BOOK ONE

SEEDING PROGRAM

The spaceship resumed humming around Sweeney without his
noticing the change. When Capt. Meikiejon's voice finally
came again from the wall speaker, Sweeney was still lying
buckled to his bunk in a curious state of .tranquility he had
never known before, and couldn't possibly have described,
even to himself. Though he had a pulse, he might otherwise
have concluded that he was dead. It took him several minutes
to respond.
"Sweeney, do you hear me? Are you all right?"
The brief hesitation in the pilot's breathing made Sweeney
grin. From Meikiejon's point of view, and that of most of the
rest of humanity, Sweeney was all wrong. He was, in fact,
dead.
The heavily insulated cabin, with its own airlock to the out-
side, and no access for Sweeney at all to the rest of the ship,
was a testimonial to his wrongness. So was Meikiejon's tone:
the voice of a man addressing, not another human being, but
something that had to be kept in a vault.
A vault designed to protect the universe outside it not to
protect its contents from the universe.   .                   '
"Sure, I'm all right," Sweeney said, snapping the buckle and
sitting up. He checked the thermometer, which still registered
its undeviating minus 194 F.the mean surface temperature
of Ganymede, moon number III of Jupiter. "I was- dozing,
sort of. What's up?"
"I'm putting the ship into her orbit; we're about a thousand
miles up from the satellite now. I thought you might want to
take a look."
"Sure enough. Thanks, Mickey."
The wall speaker said, "Yeah. Talk to you later." Sweeney
grappled for the guide rail and pulled himself over to the
cabin's single bull'seye port, maneuvering with considerable
precision. For a man to whom 1/6 Earth gravity is normal, free
fall -a situation of no gravity at all-is only an extreme case.
Which was what Sweeney was, too. A human being -but
an extreme case.
He looked out. He knew exactly what he would sec; he had
studied it exhaustively from photos, from teletapes, from
maps, and through telescopes both at home on the Moon and
on Mars. When you approach Ganymede at inferior conjunc-
tion, as Meikiejon was doing, the first thing that hits you in
the eye is the huge oval blot called Neptune's Trident so
named by the earliest Jovian explorers because it was marked
with the Greek letter psi on the old Howe composite map. The
name had turned out to have been well chosen: that blot is a
deep, many-pronged sea, largest at the eastern end, which
runs from about 120 to 165 in longitude, and from about
10 to 33 North latitude. A sea of what? Oh, water, of
course water frozen rock-solid forever, and covered with a
layer of rock-dust about three inches thick.
East of the Trident, and running all the way north to the
pole, is a great triangular marking called the Gouge, a tom-
up, root-entwined, avalanche-shaken valley which continues
right around the pole and back up into the other hemisphere,
fanning out as it goes. ( Up because north to space pilots, as to
astronomers, is down.) There is nothing quite like the Gouge
on any other planet, although at inferior conjunction, when
your ship is coming down on Ganymede at the 180 meridian,
it is likely to remind you of Syrtis Major on Mars.
There is, however, no real resemblance. Syrtis Major is per-
haps the pleasantest land on all of Mars. The Gouge, on the
other hand, is -a gouge.
On the eastern rim of this enormous scar, at long. 218, N.
lat. 32, is an isolated mountain about 9,000 feet high, which
had no name as far as Sweeney knew; it was marked with the
letter pi on the Howe map. Because of its isolation, it can be
seen easily from Earth's Moon in a good telescope when the
sunrise terminator lies in that longitude, its peak shining de-
tached in the darkness like a little star. A semicircular shelf
juts westward out over the Gouge from the base of Howe's pi,
it sides bafflingly sheer for  a world which  shows no  other
signs of folded strata.
It was on that shelf that the other Adapted Men lived.
Sweeney stared down at the nearly invisible mountain with
its star-fire peak for a long time, wondering why he was not
reacting. Any appropriate emotion would do:  anticipation,
alarm, eagerness, anything at all, even fear. For that matter,
having been locked up in a safe for over two months should
by now have driven him foaming to get out, even if only to
join the Adapted Men. Instead, the tranquility persisted. He
was unable to summon more than a momentary curiosity over
Howe's pi before his eye was drawn away to Jupiter himself,
looming monstrous and insanely-colored only 600,000 miles
away, give or take a few thousand. And even that planet had
attracted him only because it was brighter; otherwise, it had
no meaning.
