CHAPTER 12 - THE SLOWBOAT

BLEEDING HEART. Matthew Keller. Polly Tournquist.

Why Polly Tournquist?

She could have nothing to do with the present trouble. Since Saturday evening she had been suffering sensory deprivation in the coffin cure. Why must he be haunted by the colonist girl? What was her hold on him that she could pull him away from his office at a time like this? He hadn't felt a fascination like this since...

He couldn't remember.

The guard in front of him stopped suddenly, pushed a button in the wall, and stepped aside. Jesus Pietro jerked back to reality. They had reached the elevator.

The doors slid back, and Jesus Pietro stepped in, followed by the two guards.

(Where's Polly? Deep in his mind something whispered, Where is she? Subliminally, he remembered. Tell me where Polly is!)

Bleeding heart. Matthew Keller. Polly Tournquist.

Either he'd finally lost his mind--and over a colonist girl!--or there was some connection between Matthew Keller and Polly Tournquist. But he had no evidence of that at all.

Perhaps the girl could tell him.

And if she could, certainly she would.

Matt had trailed them to the end of a blind corridor. When they stopped, Matt stopped too, confused. Was Castro going to Polly, or wasn't he?

Doors slid back in the wall, and Matt's three guides entered. Matt followed, but stopped at the doors. The room was too small. He'd bump an elbow and get shot--

The doors closed in his face. Matt heard muted mechanical noises, diminishing.

What in blazes was it, an airlock? And why here?

He was at the end of a dead-end corridor, lost in the Hospital. The Head and two guards were on the other side of those doors. Two guards, armed and alert--but they were the only guides he had. Matt pushed the big black button which had opened the doors.

This time they stayed closed.

He pushed it again. Nothing happened.

Was he doing exactly what the guard had done? Had the guard used a whistle, or a key?

Matt looked down the hall to where it bent, wondering if he could make his way back to Castro's office. Probably not. He pushed the button again...

A muted mechanical noise, nearly inaudible, but rising.

Presently the doors opened to show a tiny, boxlike room, empty.

He stepped in, crouched slightly, ready for anything. There were no doors in the back. How had the others left? Nothing. Nothing but four buttons labeled One, Two, Door Open, Emergency Stop.

He pushed them in order. One did nothing. He pushed Two, and everything happened at once.

The doors closed.

The room started to move. He felt it, vibration and uncanny pressure against the soles of his feet. He dropped to his hands and knees, choking off a yell.

The pressure was gone, but still the room quivered with motion, and still there was the frightening, unfamiliar sound of machinery. Matt waited, crouching on all fours.

There was a sudden foreign feeling in his belly and gonads, a feel of falling. Matt said, "Wump!" and clutched at himself. The box jarred to a stop.

The doors opened. He came out slowly.

He was on a high narrow bridge. The moving box was at one end, supported in four vertical girders that dropped straight down into a square hole in the roof of the Hospital. At the other end of the bridge was a similar set of girders, empty.

Matt had never been this high outside a car. All of the Hospital was below him, lit by glare lights: the sprawling amorphous structure of rooms and corridors, the inner grounds, the slanting wall, the defense perimeter, the trapped forest, and the access road. And rising up before him was the vast black hull of the Planck.

Matt's end of the bridge was just outside what was obviously the outer hull of the ancient slowboat. The bridge crossed the chisel-sharp ring of the leading edge, so that its other end was over the attic.

The Planck. Matt looked down along the smooth black metal flank of the outer hull. For most of its length the ship was cylindrical; but the tail, the trailing edge, flared outward for a little distance, and the leading edge was beveled like a chisel, curving in at a thirty-degree angle to close the twenty-foot gap between outer and inner hulls, the gap that held the guts of the ship. More than halfway down, just below a ring of narrow windows, the roof of the Hospital moved in to grip the hull.

Something hummed behind him. The moving box was on its way down.

Matt watched it go, and then he started across the bridge, sliding his hands along the hip-high handrails. The dropping of the box might mean that someone would be coming up.

At the other end he looked for a black button in one of the four supporting girders. It was there, and he pushed it. Then he looked down.

