Johann said, “If she really believes it’s that serious, she ought to tell us about it—put us on our guard.”

  “She’s talked to most of the officers privately.”

  “She hasn’t talked to me.”

  “I know.”

  He swung his stiff leg off the bunk and stood up, and inadvertently brought himself close enough for her to reach. She cupped his face in her hands and used the leverage to thrust her floating body down until it was pressed to his and he could feel the firm push of her breasts on his chest, and her small, rounded belly touching his loins. “And what is that supposed to mean?” he asked.

  “It means we still have time. You don’t have to go yet, and I’ll be all right as long as I’m with you. Horst doesn’t care, and she’s busy with Helmut.”

  “You know what I meant. If she told everyone, why didn’t she tell me?”

  “I didn’t say she told everybody.”

  “Why not me?” He pushed her away, and she floated off toward the upper left corner of the compartment, like a pink and blond fornicatory doll, he thought, in the slow-motion pictures of a bomb blast in a department store.

  “Look at yourself!”

  Suddenly, just as she banked against the ceiling, she was angry. “Think about what you look like to other people. You’re just the type, just the kind that does it. Alone all the time and so very, very intellectual. When was the last time you talked to the overmonitor?”

  “That doesn’t matter. Not long ago, but it was the first time for a long time.”

  “Nobody else does it at all. Except them. And they do whatever it tells them, because they think it has everything so perfectly worked out—when it’s only the same kind of thinking that turned Earth into a sewer a hundred years ago.”

  In Michelangelo’s painting The Creation of Adam, a floating Jehovah stretches forth his hand to the reclining Adam. On the ceiling Johann saw acted out the reverse of this—his own shadow reached up from behind him to touch the floating shadow of Grit. For a moment it held the position, and he began, awkwardly, to raise his own arm in the same way, suddenly embarrassed to think that she might notice that his shadow no longer followed his movements. The arm had a second, true, shadow of its own, weaker and grayer than the black outline behind him that, even as he watched, seemed to send a wave of dark strength into Grit’s pale shadow.

  Later, on the bridge, he found himself adjusting the wall communicator screen to show the ship: the rounded curve of the bridge module itself, with the hard domes and pyramids of the instrument pods, launcher casings, and airlocks that rose like temples and tombs from the smooth surface of a world eroded to its iron core; and beyond it the shining filigree of the other modules and the writhing corridors that connected them, spread like a goddess’s veil down the trailing night. While he watched, one of the silvery threads parted—perhaps a hundred kilometers from where he stood. Blue attitude jets the size of pinpoints flared; the severed module was united in moments to another corridor, while the original corridor, coiling like the broken string of a guitar, curved toward the bridge some twenty or thirty kilometers to fasten on the hatch of a new module; in slow, trembling waves, the entire fabric of the ship readjusted itself to the change.

  “Ugly, isn’t it,” Gerta said behind him.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “No? With all those loops and ravels? I think a ship ought to be long and slender and graceful—like the Captain, if you know what I mean. This one looks like a bacterial nucleus under a microscope.”

  “You’re trying to make me angry, aren’t you?”

  “Not at all. Have you heard the news?”

  Johann shook his head.

  “The Captain’s going to go down herself. To Neuerddraht. She’s going back with Helmut.”

  “She’s not supposed to leave the ship.”

  “Technically, no. But think what it will be like when we get back home. There will be hearings and interviews. How would it look if she were to say she hadn’t been there herself? She’ll be the chief witness.” Gerta glanced over her shoulder. “Besides,” she added in a lower voice, “she’ll be almost alone, down there with Helmut. Just a handful of crewpeople and Erik. She’s had a vehicle built in the welding shop—you know, for ‘surface exploration.’ It seats two, so they can go off together, hundreds of kilometers from anyone.”

  “I would like to go, too,” he said. “To go down.”

  “To keep an eye on her? Don’t be silly.”

  “Just to be going. To see the place.”

  “I thought you loved the ship. You’re the only one left. The rest of us hate this smelly mouse-maze.”

  “That doesn’t mean I want to stay on board forever. I’d like to see Neuerddraht at first hand—it seems to have been ruined already, by some race older than ours. Earth must be that way by now.”

  “Don’t let the Captain hear you talk like that,” Gerta said.

  “Where is she?”

  “The marine module. You want me to get Elis to fill in for you?”

  “It’s true then. There’s going to be a mutiny.”

  “Everybody hears that talk; I don’t think you ought to take it seriously.” Gerta was already coding Elis’s number on the communicator.

  Johann watched her long fingers flying across the buttons. “You love the ship, too,” he said. “Even if you won’t admit it. You know there’s going to be an insurrection, too, and you think I can stop it. I feel as if you were asking me to stop an avalanche.”

  Gerta shook her head, her fingers busy with the keys. The screen lit up.

  “Elis? Johann wants you to take the rest of the watch for him.”

  Johann could see Elis’s lips move in the screen, but he was too far away to hear.

  “No. You owe him. I looked it up.”