"Mickey?" he said, forcing himself to look back down into
the Gouge.
"Right here, Sweeney. How does it look?'
"Oh, like a relief map. That's how they all look. Where are
you going to put me down? Don't the orders leave it up to
us?"
"Yeah. But I don't think there's any choice," Meikiejon's
voice said, less hesitantly. "It'll have to be the big plateau
Howe's H."
Sweeney scanned the oval mare with a mild distaste. Stand-
ing on that, he would be as conspicuous as if he'd been
planted in the middle of the Moon's Mare Crisium. He said
so.
"You've no choice," Meikiejon repeated calmly. He burped
the rockets several times. Sweeney's weight returned briefly,
tried to decide which way it wanted to throw itself, and then
went away again. The ship was now in its orbit; but whether
Meikiejon had set it up to remain put over its present co-
ordinates, or instead it was to cruise criss-cross over the whole
face of the satellite, Sweeney couldn't tell, and didn't ask.
The less he knew about that, the better.
"Well, it's a long drop," Sweeney said. "And that atmos-
phere isn't exactly the thickest in the system. I'll have to fall
in the lee of the mountain. I don't want to have to trudge a
couple of hundred miles over Howe's H."
"On the other hand," Meikiejon said, "if you come down
too close, our friends down there will spot your parachute.
Maybe it'd be better if we dropped you into the Gouge, after
all. There's so much tumbled junk down there that the radar
echoes must be tremendous -not a chance of their spotting a
little thing like a man on a parachute."
"No, thank you. There's still optical spotting, and a foil
parachute looks nothing like a rock spur, even to an Adapted
Man. It'll have to be behind the mountain, where I'm in both
optical and radar shadow at once. Besides, how could I climb
out of the Gouge onto the shelf? They didn't plant themselves
on the edge of a cliff for nothing."
"That's right," Meikiejon said. "Well, I've got the catapult
pointed. I'll suit up and join you on the hull."
"All right. Tell me again just what you're going to do while
I'm gone, so I won't find myself blowing the whistle when
you're nowhere around." The sound of a suit locker being
opened came tinnily over the intercom. Sweeney's chute har-
ness was already strapped on, and getting the respirator and
throat-mikes into place would only take a moment. Sweeney
needed no other protection.
"I'm to stay up here with all power off except maintenance
for 300 days," Meikiejon's voice, sounding more distant now,
was repeating. "Supposedly by that time you'll have worked
yourself in good with our friends down there and will know
the setup. I stand ready to get a message from you on a fixed
frequency. You're to send me only a set of code letters; I
feed them into the computer, the comp tells me what to do
and I act accordingly. If I don't hear from you after 300 days,
I utter a brief but heartfelt prayer and go home. Beyond that,
God help me, I don't know a thing."
"That's plenty," Sweeney told him. "Let's go."
Sweeney went out his personal airlock. Like all true inter-
planetary craft, Meikiejon's ship had no overall hull. She con-
sisted of her essential components, including the personnel
globe, held together by a visible framework of girders and
I-beams. It was one of the longest of the latter, one which
was already pointed toward Howe's H, which would serve as
the "catapult."
Sweeney looked up at the globe of the satellite. The old fa-
miliar feeling of falling came over him for a moment; he
-looked down, reorienting himself to the ship, until it went
away. He'd be going in that direction soon enough.
Meikiejon came around the bulge of the personnel globe,
sliding his shoes along the metal. In his bulky, misshapen
spacesuit, it was he who looked like the unhuman member of
the duo.
"Ready?" he said.
Sweeney nodded and lay face down on the I-beam, snap-
ping the guide-clips on his harness into place around it. He
could feel Meikiejon's mitts at his back, fastening the JATO
unit; he could see nothing now, however, but the wooden sled
that would protect his body from the beam.
"Okay," the pilot said. "Good luck, Sweeney."
"Thanks. Count me off, Mickey."
"Coming up on five seconds. Five. Four. Three. Two. One.
Hack."