The attic, the space enclosed by the inner hull, was as perfectly cylindrical as a soup can with both ends removed. Four airfoils formed a cross at the stem, a few yards above the ground, and where they crossed was a bulky, pointed casing. There was a ring of four windows halfway down the inner hull. The airlock was at the same level. Matt could see it by looking between the hull and the moving box, which was rising toward him.

Matt felt a chill as he looked down at that pointed casing between the fins. The ship's center of mass was directly over it. Therefore it had to be the fusion drive.

The Planck was rumored to be a dangerous place, and not without reason. A ship that had carried men between the stars, a ship three hundred years old, was bound to inspire awe. But there was real power here. The Planck's landing motors should still be strong enough to hurl her into the sky. Her fusion drive supplied electrical power to all the colonist regions: to teedee stations, homes, smokeless factories--and if that fusion plant ever blew, it would blow Alpha Plateau into the void.

Somewhere in the lifesystem, sandwiched between inner and outer hull, were the controls that could blow the bomb in that casing. The Head was in there too-somewhere.

If Matt could bring them together...

The moving box reached the top, and Matt entered.

It dropped a long way. The Planck was tall. Even the beveled ring of the leading edge, which had held stored equipment for the founding of a colony, was forty feet high. The ship was one hundred and eighty feet high, including a landing skirt, for the inner hull did not quite reach the ground. The stem and the mouths of the landing motors were supported ten feet above the ground by that long skirtlike extension of the outer hull.

This moving box was an open grid. Matt could watch his progress all the way down. Had he been acrophobic, he'd have been insane before the box stopped opposite the airlock.

The airlock was not much bigger than the moving box. Inside, it was all dark metal, with a dial-and-control panel in chipped blue plastic. Already Matt was heartily sick of blinking dials and metal walls. It was strange and discomforting to be surrounded by so much metal, and unnerving to wonder what all those dials were trying to tell him.

Set in the ceiling was something Matt had trouble recognizing. Something simple, almost familiar... ah. A ladder. A ladder running uselessly from door to wall across the ceiling of the airlock.

Sure. With the ship spinning in space, the outer door would be a trapdoor down from the attic. Of course you'd need a ladder. Matt grinned and strode through the airlock and nearly ran face on into a policeman.

"The luck of Matt Keller" had no time to work. Matt dodged back into the airlock. He heard a patter of mercybullets, like gravel on metal. In a moment the man would be around the corner, firing.

Matt yelled the only thing he could think of. "Stop! It's me!"

The guard was around in the same instant. But he didn't fire yet... and he didn't fire yet... and presently he turned and went, muttering a surly apology. Matt wondered whom he'd been taken for. It wouldn't matter; the man had already forgotten him.

Matt chose to follow him instead of turning the other way. It seemed to him that if a guard saw two men approach, and ignored one and recognized the other, he wouldn't shoot--no matter how trigger-happy he was.

The corridor was narrow, and it curved to the left. Floor and ceiling were green. The left-hand wall was white, set with uncomfortably bright lights; the wall on the right was black, with a roughened rubbery surface, obviously designed as a floor. Worse yet, the doors were all trapdoors leading down into the floor and up into the ceiling. Most of the doors in the floor were closed and covered with walkways. Most of the ceiling doors were open, and ladders led up into these. All the ladders and walkways looked old and crude, colony-built, and all were riveted into place.

It was eerie. Everything was on its side. Walking through this place was like defying gravity.

Matt heard sounds and voices from some of the rooms above. They told him nothing. He couldn't see what was happening above him, and he didn't try. He was listening for Castro's voice.

If he could get the Head to the fusion-drive controls-wherever they were-then he could threaten to blow up the Planck. Castro had held out under threat of physical pain, but how would he react to a threat to Alpha Plateau?

And all Matt wanted was to free one prisoner.

... That was Castro's voice. Coming not from the ceiling but from underfoot, from a closed door. Matt bent over the walkway across it and tried the handle. Locked.

Knock? But all of Implementation was on edge tonight, ready to shoot at anything. Under such circumstances Matt could be unconscious and falling long seconds before a gunman could lose interest in him.

No way to steal a key, to identify the right key. And he couldn't stay here forever.

If only Laney were here now.

A voice. Polly jerked to attention--except that she felt no jerk; she did not know if she had moved or not.

