“Then,” said Amblick, “No one will hear the Voice.”

  Garol had known this was the answer, and it was a thought too terrible for him to face. Tears rolled down his cheeks, and he said, “Old Father, can’t you then give us the last words of the Voice so we’ll know how to live after you’re gone?”

  And Amblick sighed and sank into the, pillows and wondered if the Voice had ever really existed after all. Certainly there had been no words lately, nothing but a feeling of despair and impending doom. But then, wasn’t that a sign that the Voice indeed had been real, since now that he needed it so desperately, it had withdrawn itself?

  Itself? No, himself. And Amblick tried to grasp and hold to at least the modicum of truth that had told him the Voice was not just an ethereal source of inspiration but was rather a person of some kind. Hold to something, he told himself, and then he cried out with the bubbling in his lungs filling his voice, “Oh, God, where are you? Where is the wall that covers your face? Why do you hide silently in the noise of this world!”

  And the congregation sat or stood upright, their eyes riveted on Amblick; the scribes ready to write down every word he uttered. For they knew this voice, it was the voice of the Voice, and Amblick would, as the boy had asked, give them the last words of God before he died.

  “The tigers rage in the forest, and the lions roar on the plain, and the voice of the hunter shall be silent.” The pens leaped across the paper, writing. “The hunter shall now watch and wait, for those that sleep will soon never waken, and the tigers shall tear the lion’s belly even as the lion rips the tigers’ throats.

  “Those who borrow from the future must repay, and they will pay in blood and horror and the stars shall go dark, and in the darkness on every world shall man discover again his God, wondering how he could ever have forgotten him in the bright times when the stars were handfuls of gems to be bought and sold. In the darkness will I speak again, because men would not hear me in the light.

  “As for my servant Amblick, he was the weakest of all my servants, and yet when he dies the last strength shall go out of the world. Only one of you shall live to see the end. And that one shall not know whether his God won or lost the final battle.”

  And then Amblick fell silent, and the pens chased his last words and at last came to rest on the periods, and then Amblick reached out to Garol Stipock and embraced him, as if to thank him for demanding the last words of the Voice, and it was thus Garol Stipock who first felt the stiffening and then the relaxing of the hands and arms and knew that the prophet, Amblick, was dead.

  They took the body and gave it to the machines, which gave them back ashes and let them pour the ashes into the garden of life. And then they all went home.

  Garol’s parents had made their decision, and so had made his. With Amblick gone, they decided that the religion could only be followed privately; the preaching and the publication (and, not coincidentally, the constant embarrassment and ostracism) were over. God would be their secret; the neighbors could find their own way without the preaching of the Way.

  Not all the congregation reached that decision. Many of them kept holding meetings for a while. One of them even claimed to have the Voice, but when he dictated revelation the scribes refused to write it because there was no ring of truth in it and it didn’t burn them with the fire of life as Amblick’s words.

  had. But eventually there was nothing more to say in the meetings, and eventually there was no more money being contributed; when believers lose their faith, their purses discover the fact even before their hearts and minds do.

  Amblick’s Church of the Undying Voice died only four years after he did. And Garol Stipock, who was then eleven, did not even know it had lasted that long.

  Without the congregation to buoy them, Garol’s parents soon began to compromise with Capitol; the long war was over. First it was the decision to send Garol to school. He was eight years old when he started, but he learned so quickly that within six months he was caught up to the children his own age, and by the time he was ten he was studying material that bright fourteen-year-olds had trouble with.

  His parents made other compromises, too. The first compromise was a quiet one in their own bedroom, where they began taking the medicine that would let them use sex for something other than procreation. The next compromise was a move to a different sector, where they were strangers, and they began to go to parties and invite friends over and Garol’s father even joined a group of gamers and Garol’s mother became a gourmet cook of sorts. They thought Garol was so young the didn’t notice. But he noticed, and though it was not in his nature to say anything, his parents’ apostasy shook him to the foundation.

  At first he thought his parents had betrayed the faith and wavered between hating them for their infidelity and fearing that God would strike them down.

  But, God didn’t strike them down, and after a few years Garol discovered that his parents were still decent, good people, and about this time Garol discovered science.

  At first it was geology, with the pictures of rocks. He had never seen a rock in his life. To him even granite was a gem, and he lovingly fondled the school’s samples of rocks as if just touching them could give him an understanding of a planet and what made it live.

  Then it was biology, the endless variety of plants and animals working together to form one vast, planetwide organism. It struck Garol’s sense of beauty more than it stimulated his scientific curiosity, there were few mysteries in biology anymore, and Garol studied it only until he knew how it worked.

  And then he found the field where the mysteries still endured: physics. And though he was locked into a planet where nothing grew that was not forced to grow, and where nature was utterly defeated, he became a pioneer for the colony ships. Surely there must be a way to learn, before a ship ever landed on a planet, exactly what mineral deposits there were, and where; exactly what kind of animal life there was, and which animals could be safely killed for food; and what the weather and climate patterns were. His goal was to create a way for an orbiting ship to know everything the colonists would need to know before they landed, so that the best possible landing site could be chosen, and all necessary precautions could be taken. He was an eclectic, he knew the questions in other fields that only physics could answer.

