Dr. Hort nodded.

  There was a knock at the door. Link straightened up. “Who is it?” Hort asked.

  “Me. Mrs. Danol.”

  Linkeree stood up abruptly, walked around the office to a point at the far wall from the door.

  “I’m consulting, Mrs. Danol.”

  Her voice was strident, even through the muffling door. “They told me Linkeree had come back. I heard you talking to him in there.”

  “Go away, Mrs. Danol,” Dr. Hort said. “You will see your son in due time.”

  “I will see him now. I have a writ that says I can see him. I got it from the court at noon. I want to see him.” Hort turned to Link. “She thinks ahead, doesn’t she?”

  Link was shaking. “If she comes in, I’ll kill her.”

  “All right, Mrs. Danol. Just a moment.”

  “No!” Link shouted, making spastic motions as if he wanted to claw his way through the wall backward.

  Hort whispered, “Relax, Link. I won’t let her near you.” Hort opened a closet—Link started to walk in it. “No, Link.” And Hort took his spare suit off the hanger, and a clean shirt. The suit, in the standard one piece, was a little long for Linkeree, but the waist and shoulders were not far wrong, and Link didn’t look out of place in it when he had finished dressing.

  “I don’t know what you hope to gain by stalling, Mr. Hort, but I will see my son,” Mrs. Danol shouted. “In three minutes I’ll call the police!” Hort shouted back, “Patience, Mrs. Danol. It takes a moment to prepare your son to see you.”

  “Nonsense! My son wants to see me!”

  Linkeree was trembling, hard. Hort put his arms around the young man, gripped him tight. “Keep control,” he whispered.

  “I’m trying,” Link chattered back, his lower jaw out of control.

  Hort reached into his hipbag, pulled out his id and his cred, and handed them to Link. “I won’t report them missing until you are on a ship out of here.”

  “Ship?”

  “Go to Capitol. You’ll have little trouble there, finding a place. Even without money. There’s always room for someone like you.”

  Link snorted. “That’s a damn lie and you know it.”

  “Right. But even if they send you back here, your mother will be dead by then.”

  Linkeree nodded.

  “Now here’s the door control. When I say, open the door.”

  “No.”

  “Open the door and let her in. I’ll keep her under control until you get out the door and close it from the outside. There’s no way out of here, then, except Gram’s masterkey, and this note should take care of that.” Hort scribbled a quick note. “He’ll cooperate because he hates your mother almost as much as I do. Which is a terrible thing for an impartial psychologist to say, but at this point, who the hell cares?”

  Linkeree took the note and the door control and stood beside the door with his back to the wall. “Doctor,” he asked, “what’ll they do to you for this?”

  “Raise holy hell, of course,” he said. “But I can only be removed by a council of medical practitioners—and that’s the same group that can have Mrs. Danol committed.”

  “Committed?”

  “She needs help, Link.”

  Linkeree smiled—and was surprised to realize it was his first smile in months. Since. Since Zad died.

  He touched the open button.

  The door slid open and Mrs. Danol swept in. “I knew you’d see reason,” she pronounced, then whirled to look as Link stepped out the door, closing it so quickly that he almost got caught in it. His mother was already screaming and pounding as Link handed the note to Gram, who read it, looked closely at the man, and then nodded. “But hurry your ass, boy,” Gram said. “What we’re doing here is called kidnapping in some courts.”

  Linkeree set the door control on the desk and left, running.

  He lay in the ship’s passenger hold, recovering from the dizziness that they told him was normal with a person’s first mindtaping. The brain patterns that held all his memories and all his personality were now in a cassette securely stored in the ship’s cabin, and now he lay on a table waiting for them to drug him with somec, the magical medicine that had made interstellar travel possible by slowing all body activities to an infinitesimal crawl, at the cost of wiping out the mind and memory of the sleeper. When he woke up and had his memory played back into his mind in Capitol, he would only remember up to the moment of taping. These moments now, between the tape and the tap, would be lost forever.

  And that was why he thought back to the infant whose warm body he had held, and why he let himself wish that he could have saved him, could have protected him, could have let him live.

  No, I’m living for him.

  The hell I am. I’m living for me.

  They came and put the needle into his buttocks, not for the cold sleep of death, but for the burning sleep of life. And as the hot agony of somec swept over him, he writhed into a ball on the table and cried out, “Mother! I love you.”

  In the Dog House

  Every species has its limits—some mental, some physical.

  As Mklikluln awoke, he felt the same depression that he had felt as he went to sleep ninety-seven years ago. And though he knew it would only make his depression worse, he immediately scanned backward as his ship decelerated, hunting for the star that had been the sun. He couldn’t find it. Which meant that even with acceleration and deceleration time, the light from the nova—or supernova—had not yet reached the system he was heading for.

  Sentimentality be damned, he thought savagely as he turned his attention to the readouts on the upcoming system. So the ice cliffs will melt, and the sourland will turn to huge, planet-spanning lakes. So the atmosphere will fly away in the intense heat. Who cares? Humanity was safe.

