He was upside down, his head a few centimeters from the floor, between a black chair shaped like a toadstool and a yellow recliner. The Captain’s orderly handed him a thin sheet of moistened and perfumed plastic sponge, and then, when he did nothing, wiped him with it. “Where is she?” Johann said. He meant Marcella.

  “She’s on the bridge. Don’t go out there—she won’t want to see you again for a while.”

  · · · ·

  Five people were waiting for him in his compartment. One was Heinz. Two of the other four, whom he did not know, were men; one was a woman; the fifth, smooth-faced and slender-bodied, he could not be sure of. Nor could he be certain whether they were officers whose duties lay in parts of the ship with which he was unfamiliar, faces he had sometimes seen in the wardroom, people who sometimes came briefly to the bridge to speak to the Captain—or enlisted personnel from the teeming compartments beyond officers’ country. If officers they were violating regulations by not wearing their insignia. If enlisted personnel, they were violating regulations if they were here without passes, and would be punished if caught; but he knew instinctively that they did not care if they were in violation of regulations, and that they would not be caught.

  All the lights in one wall were out, and all but one in the other.

  They had left him the chair; four sat on his bunk with their backs to the dark wall. The man/woman lay at full length behind them.

  The real woman, who was almost as tall as the Captain, and so thin every rib showed, looked at Heinz.

  “You know who we are,” Heinz said.

  Johann shook his head.

  “Ever since this ship penetrated the orbit of Pluto,” Heinz said solemnly, “there have existed covens and brotherhoods, sisterhoods, families, lodges, and societies of those willing to acknowledge that the coarse physical world is no more than an illusion; of those who have sought a deeper meaning and a true wisdom and who have known that the void of Space is no void, but is peopled by beings of great power, ancient beings who traverse it instantaneously at will, needing no ships, and who are not unfriendly to those who, humbling their own pride, are willing to approach them in a proper spirit of reverence.”

  “I’ve been invited to join several times,” Johann told him. “Usually by Emil.” He sat down in the chair.

  “And you have refused. For some years that puzzled us; we have learned more recently that you yourself are not unacquainted with the Paths of Power.”

  The person on the bunk said, as if to itself, “It is true; he has a familiar spirit. Surely we have all seen it by now.” Its voice was thin and piping, like a child’s.

  Johann asked, “You say that there are creatures who live in space? Have you communicated with them?”

  The thin woman said, “In a thousand ways.”

  “Name five.”

  “In dream. By the intermediacy of the gifted, of whom I am one. By things seen in water under certain conditions. By the planchette. In the visions induced by certain liberating medications.”

  “I just had one of those myself,” Johann said. Another voice, much like his own but not his, with a quality that suggested the crumpling of thin, stiff tissue paper, added, “But what do you want from us?”

  The voice, however much it sounded like his, had not been his own. And it had said, “Us.” In the tapes he had viewed, and particularly in old tapes, or tapes made from paper-printed material older than the tape system itself, it seemed to be taken for granted that human beings feared insanity more than death. He had never understood this—nor did he fear death as it seemed, in reading, he should. (One of the men who had come with Heinz was talking, but he found himself unable to concentrate on what was being said enough to understand. Again, something answered for him.)

  It seemed possible that the bite of the drugbug had somehow induced a condition of dual personality—he clung to that thought, remembering a time when he had gone to Grit’s compartment, book in hand, because she had failed to keep an appointment with him, and found her sitting naked on Helmut’s knees. Helmut had had a few cc’s of powder in the bottom of an empty kaf-bulb; from time to time he shook it and, putting the tip of the bulb into Grit’s left nostril, blew out a little of the powder. Grit’s eyes had lost their focus, and at each puff of powder she laughed and kissed Helmut, rocking back and forth on his lap. Johann, watching her, had at first felt a deep disgust, but later—he had stayed and talked to Helmut for a time—had come to realize that she was happy at last and had wanted to leave her where she was. But Helmut was tired of her and had not wanted to exhaust his supply of dust, which he claimed to have made himself, with great labor, from supplies taken from the Food Quality Laboratory. At his insistence they had dressed her, Helmut holding her shoulders to the surface of her bunk while Johann slipped the shorts onto her fleshy, unwilling legs and tied her sandals.

  He had led her to his own compartment, and she had been a completely different Grit from the one he had known, calling herself Joan (which might have been what her mother had called her in infancy—such fashionable old names sometimes appealed to young mothers, though psychologists warned against them) and talking of people and places he had never known, things that bored and frightened him.

  “You will not assist us then?” It was the person on the bed. It had large, bright eyes, he noticed, like the lights on a control panel.

  He said, “I didn’t say that.”

  “We assumed the spirit spoke for you.”

  Unexpectedly, Heinz quoted, “’Lying spirits all, whose rancor runs blacker than their reach.’”

  The thin woman said, “Then there is still a possibility of your joining us? That is better luck for you than for us—we will succeed in any event.”