A voice. For some timeless interval she had existed with no sensation at all. There were pictures in her memory and games she could play in her mind, and for a time there had been sleep. Some friend had shot her full of mercy-bullets. She remembered the sting, vividly. But she'd wakened. Mental games had failed; she couldn't concentrate. She had begun to doubt the reality of her memories. Friends' faces were blurred. She had clung to the memory of Jay Hood, his sharp-edged, scholarly face, easy to remember. Jay. For two years they had been little more than close friends. But in recent hours she had loved him hopelessly; his was the only visual image that would come clear to her, except for a hated face, wide and expressionless, decorated with a bright snowy moustache: the face of the enemy. But she was trying to make Jay come too clear, to give him texture, expression, meaning. He had blurred, she had reached to bring him back, he had blurred more...

A voice. It had her complete attention.

"Polly," it said, "you must trust me."

She wanted to answer, to express her gratitude, to tell the voice to keep talking, to beg it to let her out. She was voiceless.

"I would like to free you, to bring you back to the world of sense and touch and smell," said the voice. Gently, sympathetically, regretfully, it added, "I cannot do that just yet. There are people making me keep you here."

A voice had become the voice, familiar, wholly reassuring. Suddenly she placed it.

"Harry Kane and Jayhawk Hood. They won't let me free you" Castro's voice. She wanted to scream-"because you failed in your mission. You were to find out about ramrobot number one-forty-three. You failed."

Liar! Liar! I didn't fail! She wanted to scream out the truth, all of the truth. At the same time she knew that that was Castro's aim. But she hadn't talked in so long!

"Are you trying to tell me something? Perhaps I can persuade Harry and Jayhawk to let me free your mouth Would you like that?"

I'd love that, Polly thought. I'd tell all the secrets of your ancestry. Something within her was still rational. The sleep, that was what had done it. How long had she been here? Not years, not even days; she would have been thirsty. Unless they'd given her water intravenously. But however long it had been, she'd slept for some part of the time. Castro didn't know about the mercy-bullets. He'd come hours early.

Where was the voice?

All was silent. Faintly she could hear her pulse beating in her carotid arteries; but as she grasped for the sound, it too was gone.

Where was Castro? Leaving her to rot?

Speak!

Speak to me!

The Planck was big, but its lifesystem occupied less than a third of its volume: three rings of pressurized compartments between the cargo holds above and the water fuel tanks and fission-driven landing motors below. Much cargo had been needed to set up a self-sufficient colony. Much fuel had been needed to land the Planck: trying to land on the controlled hydrogen bomb of the fusion drive would have been like landing a blowtorch on a featherbed.

So the lifesystem was not large. But neither was it cramped, since the compartments aft of the corridor had been designed for the comfort of just three growing families.

That which was now Jesus Pietro's interrogation room had once been a living room, with sofas, a cardtable, a coffeetable, a reader screen connected to the ship's library, a small refrigerator. The tables and other things were gone now, cut from the outer wall with torches long ago. It had been a big room, luxuriously so for a spacecraft, where room is always at a premium. It had had to be big. Any normal apartment-dweller can step outside for a breath of air.

Now, upended, the room was merely tall. Halfway up the walls were the doors which had led to other parts of the apartment. The door to the corridor had become a trapdoor, and the door just under it, a closet to hold spacesuits in case of emergency, could now be reached only from the ladder. In the crescent of floor space at the bottom of the room were a long, heavy box, two guards in chairs, an empty chair, and Jesus Pietro Castro, closing the padded lip of the speaking tube at one corner of the box.

"Give her ten minutes to think it over," he said. He glanced at his watch, noted the time.

His handphone buzzed.

"I'm in the vivarium," Major Jansen reported. "The girl's a colonist, all right, in stolen crew clothing. We don't' know where she got it yet. I doubt we'll like the answer. We had to pump antidotes into her; she was dying from an overdose of mercy-weapons."

"No sign that anyone came with her?"

"I didn't say that, sir. There are two things. One, the wires were pulled on the chair she was sitting in. Her helmet was stone dead. She couldn't have done that herself. Maybe that’s why one of the prisoners woke up this afternoon."

"And then he freed the others? I don’t believe it. We would have noticed the pulled wires afterward."

"I agree, sir. So somebody pulled those wires after she was in the chair."

"Maybe. What's your second point?"