  As safe as bodiless minds can be, resting in their own supporting mind-fields somewhere in space, waiting for the instantaneous message that here is a planet with bodies available, here is a home for the millions for whom there had been no spaceships, here we can once again—

  Once again what?

  No matter how far we search, Mklikluln reminded himself, we have no hope of finding those graceful, symmetrical, hexagonally delicate bodies we left behind to burn.

  Of course, Mklikluln still had his, but only for a while.

  Thirteen true planetary bodies, two of which co-orbited as binaries in the third position. Ignoring the gas giants and the crusty pebbles outside the habitable range, Mklikluln got increasingly more complex readouts on the binary and the single in the fourth orbit, a red midget.

  The red was dead, the smaller binary even worse, but the blue-green larger binary was ideal. Not because it matched the conditions on Mklikluln’s home world—that would be impossible. But because it had life. And not only life—intelligent life.

  Or at least fairly bright life. Energy output in the sub- and supravisible spectra exceeded reflection from the star (No, I must try to think of it as the sun) by a significant degree. Energy clearly came from a breakdown of carbon compounds, just what current theory (current? ninety-seven-year-old) had assumed would be the logical energy base of a developing world in this temperature range. The professors would be most gratified.

  And after several months of maneuvering his craft, he was in stationary orbit around the larger binary. He began monitoring communications on the supravisible wavelengths. He learned the language quickly, though of course he couldn’t have produced it with his own body, and sighed a little when he realized that the aliens, like his own people, called their little star “the sun,” their minor binary “the moon,” and their own humble, overhot planet “earth” (terra, mund, etc.). The array of languages was impressive—to think that people would go to all the trouble of thinking out hundreds of completely different ways of communicating for the sheer love of the logical exercise was amazing—what minds they must have!

  For a moment he fleetingly thought of taking over for his people’s use the bipedal bodies of the dominant intelligent race; but law was law, and his people would commit mass suicide if they realized—as they would surely realize—that they had gained their bodies at the expense of another intelligent race. One could think of such bipedals as being almost human, right down to the whimsical sense of humor that so reminded Mklikluln of his wife (Ah, Glundnindn, and you the pilot who volunteered to plunge into the sun, scooping out the sample that killed you, but saved us!); but he refused to mourn.

  The dominant race was out. Similar bipedals were too small in population, too feared or misunderstood by the dominant race. Other animals with appropriate populations didn’t have body functions that could easily support intelligence without major revisions—and many were too weak to survive unaided, too short of lifespan to allow civilization.

  And so he narrowed down the choices to two quadrupeds, of very different sorts, of course, but well within the limits of choice; both had full access to the domiciles of the dominant race; both had adequate body structure to support intellect; both had potential means of communicating; both had sufficient population to hold all the encapsulated minds waiting in the space between the stars.

  Mklikluln did the mental equivalent of flipping a coin—would have flipped a coin, in fact, except that he had neither hand nor coin nor adequate gravity for flipping.

  The choice made—for the noisy one of greater intelligence that already had the love of most members of the master race—he set about making plans on how to introduce the transceivers that would call his people. (The dominant race must not know what is happening; and it can’t be done without the cooperation of the dominant race.)

  Mklikluln’s six points vibrated just a little as he thought.

  Abu was underpaid, underfed, underweight, and within about twelve minutes of the end of his lifespan. He was concentrating on the first problem, however, as the fourth developed.

  “Why am I being paid less than Faisel, who sits on his duff by the gate while I walk back and forth in front of the cells all day?” he righteously said—under his breath, of course, in case his supervisor should overhear him. “Am I not as good a Muslim? Am I not as smart? Am I not as loyal to the Party?”

  And as he was immersed in righteous indignation at man’s inhumanity, not so much to mankind as to Abu ibn Assur, a great roaring sound tore through the desert prison, followed by a terrible, hot, dry, sand-stabbing wind. Abu screamed and covered his eyes—too late, however, and the sand ripped them open, and the hot air dried them out.

  That was why he didn’t see the hole in the outside wall of cell 23, which held a political prisoner condemned to die the next morning for having murdered his wife—normally not a political crime, except when the wife was also the daughter of somebody who could make phone calls and get people put in prison.

  That was why he didn’t see his supervisor come in, discover cell 23 empty, and then aim his submachine-gun at Abu as the first step to setting up the hapless guard as the official scapegoat for this fiasco. Abu did, however, hear and feel the discharge of the gun, and wondered vaguely what had happened as he died.

  Mklikluln stretched the new arms and legs (the fourness of the body, the two-sidedness, the overwhelming sexuality of it—all were amazing, all were delightful) and walked around his little spacecraft. And the fiveness and tenness of the fingers and toes! (What we could have done with fingers and toes! except that we might not have developed thoughttalk, then, and would have been tied to the vibration of air as are these people.) Inside the ship he could see his own body melting as the hot air of the Kansas farmland raised the temperature above the melting point of ice.

  He had broken the law himself, but could see no way around it. Necessary as his act had been, and careful as he had been to steal the body of a man doomed anyway to die, he knew that his own people would try him, convict him, and execute him for depriving an intelligent being of life.

  But in the meantime, it was a new body and a whole range of sensations.

