He screamed, and the young woman was afraid, because though she had seen countless others writhe and perspire and moan on the bed as the somec worked its hot destruction, she had never seen anyone lie so rigidly, have such an expression of terror, and scream as if life itself were being taken from him.

  But soon he quieted, and soon he slept like a corpse, and she connected him to the lifesupport mechanism and wheeled him to where the attendants waited. They would put him in his coffin and slide him into his place on a shelf and leave him there until he was revived in seven years.

  When he awoke, he remembered nothing of the agony of going to sleep. He remembered only that he had been afraid of somec, and he had come out of it perfectly all right.

  In his mind he heaved an enormous sigh of relief. And then he settled down to doing the final work on his colony-support machines, making sure the programs did the work they were supposed to do. No more overcompensation for his early inhibitions about sex and fun and profit. His life steadied out.

  He became stable. He was prepared to let somec keep him alive forever.

  He was thirty subjective years old when the starship captain awoke him and brought him into the control room. It was the first field test of his machines, and he had insisted on being sent along. They were already in orbit around a planet that had been settled for years, and he had only had to sleep for eleven years to get there, since a child genius on Capitol had recently discovered a way to make starships that went ten times faster than they had before, now to eighty or ninety times the speed of light. I, too, was a child genius, he remembered wistfully. It had been a lonely time, but now genius was merely expected of him, while before it had been exciting to watch how his discoveries brought a gradual increase of power and respect.

  The test was easily performed, a single orbit for each of the analyzers (though in practice, all three could perform their work in the same orbit). The program fed out dozens of maps, and on request could provide thousands more, each map providing detailed information about a particular mineral, a particular species, the weather patterns likely in a particular year.

  With the survey done, they descended to the planet in a landing craft and began the painstaking work of comparing the charts with known deposits, and insisting that where the maps revealed new sources of any metal or unusual information about any species the data should be checked meticulously against the facts on the planet.

  Soon the business settled into a routine mostly performed by onplanet scientists and students, and Garol had time to himself. And that was why he was alone when the madman tried to kill him.

  He was sitting on a bench in one of the many parks in the capital city of the planet he Was working on. An older man came up to him and sat down next to him. Both of them were wearing coats because it wag a chilly afternoon, and the night would be much colder.

  “Why are you sitting here?” asked the man.

  “I’m busy being amazed,” Garol answered with a smile.

  “At what?”

  “Plants growing right out of the earth without anything between them and bedrock but the soil. A wind that chooses its own direction to blow and sometimes has an uncomfortable temperature. A sky with no ceiling to block the view. A space so large that I can’t see the end of it.”

  The older man nodded. “You’re from Capitol.”

  “I guess there’s no hiding that.”

  “Are you a sleeper?” the old man asked.

  “At the moment I’m very much awake, and loving it,” Garol answered, with the courtesy of somec-users, who tried to avoid mentioning their virtual immortality around those who did not use it, why cause hurt feelings?

  The older man nodded, and thrust his hands into the pockets of his coat.

  “You’re the genius, aren’t you?” he asked. “The man who made the machines they’re testing.”

  His picture had been in every newsloop for weeks, a visit from a man of his stature and interplanetary fame was a major event, overshadowing all the local happenings. “Yes, I’m Garol Stipock.”

  “Then you are a sleeper.”

  Garol nodded absently. “Yes,” he said, “I am.”

  The man lifted his hand out of his pocket and a needle was in it. It was obviously set on full. Garol struck out at the man and that was why the needle tore his arm apart and did not do any damage to his nervous system. He would live.

  It took weeks in the hospital, however, before his arm had healed enough that he could leave. Visitors from the project came from time to time to report on progress, so far his machines had been invariably accurate, but the first item of business after he could leave the hospital was an appearance in court.

  It was a small, private interview. The judge, the lawyers, and the defendant made a small group, comfortably gathered on soft furniture, and they all asked Stipock and the older man questions.

  “Why did you try to kill Dr. Stipock?” they asked.

  “He’s a sleeper,” the older man said.

  The judge nodded. “You’re an Equalizer, then?”

  The older man sneered. “An Abolisher, now, even if I was an Equalizer before!”

  Stipock caught the judge’s eye. The judge explained. “Equalizers want to dismantle the merit system and make somec available for everyone.

  Abolishers simply want to kill everybody who uses somec.”

  “No!” the older man said, his face lit up by rage. “No!”

  “Whom do you want to kill, then?” Stipock asked. “And why me?”

  The older man narrowed his eyes. “I don’t want to kill anybody.”

  Stipock smiled, though his arm suddenly throbbed as if to remind him of how close he had come to death at the hands of this man. “You only want to tear their arms off?”

  “I kill where I must.”

  “I was no threat to you, sir.” Stipock was no longer smiling. He recognized something in this man’s eyes. “Why did you have to kill me?”

  “Somec is the enemy.”