  The speaker muttered.

  “All right, then.” Gerta keyed out and turned back toward Johann. “He’s coming. You can go now, if you like. I’ll take care of things until he gets here.”

  “I’ll wait.” He turned away and busied himself with instrument readings. A yeoman was like a wife, he thought. He and Gerta had never been lovers, but he wondered now why they had not. A ship should be long and slender and graceful, she had said. Like the Captain. And had run her hands over her own body, trying to call attention to herself, to make him see that she was, physically, much like the Captain, with her tall, slender figure. He had always thought her too masculine—wide-shouldered and small-breasted under the white tunic. But was she? A yeoman was like a wife—sharing the events of each watch, united with the duty officer. United with the three of them now, a dark man was standing behind him—like Gerta, a partner. Or so he felt. He turned and saw him, stretched in inky darkness, hard-edged on the floor though the bridge was bright as always with diffused light. Gerta, whose back was to him now as she wrote the log, had a hundred jostling shadows, each almost too weak to be seen.

  Elis came, and Johann, wondering what she would think of it, brushed the nape of Gerta’s neck with his lips as he stepped toward the big double doors leading out into Corridor A.

  Before he could push them open, the communicator screen flashed, calling him back. It was Erik, Helmut’s second in command, his square, handsome, stupid face tense behind its transparent guard.

  “I must speak to the Captain,” he said.

  “She isn’t here. Report to me.”

  “Can you send for her?”

  “She is not to be disturbed. What is it? If whatever has happened is important, it shouldn’t have to wait for her. If it isn’t important, you can report it in the usual way.”

  “We found a city,” Erik said. “A dead city with all the buildings knocked to ruins, and the streets filled with sand that whispers in the wind, so that the men are all afraid of it, and there are piers jutting out into the sea—piers for the ships, that the sand surges against. I went out onto one of them—”

  “Pull yourself together,” Elis said.

  “—the stones are still solid enough, though they’re not really stones, and stood at the end, and I swear to you, Lieutenant, the ocean that isn’t within a thousand kilometers of here washed over my feet and the sand blew and sang so in my ears that I nearly fell, almost fell off the end of it as I stood there looking out into the ocean with the unwalled houses all behind me and the ships beating their gongs in the rain out there in the whirling bay.”

  Johann looked at Elis and whispered, “What do you think?” Elis winked and slapped his hand against his mouth as though he were swallowing a pill.

  “Is there a city down there? Could there be? A ruined city?”

  “We’d have seen it from above.”

  “Here,” Erik said, and held a picture up to the scanner. It showed a flat, brown landscape of sand; but rising from the sand were three oddly colored stones with regular outlines.

  “Wind formations,” Elis said.

  Johann said, “They look too well squared.”

  “Stone is crystalline in structure. When an entire plane wears away—or splits away—it leaves a flat surface.”

  Gerta said: “Remember the man, Elis? The one they saw, who wasn’t one of the expedition, crossing the desert when it was almost dark? Helmut saw him.”

  “Take care of things,” Johann told Elis. “I’m going to go and find the Captain, and let her know about this.”

  Erik said: “We haven’t taken off the breathing apparatus—not any of us. But even so the ocean smells like flying foam and the city like yeast, and all the hills around us are ringing with roses and mosses and damp ferns with the sounds of fountains.”

  “I’ll tell her,” Johann said.

  · · · ·

  When he left the bridge, he went to the Personnel Office and keyed the overmonitor.

  “Interrogative.”

  “Have I left the ship since boarding?”

  “Response: Indeterminable.”

  “By reason of insufficient data?”

  “Response: By reason of erroneous data.”

  “What is the erroneous data?”

  “Response: Debarkation data shows no absences. Cerebral radiation monitoring indicates absence or death on several occasions.”

  “Is it possible for a human being to pass from one point to another without passing through the intervening space?”

  “Response: Yes.”

  The personnel clerk, who had come into the office while Johann was questioning the overmonitor, said, “Something wrong, sir?”

  Johann shook his head.

  “You looked funny. If there’s something the matter, just call on me.”

  “I learned something startling, that’s all.”

  “Interrogative.”

  “I wouldn’t trust it, sir. It’s liable to tell you anything.”

  “Can you give me a nontechnical explanation?”

  “Response: No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Response: Since explanations must be couched in terms of fundamental lemmas or expressions logically derived from such lemmas, the lemmas themselves while sometimes capable of proof are not capable of explanation.”

  “Can you provide a nontechnical proof?”

  “Response: Such a proof is dependent on the quantum nature of time and the continuous nature of extension. Is proof required of these?”

  “No. Proceed with the proof requested.”

