a few clumps of palms, find one that had fallen. "I guess you like coconut milk a lot," Oporto said sulkily, seeing how greedily Ryeland hammered off the outer husk and bashed in the shell.

  "I love it." Actually the nut was overripe, and the milk had a foul taste.

  "Tastes good with garlic, huh?" Oporto was referring to some wild roots Ryeland had found, dark green spears thrusting out of the grass with a cluster of muddy little strong-flavored knobs underground; Oporto had found him nibbling them experimentally.

  Ryeland said: "Leave me alone, will you? I—ah—don't feel very well."

  Oporto sighed. "I'm not surprised." But he wandered away after a while.

  Ryeland dismissed him from his mind. He felt weak and starved. It was only psychological, he told himself; why, shipwrecked mariners had lasted for months and years on little more than what he had so easily come by!

  But they had not, it was true, been subjected to the thrice-daily temptation of a loaded table from which they dared not eat.

  And there was another consideration. He looked longingly at the little fish in the lake, for example. He could easily catch one. What was to stop him from broiling it over a fire?

  But he had already attracted enough attention, he dared no more. Surely the guardians of Heaven would know what to do with a cadaver who had stumbled on the necessity of avoiding their drugs. Once they found one such it would be only a name on the shape-up list, a needle in the arm, and all the drug his system could absorb thrust into him at one moment. Will power would not help him then.

  Yet he could not avoid suspicion entirely, not as long as he continued to reject the all but irresistible food of Heaven. Already he was concerned over his mates in the Dixie Presidents, not to mention Angela Zwick and, above all, Oporto, whose behavior was no longer suspicious but sure. There was no doubt; Oporto knew.

  The next morning he got away from the others and scouted the periphery of Heaven. Reluctantly he decided that what everyone said was true; the fence was impassable. It would have to be the garbage heap.

  The leftover bits from the cadavers in Heaven were deposited in a stainless steel sump next to the North Clinic. The pit was empty at this hour; it had been sluiced clean, its tons of abandoned humanity chuted into a barge and towed away. The hot sun had baked it gleaming. It was surrounded by a wire fence, and that in turn screened by red-flowered bougainvillea bushes. Ryeland wondered if the fence was electrified. Probably not...

  It would, he thought, be wise to make his bid for freedom soon. The quicker he tried, the more likely that he would retain all his parts. Even now, he saw, there was some sort of activity going on; guards were on the roof of the North Clinic, working around what looked like searchlight projectors. Ryeland scowled. If they flooded the garbage heap with light, that would make things more difficult. Still the projectors were peculiar; they had reflectors but no lenses, and they seemed to be rather small for the task involved. Ryeland crossed his fingers. Perhaps they would be for some other use entirely. He could only hope.

  "Sdeve! Sdeve Ryeland!" a familiar voice called loudly. It was Oporto—shouting, waving, smiling.

  Ryeland waited, suddenly wary. How had the little man known he would be here? And what was this sudden excitement in his manner? Oporto was sniffling, almost quivering. "Whad a mess, hey, Steve You hear about id?"

  "About what?"

  "Another tube collabze! Eighdeen hundred people this time. You know whad I think? Sabotage. Thad's whad I think."

  Ryeland shook his head. He was not feeling over-friendly to the little man; he was still wary. Still, there was the chance that Oporto knew something, even here, cut off from the world as they all were. "Sabotage by whom?"

  "Anti-Plan elemends," Oporto explained cheerfully. "They've been happening all over the world, you know. Thousands dead! Commudication wrecked!" He glanced over his shoulder, smiled, and said quite loudly: "Or don'd you think so, Steven Ryeland?"

  Ryeland's nostrils flared; he smelled danger. He looked where Oporto had glanced, and saw what Oporto had seen. Three big men in the white uniforms, coming toward them with purpose. He understood why Oporto had spoken his name so loudly; and the little man nodded, quite unabashed. "Yes, Steve, Judas Isgariot, thad's my other name."

  The guards looked as though they were spoiling for a touch of resistance from him. He didn't offer it. He let them take him to the clinic, and when the needle was presented to his arm he stared at it without emotion. The shot was painless enough, even though he knew what it was. It was asphodel again, but this time he was ready for it. "Don't give us any more trouble, Zero-Dome," growled the guard, and released him at the gate of the clinic.

  Ryeland's body responded at once to the shot. He accepted it; it was warmly comforting; it would not matter now. He almost laughed out loud. He could not feel betrayed by Oporto, even; Oporto could no longer commit betrayal; he was no longer trusted. And meanwhile ... Ryeland could eat!

  There was a guard brooding over the tables assigned to the Dixie Presidents at lunch. Ryeland conscientiously gorged himself on roast pork and sweet potatoes, with three cups of coffee. It tasted very good. Why not? It didn't matter anymore. Meprobamate is not a narcotic; it doesn't keep you from thinking. It only eases jitters— that sovereign incentive to action!—and for Ryeland the worrying fear had already served its purpose. He had his plan. He would carry it out that night, if he could; the next night certainly. He recognized quite calmly that, now that Oporto had told the guards he was avoiding food, he would no longer serve any purpose by not eating; they would pick him up and inject him. All right. It didn't matter, nothing mattered, he was on his way out.

