“Yes,” she said.

  “Agnes, if I could take the memories and wipe them out—”

  “It’s not the memories, Danny,” Agnes whispered, touching his eyes gently where the epicanthic fold made his eyes seem to slant. “It’s now. It’s the people I can’t do a damn thing about now.”

  “You couldn’t do a damn thing about them before,” Danny reminded her. “That’s reality.”

  “But I’ve seen a place that could be heaven for them, and I can’t get them there.”

  Danny smiled sadly. “That’s just it. You can’t. Now you’ve just got to let your dreams know that and give you a little peace.”

  “Yes,” Agnes agreed, and fell asleep again holding and being held by Danny, while Roj and Roz piloted the skipship back toward Earth, which had seemed so large when they left it, and which now seemed unbearably, impossibly, criminally small.

  The Earth was large in the window of the skipship when Agnes finally decided that it was her dreams that were right, her conscious mind that was wrong. She could do something. There was something to be done, and she would do it.

  “I’m going back there,” Agnes said.

  “Probably,” Danny said.

  “I won’t go alone.”

  “You sure as hell better take me.”

  “You,” she said, “and others.” Billions of others. It could be done. Must be done. Therefore would be done.

  Hector 4

  “Now I will tell you the story of the Masters,” said Hector to himselves, and the Hectors listened to himself. “This is the story of why the Masters penetrate and why the Masters hurt.”

  Martha [Hector said] was administrator of Tests and Assignments in the sector where Cyril had been sentenced to death. Martha was hardworking and concientious, and prone to doublecheck things which had already been checked and doublechecked and triplechecked by others. This was why Martha discovered the mistake.

  “Cyril,” she said when the guard let her into the clean white plastic cell where the coal miner waited.

  “Just stick the needle in quick,” Cyril answered, wanting to get it over with quickly.

  “I’m here to bring you the apologies of the state.”

  The words were so strange, so never-before-heard that Cyril did not understand at first. “Please. Let me die and get it over with.”

  “No,” said Martha. “I’ve done some checking. I checked into your case, Cyril, and I discovered that fifty years ago, just after all your tests were taken, your number was punched incorrectly by a moron of a clerk.”

  Cyril was shocked. “A clerk made a mistake?”

  “They do it all the time. It’s just easier, usually, to let the mistake go than to fix it. But in this case, it was a gross miscarriage of justice. You were given the number of a retarded man with a criminal bent, which is why you were not allowed to live in a civilized town and why you were not regarded as being capable of carpentry and why you were not allowed to marry Lika.”

  “Just punched in the number wrong,” Cyril said, unable to grasp the minitude of the error that had such an enormous, disastrous effect in his own life.

  “Therefore, Cyril, the office of Assignments hereby rescinds the execution order and grants you a pardon. Furthermore, we are undoing the damage we did. You can now live in the town where you wanted to live, among friends you wanted to keep, dancing to the music you enjoyed. You do indeed, as you used to believe, have an aptitude and a desire to be a carpenter—you will be instructed in the trade and given your own shop. And Lika is entirely compatible with you. Therefore you and she will now be married, and in fact she is already on her way to the cottage where you will live together in wedded bliss.”

  Cyril was overwhelmed. “I can’t believe it,” he said.

  “The office of Assignments loves you and every citizen, Cyril, and we do everything we can to make you happy,” said Martha, glowing with pride at the great kindness she was able to do. Ah, she thought, it is moments like this that make my job the best one in the world.

  And then Martha went away to her office and forgot about Cyril most of the time for several months, though occasionally she did remember him and smile to think of how happy she had made him.

  After several months, however, a message crossed her desk: “Serious complaints Cyril 113-49-55576-338-bBR-3a.”

  Cyril? Her Cyril? Complaining? Had the man no sense of propriety? He already had enough complaints and resistance on his record to justify terminating him twice, and now he had added enough more that if it were possible, the office would have to kill him three times. Why? Hadn’t she done her best for him? Hadn’t she given him everything his early (and now correctly recorded) tests indicated he wanted and needed? What could be wrong now?