  “But I’m not in charge of somec. I just use it. Like millions of other people.”

  “Millions of other people!” the man said scornfully. “To a universe of trillions, they decide who deserves eternity and the rest of us deserve to die like worms!”

  “I didn’t make the system,” Stipock said lamely.

  “Yes you did,” the older man said. “You keep it alive. You. Single-handedly.

  And as long as you and people like you live, it will stay alive!”

  Stipock looked around at the others in the room, puzzled. The prosecutor leaned over and touched his good arm reassuringly. “Don’t expect them to make sense. They’re just fanatics, like a religion.”

  The word religion stirred a memory, and Stipock turned back to the old man. He remembered those eyes, that expression, now: They were Amblick’s eyes, his earnest look.

  “This man isn’t crazy,” Stipock said. “He just believes something.”

  The older man nodded. “That’s right. The truth. I knew that you could see it.

  Even the liars know it’s true, but you’re not a liar. You’re a man with true greatness,” he said.

  The judge was exasperated. “Why in the world did you try to kill him, then?”

  “Because,” the old man said impatiently, as if they should already have known, “as long as great men are on somec, everybody can point to the merit system and say, ‘A man like that proves that we need somec, he proves that the merit system lets the great men live forever.’ While most of the somec users are venal little power-hungry bastards like you.” And he stared the judge in the, eye, until the judge looked away, his face rigid with anger.

  “The proof is obvious, and this questioning is doing nothing but letting a madman have a few listeners to his madness. Guilty. Sentence is prison for five years and then transshipment to another world. Got to stop this cancer before it spreads.”

  The defender said, “Sir, if you wish to stop the cancer, why do you send him as an emissary to another world?”

  “To get him off of this one,” the judge answered curtly. And then both the judge and the defender were startled by the older man’s laugh.

  “What’s so funny?” the judge snarled.

  “You dig a cesspool and then you swim around in it, complaining of the smell! They’ll tear you up, someday! They’ll rip you to pieces!”

  “Who?” asked Stipock. “Who’ll do this?”

  “Don’t bother, Dr. Stipock,” the prosecutor said. “They never admit there’s an organization. Even under drugs. I’ve never seen control like it.”

  “There is no organization,” the old man said. “Who needs an organization? I mean that everybody, all the real people, all those who don’t get somec and know they never will, all of them will rise up and tear you sleepers out of the walls and rip you to pieces and feed you to the animals. They’ll kill the starship captains and the scientists and the politicians and the businessmen and the society ladies and the lifeloopers and all the other bastards who think they can live forever while the rest of us die, and there won’t be any more somec and people will be human beings like they were meant to be!”

  The old man’s face was red; he was standing up; he was trembling, and a shaking finger was pointed at Stipock’s heart, and the embarrassed judge had them take him out. “I’m so sorry,” the judge kept telling Stipock. “But you see how hard it is to keep them under control.”

  Stipock shook his head, insisting that he was not distressed. “There are criminals everywhere,” Stipock said. And then he asked, “What if the man’s right? What if everybody who wasn’t on somec did revolt?”

  The Judge laughed off the idea. “There’s no chance of that. There’s hardly a soul alive who doesn’t live in hope of someday getting enough money or enough power or enough prestige to get on somec. And most of the old people who’ll never get on somec are working to help get their kids a chance. They’re all the part of the system, and it’s only a few lonely old fanatics like this who go crazy. But we can’t prevent them. We’d have to watch every single old man and woman in the world, and we just can’t do that. Sorry.” And the profuse apologies went on.

  But Stipock had taken the old man more seriously than he could have imagined. He had never known that anyone but his small and now dead religious group hated somec. But now he remembered all his childhood training, training he had overcome so well. Somec was evil, but not because God forbade it. It was evil because it formed the universe of people into two groups: the few with eternal life, and the rest condemned to die.

  He began noticing how few of the people on somec were in any way remarkable. They were relatives of somec users who were allowed into the Sleeprooms because of the same loophole that had let Garol’s parents become sleepers. Or they were rich, lucky winners of the Market sweepstakes. Or they were ruthless businessmen who had forced luck their way. Or they were women who slept with the men who could give them enough money to get on somec. Or they were lifeloopers or fashionable artists or politicians who had won often enough. And some of them Garol could find no conceivable excuse for. They had come in because the merit system was a joke. Garol met no one who, as he had done, had become a sleeper through remarkable achievement.

  There aren’t that many remarkable achievements in the universe these days, Garol realized.

  And he became an enemy of somec.

  At first he toyed with the idea of simply going off somec and removing himself as a tool of the system, as the old man had tried to accomplish. But he soon realized (or rationalized, he was honest enough to admit he wanted immortality as much as anyone) that removing himself from the somec system would hardly cause a shockwave that would bring it down.

