The Reefs of Space Read online

  R. Information. Machine Major Chatterji is authorized

  to reconsider your status. Action. Requisition necessary equipment for expansion of equations re unified force field and steady-state hypothesis.

  Ryeland frowned. Major Chatterji, peeking over his shoulder at the gray teletype, cried: "At once, Steve! Oh, we move fast here. I’ll have a six-deck calculator and a room to put it in before you can change your clothes, I'll bet you a lakh of dollars!"

  Ryeland said: "I don't understand. 'Unified force field and steady-state hypothesis'—what's that about?" But the major was cheerfully ignorant. Administration was his job; Ryeland would find out everything else in due course, wouldn't he? Ryeland shrugged. "All right. But I won't need the calculator—not if Oporto is still around."

  "The other Risk?" Machine Major Chatterji winked. "Always stick together," he nodded. "I'll have him detailed to you."

  Ryeland looked again at the teletype. The truly important part of the message also needed some thought. Machine Major Chatterji is authorized to reconsider your status. Then this man here, with the liquid black eyes and the lean, hooked nose, this was the man who could turn the key that would unlock the iron collar?

  Or was that the wrong assumption to make? The Machine was always exact. But sometimes the mere human who read its message failed to understand the meaning. For instance, did that message mean that Machine Major Chatterji could clear Ryeland—or did it mean that he could downgrade him ... say from Risk to raw material for the Body Bank?

  It was a sobering thought.

  The faded unreality of everything in his past except his knowledge of science left Ryeland with a nagging sense of bewilderment and loss.

  "Why does the Machine need a jetless drive?" Uneasily, he put the question to Major Chatterji. "The ion jet ships , are good enough to reach the planets—and anyhow the Plan of Man seems to be retreating from space and burrowing into the Earth."

  "Stop it!" Chatterji warned him sharply. "Such speculation is no part of our function."

  Ryeland insisted, "The Machine seems to be afraid that a jetless drive in the wrong hands would be dangerous to the Plan. Whose hands could that be? The . Plan has conquered all the planets, taken in the whole human race. Except for a few fugitives like Ron Donderevo—"

  "Don't talk about him!" Chatterji looked shocked. "Our own function here is enough to keep us busy without any such unplanned talk."

  Ryeland shrugged and gave it up, and Chatterji at once reverted to his cheerful bustle.

  "We've got to get you settled," he beamed, his gold-rimmed glasses flashing. "Faith! Come in here, girl."

  The door opened. A tall blonde strutted in. She wore tight scarlet pants and a brief scarlet jacket. Two centuries before she would have been a drum majorette; under the Plan she had a more important role to play. "This is Faith, Steve. She's one of our Togetherness girls. She'll help you get adjusted here, I promise!"

  The Togetherness girl smiled a lacquered smile. She piped: " 'Perform your own function perfectly—and your own function only.' That's our motto here, Mr. Ryeland." It was like a doll talking.

  "And a splendid motto it is!" Major Chatterji endorsed, beaming. "Get him started, Faith. And don't forget the Togetherness meeting at nineteen hundred hours."

  Ryeland's mind was teeming with jetless drives and the steady-state hypothesis and three missing days and Major Chatterji is authorized to reconsider and the fact that the Planner had known about his interview with Donna in her bath. But this was important too; he swept the other things out of his mind and tried to pay attention to what the Togetherness girl was saying.

  "You'll like it here, Steve," she whispered, solemnly squeezing his arm. She smiled up at him, and steered him down a gray-walled concrete tunnel. There were no windows. "This is Point Circle Black. Sounds confusing, doesn't it? But you'll learn. I'll teach you!" Point Circle Black was the headquarters office, where Major Chatterji, the administrative officer, fussed endlessly over his problems of supply and personnel. "Point Triangle Gray." Faith sang, waving at an intersection ahead. "That's the medical section. Tests and diseases, injuries and—" she giggled naughtily—"supply depot for the Body Bank."

  Ryeland grunted.

  "Oh, that's nothing for you to worry about, Steve," she said reassuringly. "Trust Major Chatterji. You do your part and he'll do his; that's Teamwork."

