computer-educated technicians had patched the nationwide network of communications to establish a link to the west. The news saddened Luke. He walked to the wall on which hung a large, military map of the Republic, looking at it with unseeing eyes. He thought of Caster as she was when they were together in West City, gay, optimistic. He
remembered the fright on her face as he was lifted by the girl called, in his mind, Blaze. He imagined the tortures she had endured, the final treatment on the shakeshock rack which blasted her mind, left her a vegetable, for that was the only conclusion to be drawn from the information that she'd been sent to a Fare home for invalids. Then the
local battle with high-explosive shells tearing and blasting and ripping the buildings and people fleeing in panic, those who could move. Caster, perhaps, not realizing the danger, moving slowly, zombilike, walking into the path of the onrushing troops. She was dead. He had to accept it. And there was an empire to be built. It was estimated that some 60 percent of the population had changed. Another small percentage would be reached, but that would leave almost 40 percent of the people in misery. Orders went out. Those who have the life-control power are to use it to heal those who have not been able to make a change. Time passed. Local areas elected representatives to the First Congress of the Third Republic. The congress approved Luke's unilateral appointment of Colonel Ed Baxley as President, pending organization of the elective machinery based on the old system of the First Republic. Luke spent long hours in consultation with Baxley and a staff of newly changed, vibrant, healthy young men. There was so much to be done. A task force was set to work revamping the industrial facilities of the Republic. Plants which had produced endless lines of useless ground cars turned to the making of elements which went into ships patterned after the fleet which
Luke had brought into the last battle on the northern plains, for vast as it was, the fleet was inadequate for the purpose of resettling almost three billion people on new planets scattered long light-years along the periphery of the galaxy. Another task force went into the Republic of South American, working toward union, toward peace among the survivors of centuries of warfare and pestilence on a tired, wasted planet. Vast efforts were underway to clean the environment of the Earth. This effort had priority, since it would take years, decades to complete the colonization of new planets and, moreover, there were those who were sentimental about the home planet, who wanted to keep it, return it to health and beauty. It became increasingly apparent that the non-changees were being left behind. Baxley and Wundt, healthy, cared for by the changees on the staff, found themselves turning over details more and more to the vibrant young men with the expanded minds. It was thus over the entire area of the two continents. Those who could not change found themselves being left out. They were treated with courtesy, but there was a touch of condescension which, as the exciting days passed, brought a crisis. The crisis came when the majority, the changees, voted to limit the franchise to changees only. Colonel Ed Baxley, at the head of the table, resplendent in white, rose, his face grim. «Gentlemen, I find myself, as President of the Republic, in an untenable position. You are saying that I will be unable to exercise the basic rights of citizenship.» «The rule will not apply to you, of course,» said a bright young changee. «Why should I be allowed special status?» Baxley asked his face flushed. «I am, along with all the others who have not been able to change, an inferior being.» «As I understand it,» Dr. Wundt said, with a rueful smile, «We are being punished now for having lived a childhood of comfort.» «Perhaps we can find a way,» Luke said. «Research is under way.» «I don't have your mental abilities, my boy,» Wundt said, «but I'm a medical doctor. I've studied the matter. Encephalograph of changees and those who have the change potential, when compared with the ordinary
brain, say the brain of the colonel or myself, show differences so basic that I, in my ignorance, hold no hope of ever knowing the feeling of being a superman.» «But we can help you,» Luke said. «We can heal you, keep you healthy.» «And keep us as poor, retarded relations locked in a back room?» Baxley said. «No, not at all,» Luke insisted. «He is right, of course,» said one of the young staff men. Luke looked angrily toward the speaker. «I've always wanted to go into space,» Wundt said. «It's been a lifelong dream. Give us, the retarded relations a back room, a planet or two somewhere. Give us a basic technology, medicine—» «But that's exile,» Luke said. «That's what they did with us.» «Yes,» Wundt said. «I've been thinking of that. It's almost as if there had been a long- range plan, almost as if we were put here, God knows how long ago, to act as a blood bank for the race, to furnish new blood when the old became tired, inactive. Now they had lapsed into complete inactivity. You might even say they're being rewarded for good work. When it comes right down to it, being eternally healthy, euphoric, sexually stimulated, without care or responsibility is not a bad way to live.» «But don't you see,» Luke said, «we'd be doing exactly as they did. We'd
