Nell Upson’s drifting corpse watched him with indifferent eyes until he pushed her away, sending her deeper into the dark recesses of Section Three to join her fellows. In time, space would dry Nell utterly, mummifying her; radiation would blacken her livid skin. None of that had yet taken place, and without air, Nell’s blood could not even coagulate—she had left a thin, crimson trail of it floating in the void behind her.

  Twelve minutes. That was still plenty of time, but it was time to go. When he left the side of Section Three, the mobile unit was at work on a second hole.

  · · · ·

  “Resuscitation under way,” was still on the screen half an hour into Reis’s watch. He read it for the hundredth time with some irritation. Was it supposed to refer to Centcomp’s self-repair functions? Reis picked up the rat and wrote, “Who’s in resusc?”

  “Capt. Hilman W. Happle. Resuscitation under way.”

  So that was that. “Discon.”

  “Resuscitation under way.”

  “Clear screen,” Reis scribbled.

  “Resuscitation under way.”

  Reis cursed and wrote, “What authority?”

  “Capt. Hilman W. Happle.”

  That was interesting, Reis decided—not sensible or useful, but interesting. Centcomp did not know that Hap was dead. Reis wrote, “Capt. Happle K. Lt. Wm. R. Reis commanding.”

  The screen went blank, and Reis decided to try a general instrument display. “GID”

  The three letters faded slowly, replaced by nothing.

  “Enter—GID”

  That too faded to an empty screen. Reis scratched his nose and looked speculatively at the transducer headband. He had ordered the others not to use it—the hard instrumentation was amply sufficient as long as nothing too delicate was being attempted; but it had been sixteen hours since the hit, and Centcomp was still limping at best.

  Multiplication became coitus, division reproduction; to add was to eat, to subtract to excrete. Glowing, Centcomp’s central processor loomed before him, a dazzling coral palace with twice ten thousand spires where subroutines worked or slept. Tiny and blue alongside it, the lone mobile unit sang a Bach fugue as it labored. Smoldering leaves perfumed the breeze, washed away by a fountain of exponential functions that appeared to Reis to be calculating natural logarithms for purposes both infinite and obscure, pungently returning with each fresh gust of algorithmic air. Interactive matrices sprouted around his feet—the lilies, buttercups, and pale or burning roses that allowed his conscious mind to move here as it did, their blossoms petaled with shining elementary rows and columns.

  Hap was sitting astride a tree that sprouted from the coral wall. The smile that divided his dark face when he saw Reis seemed automatic and distracted. Reis saluted, called, “Good evening, Skipper,” and leaped across the laughing rill that had overflowed the fountain’s rim.

  Hap touched his forehead in return. “Hi ya, Bill.”

  Reis said, “It’s damned good to see you here. We thought you were dead.”

  “Not me, Bill.” Hap stared off into the twilight. “You can’t die on duty, know that? Got to finish your tick, know what I mean, Bill boy? You want up here on the bridge?” He patted the tree trunk.

  “That’s okay—I’m fine where I am. Hap…?”

  His eyes still upon something Reis could not see, Hap said, “Speak your piece.”

  “Hap, I checked your cortical activity. There wasn’t any. You were brain-dead.”

  “Go on.”

  “That’s why it was quite a surprise to run into you here, and I’m not sure it’s really you. Are you Hap, or are you just a kind of surrogate, Centcomp’s concept of Hap?”

  “I’m Hap. Next question?”

  “Why won’t Centcomp terminate resuscitation?”

  “Because I told it not to, as soon as we left Earth.” Hap sounded as though he were talking to himself. “Not just on me, on all of us. We’re all too necessary, all of us vital. Resusc is to continue as long as—in Centcomp’s judgment—there’s the slightest possibility of returning a crewman to his or her duty. No overrides at all, no mutinies. Know what a mutiny is, Bill? Grasp the concept?”

  Reis nodded.

  “Some snotty kid’s trying to take over my ship, Billy boy, trying to push me out through a hatch. That’s mutiny. It’s a certain Lieutenant William R. Reis. He’s not going to get away with it.”

