The Reefs of Space

by Frederik Pohl

  Ryeland reached out a hand to her—

  And drew it back.

  It was too late; it was all over. The spaceling had stopped breathing entirely.

  Absently Ryeland brushed the dull fur on her cooling neck. Dead, yes. No matter what secrets her alien metabolism held, there was no doubt that life had gone.

  And now ... how long would the field that contained their air persist?

  Ryeland had no idea. In a firefly, he remembered, the bioluminescence lingered for hours after death. Was this a related effect? Probably not. The strange force that drove the spaceling was something far removed from a mere greenish glow. It might last for a few minutes. It might—at any split second it might—disappear, and kill them instantly in a soundless explosion of released air.

  Donna said softly, "Steven. Let's go outside where we can see the stars."

  The Reef was a small hollowed planet, wheeling slowly now, perhaps because of some dying convulsion from Chiquita. From the mouth of the cave the whole stardusted splendor of the heavens was revealed. The sun itself, yellow and distant, came up through tangled vines to look at them, like the headlight of a far-off locomotive.

  "The sun," whispered Ryeland. "Still the brightest star. We haven't come so far."

  They looked out at the mighty constellations, strange in their powdery mask of lesser stars but still identifiable —mighty Orion, the misty cluster of the Pleiades, the vast silvery sweep of the galaxy. There it was, thought Ryeland soberly, the terrible, wonderful new empire that they had hoped to help claim for Man. And they had failed.

  It was very strange and wonderful, but he felt almost at peace. They were still alive. It was a fact that brought with it a sense of unbounded wealth. As everything had been lost with the death of the spaceling, now each tiny moment that they were somehow spared was a treasure. Each second was a joy.

  Ryeland anchored himself to a ledge of space coral, all silver and ruby, with Donna very light in his arms. They talked, not consecutively. There were things each had to say.

  The one central fact—the fact that they were clinging to life by only the feeblest of grips—they did not mention.

  Donna said:

  "Father's probably still on Earth. He can't have got my message. He'd have followed if he did. He's a busy, a driving man, Steven, and I used to hate him, but—-Oh, Steven! Now I am only sorry for him."

  Ryeland said:

  "You wouldn’t remember. You were bathing, and I blundered in. I was embarrassed. I guess you were, too. No, you probably weren't. And you had the Peace Dove. It nearly killed—what was his name? Oporto." Cloudily it struck him as odd: he had almost forgotten the man who had been the nearest thing he had to a friend.

  Donna said:

  "That was Father's idea, the Peace Dove. If you hate black ... call it white, and love it. So he took that murdering thing and called it 'Peace'. He always boasted. The Planner is the first ruler in all Earth's history who has never needed a bodyguard,' But what would you call those things? My Peace Doves. His Hawks."

  Ryeland said, with a sudden rush of amazement:

  "Donna! We're still alive!"

  Chapter 18

  They looked at each other in wonderment, for sure enough, it was true. They had not died of air-strangulation. Around them the little world was still intact.

  "But surely the spaceling was dead!" Donna cried.

  "No doubt of that. I don't understand this."

  They looked around anxiously. The stars blazed down on them, and that was all there was to be seen beyond the confines of the tiny air bubble that made their world.

  "Look!" cried Ryeland. "Something's happening." At the edge of the reeflet, suddenly, like a vanishing ghost ... . puff! There was a soundless explosion of faint, misty fog. And a colony of flying fish, a lacy pattern of vines, a clump of blossoms with liquid gold in their cups—they fluttered, shook, flung madly away; and then that corner, too, was still; but it was dead.

  The shape of the bubble had changed. One corner of their little world had lost its air—poof!—like the winking of an eye. For one eternal moment Ryeland thought that this was what they had been waiting for. The spaceling, Chiquita, had died at last; the strange forces that allowed her to hold air about her, and them, had loosened their grasp, and they were face to face with death. Donna, who felt the abrupt clutch of fear, clung to him tightly.