  The third man, who had kept silent while the others were talking, a thick-necked, powerful-looking man with a bald head, whispered: “We will take the ship. If you assist us we’ll give you a chance to speak and vote when we decide what to do next. If you do not, we’ll probably kill you and your followers.”

  Johann looked at all five, wondering if they might succeed. If so, there could be no question of law between them—nothing but a straight struggle for power. He said, “In the end, even if you win, only one of you can be the new captain.”

  Heinz answered, “The ship will be administered by a joint council.”

  “I wouldn’t want to be a member. It will be more dangerous than fighting against you.” A voice that was almost his own added, “We will not join you.”

  None of the five spoke, but a faint rustling passed among them as they shifted in their seats. The second man stood up. He had a pick in his hand—a weapon made by grinding a screwdriver to a point.

  He sat down again. It was so unexpected that Johann had to fight the impulse to laugh. Nothing had happened, except that the lights in the defective wall behind him had flickered—one going out, another flashing on in such a way that his shadow had seemed to leap out toward the man with the pick. Johann stood up, holding the chair by the back, testing its mass with one hand. “Come on,” he said. “I swing this around sometimes just to keep my shoulders loose. How many real fighters have you got?”

  No one spoke.

  “You,” Johann said to the second man. “And he.” He pointed to the bald man. “Maybe. One real and one possible.”

  “It’s not your chair we are afraid of,” the woman said, and the thing on the bunk nodded, sitting up and putting its thin legs over the side. Heinz and the other two men were still looking at Johann’s shadow. He looked too and saw that the shadow of the chair he held was not as thick and black as his own, which might almost have been a pool of ink or a silhouette cut from black paper.

  Something struck the chair. The second man, already out the compartment door now, had thrown his pick. It quivered in the fiberglass backing of the seat.

  The sexless being who had been lying on the bunk was the last to leave; Johann jerked the pick out and offered it to it handle first and was ignored.

  When it was gone, he locked the door and coded the bridge on the communicator. Horst answered and told him that the Captain had left word that she did not wish to speak to him. “Five people are planning a mutiny,” Johann said. “Heinz is one of them.” He described the other four. “They wanted me to join them.”

  “Are you being forced to make this call?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Who’s in your compartment with you, Johann?”

  “No one. They’re gone.”

  “I’ll tell the Captain. And I’ll send someone down to help you.” The screen went dark.

  Johann drew a squeeze-bulb of water and sat down on the bunk, facing the light. “All right,” he said, “who are you?”

  Nothing answered.

  “You attached yourself to me. You rode the shuttle back up, after the expedition landed, and you must have wandered around the ship after that until you found me. Then you used me to get back home—in some way I don’t understand, you were able to trigger teleportation, something a few dozen people in history have been actually able to do, but that must be latent in the rest of us.” He stopped, looking around the empty compartment, waiting for a reply.

  None came.

  His Voisriit had worked its way to the bottom of his bag, but he extracted it and looked briefly at the material he had written a few hours before. “I’m going to record this too,” he said. “I might as well. You realize we’ve only got two or three minutes before whoever Horst sent gets here.” He had already flicked the on-off button with his thumb. He added, “As it happens, I like you. Those people would probably have killed me when I wasn’t willing to go along with their mutiny; I know that.”

  There was silence in the compartment except for the sighing of the vent. He saw the Voisriit tape pause as the machine waited for transcribable speech.

  “Listen—” (he found that he was massaging his thighs with his hands, and stopped, embarrassed, wiping them on the cool, soil-resistant fabric of the bunk; the center was still slightly warm and carried a smoky odor that was not quite any sort of cologne)—“I know I’m not right. My mind has been slipping for some time—I know that. But you’re real. All the rest of it could have been delusions: the lights, going down to the surface of Neuerddraht, the sound of your voice; but they were afraid of you.”

  Silence.

  “And Horst saw something in here; he was certain I wasn’t alone. It took me a few minutes to understand it, but I know what it was he saw now. On the bulkhead behind me there must have been a shadow that didn’t match my position. He saw you. I’m not looking at you now because you don’t seem to want to talk when I can see you.”

  “It is difficult for me to speak when you can see me.” The Voisriit tape crept forward, black lettering appearing on its surface. It was possible, though he was not conscious of it, that it was his own voice. He put his right hand firmly over his mouth. “By instinct I follow your will, to better remain in your shadow. If you disbelieve—I am inhibited from speech.” The tape still moved.

  “What are you?”

  Someone pounded on the door of the compartment. The lock buzzed briefly, and the door swung back. Grit stood between two hulking enlisted patrolers, a man and a woman. “Is anything wrong?” she said.

  The Voisriit recorded the words, and Johann erased them and switched it off. “No,” he said. “Horst got the idea—somehow—that I wasn’t alone when I talked to him. That’s all.”

  “You were alone?”

  “Yes. Do you know what I told him?”

  Grit nodded, her straw-colored curls bobbing, her face serious.

  “Do they?” Johann indicated the patrolers.

  “No.” She looked at the two, who were waiting impassively, their truncheons in their belts. “I think everything’s all right here,” she said. “Dismissed.”