"When the gas went off in the vivarium, one of the four police wasn't wearing his nose plug. We haven't been able to find it anywhere; his locker's empty, and when I called his wife, she said he took it with him. He's awake now, but he has no idea--"

"Is it worth bothering with? The guards aren't used to gas filters. Or gas."

"There was a mark on the man's forehead, sir. Like the one we found this afternoon, only this one is in ballpoint ink."

"Oh."

"Which means that there must be a traitor in Implementation itself, sir."

"What makes you think so, Major?"

"The bleeding-heart symbol does not represent any known revolutionary organization. Further, only a guard could have made that mark. Nobody else has entered the vivarium tonight."

Jesus Pietro swallowed his impatience. "You may be right, Major. Tomorrow we'll devise ways to smoke them out."

Major Jansen made several suggestions. Jesus Pietro listened, made appropriate comments, and cut him off as soon as he could.

A traitor in Implementation? Jesus Pietro hated to think so. It was possible, and not a thing to be ignored; but the knowledge that the Head suspected such a thing could damage Implementation morale more than any possible traitor.

In any case, Jesus Pietro was not interested. No traitorous guard could have moved invisibly in Jesus Pietro's office. The bleeding heart was something else entirely.

Jesus Pietro called the power room. "You aren't doing anything right now, are you? Good. Would one of you bring us some coffee."

Three minutes more and he could resume interrogation.

Jesus Pietro paced. He walked off balance, with one arm bound immobile against his body: one more annoyance. The numbness was wearing off in his mangled hand.

Yes, the bleeding heart was something else again. A gruesome symbol on a vivarium floor. Fingers that broke without their owner noticing. An ink drawing appearing from nowhere on a dossier cover, like a signature. A signature.

Intuition was tricky. Intuition had told Jesus Pietro that something would happen tonight. And something had; but what? Intuition, or something like it, had brought him here. Surely he'd had no logical reason to keep thinking about Polly Tournquist. Did she really know something? Or did his subconscious mind have other motives for bringing him here?

Jesus Pietro paced, following the arc of the inner wall.

Presently someone knocked on the door overhead. The guards loosened their guns and looked up. Fumbling sounds, and then the door dropped open and a man backed slowly down the ladder. He balanced a tray in one hand. He did not try to close the door after him.

The slowboat had never been a convenient place to work. Ladders everywhere. The man with the tray had to back a long way down the full length of what had been a large, comfortable living room before he touched bottom.

Matt poked his head through the doorway, upside down.

There was the lab man, backing down the ladder with his coffee tray balanced on one hand. On the floor were three more men, and one was Castro. As Matt's head appeared in the doorway each pair of eyes glanced up, held Matt's stare for a moment, then dropped.

Matt started down, looking over his shoulder, trying to hold eight eyes at once.

"Dammit, Hood, help me up."

"Parlette, you can't possibly expect--"

"Help me over to the phone."

"We'd be committing suicide," said Harry Kane. "What would your army of relatives do when they learned we were holding you prisoner in your own house?"

"I'm here of my own free will. You know that."

"But will they know that?"

"My family will stand behind me." Parlette set the palms of his hands on the chair arms, and with tremendous effort, stood up. But once up, he was unable to move.

"They won't know what's going on," said Harry Kane. "All they'll know for certain is that you're alone in the house with three escaped vivarium prisoners."

"Kane, they wouldn't understand what's happening if I talked for two hours. But they'll stand behind me."

Harry Kane opened his mouth, closed it again, and began to tremble. He had to fold his hands on the table to keep them from shaking. "Call them," he said.

"No," said Jay Hood.

"Help him, Jay."

"No! If he uses that phone to turn us in, he'll go down as the greatest con man in history. And we'll be finished!"

"Oh, phut." Lydia Hancock stood up and wrapped one of Parlette's arms around her neck. "Be sensible, Jay. Parlette is the best chance we ever had. We've got to trust him." And she walked him over to the phone.

Almost time to resume the interrogation. Jesus Pietro waited while the lab man deposited his tray on the "coffin" and started back up.

And he realized that his pulse was racing. There was cold perspiration dribbling wetly down his ribs. His hand throbbed like a heart. His eyes flicked here, there, all about the room, looking for something that wasn't there.

Within seconds, and for no reason at all, the interrogation room had become a trap.