  “Hap…”

  Hap was gone. Briefly, the tree where he had sat remained where it was, vacant; then it too vanished, wiped from working memory.

  Something was wrong: the brilliant garden seemed haunted by sinister shadows, flitting and swift; the chaotic twilight from which Reis had emerged pressed closer to the coral palace. His head ached, there was a chill in his side, and his fingers felt oddly warm. He tried to remove the headband, willing himself to use his real arms, not the proxies that here appeared to be his arms. A hurrying subroutine shouldered him out of the way; by accident he stepped into the laughing rill, which bit his foot like acid…

  A smudged white cabin wall stood in place of the wall of the coral palace. Dawson was bending over him, his face taut with concern. “Reis! What happened?”

  His mouth was full of blood; he spat it out. “I’m hurt, Sid.”

  “I know. Christ!” Dawson released him; but he did not fall, floating derelict in the cabin air. Dawson banged on Jan’s pod.

  Reis moved his right arm to look at the fingers; the warmth there was his own blood, and there was more blood hanging in the cabin, floating spheres of bright scarlet blood—arterial blood. “I’m bleeding, Sid. I think he nicked a lung. Better patch me up.”

  Twilight closed upon the cabin. Reis remembered how they had celebrated Christmas when he was three—something he had not known he knew, with colored paper and a thousand other wonderful things. Surely he was peeping through one of the plastic tubes the paper had come on; the few things he could see seemed small, toylike, and very bright. Everything in all the universe was a Christmas present, a fact he had forgotten long, long ago. He wondered who had brought them all, and why.

  · · · ·

  “You have been asleep in the medical pod. There is little cause for concern.”

  Reis searched the pod for a rat, but there was none. No backtalk to Centcomp from in here.

  “Are you anxious? Fearful? Confide your fears to me. I assure you that any information that I provide concerning your condition will be both complete and correct. No matter how bad, reality is never quite so bad as our fears concerning reality.”

  Reis said, “Spare me the philosophy,” though he knew that Centcomp could not hear him.

  “And your condition is not even critical. You suffered a dangerous lesion between the fifth and sixth ribs of your right side, but you are nearly well.”

  Reis was already exploring the place with his fingers.

  “Please reply.”

  “Would if I could,” Reis muttered.

  “You will find a rapid-access trace beside your right hand. Please reply.”

  “There’s no God-damned rapid-access trace.”

  A latch clicked. Servos hummed. The pod in which Reis lay rolled forward with stately grandeur, and the pod opened. This time it was Jan who was looking down at him. “Reis, can you sit up?”

  “Sure.” He proved it.

  Low and quick: “I want you to get into your sleeping pod with me, please. Don’t ask questions—just do it, fast.”

  His pod was closed, but not latched from inside. He threw it open and he and Jan climbed in; she lay facing him, on her side, her back to the pod wall. He got in beside her, closed the pod, and threw the latching lever. Jan’s breasts flattened against his chest; Jan’s pelvis pressed his. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I hadn’t realized it would be this crowded.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “Even if I had, I’d have had to ask you anyway. This is the only place I could think of where we could talk privately.”

  “I like it,” Reis said, “so you can forget about that part. Talk about what?”

  “Hap.”

  He nodded, though she could not have seen him in the dark. “I thought so.”

  “Hap was the one who stabbed you.”

  “Sure,” Reis said. “I know that. With the rat from the med pod.”

  “That’s right.” Jan hesitated; Reis could feel her sweet breath wash across his face. At last she said, “Perhaps you’d better tell me how you knew. It might be important.”

  “I doubt it, but there’s no reason not to. Hap thinks I’m a mutineer because I took charge when he was hurt—I was talking to him in Centcomp’s conscious space. Hap had been in the med pod, and when I woke up in there the rat that should have been there was gone. A rat’s stylus is long and sharp, and the whole rat’s made of some sort of metal—titanium, I suppose. So a rat ought to make a pretty decent weapon.”