  Ryeland mumbled, "I understand. It's just that—well, I've had to face the chance of the Body Bank for three years now, I admit I don't like the idea of being butchered."

  She stopped, scandalized, her perfect eyebrows arched, her clear eyes wide. "Butchered? Steve, what an unplanned word!"

  "I only meant—"

  "The Planned term," she said firmly, "is 'salvaged’. And you can't deny the logic of the Machine, can you?" She didn't wait for an answer. She was well into her set speech, 'The Body Bank," she parroted, "provides the attack team with the necessary stimulus to insure maximum effort. If the effort is successful, the team has nothing to fear. If the effort fails—"

  She shrugged winsomely. "The welfare of the Plan of Man," she said, "requires that they must make their contribution in another way. That is, their physical organs must contribute to the repair of more useful citizens. That's Teamwork!"

  "Thanks," said Ryeland grumpily. The isolation camp on the rim of the Arctic Circle, he thought wistfully— it had been hard and dull and uncomfortable; but at least he hadn't been exposed to lectures from teen-aged girls!

  Point Triangle Gray was a Security designation; all the names were. The whole area was called Team Center. It might have been under Lake Erie or the Indian Ocean; Ryeland never learned.

  At Point Triangle Gray he was given his tests. He caught a glimpse of Oporto, looking healthy enough but somehow crestfallen; they waved, but there was no chance to speak as Oporto came out of one laboratory room while Ryeland was going into another. At least, Ryeland thought, the little man hadn't been salvaged.

  Then he forgot about Oporto for five rigorous hours. Point Triangle Gray measured his functional indices and his loyalty quotients with every test that he had ever undergone before and one or two that were brand new to him. The lab men stripped him and clamped him in their metering devices, while the interrogators demanded every detail of his life, back to the toys his mother had given him for his third birthday.

  In these tests he tasted the after-bitterness of those sessions in the therapy room at the "recreation center"— those long, endless ages when he was punished and punished again because he could not make sense of the crazy questions the therapists flung at him. He dreaded, each moment now, that in the next moment it would start again. Someone would fling him a question about pyro-pods or Ron Donderevo. Someone would ask him about the missing three days in his life, or demand that he draw them the plans for a device he'd never heard of.

  But it didn't happen; the questions were all routine.

  In fact, every one of the questions had been asked him before—some of them a hundred times. Every answer had long since been recorded for the memory drums of the Planning Machine. But the interrogation went on. His reactions were studied in blinding actinic light, and photographed by infra-red in what to him was utter dark. His body fluids were sampled again and again. Whole salvos of injections stimulated and calmed him, and for a short time put him to sleep—while heaven knew what pokings by scalpe! and probe investigated the muscle tensions of his innermost system.

  But at last it was over.

  He was dressed in new crisp scarlet slacks and tunic and propelled into the gray concrete corridors where Faith was waiting, the lacquered smile on her face and her eyes glad.

  "You've passed!" she sang, "But I knew you would And now you're a full member of the Team."

  She led him caroling: "Next I'll show you your quarters. They're nice, Steve! And then, oh, there's so much here! You'll like the Togetherness Canteen. You'll have wonderful work facilities. Everything is fine—and, of course, that's only fair, isn't
it? Because so much is expected of you people on the Attack Team. You're entitled to a great deal in return; that's Teamwork!"

  She led him about for an hour, and she did not stop chattering once. She took him to a sort of mess hall to be fed—-alone; he was late for dinner, due to the tests at Point Triangle Gray, and the others were all through. The food was General Workers A-Ration—about the same as at the maximum-security camp, though somewhat less of it in terms of calories. But it was pleasant to be allowed to sit and smoke after the meal. And she showed him his quarters.

  They were comfortable. A rather surprisingly soft bed, a bookcase (already Machine Major Chatterji had stocked it with conversion tables and reference books), a more than adequate chest for the personal belongings he had long since ceased to own. "Isn't it nice?" the Togetherness girl enthused. "But we'll have to hurry, Steve. It's almost nineteen hundred hours!"

  The Togetherness Canteen was high over the maze of tunnels that comprised Team Center. Its gray concrete was liberally splashed with bright colors.