  Her pride was involved. Cyril was not being ungrateful to the state—he was being ungrateful to her. So she went to his cottage in his village, and opened his door.

  Cyril sat in the main room, struggling to get past a gnarl in a fine old piece of walnut. The adz kept slipping to the side. And finally Cyril struck with enough force that when the adz slipped it gouged a deep rut in the good, ungnarled part of the wood.

  “What a botch,” Martha said without thinking, and then covered her mouth, because it was not proper for a person of her high position to criticize anyone of low station if it could be avoided.

  But Cyril was not offended. “Damn right it’s a botch. I haven’t the skill for this close, tricky work. My muscles are all for heavy equipment, for grand strokes with stone-eating power tools. This is beyond me, at my age.”

  Martha pursed her lips. He was indeed complaining. “But isn’t everything else well with you?”

  Cyril’s eyes grew sad, and he shook his head. “Indeed not. Much as I hate to admit it, I miss the old music from the mines. Terrible stuff, but I had good times with it, dancing away with those poor bastards who hadn’t a thought worth having. But they were good people and I liked them well enough, and here no one’s willing to be my friend. They don’t talk the way I’m used to talking. And the food—it’s too refined. I want a haunch of good, well-cooked beef, not this namby-pamby stuff that passes for food here.”

  His diatribe of complaint was so outrageous that Martha could not conceal her emotion. Cyril noticed it, and became alarmed.

  “Not that it’s unendurable, mind you, and I don’t go complaining to other people. Heaven knows, there’s no one who’d care to listen to me anyway.”

  But Martha had already heard enough. Her heart sank within her. No matter what you do for them, they’re still ungrateful. The masses are worthless, she realized. Unless you lead them by the hand . . . .

  “You realize that this complaint,” she said, “can have dire consequences.”

  Cyril got a very weary expression on his face. “So we do it again?”

  “Do what?”

  “Punish me.”

  “Indeed, no, Cyril. We remove you from circulation. Apparently you are going to complain and resist no matter what happens. What about your wife?”

  Cyril got a bitter smile on his face. “Lika? Oh, she’s content. She’s happy enough.” And he glanced toward the door into the cottage’s other room.

  Martha went to the door and opened it. (Officers of the office of Assignments did not need to knock.) Inside the room Lika sat in a clumsily built rocking chair, rocking back and forth, an old woman with a blank stare on her face.

  Martha heard breathing over her shoulder, and turned, startled, to see Cyril leaning over her. For a moment Martha was afraid of violence. Quickly she realized, however, that Cyril was merely looking sadly at his wife.

  “She’s raised a family, you know. And now to be cut off from her husband and her children and her grandchildren—it’s hard. She’s been like this since the first week. Never lets me near her. She hates me, you know.” The sadness in his voice was contagious. And Martha was not without pity.

  “It’s a shame,” she said. “A damned shame. And so I’ll use my discretionary powers, Cyril, and not kill you. As long as you promise not to complain to anyone ever again, I’ll let you live. It wouldn’t be fair, when things really are bad in your life, to kill you for noticing it.”

  Martha was an exceptionally kind administrator.

  But Cyril did not smother her with gratitude. “Not kill me?” he asked. “Oh, but Administrator, can’t we have things back the way they were? Let me go back to the coal mines. Let Lika go back to her family. This was what I wanted when I was twenty. But I’m near sixty, and this is all wrong.”

  Ingratitude again. What I have to put up with! Martha’s eyes went small and her face flushed with rage (an emotion she did remarkably well, and so she reserved it for special occasions) and she shouted, “I will forgive that one remark, but only that one remark!”

  Cyril bowed his head. “I’m sorry.”

  “The tests that sent you to the coal mines were in error! But the tests that sent you here are absolutely, completely, totally correct, and by heaven you’re going to stay here! There isn’t a law on Earth that will let you change now!”

  And that was that.