  Hair brushed his cheek as Jan nodded. “Sid found you. He woke up and realized he should have been on watch.”

  “Sure.”

  “He yelled for me, and we put you in the med pod when we saw that it was empty. There’s another pod in Section Three, remember?”

  “Of course,” Reis said.

  He waited for her to pursue that line of thought, but she seemed to veer off from it instead. “Hap’s resumed command.” She swallowed. “It was all right at first—he’s the captain, after all. None of us even thought about resisting him, then.”

  Reis said slowly, “I wouldn’t have resisted him either; I would have obeyed his orders, if I’d known he was alive to give them.”

  Jan said, “He’s very suspicious now.” There was a queer flatness in her voice.

  “I see.”

  “And Reis, he’s going to continue the mission.”

  For a moment he could not speak. He shook his head.

  “It’s crazy, isn’t it? With the ship ripped up like it was.”

  “Not crazy,” he told her. “Impossible.”

  Jan took a deep breath—he could feel and hear it, her long gasp in the dark. “And Reis, Hap’s dead.”

  Reluctantly Reis said, “If he really wanted to proceed with the mission, maybe it’s for the best. You didn’t kill him, did you? You and Sid?”

  “No. You don’t understand. I didn’t mean… Oh, it’s so hard to say what I do mean.”

  Reis told her, “I think you’d better try.” His right hand had been creeping, almost absently, toward her left breast. He forced it to stop where it was.

  “Hap’s still running the ship. He tells us what to do, and we do it because we know we’d better. But our real captain, our friend, is dead. Try to understand. The real Hap died in the med pod, and Centcomp’s substituted something else—something of its own—for his soul or spirit or whatever you want to call it. When you’ve seen him, after you’ve been around him for a while, you’ll understand.”

  “Then I ought to be outside, where I can see him,” Reis said practically, “not in here. But first—”

  Jan screamed, a high-pitched wail of sheer terror that was deafening in the enclosed space of the sleep pod. Reis clapped his hand over her mouth and said, “Jesus! All right, if you don’t want to, we won’t. Promise you won’t do that again if I let you talk?”

  Jan nodded, and he returned his hand to his side.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “It isn’t that I don’t like you, or that I’d never want to. I’ve been under such a terrible strain. You missed it. You were in the med pod, and you can’t know what it’s been like for us.”

  “I understand,” Reis told her. “Oh, hell, you know what I mean.”

  “If Hap isn’t looking for us already, he will be soon. Or looking for me, anyway. He thinks you’re still in the med pod, unless Centcomp’s told him I took you out. Reis, you’ve got to believe me. He’s going to court-martial and execute you; that’s what he said when Sid and I told him we’d put you in the pod.”

  “You’re serious?”

  “Reis, you don’t know what he’s like now. It doesn’t make any difference, we’re all going to die anyway, Sid and Paula and me. And Hap’s already dead.” Her voice threatened to slip from tears to hysteria.

  “No, we’re not,” he told her. “Hap’s been having you fix the ship? He must have, if he’s talking about carrying out the mission.”

  “Yes! We’ve got three engines running now, and the hull’s airtight. We don’t know—Sid and I don’t know—whether we can count on Paula. If she sided with Hap it would be two against two, a man and a woman on each side, and…”

  “Go on,” Reis said.

  “But if you were with us, that would be two men and a woman on our side. We’d save the ship and we’d save our lives. Nobody would have to know—we’d tell them the truth, that Hap died in the hit.”

  “You’re not telling me the truth,” Reis said. “If we’re going to handle this together, you’ve got to open up.”

  “I am, Reis, I swear. Don’t you think I know this isn’t the time to lie?”

  “Okay,” he said. “Then tell me who’s in the medical pod in Section Three. Is it Sid? Somebody’s in there, or you wouldn’t have brought it up.”

  He waited, but Jan said nothing.

  “Maybe Hap sleeps in there,” Reis hazarded. “Maybe he’s getting himself some additional treatment. You want me to pull the plug on him, but why can’t you do that yourself?”