  He was fifteen and a college graduate when he began his serious work. His professors in his graduate school were uneasy at having a student so young, and their uneasiness turned to outrage when they discovered that he was designing, of all things, machines.

  “Mr. Stipock,” said the dean to the young man who was quietly listening and obviously not paying the slightest attention, “we are concerned because you seem to be wasting your time with toys.”

  Garol looked surprised. “Not toys,” he said. “Tools.”

  “Physics is a theoretical science, a mathematical manipulation of the universe, Mr. Stipock. Not a field for magic boxes.”

  “But Dr. Whickit,” Garol protested, “I have to measure minute amounts of radiation. That means I have to have a tool to measure it. And there isn’t any such tool.”

  “If you want to make tools, perhaps you should be in a different program. A technical school.”

  And Stipock laughed. It was an unnerving laugh, and Whickit was offended.

  “Dr. Whickit,” Garol said, “if you really believe physics is a mathematical game, why do you persist in using data acquired from the telescopes and the accellerators? It isn’t the fact that I’m working with tools that bothers you, is it? It’s the fact that I know how to ask questions for which there are no tools to get the answers, and that I am daring to make those tools. If I were so unscientific as to be a psychologist, I’d speculate that you were a bit envious and felt threatened. And since I’ve already made my tool and it works very well, I’d be perfectly delighted for you to expel me from this university, and I’ll just go to Sector H-88 to publish my papers and patent the machines.”

  Whickit was furious; he shouted, he resented, he plotted, he undermined.

  But Stipock had already won. His tools did all he meant them to, and Whickit quickly discovered that the administration would trade twenty Whickits for one Stipock any day.

  And they offered Stipock somec.

  “We need to keep you alive,” the Sleeproom people said. “You’re one of the ten or twenty most valuable minds in this century. We need to let you live for centuries so you can help answer the questions that arise then.”

  Stipock said no. “I’m working on several projects that no one can complete except me, and if they could I wouldn’t want them to. Come see me when the projects are finished.”

  The Sleeproom people weren’t used to being refused, but his reasons were plausible, and he was only fifteen, and so they waited.

  But Garol’s reasons were not what he said they were.

  “Mother,” he said. “Father. They’ve offered me somec.”

  He watched his parents carefully. Somec was the worst sin of all the sins of Capitol, and Amblick and the other prophets had condemned it as the Souldestroyer, the Hatemaker, Somec the Lifestealer. Garol knew enough science to know that God was impossible; knew enough of life to know that no one believed in God and few enough remembered he had ever existed in people’s hearts. But all that knowledge had never undone the structure of his childhood: sex for pleasure was still unthinkable, somec was still a sin.

  And so he watched his parent to see if they, too, still held on to a measure of the old faith.

  “Somec?” asked his father. “What level?”

  “Seven under, one up.”

  “That’s high,” his mother said.

  His father looked at his mother for a moment, and then, rather awkwardly, he asked, “Garol, I understand that someone who’s at that high a level can choose several close family members to go on somec with him at the same level, so that his life isn’t too disrupted.”

  “Yes,” his mother said. “And we’re all the family you have.”

  Their eyes were bright with hope, and Garol felt the last of the religion crash down inside himself. He felt angry, betrayed, hurt; but all he said was, “Of course. I won’t be going on for a few years, but you can come with me.”

  “A few years?” asked his mother. “Why?”

  “I have work to do.”

  His, father coughed, looked a little upset. “It’s your right, I suppose. But remember, Garol, that while you’re still young, we’re getting a bit on in years.”

  Garol did nothing to show his contempt. The next day he went to the Sleeproom and told them that he would go on somec in three years, but he wanted his parents to go on somec now.

  “But Mr. Stipock,” said the man at the Sleeproom, “they can only go on somec at precisely the same level as you. So if they went on now and you went on in three years, they would never see you again. They’d always be asleep when you awoke, and vice-versa.”

  Garol tapped the desk. “Draw it up, and I’ll sign it.”

  They drew it up, he signed it, and his parents went to the Sleeproom happily, knowing that they were the envy of all their friends. They hadn’t even asked whether Garol would be awake when they awoke. Perhaps they merely took it for granted and would be terribly disappointed. But Garol simply assumed they didn’t care. And neither, he pretended, did he.

  The Stipock Low-Density Radiation Counter was a revolution in physics.

  Now, because an extremely sensitive machine could detect infinitesimal amounts of radiation from the most inert elements, it was possible to analyze practically to the molecule the makeup of any sample, whether it was a small rock or the light from a star millions of light-years away.

  Garol’s new work was more that of a cataloger than of a scientist, but he was unable to perceive much difference between theory and practice of science, and saw no contradiction in it. He set up the programs for the Stipock Geologer, which would analyze planets from orbit and lay out incredibly detailed maps of metals, ores, and topography; the Stipock Ecologer, which analyzed the lifesystem of a planet in a single orbit; and the Stipock Climate Analyzer, which could predict weather for a year in advance with fair accuracy, and climatic trends for centuries with near perfect accuracy. It would take years to make the machines work well, but once Garol’s groundwork was done, the details could be fleshed out by thousands of much less talented researchers.