  Or almost. Because in the silence ringing after Martha spoke and before she left (the silence she was saving for effect) a voice came from the rickety rocker in the bedroom.

  “Then we have to stay like this?” Lika asked.

  “Until Cyril dies, you have to stay like this,” Martha said. “It’s the law. He and you have both been given everything you ever petitioned for. Ingrates.”

  Martha would have turned to go, but she saw Lika looking pleadingly at Cyril, and saw Cyril nod slowly, and then Cyril turned away from the door, picked up the crosscut saw, and drew it sharply and hard across his own throat. The blood gushed and poured, and Martha thought it would never, never end.

  But it did end, and Cyril’s body was taken out and disposed of, and then everything was set to rights, with Lika going back to. her family and a real carpenter getting the cottage with the dark red stains on the floor. The best solution after all, Martha decided. Nobody could be happy until Cyril was dead. I should have killed him in the first place, instead of these silly ideas of mercy.

  She suspected, however, the Cyril would rather have died the way he did, ugly and bloody and painful though it was, then to have an injection administered by strangers in a plastic room in the capital.

  I’ll never understand them. They are as foreign to human thought as monkeys or dogs or cats. And Martha returned to her desk and went on doublechecking everything just in case she found another mistake she could fix.

  That is the story of the Masters.

  When Hector was finished the Hectors wriggled uncomfortably, some (and therefore all) of them angry and disturbed and a little frightened. “But it makes no sense.” the Hectors said to himself. “Nothing was done right.”

  Hector agreed. “But that’s the way they are made,” he said to himselves. “Not like me. I am regular. I act as I have always acted, as I will always act. But the Masters and the Masses always act oddly, forever seeing things in the future where no one can see, and acting to avert things that would never have come to pass anyway. Who can understand them?”

  “Who made them, then?” asked the Hectors. “Why were they not made well, as we were?”

  “Because the Makers are as inscrutable as the Masters and the Masses. I shall tell you their story next.”

  (“They are gone,” whispered the ones who had been penetrated. “They have gone away. We are safe after all.” But Hector knew better, and because he knew better, so did the Hectors.)

  Agnes 5

  “You invited yourself to my bedroom, Agnes. That isn’t typical.”

  “I accepted your standing invitation.”

  “I never thought you would.”

  “Neither did I.”

  Vaughan Malecker, president of IBM-ITT Space Consortium, Inc., smiled, but the smile was weak. “You don’t long for my body, which is in remarkably good shape, considering my age, and I have an aversion to making love to anyone who is doing it for an ulterior motive.”

  Agnes looked at him for a moment, decided that he meant it, and got up to leave.

  “Agnes,” he said.

  “Never mind,” she answered.

  “Agnes, it must have been something important for you to be willing to make such a sacrifice.”

  “I said never mind.” She was at the door.

  It didn’t open.

  “Doors in my house open when I want them to,” Malecker said. “I want to know what you wanted. But try to persuade my mind. Not my gonads. Believe it or not, testosterone has never made a major decision here at the consortium.”

  Agnes waited with her hand on the knob.

  “Come on, Agnes, I know you’re embarrassed as hell but if it was important enough to come this far, you can get over the embarrassment and sit down on the couch and tell me what the hell you want. You want to take another trip to the Balloon?”

  “I’m going anyway.”

  “Sit down, dammit, I know you’re going anyway but I was trying to get you to say something.”

  Agnes came back and sat down on the couch. Vaughan Malecker was a remarkably good-looking man, as he had pointed out, but Agnes had heard that he slept with anyone good-looking and was nice to them afterward. Agnes had been turning him down for years because she wanted to be a pilot, not a mistress, and Danny was plenty for her needs, which were not overwhelming. But this mattered, and she thought . . . .

  “I thought you’d listen to me if I came this way. I thought—”

  Malecker sighed and buried his face in his hands, rubbing his eyes. “I’m so tired. Agnes, what the hell makes you think I ever listen to a woman I’m trying to lay?”

