To The Stars

“Please. We follow each plot, help it to flourish, encourage the dissatisfied to join. Then crush it. Here, on the satellites, on the planets as well. They keep trying but they can never succeed. They are too foolish to even notice that they are not self-sufficient. The satellites will die if we cut off supplies. The planets as well. It is more than economics that has one planet mining, another manufacturing, another growing food. Each needs the other to survive. And we control the relations hip. Are you beginning to understand at last?”

Jan drew his hands down his face, felt them trembling. When he looked at the back of his hand he saw the skin was pale, that he had lost a good deal of weight. And he believed, finally believed, that Thurgood-Smythe was at last telling him the truth.

“All right, Smitty, you’ve won,” he said with utmost resignation. “You’ve taken away my memories, loyalties, my world, the woman I loved. And she didn’t even have to die to keep her secret. She had already been betrayed by her own people. So you’ve taken it all away — except my life. Take that too. Have done.”

“No,” Thurgood-Smythe said. “I won’t. I lied about that as well.”

“Don’t try to tell me you are keeping me alive for my sister’s sake?”

“No. It never mattered for an instant what she thought, had no effect on my decisions. It just helped if you believed that it did. Now I will tell you the truth. You will be kept alive because you have useful skills. We do not waste rare talents in the Scottish camps. You are going to leave Earth and you are going to a distant planet where you will work until one day, in the future, you will die. You must understand, you are just a replaceable bit of machinery to us. You have served your function here. You will be pulled out and plugged in again some other place…

“I can refuse,” Jan said angrily.

“I think not. You are not that important a bit of machinery. If you don’t work you will be destroyed. Take my advice. Do your work with resignation. Live out a happy and productive life.” Thurgood-Smythe rose. Jan looked up at him.

“Can I see Liz, anyone?”

“You are officially dead. An accident. She cried a great deal at your funeral, as did a great number of your friends. Closed coffin of course. Good-bye, Jan, we won’t be meeting again.”

He started toward the door and Jan shouted after him.

“You’re a bastard, a bastard!” Thurgood-Smythe turned about and looked down his nose at him.

“This petty insult. Is this the best you can do? No other final words?”

“I have them, Mr. Thurgood-Smythe,” Jan said in a low voice. “Should I bother telling them to you? Should I let you know how indecent the life is that you lead? You think that it will last forever. It will not. You’ll be brought down. I hope I’ll see it. And I will keep working for it. So you'd better have me killed because I am not going to change what I feel for you and your kind. And before you go — I want to thank you. For showing me what kind of world this really is, and allowing me to stand against it. You can go now.”

Jan turned about, faced away, the prisoner dismissing his jailer.

It penetrated, as nothing else had done that he had said. A flush slowly grew on Thurgood-Smythe’s skin and he started to speak. He did not. He spat in anger, slammed the door, and was gone.

In the end, Jan was the one who smiled.

Book Two - WHEELWORLD

One

The sun had set four years ago and had not risen since.

But the time would be coming soon when it would lift over the horizon again. Within a few short months it would once more sear the planet’s surface with its blue-white rays. But until that happened the endless twilight prevailed and, in that half-light, the great ears of mutated corn grew rich and full. A single crop, a sea of yellow and green that stretched to the horizon in all directions — except one. Here the field ended, bounded by a high metal fence, and beyond the fence was the desert. A wasteland of sand and gravel, a shadowless and endless plain that vanished into dimness under the twilight sky. No rain fell here and nothing grew here — in sharp contrast to the burgeoning farmland beyond. But something lived in the barren plains, a creature that found its every need in the sterile sands.

The flattened mound of creased gray flesh must have weighed at least six tonnes. There appeared to be no openings or organs in its upper surface, although close examination would have revealed that each of the nodules in the thick skin contained a silicon window that was perfectly adapted to absorb radiation from the sky. Plant cells beneath the transparent areas, part of the intricate symbiotic relationships of the lumper, transformed the energy into sugar. Slowly, sluggishly, by osmotic movement between cells, the sugar migrated to the lower portion of the creature, where it was transformed into alcohol and stored in vacuoles until needed. A number of other chemical processes were also taking place on this lower surface at the same time.