  Besides, he didn’t want to bring it down. He wanted to reform it. Give somec to those few who genuinely merited it, and then extend the privilege, regardless of wealth or social status, by some fair means, perhaps a lottery scrupulously administered, or a quota of so many individuals per family, or something, anything but the corrupt method of rewarding wealth and cruelty with immortality.

  Somec reform was not a rare topic of discussion, he soon discovered. Others, too, were concerned about inequality or unfairness, and Garol soon made contact with groups of somec-users on the same schedule as himself who were working for reform.

  To reform the system, we must reform the government, these groups declared. And to reform the government, we must take over the government.

  And so it was that Stipock stepped over the edge from social concern to political conspiracy. Soon he was working for them all the time; he invented weapons that could easily be concealed, devised computer languages that allowed them to steal computer time and memory capacity without allowing anyone else to tap into their programs, and developed a machine that would so disorient a person that he would be unable to keep secrets, the perfect psychological probe, something that had been hunted for by psychologists as eagerly as alchemists had sought the philosopher’s stone.

  They got closer and closer to their goal. It seemed as though victory might, within a century, be feasible.

  And then Stipock once again was brought up short by reality. A chance remark at a meeting of a small cell of conspirators’ forced him to notice something he had been studiously ignorant of for years.

  “Stop arguing about reform,” a fiery young woman had shouted when the meeting got too heated. “It really doesn’t matter how we reform the system, does it, so long as everybody’s happy and *we* get somec!”

  Everyone laughed nervously and ended the discussion, but Garol Stipock carried her statement to its underlying truth. No one usually mentioned it, but every single conspirator was a somec user, and none of them would ever countenance a somec reform that would take them off somec. It was as if they assumed that merely taking part in the revolution would assure them of meriting somec. Yet very few of them had the slightest conceivable claim to real merit.

  Somec reform and our revolution will change nothing, Stipock told himself, and knew that he was right. He went home that night despairing.

  His flat was not large; he could have afforded more. Nor was it luxurious.

  After his fling with hedonism in his adolescence, he had become almost ascetic in many ways. He exercised frequently to keep in top shape. He ate carefully and never too much. His life was ridged and bordered by habits that had become rituals, and when he got home after the meeting he immediately fell into those rituals, preparing his meal, sitting at the regular chair and eating, doing his exercises, reading a book. But his mind would not stay within its normal bounds.

  “I am an Abolisher,” he finally said, though it had been years since he had heard the older man call himself by that name. “There is no reform. Somec will always create social classes. Unless everyone is on somec exactly equally, in which case there might as well be no somec at all.” And, having spoken the words out loud, he knew he had discovered the key.

  Somec only gives the illusion of immortality as long as most of lumanky goes along at the regular snail’s pace through life. If no one has to die after a mere century, living five or ten centuries has no allure. We feel that we can live only as long as they die, and that’s true. If they once lived as long as we do, we would only plot to live longer.

  Soul destroyer. Hatemaker. Somec the Lifestealer. The old condemnations spoken fervently in meetings of the Church of the Undying Voice came back to him. And he realized, after all these years, that the prophets had been right.

  Somec was a killer. Somec was the destruction of humanity. Somec gave no more years of life to those who used it, but made the lives of those who did not use it seem worthless, seem infuriatingly short, seem hopeless.

  They were right.

  And as he sat in his study, already past the time his habits told him he should be in bed, he thought over all the other doctrines he could remember. The church had condemned meaningless sex, and they were right, he had given up casual or even passionate affairs years ago, without even meaning to. The church condemned profits, and he had seen how cruel the men and women who sought profits had to be. The church condemned pleasures of the flesh, and in his ascetic lifestyle Garol Stipock knew he was happier without them than he had ever been with them.

  It was just the matter of God that made the whole church seem pointless.

  And Stipock, tired and discouraged and despairing that he could ever change anything for the better, went to his computer and put it in the encyclopedia mode. History, he punched. Religion, he typed in. Capitol, he typed, and finally called up information on the Church of the Undying Voice.

  He was surprised to find that his name was still listed on the permanent membership list, which amounted to billions of names and short biographies since the church had been formed back on Earth. At first he was startled that anyone would have gone to go much trouble to assemble information about church members, then realized that these were simply the standard biographies the census kept up-to-date in the master library, and the list of members of the church had simply called them out of the master census lists.

  It was not names he was searching for anyway, and at last, searching through various’ files, he finally found Statements of the Prophet Amblick. He pushed the computer ahead to the end of the file. And there was the last statement of the Undying Voice.

  The Voice had known. The Voice was the voice of an Abolisher.

  “Those who borrow from the future must repay,” Amblick had said, and it was true.

  In the vague words Garol realized the Voice (no, no, not the Voice, Amblick in his dying words) had predicted a revolution, one that came not because anyone had remembered to believe in the Voice but because the tigers rage in the forest, those regarded as less than human will discover they have power, and will use it to destroy those who oppressed them. And the end of somec would also be the end of the Empire, the starships would cease to travel between the stars.