  He could hardly wait for sundown and escape.

  It was time, too. There were heavy callouts that day. Ryeland's bunkmate had gone at breakfast and had not returned by lunch—wouldn't ever return, now, said the wise old heads; if you didn't come back by the next shape-up, you weren't coming back at all. Five names were called at noon. At dinner, seven more—why, thought Ryeland through his comfortable haze of meprobamate, that left only three in the entire cottage who had not been called for some donation that day, and Ryeland was one of them. Clearly he was pushing his luck.

  After the evening shape-up he looked one last time around Heaven and strolled away. Just in time.

  For as he was almost out of earshot in the gathering dark, a white-clad guard came down the shell path. Rye-land paused, listening. "Ryeland," the guard was saying, and something with the word "clinic."

  Rumble-rumble; the bass voice of one of the few survivors of the Dixie Presidents, answering.

  "Oh." The guard again, not very interested. "Well, when he turns up, tell him to report. She can wait."

  Ryeland hid himself in the night. What they wanted with him he could not know; but he was very sure that his time was even shorter than he had thought. But who was the "she" who could wait? Angela?

  He could hardly think so, but—well, why not go to see her? If it turned out to be Angela, who had somehow inveigled a guard into being messenger-boy for her, there was no reason he should not find out why. If it turned out not to be her ... he was surely all the better off for being as far as possible from the cabin of the Dixie Presidents.

  It wasn't Angela. She was complet
ely ignorant of why the guard had been looking for him, and completely disinterested.

  Uneasily, keeping an alert eye open for any possible guard who might, come their way, he sat down beside her in the warm tropical evening. More to see what she would say than to relieve his feelings, he told her about Oporto's reporting him to the guards and his consequent new dose of tranquilizer. "Very right of him, Steve. You shouldn't go against the Plan!"

  He shook his head ruefully. "I can't understand you," he admitted. "To work for the Plan—yes. That's duty.

  But to betray a friend—" He stopped, and looked quickly at her, but she only laughed.

  "I know, Steven. But you're wrong. Do you remember what I was doing when we first met?"

  "Running a computer."

  "That's right! And we would set up problems—oh, enormous problems. I loved that job, Steven! And the computer would solve them, one-two, click-click, ting-a-ling! It could do it without fail; well, it was part of the Plan, you see. Only one unit in the master Plan of Man that the Machine itself runs. Do you know why it was never wrong?"

  "You tell me," he growled. She was so calm!

  "Because we tested it!" she cried. "There was a special test-circuit switch. After a big problem we'd send a charge —oh, five times normal voltage!—through every last tube and transistor and relay. If anything was going to fail, it would fail then—and we'd know—and we could replace it. And ... well, Steven," she said, quite serious, "that's what I am, you see. I'm a test charge."

  She leaned forward against the high restraining chair-arms that kept her limbless body from toppling. "You can't be allowed to fail the Plan!" she cried. "You must be found if you are weak ... and replaced. Oporto and I, we have one purpose under the Plan of Man: to find and report the bad tubes. Did I trick you? I don't know; is the excess voltage flushing out a computer a 'trick?’ You were a bad tube. Admit it, Steven; you could fail. You did fail! And the Machine is better without you!"

  Ryeland paced about. The girl watched him solemnly, her eyes large and compassionate. He said at last, unwillingly: "And you are willing to serve the Machine, even after it lops your arms and legs off?"

  "I'm willing."

  "Then you're crazier than Oporto!" he roared. "The Machine is a monster! The Plan of Man is a hoax!"

  She refused to be shocked. "It keeps thirteen billion of us alive," she reminded him.

  "It keeps thirteen billion of us enslaved!”

  "Do you have another way!"

  He scowled. "I don't know. Maybe—out in the Reefs of Space—"

  "The Reefs of Space are no longer of any importance to you, my dear. Just like Ron Donderevo. Oh, he was a real man———and maybe there are Reefs, I don't know. But there's nothing there for us." She moved her head, and the obedient wheels brought her closer to him. "And is it so bad, Steven? Being slaves? I know you have ideals—I respect you for them, truly I do! But this is a matter of life and death for Mankind. And isn't it true that, for almost all of us, under the Plan of Man there is happiness?"

  He laughed shortly. "It comes in the drinking water!"

  "All of it?" She leaned back lazily, looking at him with candid huge eyes. "What about me, Steven. Don't you want me?"

  It caught him off-guard. He flushed. "I—I don't know what—"

  "Because I'm here, Steven," she went on softly. "If you wanted me, I'm here. And I'm helpless; I can't resist you."

  He swallowed. "You—You could scream for help. The guards would—Damn you!" He leaped away from her, "I'll never forgive you that, Angela! You've dragged me down to your level, haven't you? But you can't do the same trick again!"