  It was full of light and sound and people. There were nearly twenty Togetherness girls as pretty as Faith; they danced with laughing officers of the Technicorps, sat with them at tables, sang with them around a piano. There were hurrying waitresses as pretty as the Togetherness girls, or almost, bringing drinks and light refreshment. And there were the officers—Ryeland's new colleagues.

  They all wore the crisp scarlet uniform; and his heart bounded, for three of them at least, he saw,-wore the same iron collar as himself. But they were laughing. One danced with a red-headed girl as tall as he, two were in a card game.

  The iron collar did not seem to weigh heavily on these Risks.

  Ryeland took a deep, wondering breath. Maybe this place was the place he had hoped for all those three years... .

  One side of the room was an enormous window, twenty feet tall, made of armor-glass. Outside weathered cliffs were splashed with orange sun, nearly set. The tops of pines swayed in an unheard wind, and a far mountain slope was splotched with evergreens and golden autumn aspen.

  Faith touched his arm. "What's wrong, Steve? Afraid of high places?"

  He had hardly noticed the scenery; his thoughts had been on his collar. But he blinked and came awake. "I —I didn't know where this place was, until I saw the outside."

  "You still don't know," she laughed. "Come along. You'll want to meet the Team leader."

  General Fleemer had big bulging eyes and a tight uniform; it made him look like a very important frog. "So -you're Steve Ryeland?" The general pumped his hand, the bulging eyes glowing with friendly Togetherness. "Glad to have you, Steve!" He grinned and flicked the iron collar with a fingernail. It rang faintly. "We'll have that off you in no time. Give us results, we'll give you your clearance! What could be fairer?"

  He caught Steve by the other elbow, the one Faith wasn't using, and carried him off. Faith trailed along. "Want you to meet some of the others," he boomed. "Here. Pascal! Come over here. Steve, I want you to meet—"

  "But I already know Colonel Lescure," said Ryeland. It was the grayhaired Technicorps officer who had conducted them to Compartment 93 on the Planner's sub-train.

  The colonel nodded, and took him aside for a moment while General Fleemer rounded up more of the Team. "I didn't want to say anything before—but I knew you were coming here. And I'm glad. Your—ah—interview was a success, eh?" And he nudged Ryeland's ribs.

  It occurred to Ryeland that the colonel might not have been nearly as jolly with him if the interview hadn't been a success, but he let it pass. "Yes," he said, "the Planner was quite—"

  "Planner?" Colonel Lescure winked. "I mean the other interview, son! She's quite a girl!" It seemed, thought Steve Ryeland, that there was hardly a human under the Plan of Man who wasn't aware that he had spent three-quarters of an hour with Donna Creery in her bath.

  "Over here!" cried the genera!, beckoning. "You too, Otto!" As Ryeland reached the general Colonel Otto Gottling stumped over, his face like a rock. He was a jet combustion expert, as it turned out; his chamber had powered the last twelve rockets built for the out-planet run.

  Everyone was a specialist and Ryeland found it uncommonly difficult to figure out where the specialties fit together. Colonel Lescure, he discovered, was Director of the Plan of Space Biology, for example. A major named Max Lunggren was an astrophysicist. There were two other mathematicians—one an expert in number theory, the other whose name was vaguely familiar to Ryeland as the author of a paper on normed rings. (Coincidentally— or was it coincidence?—both of them wore the collars of Risks.) The third Risk was a food chemist, a fat, jolly man who owned a fund of limericks.

  But some hours later Ryeland received a clue, at least; the evening was not entirely devoted to Togetherness.

  When everyone was satisfactorily mellow General Fleemer climbed atop a table and hammered it with his heel for attention.

  "A toast!" he bawled. "I give you Teamwork—and the Plan!"

  There was a rousing roar. Fleemer drained his glass with them and then turned serious. "Some of you," he cried, "wonder what our Team Attack is aimed at. Well, you'll find out! But for the benefit of the new people, first let me review the overall philosophy of the Team Attack itself. It is the essential tool of our scientific progress, and too important to be taken for granted!"

  "Hurray for Team Attack!" bawled one of the iron collar mathematicians, amid a giggle of the Togetherness girls around him.