  But Ryeland whispered thoughtfully. "It isn't right, Donna. Something's happening, but not what we expected at all. If the field went, it should go all at once." "But what could it be, then, Steven?" "Let's go see!" Like biped spacelings themselves, they turned and dove into the cavern. Quickly, quickly. Crazed, confused thoughts floated through Ryeland's mind: Their dying little world ... all worlds, dying ... all the planets of the sun, doomed to death, doomed because Ryeland had failed to give them inertialess travel in time ... doomed to die without giving seed to space. They stopped, clutching at palely glowing vines. In the very green darkness Chiquita lay. She was surely dead. There was no possibility of a mistake. But beside her—

  Beside her something moved! Beside that shrunken, lifeless skin, something quivered, curled and lifted. It came frolicking toward them, flying—something small, smaller even than Donna, a mere doll beside the dead Chiquita, racked and shrunken though she was. It was a spaceling!

  A baby spaceling! Its red nose winked swiftly; it looked at them with bright, friendly eyes. "Oh, you darling!" cried Donna, holding out her arms to it, and it licked at her face with a slim, quick, black tongue.

  "Look there!" croaked Ryeland, astonished beyond words, pointing. There was another tiny, seal-like creature ... and a third, and a fourth, and—there seemed to be a dozen of them, frolicking and darting with their tiny noses blinking comically, pink light and orange, red and almost purple.

  Ryeland said softly: "Chiquita may be dead, but her children are not."

  There were eight of them in all, as well as they could count their quicksilver, gamboling shapes. Eight baby spacelings, frolicking like pups. Had they been born after the death of the mother, in some reproductive mystery of the spacelings? Had they been born before, and wandered off? Ryeland could not know. He only knew that they were here.

  "Thank heaven," whispered Donna, as Ryeland carried one out into the light to see it.

  "Thank Something," murmured Ryeland. "Look, Donna. They're just like adult spacelings, but tiny. Born fully formed—obviously, they are able to maintain a field, able to use the jetless drive! Fortunately for us. Though," he said remembering the lost comer of their paradise, "I think they could stand a little more practice."

  He stopped, looking up, jaw hanging.

  Out there somewhere past the air curtain, something moved and winked.

  "The Plan rocket!" cried Donna in terror.

  "No! No," shouted Ryeland, leaping up. "Don't you see? It's too small too close. It's a spaceling! Quiveras has come back, and—look! There's someone else. He has brought Donderevo back with him!"

  Donderevo! Six feet eight inches tall, a dark-faced man with blue eyes that blazed. His spaceling brought him daintily into the air bubble of their little haven, and Ron Donderevo sprang free. "Donna!" he cried, and caught her hand.

  Joyously Donna threw her arms about him, pressing her face against his bronzed cheek. When she drew free, she said: "Ron, this is Steve Ryeland."

  "I remember," Ryeland whispered breathlessly. "When I was a Technicub, about eight years old. And you were a medical student from space, wearing a collar because your people hadn't accepted the Plan—"

  Chuckling, the huge man gripped his hand. Ron Donderevo's fringed leather jacket was open at the throat His neck was a brown muscular column. A thin scar circled it, but he wore no collar.

  "And I remember you," Donderevo rumbled. "I admired your father. A philosopher and a historian, as well as a mathematician. He's the scholar who helped me understand the real meaning of the space frontier."

  "Your collar?" Ryeland interrupted him.
"You really got out of it?"

  "Out of the collar, and out of the place they call Heaven." Donderevo nodded solemnly. "I was luckier than your father."

  "I was never told what became of him."

  Ryeland caught his breath to ask another question, but the sudden iron constriction of his own collar stopped him. He wanted to know how Donderevo had got away, but he was afraid to know the answer. He was afraid that Donderevo would confirm the strange story of Angela Zwick—that Ryeland was the imitation man that the anti-Plan surgeons had assembled in Donderevo's collar, to cover his escape.

  "Ron?" Donna's voice was quick and quivering with concern. "Can you get Steve out of his collar?"

  "Not quite the way I was taken out of mine." Ron Donderevo shook his shagged, craggy head. "Mine was removed in the surgical center at the stockpile where I had been sent for salvage. Half a dozen surgeons helped, using the best equipment—"

  "What was done with your collar?" Ryeland interrupted.

  "I promised not to tell," Donderevo said.