  They touched their foreheads and turned away. Grit stepped into the compartment and closed the door behind her. “Johann, what’s wrong?”

  “Five people came in here and asked me to join them in a mutiny.”

  “I know that, but—”

  “Did Horst tell the Captain?”

  “He said he would, the next time she came on deck.”

  “I’m quite serious. So were they. They are going to try to take over the ship.”

  “Is this the first time you’ve been asked to join that kind of thing?”

  Johann nodded.

  “I suppose it is frightening at first, but these plots have been going on for years now. You must have heard.” Her lips were tight, as though she considered herself, as a warrant officer whose duties lay on the bridge, shamed by his naïveté.

  “I’ve heard about the secret societies and the cults, but I don’t think this can be brushed aside like that.” He had remained seated on the bunk; he felt now, somehow, that he should be standing, that standing would enable him to drive home his point more forcefully. But he was too tired for the work of maintaining an upright posture in magnetic sandals. He would be on duty again in a few hours, and the close air of the compartment seemed to press in upon him. He said, “You’re not going to believe me, are you.”

  “I do believe you. It’s just that I don’t think it’s that serious. What’s this thing?” Grit picked up the pick.

  “One of them threw it at me.”

  She pressed a soft fingertip against the point. “I suppose I’d be bothered too, if someone threw one of these at me.”

  “It was just a gesture; a parting shot.”

  “Who were they?”

  “Heinz was one of them.”

  He described the others again, and Grit said: “The bald man was Rudi. I know him. I’m sorry you’re mixed up with him.”

  “So you know about him,” Johann said. “You know about all these people. Why don’t I? Does the Captain know?”

  “Of course she does. You don’t know because you’ve never bothered to find out. You have to—” She broke off, shaking her head in irritation. “Can’t you do something about these lights? This is just like you, lying in here in the dark, sucking at your ambition, not knowing anything, not talking to anybody.”

  “I can’t get them repaired. You’re the one who believes, or at least seems to believe, that everything on the ship is all right.” He lay down.

  “I don’t believe that,” she said.

  “Horst sent you to see if anyone was with me. You’ve seen that there is no one.” He wanted to be alone with the shadow again; he could see it stretched, as black as the space between the stars, on the bulkhead at his right. “You say this isn’t serious,” he said, “but Horst seemed to take it seriously.”

  “Horst is an old woman.”

  “Go back to the bridge. You’re on duty.”

  “Is that an order?”

  “You don’t take orders from me, and we both know it.”

  “I’m not going back to the bridge, either. I’m off in an hour, and Horst will cover for me. There’s been nothing doing since Helmut came back.”

  “I’m surprised you’re not in his compartment.”

  “He’s seeing the Captain. You really think I care about Helmut, don’t you? He’s nice; he’s fun to be with sometimes, and he’s generous. He knows how to make conversation. But he’s not as handsome as you are, and not as strong, and he can be very silly at times.”

  “And he’s the Captain’s man. Currently.”

  “Well, of course currently! That’s one of the things that bothers me about you—every time you touch somebody—every time you touch someone’s body—you think… Well, you know what you think.” Three clips held her blouse; her plump fingers ran down them with practiced ease until the blouse hung suspended behind her like a shiny white cloudlet. She slipped out of her sandals, leaving them on the deck, kicked off her shorts, and held out a hand to let him draw her to him.

  He ignored it, and she said, “You’re sure? I didn’t think you would.”

  “What do you know about them?”

  “Who?”

  “The five people who were here.”

  “I could tell you anyway. Pull me over to you.”

  “Not now. Tell me.”

  “You know Heinz. Rudi is a technician in the plant rooms. He sells drugs—that’s how I know him—and he claims that a lot of what he sells he grows himself. He has good merchandise and charges a lot, but he’ll give a certain amount of credit—you’d better pay him, though.”

  “The cult.”

  “I always thought it was just a sideline. A lot of them do it, you know, because it’s a good way to get people started. There’s a group, and, you know, social acceptance, and making it a ritual makes it easier—besides, the ceremony makes it more interesting when the rush comes. All the singing and the costumes and invocations.”

  “No,” Johann said, “I don’t. I take it you’ve been to a number of these ceremonies.”

  “It’s something to do. Don’t you understand?”

  “No,” he said again.

  “Only the fools really believe—it’s a kind of game. If you really want to know, there’s another group, a whole other thing, that I think is a lot more dangerous: the overmonitor’s people.”

  His face must have shown the surprise he felt, because she grinned at him. He said, “I didn’t think anyone paid attention to that any more.”

  “There’ve always been people who would play around with a machine like that for as long as anyone would let them. Paper games on a cathode ray terminal, and programming music and those pictures printed in symbols. It’s using that now; it’s pulled all those people together, drawn them around itself. Each of them only knows who a few of the others are, but they know there are others, and they want to put the overmonitor in charge of the ship. The Captain’s a lot more worried about that than she is about the occult groups, and I think she’s right.”