There was a thump, and every muscle in his body jumped. Nothing there, nothing his eyes could find. But he the nerveless, elephantine Castro, was jumping at shadows. The room was a trap, a trap.

"Back in a moment," said Jesus Pietro. He strode to the ladder, looking every inch the Man in Charge, and went up.

A guard said, "But, sir! What about the prisoner?"

"I'll be right back," said the Head, without slowing.

He pulled himself through the doorway, reached down, and closed the door. And there he stuck.

He'd had no planned destination. Something had screamed at him to get out, some intuition so powerful that he had followed it without questioning right in the middle of an interrogation.

What was he afraid of? Was he about to learn some unpleasant truth from Polly Tournquist? Or was it guilt? Surely he no longer lusted after the colonist girl. Surely he could control it if he did.

No Implementation man had ever seen him thus: shoulde'rs slumped, face set in wrinkles of fatigue, standing in a hallway because he had no place to go.

In any case, he had to go back. Polly Tournquist was waiting for the sound of his voice. She might or might not know things he needed to know.

He pulled himself together, visibly, and turned to face the door, his eyes sliding automatically around the bright frosted pane in the wall. Men who worked in the slowboats developed such habits. As ceiling lights, the panel would have been just bright enough. As wall lights, they hurt the eyes.

Castro's eyes slid around the pane, caught something, and came back. There was a blue scrawl on the frosted pane.

Matt was almost down the ladder when the man in the lab coat started up.

Matt addressed a subvocal comment to the Mist Demons, who made no obvious response. Then, because the lab man was about to bump into him, he swung around to the underside of the ladder and dropped. He landed with a thump. Every head in the room jerked around. Matt backed into a corner, stepping softly, waiting.

He'd known it from the beginning: He couldn't count on this power of his. At some point he would have enough of being afraid; the glandular caps over his kidneys would stop producing adrenaline...

The guard turned their eyes back to the ceiling. The lab man disappeared through the doorway and closed the door after him. Only Castro himself continued to behave peculiarly; his eyes kept darting around the room as if searching for something that wasn't there. Matt began to breathe more easily.

The man with the coffee had appeared at just the right time. Matt had been about to leave, to see if he could find a fusion control room before he got back to Castro. He had, in fact, discovered that the frosted glass in the hall light would take ink; and he was marking it to show which door led to Castro, when someone had rounded the corner, carrying coffee.

Castro was still behaving oddly. During the interview in Castro's office, Matt had never ceased to be afraid of him. Yet now he seemed only a nervous man with a bandaged arm.

Dangerous thinking, thought Matt. Be scared!

Suddenly Castro started up the ladder.

Matt nibbled his lower lip. Some comic chase this was becoming! Where was the Head going now? And how could Matt hold six eyes, two above and four below, while climbing a ladder? He started for the ladder anyway.

"But, sir! What about the prisoner?"

"I'll be right back." Matt backed into the corner again. Prisoner? Coffin. The word was nearly obsolete on Mount Lookitthat, where crew and colonist alike cremated their dead. But that box against the wall was easily big enough to hold a prisoner. He'd have to look inside. But first, the guards...

"It's the Head calling, Major."

"Thank you, Miss Lauessen."

"Jansen, is that you?"

"Yes, sir."

"I've found another bleeding heart."

"In the Planck?"

"Yes. Right above the coffin room, on a light. Now here's what I want done. I want you to close the Planck's airlocks, flood the ship with gas, then come in with a squad. Anyone you can't identify immediately, play a sonic over him to keep him quiet. Got it?"

"Yes, sir. Suppose the traitor is someone we know?"

"Use your own judgment there. I have good reason to assume he's not a policeman, though he may be in uniform. How long will you need?"

"About twenty minutes. I could use cars instead of elevators, but it would take just as long."

"Good. Use the cars. Seal off the elevators first. I want as much surprise effect as possible."

"Yes, sir.'

"Execute."

The guards were no trouble at all. Matt stepped up behind one of the men, pulled the gun from his holster, and shot them both.

He kept the gun in his hand. It felt good. He was sick of having to be afraid. It was a situation to rive a man right out of his skull. If he stopped being afraid, even for an instant, he could be killed! But now, at least for the moment, he could stop listening for footsteps, stop trying to look in all directions at once. A sonic stunner was a surer bet than a hypothetical, undependable psi power. It was real, cold and hard in his hand.