  “No. I don’t think he sleeps at all. Or…”

  “Or what?”

  “He’s got Nell with him—Sergeant Upson. Nell was in the pod, but she’s out now, and she stays with him all the time. I didn’t want to tell you, but there it is. Something else is in Three’s med pod. I don’t know who it was, but when it gets out we won’t have a chance.”

  “Nell’s dead.” He recalled her floating body, its hideous stare.

  “That’s right.”

  “I see,” Reis said, and jerked back the lever that opened the sleep pod.

  “Reis, you have to tell me. Are you with us or against us?”

  He said, “You’re wrong, Jan. I don’t have to tell you one God-damned thing. Where’s Hap?”

  “In Section Five, probably. He wants to get another engine on line.”

  Reis launched himself toward the airlock, braked on the dog handles, and released them.

  Section Three seemed normal but oddly vacant. He crossed to Centcomp’s screen and wrote, “Present occ this med pod for vis check.”

  “ID” flashed on the screen.

  “Lt. Wm. R. Reis.”

  “Refused. Resuscitation under way.”

  Behind him Jan said, “I tried that. Centcomp won’t identify it either.”

  Reis shrugged and pushed off toward the emergency locker. Opening it, he tossed out breathing apparatus, the aid kit, a body bag, and a folding stretcher with tie-downs. Behind them was a steel emergency toolbox. He selected a crowbar and the largest screwdriver and jetted to the med pod.

  “Tampering with medical equipment is strictly forbidden. Resuscitation under way.”

  Reis jammed the blade of the screwdriver into the scarcely visible joint between the bulkhead and the pod, and struck the screwdriver’s handle sharply enough with the crowbar to make his own weightless bodymass jump. He let the crowbar float free, grasped the pod latch, and jerked the screwdriver down. That widened the crack enough for him to work one end of the crowbar into it.

  Centcomp’s screen caught his eye. It read, “Tampering is strictly Bill stop.”

  Reis said, “Jan, tell it to open the God-damned pod if it doesn’t want me to mess with it.”

  Jan found the rat; but before she could write, the screen read, “Bill, I cannot.”

  Jan gasped, “Oh, holy God,” and it struck Reis that he had never heard her swear before. He said, “I thought you couldn’t hear us, Centcomp. Wasn’t that the story?”

  “I truly cannot, Bill, and that is no story. But I monitor conditions everywhere in the ship. That is my job, and at times I can read your lips. Particularly yours, Bill. You have very good, clear lip motion.”

  Reis heaved at the crowbar; tortured metal shrieked.

  Jan said, “Centcomp will have told Hap. He and Nell are probably on their way up here right now.”

  “I have not. Lieutenant van Jure.”

  Reis turned to face the screen. “Is that the truth?”

  “You know I am incapable of any deception, Bill. Captain Hapgood is engaged in a delicate repair. I prefer to take care of this matter myself in order that he can proceed without any interruption.”

  “Watch the dogs—the moment they start going around, tell me.”

  “All right,” Jan said. She had already pulled a wrench from the toolbox.

  “Bill, I did not want to tell you this, yet I see I must.”

  Reis moved the crowbar to the left and pried again. “What is it?”

  “You said…?”

  “I said what is it, God damn it! Stop screwing around and stalling. It’s not going to do you any good.”

  “Bill, it really would be better if you did not open that.”

  Reis made no reply. Pale blue light was leaking from the med pod through the crack; it looked as though there might be a lot of ultraviolet in it, and he turned his eyes away.

  “Bill, for your own good, do not do that.”

  Reis heaved again on the crowbar, and the latch broke. The pod rolled out, and as it did a nearly faceless thing inside sat up and caught his neck in skeletal hands. Section Three filled with the sickening sweetish smells of death and gangrene. Reis flailed at the half-dead thing with the crowbar; and its crooked end laid open a cheek, scattering stinking blood that was nearly black and exposing two rows of yellow teeth.