The JATO unit shuddered and dealt Sweeney a nearly par-
alyzing blow between his shoulder-blades. For an instant the
acceleration drove him down into his harness, and the sled
spraddled against the metal of the I-beam.
Then, suddenly, the vibration stopped. He was flying free.
A little belatedly, he jerked the release ring.
The sled went-curving away from under him, dwindling
rapidly among the stars. The pressure at his back cut out as
the JATO unit, still under power, flamed ahead of him. The
instantly-dissipated flick of heat from its exhaust made him
ill for a moment; then it bad vanished. It would hit too hard
to leave anything where it landed but a hole.
Nothing was left but Sweeney, falling toward Ganymede,
 head first.                                  '
From almost the beginning, from that day unremember-
ably early in his childhood when he had first realized that
the underground dome on the Moon was all there was to the
universe for nobody but himself, Sweeney had wanted to be
human; wanted it with a vague, impersonal ache which set
quickly into a chill bitterness of manner and outlook at his
unique everyday life, and in dreams with flares of searing
loneliness which became more infrequent but also more in-
tense as he matured, until such a night would leave him as
shaken and mute, sometimes for several days at a stretch, as
an escape from a major accident.
The cadre of psychologists, psychiatrists and analysts as-
signed to him did what they could, but that was not very
much. Sweeney's history contained almost nothing that was
manipulable by any system of psychotherapy developed to
help human beings. Nor were the members of the cadre ever
able to agree among themselves what the prime goal of such
therapy should be: whether to help Sweeney to live with the
facts of his essential inhumanity, or to fan instead that sin-
gle spark of hope which the non-medical people on the Moon
were constantly holding out toward Sweeney as the sole rea-
son for his existence.
The facts were simple and implacable. Sweeney was an
Adapted Man -adapted, in this instance, to the bitter cold,
11
the light gravity, and the thin stink of atmosphere which pre-
vailed on Ganymede. The blood that ran in his veins, and
the sol substrate of his every cell, was nine-tenths liquid am-
monia; his bones were Ice IV; his respiration was a complex
hydrogen-to-methane cycle based not upon catalysis by an
iron-bearing pigment, but upon the locking and unlocking of
a double sulfur bond; and he could survive for weeks, if he
had to, upon a diet of rock dust.
He had always been this way. What had made him so had
happened to him literally before he had been conceived: the
application, to the germ cells which had later united to form
him, of an elaborate constellation of techniques-selective
mitotic poisoning, pinpoint X-irradiation, tectogenetic micro-
surgery, competitive metabolic inhibition, and perhaps fifty
more whose names he had never even heard -which collect-
ively had been christened "pantropy." The word, freely re-
translated, meant "changing everything" and it fitted.
As the pantropists had changed in advance the human pat-
tern in Sweeney's shape and chemistry, so they had changed
his education, his world, his thoughts, even his ancestors. You
didn't make an Adapted Man with just a wave of the wand,
Dr. Alfven had once explained proudly to Sweeney over the
intercom. Even the ultimate germ cells were the emergents of
a hundred previous generations, bred one from another be-
fore they had passed the zygote stage like one-celled animals,
each one biassed a little farther toward the cyanide and ice
and everything nice that little boys like Sweeney were made
of. The psych cadre picked off Dr. Alfven at the end of that
same week, at the regular review of the tapes of what had
been said to Sweeney and what he had found to say back, but
they need hardly have taken the trouble. Sweeney had never
heard a nursery rhyme, any more than he had ever experi-
enced the birth trauma or been exposed to the Oedipus com-
plex. He was a law unto himself, with most of the whereases
blank.
He noticed, of course, that Alfven failed to show up when
his next round was due, but this was commonplace. Scientists
came and went around the great sealed cavern, always ac-
companied by the polite and beautifully uniformed private po-
lice of the Greater Earth Port Authority, but they rarely lasted
very long. Even among the psych cadre there was always a
peculiar tension, a furious constraint which erupted periodi-
cally into pitched shouting battles. Sweeney never found out
what the shouting was about because the sound to the outside
was always cut as soon as the quarrels began, but he noticed
that some of the participants never showed up again.
"Where's Dr. Emory? Isn't this his day?"
"He finished his tour of duty."
"But I want to talk to him. He promised to bring me a book.
Won't he be back for a visit?"