  “Because I listen to Danny and Danny listens to me. I’m naive. I’m innocent. But Mr. Malecker—”

  “Vaughan.”

  “I need your help.”

  “Good. I like to have people need my help. It makes them treat me nicely.”

  “Vaughan, the whole world needs your help,” she said.

  Malecker looked at her in surprise, then burst out laughing. “The whole world! Oh, no! Agnes, I would never have thought it of you! A cause!”

  “Vaughan, people all over the world are starving. There are too many people for this planet—”

  “I read your report, Agnes, and I know all about the possibilities in the Balloon. The problem is transport. There is no conceivable way to transport people there fast enough to make even a dent in the population problem. What do you think I am, a miracle worker?”

  This was the argument Agnes was waiting for. She pounced, with descriptions of the kind of ship that could carry a thousand people at once from Earth orbit to an orbit around the Balloon.

  “Do you know how many billion dollars a ship like that would cost?” Vaughan asked.

  “About fifteen billion for the first ship. About four billion for each of the others, if you made five hundred of them.”

  Vaughan laughed. Loud. But Agnes’s serious expression forced his laughter to become exasperation. He got up from the couch. “Why am I listening to this? This is nonsense!” he shouted.

  “You spend more than that every year on telephone service.”

  “I know, damn AT&T.”

  “You could do it.”

  “IBM-ITT could do it, of course, it’s possible. But we have stockholders. We have responsibilities. We’re not the government, Agnes, we can’t throw money away on stupid useless projects.”

  “It could save billions of lives. Make the Earth a better place to live.”

  “So could a cure for cancer. We’re working on that, but this—Agnes, there’s no profit, and where there’s no profit, you can bet your ass this company will not go!”

  “Profit!” Agnes shouted. “Profit! Is that all you care about?”

  “Eighteen million stockholders say that’s all I’d better care about or I get a kick in the butt and an old-age pension!”

  “Vaughan, you want profit, I’ll give you profit!”

  “I want profit.”

  “Then here’s profit. How much do you sell in India?”

  “Enough to make a profit.”

  “Compare it to sales in Germany.”

  “Practically nothing.”

  “How much do you sell in China alone?”

  “Exactly nothing.”

  “You make your profits off one tiny part of the world; Western Europe, Japan, Australia, South Africa, and the United States of America.”

  “Canada, too.”

  “And Brazil. But the rest of the world is closed to you.”

  Vaughan shrugged. “They’re too poor.”

  “In the Balloon they would not be poor.”

  “Would they suddenly be able to read? Would they suddenly be able to run computers and sophisticated telephone equipment?”

  “Yes!” And on she went, painting a picture of a world where people who had been scratching out a bare subsistence in poor soil with no water would suddenly be able to raise far more than they needed. “That means a leisure class. That means consumers.”

  “But all they’d have to trade would be food. Who needs food across a few million miles of space?”

  “Don’t you have any imagination at all?” Excess food means one person can feed five or ten or twenty or a hundred. Excess food means that you locate your stinking factories there! Solar power unlimited, with no night and no clouds and no cold weather. Shifts around the clock. You have plenty of manpower, and a built-in market. You can do everything there that you’ve been doing here, do it cheaper, make better profits, and nobody’ll be going hungry!”

  And then there was a silence in the room, because Vaughan was actually seriously thinking about it. Agnes’s heart was beating fast. She was panting. She was embarrassed to have been so fervent when fervor was not fashionable.

  “Almost thou persuadest me,” said Vaughan.

  “I should hope so. I’ll lose my voice in a minute.”

  “Only two problems. The first one is that while you’ve persuaded me, I’m a much more reasonable, persuadible man than the officers and board of directors at IBM and ITT, and it’s their final decision, not mine. They don’t let me commit more than ten billion to a project without their approval. I could make the initial ship—but I couldn’t make any more than that. And the initial ship won’t make a profit alone. So I have to persuade them, which is impossible, or lose my job, which I refuse to do.”