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Baker stopped in the middle of his thoughts and froze.
What flak?
Another piece of debris hit the shuttle.
Where did I hear about flak? Why should I even have suspected…
He began to shake. Think, idiot. Where? The planet’s are at superior conjunction. No direct observation possible. But Circus transferred to sixty degrees above the ecliptic to- But I didn’t know that.
He swallowed with great difficulty. The back of his throat scraped like leather against brick.
That’s not my memory. It didn’t happen to me. I didn’t find it out. Someone else. Ki
He switched on a scrim to stare himself in the face.
“Who are you? Which mind is yours?” The face in the scrim mimicked his movements but did not answer. It stared back at him with equal fear and incomprehension.
“Who, God damn you? Who?”
❂
When Circus Galacticus rose slowly over Mercury’s horizon, Baker plotted a rendezvous course without surprise. His days-old beard scraped at the collar of his pressure suit. His bristly scalp itched.
Why did I even think of Mercury? Even suspect that Circus’d be here? Dee is here, frozen somewhere below. Ki
He brought me… here. His body, his brain, he’s ru
Now I can’t be sure. Can’t think anything I do isn’t controlled by him. I’m not even here really. Just a few milliliters of-juice-that got realigned into someone else’s circuitry, a nothing man, a nowhere man, a never man with a never mind.
“What is your name?” Circus’s computer radioed.
“I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know. I don’t. No.” He grabbed at his head, then reached down for the attitude controls. “Jord. I am Jord Baker.” I am Jord Baker. All inside it’s like Jord. I die the way Jord dies. I’m here-
“Prepare to dock,” the computer said, opening the docking bay doors on its side. Baker’s hands deftly maneuvered the shuttle toward the glowing square on the dark side of the spacecraft. He hardly noticed his piloting.
I’m here and thinking and acting. I can tighten this thigh muscle, blink that eye, grind my teeth. I’m on the circuitry. If I could somehow deprogram. Deprogram. Dee. Program.
Pogrom. Pour grumbling, crumbling Ki
His hands tightened on the controls. “Ready to dock…” Looking for the first time at what he had been seeing, he realized that he had already docked the shuttle. Behind him, the outer doors slid shut and air cycled in.
Unstrapping with one swift motion, Baker kicked out of the chair, pounded a hand against the emergency hatch release and sailed into the docking bay.
“Begin immediate search for the cryonic preservation unit on the surface.” He had to shout over the hiss of air still filling the bay. His ears rang. Grabbing hold of a handrail, he yanked toward the hatch.
“Searching,” the computer replied. “Have you not noticed the large object to your left?”
Baker turned and started. A spacecraft nearly double the size of the shuttle lay fast to the repair section. Baker had indeed not noticed it.
“Sure. That’s the ship you disabled at flameout. How’d you get it?” He floated over to it. The arcing slash of a laser beam had left a deep, uneven valley in the ship’s flattened-cone hull from its blunt nose to topside aft.
“I transferred out ahead of it when Fadeaway came under attack. I matched velocities and picked it up, then transferred to the outer region of Mercury’s flak barrier and moved slowly into a low orbit. Your method of arrival was much more elegant.”
“Have you found it yet? Delia’s redoubt?”
“No. Not yet. Please-examine the fighter.”
Baker pulled topside to check out the cockpit.
“As you’ll notice, all controls were severed by the laser, but the cockpit remained intact.”
“There’s a body in there!”
“The pilot. You will also note that the ship possesses no radio or maser equipment or, in fact, any ship-to-ship or ship-to-base communications of-”
“Why didn’t you remove the body?”
“I was waiting for you to take a look at it along with me.”
“Forget it.” He slid away from the viewing port.
“Jord,” the computer said in the softest voice it could synthesize. “The pilot is dead.”
“You need a billion miles of neurons to figure that out?”
“He was dead while piloting the fighter. He has been dead for weeks.”
Baker felt around the collar of his pressure suit for a water spigot and found none. He tried to swallow.
“Let me change.” He slipped out of the bulky pressure suit and into one of Circus’s skintights. He do
“Straight,” he said around the mouthpiece. “When we’re done, open the bay to space and I’ll stay here until I’m certain that any contamination on me is dead.”
He found no entrance hatch. After half an hour of thorough searching, he said, “Not even through the viewports-they’re sealed tight. Did they nail him inside here for good?”
“As I suspected-he was dead from the day he was put into the ship.”
“Yeah? Put in by whom?”
“I had a robot bring some tools down. Use the cutting torch to open the top viewport. You can squeeze in through there.”
“Have you found it yet?” Baker asked, halfway through cutting the glasteel with an ultraviolet laser.
“No. I am sca
A piece of slag drifted onto the control panel inside the fighter as the section of glasteel gave way. It sizzled for a moment, then crystallized. Grabbing the coolest edge of the piece, Baker pulled it aside and left it floating nearby. He peered inside.
The corpse peered back at him.
Its eyes gazed straight forward, unglazed, clear. Every few seconds a pair of tiny tubes expelled a mist that spread over the sclera and either evaporated or was absorbed. Baker could not tell which.
It was his first indication, however, that the ship still functioned. He maneuvered inside. “Did you know the ship was still ru
“Yes. All its battle systems are inoperative, though, and it has lost all co
I can feel the death pulsating inside that thing. All those tubes like long, fat worms hanging from his neck and thighs. Pumping something gray and thick through its gray body. Out of his dead head staring so clear-I didn’t used to think like this. What’s happening to me?
“Have you found it yet?” he asked.
“Negative. Pan left-I want to look at those contact bundles.”
Baker turned his head.
The eyes of the corpse moved to follow.
They returned to their forward stare as Baker shifted back to examine the body more closely.
A line of drool appeared at the corner of the corpse’s mouth and slowly accumulated until it broke free, a tiny sphere that drifted until it adhered to Baker’s pressure suit.
“There are a series of electrodes,” the computer said, “terminating in the frontal lobes, the parietal and occipital lobes, at the temporal lobes, the cerebellum and the medulla oblongata.”
Baker nodded. “Brain wave sensors for a dead man?”
“The hookups seem to be for remote control of the body.”
Baker frowned. “Remote from where? You said there was no communication equipment. Somewhere in the ship, maybe? An autonomous onboard computer?”
The corpse inhaled.
The dry, wheezing sound rasped in Baker’s headphones. He threw his arms back, crying out when they thudded against the confines of the tiny cockpit.