The "coffin" was bigger than it had seemed from the doorway. He found clamps, big and easy to operate. The lid was heavy. Foam plastic covered the inside, with a sound-deadening surface of small interlocking conical indentations.

Inside was something packed very carefully in soft, thick white cloth. Its shape was only vaguely human, and its head was not human at all. Matt felt the back hairs stir on his neck. Coffin. And the thing inside didn't move. If he had found Polly, then Polly was dead.'

He began unwrapping it anyway, starting with what passed for the figure's head. He found ear cups, and underneath, human ears. They were blood-warm to the touch. Matt began to hope.

He unwrapped cloth from a pair of brown eyes. They looked up at him, and then they blinked.

Hoping was over. He had found Polly, and she was alive.

She was more cocoon than girl. Toward the end she was helping to get the wrappings and paddings and sensory wires off her legs. She wasn't much help. Her fingers wouldn't work. Muscles jerked rhythmically in her jaw, her arms, her legs. When she tried to step out of the coffin Matt had to catch the full weight of her failing body, and they went down in a heap.

"Thanks," she said unsteadily. "Thanks for getting me out of there."

"That's why I'm here."

"I remember you." She got up, clinging to his arm for support. She had not yet smiled. When Matt had uncovered her mouth and removed the clamps and padding, she had looked like a child expecting to be slapped. She still did. "You're Matt something. Aren't you?"

"Matt Keller. Can you stand by yourself now?"

"Where are we?" She did not let go of his arm.

"In the middle of the Hospital. But we have a fair chance to get out, if you do just as I say."

"How did you get in?"

"Jay Hood tells me I have a kind of psychic invisibility. As long as I can stay scared, I can keep people from seeing me. That's what we have to count on. Hey, are you all right?"

"Since you ask, no." She smiled for the first time, a ghost grin, a rictus that vanished in a split second. She was better off without it.

"You don't look it. Come here, sit down." She was clinging to his upper arm with both hands, as if afraid of falling. He led her to one of the chairs. She's still in shock, he thought. "Better yet, lie down. On the floor. Easy... Now put your feet up on the chair. What the Mist Demons were they doing to you?"

"It's a long story." Her brows puckered, leaving a sudden deep V between her eyes. "I can tell it fast, though. They were doing nothing to me. Nothing and nothing and nothing." She lay on her back with her feet in the air, the way Matt had placed her, and her eyes looked up past the ceiling, looked up at Nothing.

Matt wanted to look away. Polly was no longer pretty. Her hair was a housecleaners' nest, and her makeup had gone every which way; but that wasn't it. Something had gone out of her, and something else had replaced it. Her pale face mirrored the ultimate horror of what she saw, looking up at Nothing.

Presently she said, "How did you get here, Matt?"

"Came to rescue you."

"You're not a Son of Earth."

'No.

"You could be a ringer. Harry's house was raided the night you came."

"That's highly ungrateful for a maiden in distress."

"I'm sorry." But her eyes were watchful and suspicious. She took her feet off the chair and rolled to sitting position on the floor. She was wearing an unfamiliar garment, like a playsuit, but made of soft, flimsy fabric. Her fingers had found a corner of the cloth and were playing with it, kneading it, pulling at it, rolling it, crumpling it. "I can't trust anything. I'm not even sure I'm not dreaming. Maybe I'm still in the box."

"Easy," he said, and squeezed her shoulder reassuringly. "You'll get over-"

She snatched at his hand to hold it there, so quickly that he almost jerked away. Every move she made was exaggerated. "You don't know what it was like! They wrapped me up and put me away, and from then on, it was like being dead!" She was squeezing his hand, feeling the fingers and the nails and the knuckles, as if she'd never touched a human hand before. "I kept trying to remember things, and they were always just out of reach. It was--" She stuck, her larynx bobbing and her lips twitching without sound. Then she jumped at him.

She knocked him flat on his back and wrapped herself around him. It was nothing like affectionate. She clung to him as if she were drowning and he a floating log. "Hey," said Matt. "The gun. You knocked the gun away."

She didn't hear. Matt looked up at the door. It didn't move, and there were no ominous noises.

