Iris

'Sealock.' He smiled faintly, remembering the first denizens of New York that he'd met. Only homos use names? He thought of Demogorgon and suddenly realized that he now knew what had been meant. Names! He chuckled softly.

Unaccountably, the man laughed right along with him. 'Say! You must know a lot more about this experience than I do, Mr. Sealock. What's that bright star coming up over the Earth, there?' Now why would he think a thing like that? Sealock frowned and glanced out the viewport. He was momentarily confused by the weird vantage point, but, oh, yes . . . 'It's Jupiter. You headed out that way?'

The man peered at the bright planet for a long moment. 'Oh, no,' he said. 'We won't get that far. We're bound for an asteroid colony.'

We. There was something decidedly odd about this creature. 'Are you with the others in this section?' He shook his head and smiled. 'No, not really. We're all going to the same place, Hygeia, but there are three groups. I was bumped up here because the after cabin is full.' Hepaused. 'I'm a member of the Intuition Club.' It seemed to be a prideful statement.

The what? 'That's . . . interesting. What does it mean?' The urge to continue speaking had become a conversation.

The man's smile slowly blossomed into a grin. 'Mr. Sealock, I don't mind telling you that we are the first group of retarded people to leave Earth.'

Brendan felt a flicker of interest. It was to be expected: as the risks of space travel decreased asymptotically to zero, more and more of the partially disabled were going out. 'Retarded? What do you mean?' He thought he knew, but . . .

Niccoli laughed pleasantly. 'Well . . . Nowadays, of course, there aren't any official classifications of mental ability, at least not in Europe. But the textbooks talk about psychotropic dysfunction. . . . We know who we are. My score on the Senman-Reischar Test was only 1260—that's something like 80 on the Kammerchoff Acultural Metamorphosis Battery—'

And mine is over 190! Brendan thought.

'—and that was with full prosthesis! They try not to set us apart from normal people, but we can't plug into the Comnets at all. That separates us forever, doesn't it?' The agitation showed through for a moment and he realized with horror the degree of the man's disability. Through Comnet, a blind man could see, the mute speak with ease—this man was totally cut off from the world in which Brendan lived. Niccoli smiled again. 'Anyway, we have an intercontinental society restricted to people with SRT ratings of 1300 or below. We call it the Intuition Club because that's pretty much all we have to go by.' Sealock looked at him with a powerful sense of alienation. How could they live? How could they learn—and what would they do for entertainment? For normal people, everything came through Comnet!

Niccoli seemed amused, somehow a bitter amusement. 'I may not be able to plug in and link minds with you, sir,' he said, 'but I can still read your thoughts. I've seen that expression on a thousand faces in my time. You know, we live prettywell. They still make voice-and hand-controlled machines. And there are books, Mr. Sealock. Remember books? And we have each other.' He looked away. Books? Brendan suddenly remembered his personal cargo, long ago transshipped to Gamma and Deepstar. It had been about equally divided between a mass of incredibly sophisticated electronic equipment and close to half a ton of carefully preserved old books. What was the linkage to be found here? What commonality did he have with this man, at the opposite end of a spectrum-potential from him?

The chain of reasoning broke when Niccoli suddenly said, 'What's that?' Tiny forces were playing with their balance and now the Earth was visible only as a purple tinge in the rear of the window. In terms of terminal mission delta-V, the GM155 was now ninety percent of the way to Alpha-enclave-Kosmograd, sailing 1375 miles above the blue-green, white-striated ball of the Earth and again in darkness as it crossed the Andes. Without ever varying thrust, it had gone into a 130-degree spindle-yaw maneuver, from which it could decelerate and segue into a tail- first stoop on the giant space station.

Precise Fingers was the first of his kind to leave the world, to fly above great Mother Ocean. He orbited high above the blue-green planet, looking down on it with the augmented senses of his primitive vacuole, and marveled. He was in the reach of the gods at last! His oil coursed about him, touching on the sensory inputs and control nodes. He could see the other planets and the sun, so far away. He spent time examining those pinpoint sources of electromagnetic radiation that the priesthood had noticed only a generation ago. What could they be?

It rose. Coming above the limb of the planet, it was a great silvery sphere, almost featureless, a huge version of the vacuole that bore him. He knew what it was then, and felt tremendous fear and elation. This was the moment when he moved into history!

The planetoid-sized mass drew him in and Precise Fingers became one with his God.

Brendan Sealock was staring silently out his porthole when, returned to daylight, they arrived. Coming up at them almost imperceptibly was the tiny ring that was their destination. He knew there were others like it scattered about the inner Solar System, mass-produced products of Kosmodom Unlimited factories in Irkutsk and Moonport Mechta. As they dosed the intervening distance, so that it vanished from the windows and had to be watched through the aft screen, it became less and less of an ellipse until finally they were approaching from a direction perpendicular to its spin axis. Spin? It didn't seem to move at all in that sense. From here it looked like an almost featureless golden band filled with cobweb stuff. Suddenly a tiny, dark blot swam across to stop at its center. It was the shadow of GM155. For a second the immensity of the thing leaped out at him: it was a wheel, ten kilometers across. Spin? The idea, the question, plagued him annoyingly. Sealock growled with frustration and, reaching into his breast pocket, pulled out a math-element that he had carried along. It plugged into his head with a muffled click.