  “Response: It can be shown experimentally that the temporal quanta are not emitted at a uniform rate, but at a rate dependent upon the velocity of the body experiencing the time in question. Since time is composed of quanta, the reduction in the rate of passage of time must be explained as a reduction in the rate of emission of these quanta. This reduction implies the existence of hyper-time, by which the rate of emission is measured, and this in turn implies the existence of hyper-time intervals of some duration between the emission of the time quanta applicable to a rapidly moving body. If motion were continuous, it would cease with a consequent release of energy during these hyper-time intervals, since motion without time is motion at infinite velocity. No such releases of energy have been observed, from which it follows that motion is discontinuous—consisting of translations of the moving body from point to point, corresponding to the time quanta emitted. Q.E.D.”

  “Such translations must be very small,” Johann said, “except in the case of objects moving at near-light speeds. Have larger translations ever been observed?”

  “Response: No data.”

  He found the Captain in the office of the Marine Commandant. The Commandant, who was about twenty-two, was sharpening a long-bladed knife as he sat at his desk, stroking the curved steel over a little hand-held stone with a rotary motion. The suspension pod from which he had emerged stood open in one corner of the room. Johann saluted the Captain and described Erik’s “city.”

  “He’s irrational?”

  “I wouldn’t say that, but he’s been hallucinating.”

  “Helmut and I will straighten things out when we get down there. Dismissed.”

  “Sir…”

  “What is it?”

  “I’d like to request permission to accompany you.”

  The Captain turned away, shaking her head. “I appreciate your enterprise, Lieutenant, but every person we have on the surface of Neuerddraht requires a substantial support effort, and no more are needed.”

  “You may have to send Erik and some of the others back to the ship. I would be willing to put myself under Helmut’s orders.”

  “If Erik has to be replaced, I’ll keep you in mind. Is that all?”

  “No, sir. I would like to state that if you, as captain of the ship, are anticipating a mutiny, it is my right as a senior officer to be informed of the fact.”

  “I am anticipating no mutiny.”

  “The Commandant has been revived. And how many marines? Or is that confidential?”

  The Commandant said, “All of them,” and putting aside the stone ran his thumb along the edge of his knife.

  The Captain struck her desk with the flat of her hand. “I am leaving the ship. Extraordinary precautions are clearly indicated.”

  Johann asked, “You don’t trust the officers, and the patrol, to maintain security?”

  Something of the outrage he felt at the implied accusation of disloyalty must have been apparent from his voice; the Captain (her own voice somewhat softer) said: “I don’t doubt you, Johann, if that’s what you mean. But there is inevitably a certain… loss of perspective, among many originally reliable people on a voyage as long as this one. The marines—by remaining in suspension—have maintained their original orientation and patriotism. That was the reason for their inclusion in the crew.”

  “As far as my boys and girls are concerned,” the Commandant said, “yesterday they told us blast-off would be in two weeks. Now, according to what I hear from the Captain, we’ve made it, but things are a little screwed up. Well, we’re here to unscrew them.”

  “If necessary,” the Captain said.

  The Marine Commandant nodded. “If necessary,” he said. His pistol belt was buckled through the backframe of his chair, and he slipped the knife into a sheath taped to the inner side of the holster. “You look a lot older than when I saw you,” he told Johann. “You remember me?”

  Johann shook his head.

  “I sat on one side of you at the last briefing. Remember now? I was smoking, and you asked me to put it out.”

  “I’m sorry,” Johann said. He remembered graduation, signing up for the flight, the dizzying trip to the shuttleport by monorail, carrying his duffel bag around the lonely, windswept housing area. There must have been a preflight briefing, though he could not remember one. He had written Marcella, telling her why he had to go; putting down all the fine phrases that were true until saying them into the Voisriit made them false, then erased it all. He had been a boy—no older than the Commandant was now. Could such boys fight? He thrust the thought aside, knowing that they could; that the marines would fight very well, having been selected for the purpose.

  “You asked the briefing officer a question,” the Commandant continued. “I forget now what it was. I was thinking of something else.”

  “I probably did,” Johann conceded.

  Outside, the marines were still reviving, straightening their uniforms and shining their boots; checking the weapons they had carried with them into their suspension pods. One of them, a high-breasted girl with yellow curls straying from under her battle helmet, asked him if it had really been seventeen years. He said that it had, and added that she had not missed a great deal—then turned away quickly for fear that she would turn away from him.

  So he had asked the briefing officer a question. That was unlike him. It must have been important—or he had thought it important. It was probably still on tape somewhere on the ship. Not on Earth. Few if any tapes would have outlasted the accidents of even a single century, and no one would care about that one now. Marcella and the briefing officer were both dead. Possibly they had met, years after blast-off, and never realized that they were linked through him.

  · · · ·

  There was as yet no guard at the boat-hangar entrance, but there would be soon, surely. When the mutiny came, the Captain would want to cut off the mutineers’ escape. Johann pushed aside the thought that she might also wish to retain a path of escape for herself—most probably the mutiny would not begin, if it began at all, until she had gone.

  But was she leaving? It was contrary to regulations for the Captain to disembark save in a friendly port—but there was no regulation to say that she could not announce that she intended to do so. He pressed the green button, and the hangar door slid up with a sigh of compressed air. “Me,” the boat nearest the door said. “Me, me, me,” echoed the sound.