be pushing you out, cutting you off from all the benefits of our new status. You'd face death, disease, poverty, war, all the old things which have made this planet a living hell.» «It wasn't always a living hell,» Baxley said. «Once it was good here.» «Then you want this, too?» Luke asked. «In the past weeks I've found myself pretending that I understood the things that are happening,» Baxley said. «But I've been fooling no one but myself. Ask your young men. They come to me and say, 'Mr. President, there is this situation in Middle City,' and I listen and nod and don't
understand half what they're saying. It's like putting a baby who can't even speak in charge of a group of adults.» «We'll talk about it,» Luke said. The first ships lifted away two months later. Scout ships, sent out during the early days of the change, reported habitable planets in the group of stars surrounding Antares in Scorpio. Non- changers went eagerly, happy to leave behind the yet uncured filth and pollution of the Earth, pleased to be among people of their own kind. With them went the knowledge to build a civilization based on science and medicine with a limited space capacity, for it had been discovered that the knowledge needed to man and maintain the starships came only with the expanded mind. As the word went out across the two continents and the giant starships flashed outward, they came by the millions, the thousands, the hundreds, in a diminishing trickle, all the non-changers, flocking together with people they could understand, seeking the clean air and expansion room of the new planets. Irene Caster was discovered with a small group who had been, since the battles around West City, hiding in caves on the rocky coast. Notified in New Washington, Luke flew out quickly. She did not, of course, recognize him. Even if her mind had been whole, she would not have seen in the muscled, handsome, vibrant young man the slack, sick, wasted, middle-aged nineteen-year-old who had gone with her into West City to preach and try to heal. She was sitting in a chair in a bare, efficient office at the port which had been built on the wasted site of the last battle. She had been sorted out of the mass of non-changers by the identification-record method, which was to be a permanent history of all those who went to the new planets. Her fingerprints, checked against the undamaged central file in old Washington, had matched those which Luke took from Zachary Wundt's records in the old underground. Without fingerprints, she would never have been recognized. She was forty-two, a ripe old age in the olden times, when a member of the masses lived a long life if he reached thirty. She looked sixty. Her hair was dirty, long, and lank. It had turned a streaky, unattractive gray. Her body was flabby, weak, racked by disease and malfunction. The old lung disease had ravaged her. But in those respects she was not unlike thousands of others who had not yet been
treated by the life powers of the changers. The difference was in the livid, relatively fresh scars on her face, her neck, the exposed portions of her arms and legs. Her nose had been ripped by the torturers electrodes and had grown back in the shape of an obscene, white, diseased vegetable. One eye had been gouged out and the empty socket was sunken and raw. Her tongue was deformed, enlarged to the point of making it impossible to talk, very difficult to eat and swallow. And the inner damage was equally appalling. At the end of her torture when death would have been more merciful, the Brothers had treated her to shakeshock to the point of permanent damage of much of the brain. She was a walking vegetable. Her one eye was blank, expressionless. She had been kept alive by the group of non-changers through some miracle, for they, themselves were wasted and near death when the word reached them and they came in to seek treatment. Since the able-bodied ones in the group had lived on slimy weeds salvaged from the sea, on a few mollusks, and on garbage stolen from the fringes of the city. Caster, getting only the leftovers, was near
starvation, in addition to the other heart-breaking disabilities of her body. Luke cried when he saw her. He couldn't stop the tears of anger and pity. For a long moment he regretted the policy of pardon which the new people had adopted toward the Brothers and their minions. For a moment
he felt the urge to blast and kill, to main and torture as they had done. He controlled himself with an effort. He knelt before her. «Caster?» She looked past him blankly. He took her hand. The fingernails had grown back, deformed by the vile things which had been done to them. Almost automatically, he started the correction process, using the vast powers of his mind. He had never before met such a challenge. He worked rapidly. He healed scars and straightened broken fingers. He went inside, doing the physical things first, easing the pain-racked body,
