Capitol

When he awoke, he remembered nothing of the agony of going to sleep. He remembered only that he had been afraid of somec, and he had come out of it perfectly all right.

In his mind he heaved an enormous sigh of relief. And then he settled down to doing the final work on his colony-support machines, making sure the programs did the work they were supposed to do. No more overcompensation for his early inhibitions about sex and fun and profit. His life steadied out. He became stable. He was prepared to let somec keep him alive forever.

He was thirty subjective years old when the starship captain awoke him and brought him into the control room. It was the first field test of his machines, and he had insisted on being sent along. They were already in orbit around a planet that had been settled for years, and he had only had to sleep for eleven years to get there, since a child genius on Capitol had recently discovered a way to make starships that went ten times faster than they had before-- now to eighty or ninety times the speed of light. I, too, was a child genius, he remembered wistfully. It had been a lonely time, but now genius was merely expected of him, while before it had been exciting to watch how his discoveries brought a gradual increase of power and respect.

The test was easily performed-- a single orbit for each of the analyzers (though in practice, all three could perform their work in the same orbit). The program fed out dozens of maps, and on request could provide thousands more, each map providing detailed information about a particular mineral, a particular species, the weather patterns likely in a particular year.

With the survey done, they descended to the planet in a landing craft and began the painstaking work of comparing the charts with known deposits, and insisting that where the maps revealed new sources of any metal or unusual information about any species the data should be checked meticulously against the facts on the planet.

Soon the business settled into a routine mostly performed by onplanet scientists and students, and Garol had time to himself. And that was why he was alone when the madman tried to kill him.

He was sitting on a bench in one of the many parks in the capital city of the planet he Was working on. An older man came up to him and sat down next to him. Both of them were wearing coats because it wag a chilly afternoon, and the night would be much colder.

"Why are you sitting here?" asked the man.

"I'm busy being amazed," Garol answered with a smile.

"At what?"

"Plants growing right out of the earth without anything between them and bedrock but the soil. A wind that chooses its own direction to blow and sometimes has an uncomfortable temperature. A sky with no ceiling to block the view. A space so large that I can't see the end of it."

The older man nodded. "You're from Capitol."

"I guess there's no hiding that."

"Are you a sleeper?" the old man asked.

"At the moment I'm very much awake, and loving it," Garol answered, with the courtesy of somec-users, who tried to avoid mentioning their virtual immortality around those who did not use it-- why cause hurt feelings?

The older man nodded, and thrust his hands into the pockets of his coat. "You're the genius, aren't you?" he asked. "The man who made the machines they're testing."

His picture had been in every newsloop for weeks-- a visit from a man of his stature and interplanetary fame was a major event, overshadowing all the local happenings. "Yes, I'm Garol Stipock."

"Then you are a sleeper."

Garol nodded absently. "Yes," he said, "I am."

The man lifted his hand out of his pocket and a needle was in it. It was obviously set on full. Garol struck out at the man and that was why the needle tore his arm apart and did not do any damage to his nervous system. He would live.

It took weeks in the hospital, however, before his arm had healed enough that he could leave. Visitors from the project came from time to time to report on progress-- so far his machines had been invariably accurate-- but the first item of business after he could leave the hospital was an appearance in court.

It was a small, private interview. The judge, the lawyers, and the defendant made a small group, comfortably gathered on soft furniture, and they all asked Stipock and the older man questions.

"Why did you try to kill Dr. Stipock?" they asked.

"He's a sleeper," the older man said.

The judge nodded. "You're an Equalizer, then?"

The older man sneered. "An Abolisher, now, even if I was an Equalizer before!"

Stipock caught the judge's eye. The judge explained. "Equalizers want to dismantle the merit system and make somec available for everyone. Abolishers simply want to kill everybody who uses somec."

"No!" the older man said, his face lit up by rage. "No!"

"Whom do you want to kill, then?" Stipock asked. "And why me?"

The older man narrowed his eyes. "I don't want to kill anybody."

Stipock smiled, though his arm suddenly throbbed as if to remind him of how close he had come to death at the hands of this man. "You only want to tear their arms off?"

"I kill where I must."

"I was no threat to you, sir." Stipock was no longer smiling. He recognized something in this man's eyes. "Why did you have to kill me?"

"Somec is the enemy."

"But I'm not in charge of somec. I just use it. Like millions of other people."

"Millions of other people!" the man said scornfully. "To a universe of trillions, they decide who deserves eternity and the rest of us deserve to die like worms!"

"I didn't make the system," Stipock said lamely.

"Yes you did," the older man said. "You keep it alive. You. Single-handedly. And as long as you and people like you live, it will stay alive!"

Stipock looked around at the others in the room, puzzled. The prosecutor leaned over and touched his good arm reassuringly. "Don't expect them to make sense. They're just fanatics, like a religion."

The word religion stirrred a memory, and Stipock turned back to the old man. He remembered those eyes, that expression, now: They were Amblick's eyes, his earnest look.

"This man isn't crazy," Stipock said. "He just believes something."

The older man nodded. "That's right. The truth. I knew that you could see it. Even the liars know it's true, but you're not a liar. You're a man with true greatness," he said.

The judge was exasperated. "Why in the world did you try to kill him, then?"

"Because," the old man said impatiently, as if they should already have known, "as long as great men are on somec, everybody can point to the merit system and say, 'A man like that proves that we need somec-- he proves that the merit system lets the great men live forever.' While most of the somec users are venal little power-hungry bastards like you." And he stared the judge in the, eye, until the judge looked away, his face rigid with anger.

"The proof is obvious, and this questioning is doing nothing but letting a madman have a few listeners to his madness. Guilty. Sentence is prison for five years and then transshipment to another world. Got to stop this cancer before it spreads."

The defender said, "Sir, if you wish to stop the cancer, why do you send him as an emissary to another world?"

"To get him off of this one," the judge answered curtly. And then both the judge and the defender were startled by the older man's laugh.

"What's so fu

"You dig a cesspool and then you swim around in it, complaining of the smell! They'll tear you up, someday! They'll rip you to pieces!"

"Who?" asked Stipock. "Who'll do this?"

"Don't bother, Dr. Stipock," the prosecutor said. "They never admit there's an organization. Even under drugs. I've never seen control like it."