  "Was a patch—?" Ryeland had to gulp and start again. "Was a patchwork man assembled in it? A kind of living dummy to take your place until the spaceling could carry you away?"

  "Right." The big man nodded casually. "I don't suppose it matters to anybody now."

  It mattered very much to Ryeland. His flesh turned numb and cold ... as it must have been before it was sutured and cemented back into the likeness of a man. His knees felt weak.

  "What's wrong, Steve?" Donna asked. "You look so pale!"

  He couldn't tell her that he was that decoy, that patchwork of junk meat.

  "I was hoping you could take my collar off," he told Donderevo. That was a matter desperate enough to account for his agitation. "If you learned medicine on Earth, can't you—can't you possibly do the operation?"

  Donderevo started to shake his head, and suddenly looked hard at Ryeland's face. He glanced at Donna, and peered again at Ryeland. His own face twitched and stiffened, gray beneath the bronze.

  "I suppose I could try," he admitted reluctantly. "Of course you understand that I lack the experience and the fine equipment those surgeons had. Operating here, with only a portable surgery, without trained assistants, I can promise you one chance in four that you'll survive the operation—one chance in five that you'll walk again, even if you do survive."

  Ryeland fell dizzily back against a great crystal branch. Twittering iridescent bird-fish, jarred loose, swam tinkling away.

  "And yet," rumbled Donderevo compassionately, "you are right, Steve, for you have no chance otherwise. The Plan can kill you in ten seconds, as easy as that. The rocket is less than three million miles away. Push a button—poof!—your code impulse is transmitted—you're dead. And so am I," he said earnestly, "and poor Quiveras here, and Donna. So you are right, for you see, Steven, we must save you somehow or you may kill us all."

  "Describe it to me," said Ryeland emptily. 'Tell me what it entails. Exactly."

  Donderevo hesitated, and then began.

  Ron Donderevo, that huge man, his hands soft as a maiden's, his voice deep as a tiger's growl; Ron Donderevo had performed many an operation for the Plan.

  But on Earth, in the Body Bank, he said with meticulous care, there were things that could not be duplicated here. There were nurses and surgeons beyond counting. (Here was only young Donna and old Quiveras, neither of them trained.) There was equipment by the warehouse-ful. Here was only what had been packed in on the back of spacelings. Enough, yes—if nothing went wrong. But there were no extras. If a blood pump should fail, there was no other. There hi the Body Bank was the unmatched reservoir of human parts that constituted a reserve against spoilage. And here were only the four of them, and no more parts than they needed to go around.

  The first step, he said, would be to create an atmosphere of asepsis around the anesthetized Ryeland. Easy enough, particularly in the negligible gravity of the spaceling's bubble, and particularly where the only ambient germs were those the four of them had brought in. A soft hissing from a yellowish metal tube Donderevo had brought—he demonstrated it—accounted for a polyantibiotic spray.

  Then—scalpels, retractors, sutures, clamps. Sterile and inherently inhospitable to microscopic life, they came out of the gleaming containers at Donderevo's orders. Donna was whitefaced but steady as she listened and looked at the instruments. She shrank away as he described how the first scalpel would trace a thin red line around Rye-land's neck, just under the collar; but then she was all right.

  The epidermis and dermis would have to be slit and pulled back, like a stocking from a leg. Red flesh and white muscle would swiftly be cut and retracted. The great trapezius muscles would have to be cut, caught and held— it was important that muscles be kept under tension. The small blood vessels of the neck needed to be tied off; the large ones—the carotids, the jugular, the vertebral blood supply—were to be cut and quickly clamped to the plastic tubes of a double-chambered mechanical heart—not because Ryeland's own heart was out of circuit, yet, but because there was blood loss, constantly, from every vessel and uncountable capillary, from the disturbed cells themselves. Extra reserves of blood were needed and held in the mechanical heart's chambers, for a man's own heart was not equal to the task.

  Then the nerves, carefully dissected out and clamped to the wondrous organic silver leads that alone had made major replacement of parts possible. Nervous tissue does not readily regenerate in the higher vertebrates—not without help. Organic silver is the solder that holds the parts together; organic silver in the form of braided wire strands is the "connection" that permits the extension of a nerve, so that performance is not lost during surgery. As the cervical ganglia were cut, great sections of Ryeland's body would convulse quiveringly.

