A Gift From Earth

She nodded warily. "I think so. Especially after the raid."

"Oh, you saw the point, did you?"

"It's clear you have no more use for the Sons of Earth. We've always been some danger to you--"

"You flatter yourselves."

"But you've never had a real try at wiping us out. Not till now. Because we serve as a recruiting center for your damned organ banks!"

"You amaze me. Did you know this when you joined?"

"I was fairly sure of it."

"Then why join?"

She spread her hands. "Why does anybody join? I couldn't stand the way things are now. Castro, what happens to your body when you die?"

"Cremated. I'm an old man."

"You're crew. They'd cremate you anyway. Only colonists go into the banks."

"I'm half crew," said Jesus Pietro. His desire to talk was genuine, and there was no need for reticence with a girl who was, to all intents and purposes, dead. "When my--you might say--pseudo-father reached the age of seventy, he was old enough to need injections of testosterone. Except that he chose a different way to get them."

The girl looked bewildered, then horrified.

"I see you understand. Shortly afterward his wife, my mother, became pregnant. I must admit they raised me almost as a crew. I love them both. I don't know who my father was. He may have been a rebel, or a thief."

"To you there's no difference, I suppose." The girl's tone was savage.

"No. Back to the Sons of Earth," Jesus Pietro said briskly. "You're quite right. We don't need them anymore, not as a recruiting center nor for any other purpose. Yours was the biggest rebel group on Mount Lookitthat. We'll take the others as they come."

"I don't understand. The organ banks are obsolete now, aren't they? Why not publish the news? There'd be a worldwide celebration!"

"That's just why we don't broadcast the news. Your kind of sloppy thinking! No, the organ banks are not obsolete. It's just that we'll need a smaller supply of raw material. And as a means of punishment for crimes the banks are as important as ever!"

"You son of a bitch," said Polly. Her color was high, and her voice held an icy, half-controlled fury. "So we might get uppity if we thought we were being killed to no purpose!"

"You will not be dying to no purpose," Jesus Pietro explained patiently. "That has not been necessary since the first kidney transplant between identical twins. It has not been necessary since Landsteiner classified the primary blood types in 1900. What do you know about the car in Kane's basement?"

"I prefer not to say."

"You're being very difficult."

The girl smiled for the first time. "I've heard that."

His reaction took Jesus Pietro by surprise. A flash of admiration, followed by a hot flood of lust. Suddenly the bedraggled colonist girl was the only girl in the universe. Jesus Pietro held his face like frozen stone while the flood receded. It took several seconds.

"What about Matthew Leigh Keller?"

"Who? I mean--"

"You prefer not to say. Miss, Tournquist, you probably know that there are no truth drugs on this world. In the ships' libraries are instructions for making scopolamine, but no crew will authorize me to use them. Hence I have developed different methods." 'He saw her stiffen. "No, no. There will be no pain. They'd put me in the organ banks if I used torture. I'm only going to give you a nice rest."

"I think I know what you mean. Castro, what are you made of? You're half colonist yourself. What makes you side with the crew?"

"There must be law and order, Miss Tournquist. On all of Mount Lookitthat there is only one force for law and order, and that force is the crew." Jesus Pietro pushed the call button.

He did not relax until she was gone, and then he found himself shaken. Had she noticed that flash of desire? What an embarrassing thing to happen! But she must have assumed he was only angry. Of course she had.

Polly was in the maze of corridors when she suddenly remembered Matt Keller. Her regal dignity, assumed for the benefit of the pair of Implementation police who were her escorts, softened in thought. Why would Jesus Pietro be interested in Matt? He wasn't even a member. Did it mean that he had escaped? Odd, about that night. She'd liked Matt. He'd interested her. And then, suddenly ... It must have looked to him as if she'd brushed him off. Well, it didn't matter now. But Implementation should have turned him loose. He was nothing but a deadhead.

Castro. Why had he told her all that? Was it part of the coffin cure? Well, she'd hold out as long as possible. Let Castro worry about who might know the truth of Ramrobot #143. She had told nobody. But let him worry.

The girl looked about her in pleased wonder at the curving walls and ceiling with their peeled, discolored paint, at the spiral stairs, at the matted, withered brown rug which had been indoor grass. She watched the dust puff out from her falling feet, and she ran her hands over the coral walls where the paint had fallen away. Her new, brightly dyed falling-jumper seemed to glow in the gloom of the deserted house.

"It's very odd," she said. Her crewish accent was strange and lilting.

The man lifted an arm from around her waist to wave it about him. "They live just like this," he said in the same accent. "Just like this. You can see their houses from your car on the way to the lake."

Matt smiled as he watched them walk up the stairs. He had never seen a two-story coral house; the balloons were too hard to blow, and the second floor tended to sag unless you maintained two distinct pressures. Why didn't they come to Delta Plateau if they wanted to see how colonists lived?

But why should they? Surely their own lives were more interesting.

What strange people they were. It was hard to understand them, not only because of the lilt but because certain words meant the wrong things. Their faces were alien, with flared nostrils and high, prominent cheekbones.

Against the people Matt had known, they seemed fragile, undermuscled, but graceful and beautiful to the point where Matt wondered about the man's manhood. They walked as though they owned the world.

The deserted house had proved a disappointment. He'd thought all was lost when the crew couple came strolling in, pointing and staring as if they were in a museum. But with luck they would be up there for some time.

Matt moved very quietly from the darkness of a now doorless closet, picked up their picnic basket, and ran on tiptoe for the door. There was a place where he could hide, a place he should have thought of before.

He climbed over the low stone wall with the picnic basket in one hand. There was a three-foot granite lip on the void side. Matt settled himself cross-legged against the stone wall, with his head an inch below the top and his toes a foot from the forty-mile drop to hell. He opened the picnic basket.

There was more than enough for two. He ate it all, eggs and sandwiches and squeezebags of custard and a thermos of soup and a handful of olives. Afterward he kicked the basket and the scraps of plastic wrap into the void. His eyes followed them down.

Consider:

Anyone can see infinity by looking up on a clear night. But only on the small world of Mount Lookitthat can you see infinity by looking down.

No, it's not really infinity. Neither is the night sky, really. You can see a few nearby galaxies; but even if the universe turns out to be finite, you see a very little distance into it. Matt could see apparent infinity by looking straight down.

He could see the picnic basket falling. Smaller. Gone.

The plastic wrap. Fluttering down. Gone.

Then, nothing but the white mist.