population and the invention of census machines. When the census machines were perfected everything was known statistically about everybody, though without invasion of privacy, for the machines dealt in percentages and not personalities. Population loss could be accounted for; such and such a percentage died, and this percentage pigged it drunkenly in Riveredge, and that percentage deserted wife and kids for a while before it was inevitably, automatically traced—
And there was a percentage left over. People still vanished.
The F. S. I. noted that three cancer patients in Morningside Heights, New York, had vanished last year, so they gave (Temporary) Special Agent Charles Barker a cancer by nagging a harmless throat polyp with dyes and irritants, and installed him in Morningside Heights to vanish—and do something about it.
The man marched the two Stosses and Barker-Oliver into the spaceship.
Minutes later a smashing takeoff acceleration dashed them unconscious to the deck.
CHAPTER IV
IN AN EARTHLY NAVY they would have called Gori 'Guns' in the wardroom. He didn't look like an officer and a gentleman, or a human being for that matter, and the batteries of primary and secondary weapons he ruled over did not look like cannon. But Gori had a pride and a class feeling that would have made familiar sense in any navy. He voiced it in his needling of Lakhrut: a brother officer but no fighting man; a sweat-soaked ruler of the Propulsion Division whose station was between decks, screwing the last flicker of drive from the units.
Languidly Gori let his fingertips drift over a page of text; he was taking a familiarization course in propulsion. 'I don't understand,' he said to Lakhrut, 'why one shouldn't treat the units with a little more formality.
My gun-pointers, for example—'
Lakhrut knew he was being needled, but had to pretend otherwise. Gori was somewhat his senior. 'Gun- pointers are one thing,' he said evenly.
'Propulsion units are another. I presume you've worked the globes.'
Gori raised his fingers from the page in surprise. 'Evidently you—
people between decks don't follow the Games,' he said. 'I have a Smooth Award from the last meet but one.'
'What class vessel?'
'Single-seater. And a beauty! Built to my orders, stripped to a bare hull microns in thickness.'
'Then you know working the globes isn't easy. But—with all respect—I don't believe you know that working a globe under orders, shift after shift, with no stake in the job and no hope or relief ever is most infernally heartbreaking. You competed for the Smooth Award and won it and slept for a week, I dare say, and are still proud—don't misunderstand me: rightly proud—of the effort.
But the propulsion units aren't competing for anything. They've been snatched away from their families—I'm not certain; I believe a family system prevails—and they don't like it. We must break them of that.
Come and see the new units.'
Gori reluctantly followed Lakhrut to the inport where unconscious figures were being stacked.
'Pah! They stink!' he said.
'A matter of diet. It goes away after they've been on our rations for a while.'
Gori felt one of the figures curiously. 'Clothes,' he said in surprise. 'I thought—'
Lakhrut told him wearily: 'They have been wearing clothes for quite a while now. Some five thousand of their years.' That had been a dig too.
Gori had been reminding him that he was not greatly concerned with the obscure beasts between decks; that he, Lakhrut, must clutter his mind with such trivial details while Gori was splendidly free to man his guns if there should be need. 'I'll go and see my driver,' he snapped.
When he left, Gori sat down and laughed silently. Lakhrut went between decks to the banks of units and swiftly scanned them. Number Seven was sleeping, with deep lines of fatigue engraved on his mind. He would be the next to go; indeed he should have been shot through the spacelock with Three, Eight-Female and Twelve. At the first opportunity— His driver approached.
'Baldwin,' he snapped at the driver, 'will you be able to speak with the new units?'
Baldwin, a giant who bad been a mere propulsion unit six months ago and was fiercely determined never to be one again, said in his broken speech: 'Believe it. Will make to understand somewise. They may not—
converse—my language called English. Will make to understand somewise.'
BARKER AWOKE staring into dull-red lights that looked unbelievably like old-fashioned incandescent lamps. Beside him a girl was moaning with shock and fear. In the dull light he could make out her features: Ginny Stoss. Her father was lying unconscious with his head in her lap.
A brutal hand yanked him to his feet—there was gravity! But there was no time to marvel over it. A burly giant in a gray kilt was growling at him: 'You speak English?'
'Yes. What's all this about? Where are we?'
He was ignored. The giant yanked Ginny Stoss to her feet and slapped her father into consciousness as the girl winced and Barker balled his fists helplessly. The giant said to the three of them: 'My name's Baldwin. You call me mister. Come on.'
He led them, the terrified girl, the dazed old man and the rage-choked agent, through spot-polished metal corridors to
A barber shop, Barker thought wildly. Rows and rows of big adjustable chairs gleaming dully under the red lights, people sitting in them, at least a hundred people. And then you saw there was something archaic and ugly about the cup-shaped head rests fitted to the chairs. And then you saw that the people, men and women, were dirty, unkempt and hopeless-eyed, dressed in rags or nothing at all.
Ginny Stoss screamed sharply when she saw Lakhrut. He was not a pretty sight with his single bulging orb above the nose. It pointed at her and Lakhrut spat gutteral syllables at Baldwin. The burly giant replied, cringing and stammering. The monster's orb aimed at Barker, and he felt a crawling on the surface of his brain—as if fingers were trying to grasp it.
Barker knew what to do; more important, he did it. He turned off Barker. He turned on Dr. Oliver, the erudite scared rabbit.
Lakhrut scanned them suspiciously. The female was radiating sheer terror; good. The older male was frightened too, but his sense of a reality was clouded; he detected a faint undertone of humor. That would go. The younger man—Lakhrut stooped forward in a reflex associated with the sense of smell. The younger man — men? — no; man—the younger man—
Lakhrut stopped trying to scan him. He seemed to be radiating on two bands simultaneously, which was not possible. Lakhrut decided that he wasn't focusing properly, that somebody else's radiation was leaking and that the younger man's radiation was acting as a carrier wave for it.
And felt vaguely alarmed and ashamed of himself. He ought to be a better scanner than he was. 'Baldwin,' he said, 'question that one closely.'
The hulking driver asked: 'You want name?'
'Of course not, fool! Question him about anything. I want to scan his responses.' Baldwin spoke to the fellow unintelligibly and the fellow replied unintelligibly. Lakhrut almost smiled with relief as the questioning progressed. The odd double-band effect was vanishing and the young man radiated simple fright.
Baldwin said laboriously: 'Says is teacher of language and—tales of art.
Says where is this and why have—'
'That's enough,' he told the driver. 'Install them.' None of this group was dangerous enough to need killing.
'SIT THERE,' Baldwin told Barker, jerking his thumb at an empty chair.
Barker felt the crawling fingers withdraw, and stifled a thought of triumph. They had him, this renegade and his cyclops boss. They had him like a bug underfoot to be squashed at a whim, but there had been some kind of test and he had bluffed them. Wearing the persona of Oliver, he quavered: 'What is this terrible place, Mr. Baldwin? Why should I sit there?'