  General Fleemer smiled, quelling him. He said: "Once upon a time—so our Team historians tell me—science was done by individual men. Some of you may think it is still done that way." He gave a frosty grin to Ryeland and the other Risks. "But that is all over. The turning point came with the Einstein Team, which met at a town called Hiroshima to attack the primary problem of atomic fission.

  "Unfortunately," the general said sadly, holding out his glass for a refill, "these pioneers were destroyed by the unexpected success of their first experiment with uranium fission. But the principle of team attack survived!

  "Since then the Plan of Man has refined the principles and polished the techniques of Team Attack. When the Plan of Man requires a new scientific discovery, a team is created to make it. Such a team is needed now—and you are my Team, all of you!"

  There was prolonged cheering.

  Then Fleemer paused. He smiled, and it was a scorpion's smile, vastly out of character in that wattled marshmallow face.

  He said: "I'm sure you all understand why you can be counted on to do your best." He nodded merrily to Rye-land and the other iron-collar men. "When you succeed, you will learn that Teamwork operates both ways. When you succeed. But if you fail—if you fail—why, then... ."

  He trailed off, and looked somberly at the men for a second.

  Then he grinned and drew one pudgy ringer across his non-existent neck. "Zzzzt! The Body Bank! But we won't fail!"

  There was a burst of laughter. Machine Major Chatterji leaped to a table, his glasses gleaming. "Three cheers for General Fleemer and the Plan of Man! Hip, hip—"

  "Hooray!" The cheer was loud but ragged.

  "Hip, hip—"

  "Hooray!" Louder now. The whole room was together.

  "Hip, hip———"

  "Hooray!" Ryeland found himself thundering along with the rest. He couldn't help it. He had been born under the Plan of Man. He could not doubt it. It would have deprived his life of meaning, as the iron collar that was the Plan's gift to him had, for a time, nearly deprived it of hope.

  There was a loud applause. And General Fleemer, still smiling, raised his hand. "What the Machine needs," he said, "is a new physical principle." He shrugged winsomely—as best he could with those blubber shoulders. "I'm not a scientist, and I don't know just how tough this job is going to be. Probably some of you think it's going to be very tough. Well," he said, chuckling, "the rest of you are just going to have to convince them otherwise!" And he touched his finger jestingly to his throat.


  Ryeland tried, but got little information from the others. It wasn't so much that they refused to tell; it was more that he couldn't understand. The Machine would give him a detailed directive, they assured him, and wouldn't he have another drink?

  And an hour later Faith offered to show him a shortcut home to his quarters. They linked arms and wandered off through the gray-walled corridors. "Here's an area you've never seen," she caroled. "See that? Point Nexus. That's the Message Center."

  "Lovely Message Center," said Ryeland comfortably. Funny. Even the iron .collar didn't seem as hard or as cold. She was a sweet kind of girl, he thought dreamily. Of course, the Togetherness girls were coached, reared— all but bred for that. But she reminded him of the Fair Lost One, Angela—about whom the Planner's daughter had known more than she should. But of course it could have come from his personnel folder, and—

  "Point Crescent Green," sang the girl, pointing to another stenciled emblem on the wall.

  "Lovely," said Ryeland automatically, and then took a closer look. "But what's going on?"

  The girl hesitated.

  She stopped in the middle of a word and frowned at Ryeland. "I tell you," she said after a moment, suddenly gay, "maybe this short-cut isn't such a good idea. Back the other way there's—"

  "No, but look," Ryeland insisted planting his feet as she tugged at him. It was quite late now, but there were a couple of guards in Team scarlet, and one of them was turning a key to slide back a massive, lead-shielded door. Beyond was the floor of an enormous pit, lit by a bright single light, high up.

  Ryeland recognized it for what it was: A rocket landing pit. There were the great spreading girder arms of the gantry, the enormous ducts for the jet-baffles yawned black in the floor. A piece of his mind catalogued the information that rocket landings commonly took place here; dim in the gloom behind the brilliant light were the enormous doors that would open to the sky.

  But there was no rocket in the pit.

  There was something else, something in a heavy metal cage.