  Then the bones. Sonic saws to slice into the third cervical vertebra. The spinal cord—opened, sealed, tied. The fluid dammed inside its chamber—

  "That's enough," interrupted Ryeland, his face frozen into a mask. "I get the picture. I don't need any more." His eyes sought Donna's, and he tried to speak to her ... but could not. "Go ahead," he said. "Operate!"

  He stepped forward, swung himself onto the operating cradle and lay patiently while Donderevo and Quiveras strapped him in. Then Donderevo nodded and Donna moved forward, her face trembling on the verge of repressed tears, in her hand the soft flexible mask that sealed his lips and plugged his nostrils. He moved his "head aside quickly. "Good-by, my dearest," he whispered. "For a while." Then he allowed her to fit the mask.

  Crashing, crashing, the crystal trees swam down on him.

  The little reeflet folded into a bud, with himself in the heart of it like the pure liquid gold in the cup of one of its strange flowers ...

  And he was unconscious.

  Chapter 19

  He was unconscious. But his mind was racing on.

  He was dreaming. He was remembering. The haunting fog came swirling up out of the past. It had followed him all the way from Earth. It was all around him now, cold and silent and clinging. It covered Donna and Ron Donderevo, and distorted them. Everything changed, twisted into hopeless contradiction.

  He was no longer in the portable surgery. Now the straps that held him were those of the therapy couch in the recreation center. The people over him were Dr. Thrale and General Fleemer.

  "Tell us, Ryeland," Thrale's soft insistent voice was wheezing. "We know about the knocking on the door, after the teletype girl left your office to bring sandwiches and coffee. We know you left the papers on your desk and went to open the door. Tell us who came in."

  Suddenly, he knew.

  Somehow, the anesthetic had cleared away that clinging fog. It wasn't Angela Zwick! It wasn't even the Plan Police —they really hadn't come until the following Monday. It was a thin man in a blood-spotted fatigue uniform, bent under the bulging weight of a soiled space bag.

  "Horrocks—"

  "Shhh!"

  Ryeland let him into the room and locked the door again.
Horrocks dropped the space bag and stood leaning on the desk. He was panting heavily. Droplets of red foam sprayed out of his mouth and spattered over the sheafs of yellow teletape on the desk.

  "You're hurt," Ryeland said. "Let me get a doctor."

  "That can wait," Dan Horrocks gasped. "I've got a message for you—that's got more priority. From an old— friend of yours."

  Ryeland helped him into a chair and listened to the message. It came in gasped words that were sometimes incoherent. The old friend was Ron Donderevo. Horrocks had met him at a tiny colony on an uncharted asteroid twenty billion miles outside the Plan, when Colonel Lescure's ship had stopped there to pick up reaction mass.

  The message itself took a long time for the stricken man to deliver, and longer still for Ryeland to grasp. It began with the existence of the Reefs of Space and the fusorian life that had built them. The point of it was the way the spacelings flew.

  "Donderevo wants you to know space isn't dead," Horrocks panted hoarsely. "A living frontier—alive and infinite. Rockets can't—can't reach it usefully. We've got to have—propulsion—with no reaction mass."

  In the dream he tried to tell the wounded man that any sort of jetless drive was forbidden by the Third Law of Motion.

  "Wrong—" the wounded man interrupted him. "Spacelings—fly! Donderevo said—tell you that. All you need to know. Except the fact—your father taught him. The historic effect—effect of the free front—"

  Horrocks coughed, spraying Ryeland with flecks of red.

  "Sorry!" he gasped. "Mean frontier. Closed frontier— closed society. That's the Plan." He paused to cough again, turning painfully away from Ryeland. "Open frontier—that's the reefs. Freedom. Forever!"

  Ryeland needed time to understand that agonized summary of a fundamental fact, but later, when he began to grasp it, he thought he knew what had happened to his father. The Plan existed to regiment the closed society that had spread to the last frontier that rockets could reach. His father had seen the infinite promise of the new frontier of interstellar space—but even a dream of that open frontier was treason to the closed world of the Plan.