  He moved the tongue over the teeth. He made the buzzing in his throat that was used for communication. He tried to speak.

  It was impossible. Or so it seemed, as the tongue and lips and jaw tried to make the Arabic sounds the reflex pathways were accustomed to, while Mklikluln tried to speak in the language that had dominated the airwaves.

  He kept practicing as he carefully melted down his ship (though it was transparent to most electromagnetic spectra, it might still cause comment if found) and by the time he made his way into the nearby city, he was able to communicate fairly well. Well enough, anyway, to contract with the Kansas City Development Corporation for the manufacture of the machine he had devised; with Farber, Farber, and Maynard to secure patents on every detail of the machinery; and with Sidney’s carpentry shop to manufacture the doghouses.

  He sold enough diamonds to pay for the first 2,000 finished models. And then he hit the road, humming the language he had learned from the radio. “It’s the real thing, Coke is,” he sang to himself. “Mr. Transmission will put in commission the worst transmissions in town.”

  The sun set as he checked into a motel outside Manhattan, Kansas. “How many?” asked the clerk.

  “One,” said Mklikluln.

  “Name?”

  “Robert,” he said, using a name he had randomly chosen from among the many thousands mentioned on the airwaves. “Robert Redford.”

  “Ha-ha,” said the clerk. “I bet you get teased about that a lot.”

  “Yeah. But I get in to see a lot of important people.”

  The clerk laughed. Mklikluln smiled. Speaking was fun. For one thing, you could lie. An art his people had never learned to cultivate.

  “Profession?”

  “Salesman.”

  “Really, Mr. Redford? What do you sell?”

  Mklikluln shrugged, practicing looking mildly embarrassed. “Doghouses,” he said.

  Royce Jacobsen pulled open the front door of his swelteringly hot house and sighed. A salesman.

  “We don’t want any,” he said.

  “Yes you do,” said the man, smiling.

  Royce was a little startled. Salesmen usually didn’t argue with potential customers—they usually whined. And those that did argue rarely did it with such calm self-assurance. The man was an ass, Royce decided. He looked at the sample case. On the side were the letters spelling out: “Doghouses Unlimited.”

  “We don’t got a dog,” Royce said.

  “But you do have a very warm house, I believe,” the salesman said.

  “Yeah. Hotter’n Hades, as the preachers say. Ha.” The laugh would have been bigger than one Ha, but Royce was hot and tired and it was only a salesman.

  “But you have an air conditioner.”

  “Yeah,” Royce said. “What I don’t have is a permit for more than a hundred bucks worth of power from the damnpowercompany. So if I run the air conditioner more than one day a month, I get the refrigerator shut down, or the stove, or some other such thing.”

  The salesman looked sympathetic. “It’s guys like me,” Royce went on, “who always get the short end of the stick. You can bet your boots that the mayor gets all the air conditioning he wants. You can bet your boots and your overalls, as the farmers say, ha ha, that the president of the damnpowercompany takes three hot showers a day and three cold showers a night and leaves his windows open in the winter, too, you can bet on it.”

  “Right,” said the salesman. “The power companies own this whole country. They own the whole world, you know? Think it’s any different in England? In Japan? They got the gas, and so they get the gold.”

  “Yeah,” Royce agreed. “You’re my kind of guy. You come right in. House is hot as Hades, as the preachers say, ha ha ha, but it sure beats standing in the sun.”

  They sat on a beat-up looking couch and Royce explained exactly what was wrong with the damnpowercompany and what he thought of the damnpowercompany’s executives and in what part of their anatomy they should shove their quotas, bills, rates, and periods of maximum and minimum use. “I’m sick to death of having to take a shower at 2:00 am!” Royce shouted.

  “Then do something about it!” the salesman rejoindered.

  “Sure. Like what?”

  “Like buy a doghouse from me.” Royce thought that was funny. He laughed for a good long while.

  But then the salesman started talking very quietly, showing him pictures and diagrams and cost analysis papers that proved—what?

  “That the solar energy utilizer built into this doghouse can power your entire house, all day every day, with four times as much power as you could use if you turned on all your home appliances all day every day, for exactly zero once you pay me this simple one-time fee.”

  Royce shook his head, though he coveted the doghouse. “Can’t. Illegal. I think they passed a law against solar energy thingies back in ’85 or ’86, to protect the power companies.”

  The salesman laughed. “How much protection do the power companies need?”

  “Sure,” Royce answered, “it’s me that needs protection. But the meter reader—if I stop using power, he’ll report me, they’ll investigate—”

  “That’s why we don’t put your whole house on it. We just put the big power users on it, and gradually take more off the regular current until you’re paying what, maybe fifteen dollars a month. Right? Only instead of fifteen dollars a month and cooking over a fire and sweating to death in a hot house, you’ve got the air conditioner running all day, the heater running all day in the winter, showers whenever you want them, and you can open the refrigerator as often as you like.”

  Royce still wasn’t sure.

  “What’ve you got to lose?” the salesman asked.

  “My sweat,” Royce answered. “You hear that? My sweat. Ha ha ha ha.”