  She said, calm, real regret in her voice, "I don't know what you mean, dear." And after a moment Ryeland realized that there was truth in what she said. She meant it; she was his to take, if he chose, and she would not have blamed him. He said brutally:

  "You're a high-voltage test circuit, Angela, yes, indeed! But you've already burned me once. I don't intend for it to happen again!"

  There was no longer any doubt of what he had to do in his mind. He was inside a wall; well, a wall had two sides. He would reach that other side! Perhaps he would be alive; more likely he would be a cadaver, stripped of useful parts. But he would reach it.

  Because ... because, he thought, on the other side of that wall were many things. There was freedom—maybe—in the Reefs of Space. There was, perhaps, the man who knew how to remove collars.

  And there was Donna Creery.

  Abruptly he turned to Angela again, surprised at his own thought of the Planner's daughter, unwilling to think farther in that most dangerous of directions. He said, "I—I didn't mean—"

  "Don't apologize, Steve. You of all people—"

  He became conscious that she had stopped in the middle of a thought. "What were you going to say?" "Oh ... nothing. Nothing much. Just that..."

  "Angela!" he said angrily. "You've always kept secrets from me! Please don't keep on with it—not here! Now, what were you going to say? Something about me 'of all people'? Am I any different from other people?"

  Her wide, lovely eyes studied him serenely. Then she said: "Don't you know that you are?"

  Her cool regard made him uncomfortable. He had to gulp before he could ask what she meant.

  "Haven't you been aware of anything strange about yourself?"

  He was about to shake his head, when something froze him. He recalled the riddle of the three days he had lost Suddenly he remembered a time when he thought he had heard her voice, from the dark outside the circle of pitiless light that blazed down on the therapy couch, before she had sacrificed her limbs to the Plan.

  "You must have noticed that you are different, Steve," her soft voice taunted him. "Have you ever wondered why?"

  For a moment he wanted to strike her. The iron collar was suddenly tighter around his neck, so tight that he could scarcely breathe, so tight that he felt the veins throbbing at his throat. He sat numb and silent, staring at her.

  "Did you think you were human?" Her voice was contemptuous, merciless. "I thought you might guess, when I was telling you how Donderevo got away. You are the junk man."

  "Junk—what?"

  The hah- stood up at the nape of his neck. He shuddered in the sun. The collar was heavier then lead, colder than ice.

  "I told you that a thing was patched together out of waste parts. A decoy for the guards to watch while Donderevo got away. Well, Steve, that's what you are."

  He sat still, breathing carefully through the cruel constriction of the collar.

  "If you're good-looking, Steve, that's because the surgeons were trying to put together a reasonable likeness of Ron Donderevo, who was a handsome man. If you dislike the Plan, it is because your brain and your glands were patched together from what was left of several of its most distinguished enemies. If you have an unusual mastery of helical field theory, it is because one lobe of your brain belonged to the man who invented it. If the rest of your memory is somewhat blurred or contradictory, it is because the rest of your brain was stuck together from odds and ends of tissue."

  "No!" he whispered hoarsely. "That can't be true—"

  But the collar choked off his voice. He felt weak and numb with a hideous feeling that it could be true. "If I was ever here before," he argued desperately, "I can't remember anything about it."

  “That goes to prove it." Angela's slow smile was innocently sweet. "The men who assembled you were research scientists, as well as enemies of the Plan. They had been using bits of waste brain tissue in effort to improve upon nature. When they were putting your brain together, they seized the opportunity to create a mental mechanism dangerous to the plan."

  Dazed, he could only shake his head.

  "There's proof enough, if you don't believe me," she said. "Look at all your feats of sabotage. The subtrain tubes and fusion reactions and ion-drive accelerators that you have demolished with your improved designs—"

  Agony wrenched him.

  "I
don't remember—"

  'That's the final perfection of your mental mechanism," she said calmly. "The disloyal surgeons equipped your new brain with a self-erasing circuit, to protect you from any temptation to reveal your secrets under torture. Aren't you aware of the blank in your past?"

  "I—I am." Shuddering, he nodded.

  'That's all you are." A lazy malice glinted in her smile. "All the special attention that you have been receiving for the past three years is proof that you functioned remarkably well as a sabotage device, but your function has been performed. I suppose you are setting some sort of precedent, now that all your organs are about to be salvaged for the second time. But in spite of that, Steve, I can't help feeling that you are trying to carry your head a little too high. Actually, you're nothing more than a hundred and sixty pounds of bait that those traitors filched from the sharks."

  Chapter 13

  Shark meat! If that was all he was, then this was the place for him!

  Ryeland lurked in a clump of the bougainvilleas near the garbage pit, watching the guards on the roof, while the sun went down and the sky purpled and the stars began to find pockets in the cloud cover through which they could appear.

  The searchlights—or whatever—were not turned on.

  Numbed, Ryeland watched and tried not to think. That was one less worry. Still, there were guards on the roof; he would have to wait until it was darker. The guards were idly looking out over Heaven to the sea. It was a warm night, a fine tropic night.