  It was not work that involved Garol’s mind completely, and it seemed to those few who knew him at all well that he seemed determined to keep his mind as disengaged as possible. He asked the wife of a professor to explain sex to him; she did, and they kept practicing for a few weeks before he set out to experience as much of it as possible with as many different partners as possible.

  “You don’t seem to pay any attention when we make love,” a fellow graduate student complained one night.

  “Was it good?” he asked.

  “Wonderful,” she said. “But—”

  “Then don’t ask for more than that,” he said. She soon stopped sleeping with him, however, which he told her was stupid. “What do you expect out of sex,” he asked, “emotional involvement?”

  “Yes,” she answered. “Though how anyone could expect emotional involvement from you I’ll never know.”

  If any of those observing him had had a religious background, they would have seen the pattern he was following. But how could any of them know that there was something unusual about Garol immersing himself briefly in the study of business and then systematically turning the millions he earned from royalties on his Low-Density Radiation Counter into billions by investing wisely but daringly in the marketplace.

  He briefly played wargames, until he won enough that he got bored. He tried every liquor made and got drunk several times, until he decided that he didn’t like it much and quit again. He watched lifeloops to an extent that brought ridicule from fellow students (they briefly nicknamed him Soapwatcher). He even tried homosexuality, though it wasn’t fashionable then, and he soon gave it up.

  If anyone had understood the meaning behind his behavior, had thought it was anything more than adolescent experimentation coupled with a brilliant mind, his continuing refusal to go on somec would have caused some alarm.

  His religion was still, to some degree, controlling him. He knew it; but the fear of somec was not easy to overcome, and so he played hard and worked hard and still had half his mind unused so it could worry constantly about his appointment with the Sleeproom.

  “Your contract, Mr. Stipock, says you must enter the Sleeproom in four days.

  We thought it would be good to remind you so you’d be certain to have your affairs in order.”

  “Thank you,” Garol said, and celebrated his nineteenth birthday by burning the copy of the Word that he had kept all these years. It set off a smoke alarm in his apartment because he was known to be a nonsmoker, and it took three hours to convince the firemen that not only were they not needed, but the damned sprinklers had ruined his furniture.

  “Just step in here,” said the young woman, “and take off your clothes.”

  Stipock followed her into a room in the Tape and Tap that was equipped with a soft chair and a wheeled bed and several hooks to hang his clothing. He stripped, and the woman told him to sit in the chair. But he was trembling; he couldn’t hang his clothes up. They kept falling.

  “First time?” asked the young woman.

  He nodded.

  “Nothing to be afraid of. The taping is painless, and somec puts you right to sleep like a pleasant dream.”

  He smiled. He couldn’t tell her that despite his stunning record of achievement in science, the God of his childhood was still leaning over his shoulder, forbidding him to eat the fruit of the tree of life.

  The young woman put a helmet on his head, and Stipock began to sweat. My mind is being drawn out of my head, he thought, at the same time criticizing himself for being so irrational. His hands were cold; he had to will his legs to relax, so they would stop trembling so visibly, almost violently.

  “That’s it,” the woman said. “Braintape is ready to go.”

  Stipock’s mouth was dry, and he stammered as he asked, “What if something goes wrong with the tape?”

  “No chance,” she said. “The first time, we make four tapes. The first one is already played back and analyzed to make sure all your brain patterns are present. Another one is sent to the permanent tape archive. Another one is stored here, near where you’ll be sleeping, that’s the one we’ll wake you with.

  And the fourth is kept by the government, in case you should commit a crime and have to be awakened with an earlier tape. So, you see, there are four completely separate places where your memory is being stored. Nothing can happen.”

  Stipock felt somewhat reassured. “Thanks.”

  “Don’t mention it. Of course, you won’t remember a word of this conversation when you wake up, since it isn’t on your tape. So I’m leaving a note with your records to make sure this is all explained to you. The last thing you’ll remember is worrying about it!” She said it with a charming smile, and Stipock gave her one of his rare smiles back.

  “Lie on the table now, and the somec will be ready in a moment.”

  He lay on his back on the table and looked upward at the hidden lights and the aging acoustic tile. He remembered Amblick lying on his back twelve years ago, and suddenly he was afraid again. Not worry this time, though naked panic, and his legs stiffened and he wanted to urinate.

  “I need to go to the bathroom,” he said, and his voice shocked him by its calmness.

  “No you don’t,” said the young woman. “Because in exactly three minutes all your bodily functions will be stopped, or nearly stopped, for several years, and when you wake up then you can go to the toilet.” The needle slipped into his palm.

  But it was not painless. The sleep came not with a pleasant dream, but with a nightmare. The fires of hell burned in his veins, and God’s Voice throbbed in his head, crying, “Treason! Treason!” You have killed God, cried the voice in his head. You were the death of the Undying Voice. If only you had listened, you would have heard him call you! And now you take Souldestroyer into your body and negate your soul.