"It's all right," he said. "It's okay now. You're out." She had her face buried in the hollow of his shoulder, and she was moving against him. Her arms were tight around his chest with a grip of desperation. "You're out now." He massaged her neck and shoulder muscles, trying to do what Laney had done night before last.

The way she kept touching things, kneading them--he understood now. She was making sure they were real. The time in the coffin must have been worse than he could imagine. She must have lost all touch with reality, all her faith in the solidness of things outside that artificial womb. And so she ran her hands along his back, traced the lines of his shoulder blades and vertebrae with her fingertips; and so she moved against him with a sliding motion, with her toes, her thighs, her arms, her body--as if sensing, sensing with every square inch of skin...

He felt himself coming alive in response. Trapdoors and curved metal walls, guns and Implementation police, ceased to matter at all. There was only Polly.

"Help me," she said, her voice muffled.

Matt rolled over onto her. The soft, flimsy looking fabric of her jumper tore like tissue. Fleetingly, Matt wondered why it was there at all. And that didn't matter either.

Presently Polly said, "Well. I'm real after all."

And Matt, drifting peacefully down from some far peak of Nirvana, asked, "Was that what you meant by help?"

"I didn't know what I meant. I needed help." She smiled slowly, with her eyes as well as her mouth. "Suppose it wasn't what I meant. Then what?"

"Then I've callously seduced you." He moved his head back a little to look her in the face. The change was incredible. "I was afraid you'd gone off the beam for good."

"So was I."

Matt glanced up at the trapdoor, then stretched to reach, for the sonic. Nirvana was over.

"You really came to rescue me?"

"Yah." He didn't mention Laney, not yet. No point in spoiling this moment.

"Thanks."

"You're welcome. We've still got to get out of here."

"You don't have any questions to ask me?"

What was she doing, testing him? Didn't she trust him now? Well, why should she? "No," he said, "no questions. But there are things I've got to tell you--"

She stiffened under him. "Matt. Where are we?"

"In the Hospital. Deep in the Hospital. But we can get out.

She rolled away and came to her feet in one smooth motion. "We're in one of the slowboats! Which one?"

"The Planck. Does it matter?"

She scooped the other guard's sonic stunner from his holster in what looked like a racing dive. "We can set off the fusion plant! Blow the Hospital and the crew into the void mist! Come on, Matt, let's get moving. Are there guards in the corridor? How many?"

"Set off--Are you out of your mind?"

"We'd wipe out the Hospital and most of Alpha Plateau." She picked up her ripped mock-playsuit and threw it down again. "I'll have to depants one of these police. And that'll be it! We'd win, Matt! All in one stroke!"

"What win? We'll be dead!"

She stood up with her hands on her hips and regarded him with disgust. Now she wore a pair of Implementation uniform pants too big for her. Matt had never seen anyone more thoroughly alive. "I'd forgotten. You aren't a Son of Earth. AL right, Matt, see how far you can get. You may be able to get out of range of the blast. Personally, I doubt it."

"I've got a personal interest in you. I didn't come all this way to have you commit suicide. You're coming with me."

Polly donned a guard's shirt, then hurriedly rolled up the pants, which were much too long. "You've done your duty. I'm not ungrateful, Matt, but we just aren't going in the same direction. Our motives aren't the same." She kissed him hard, pushed him back, and whispered, "I can't pass up this chance." She started for the ladder.

Matt blocked her way. "You haven't a prayer of getting anywhere without me. You're coming with me, and we're leaving the Hospital--if we get that far."

Polly hit him.

She hit him with stiffened fingertips just under the sternum, where the ribs make an inverted V. He doubled up, trying to curl around the pain, not yet trying to breathe, but gaping like a fish. He felt fingers at his throat and realized that she'd seen the gas filter and was taking it.

He saw her as a blur at the corner of his eye, climbing the ladder. He heard the door open, and a moment later, close. Slow fire was spreading through his lungs. He tried to draw air, and it hurt.

He'd never learned to fight. "The luck of Matt Keller" had made it unnecessary. Once he'd struck a guard on the point of the jaw. Where else would you hit somebody? And who'd guess that a slightly built girl could hit so hard?

Inch by inch he uncurled, straightened up. He drew his breath in shallow, painful sips. When the pain over his heart would let him move again, he started up the ladder.