"I don't think so, Sweeney. He's retired. Don't worry about
him, he'll get along just fine, I'll bring you your book."
It was after the third of these incidents that Sweeney was
let out on the surface of the  Moon for the first time
guarded, it was true, by five men in spacesuits, but Sweeney
didn't care. The new freedom seemed enormous to him, and
his own suit, only a token compared to what the Port cops had
to wear, hardly seemed to exist. It was his first foretaste of the
liberty he was to have, if the many hints could be trusted,
after his job was done. He could even see the Earth, where
people lived.
About the job he knew everything there was to know, and
knew it as second nature. It had been drummed into him from
his cold and lonely infancy, always with the same command
at the end:
"We must have those men back."
Those six words were the reason for Sweeney; they were
also Sweeney's sole hope. The Adapted Men had to be recap-
tured and brought back to Earth or more exactly, back to
the dome on the Moon, the only place besides Ganymede where
they could be kept alive. And if they could not all be recap-
tured -he was to entertain this only as a possibility he must
at least come back with Dr. Jacob Rullman. Only Rullman
would be sure to know the ultimate secret: how to turn an
Adapted Man back into a human being.
Sweeney understood that Rullman 'and his associates were
criminals, but how grievous their crime had been was a ques-
tion he had never tried to answer for himself. His standards
were too sketchy. It was clear from the beginning, however,
that the colony on Ganymede had been set up without Earth's
sanction, by methods of which Earth did not approve (ex-
cept for special cases like Sweeney), and that Earth wanted it
broken up. Not by force, for Earth wanted to know first what
Rullman knew, but by the elaborate artifice which was Sween-
ey himself.
We must have those men back. After that, the hints said
never promising anything directly Sweeney could be made
human, and know a better freedom than walking the airless
surface of the Moon with five guards.
It was usually after one of these hints that one of those
suddenly soundless quarrels would break out among the staff.
Any man of normal intelligence would have come to suspect
that the hints were less than well founded upon any. real ex-
pectation, and Sweeney's training helped to make him sus-
picious early; but in the long run he did not care. The hints
offered his only hope and he accepted them with hope but
without expectation. Besides, the few opening words of such
quarrels which he had overheard before the intercom clicked
off had suggested that there was more to the disagreement
than simple doubt of the convertibility of an Adapted Man.
It had been Emory, for instance, who had burst out unex-
pectedly and explosively:
"But suppose Rullman was right?"
Click.
Right about what? Is a lawbreaker ever "right?" Sweeney
could not know. Then there had been the technie who had
said "It's the cost that's the trouble with terra-forming"
what did that mean? -and had been hustled out of the mon-
itoring chamber on some trumped-up errand hardly a minute
later. There were many such instances, but inevitably Sween-
ey failed to put the fragments together into any pattern. He
decided only that they did not bear directly upon his chances
of becoming human, and promptly abandoned them in the
vast desert of his general ignorance.
In the long run, only the command was real the com-
mand and the nightmares. We must have those men back.
Those six words were the reason .why Sweeney, like a man
whose last effort to awaken has failed, was falling head first
toward Ganymede.
The Adapted Men found Sweeney halfway up the great col
which provided the only access to their cliff-edge colony from
the plateau of Howe's H. He did not recognize them; they
conformed to none of the photographs he had memorized;
but they accepted his story readily enough. And he had not
needed to pretend exhaustion -Ganymede's gravity was nor-
mal to him, but it had been a long trek and a longer climb.
He was surprised to find, nevertheless, that he had enjoyed
it.  For  the  first  time  in  his  life  he  had  walked  unguarded,
either by men or by mechanisms, on a world where he felt
physically at home; a world without walls, a world where he
was essentially alone. The air was rich and pleasant, the
winds came from wherever they chose to blow, the tempera-
ture in the col was considerably below what had been allow-
able in the dome on the Moon, and there was sky all around
him, tinged with indigo and speckled with stars that twinkled
now and then.
He would have to be careful. It would be all too easy to
accept Ganymede as home. He had been warned against that,
but somehow he had failed to realize that the danger would
be not merely real, but seductive.
The young men took him swiftly the rest of the way to the
colony. They had been as incurious as they had been anony-
mous. Rullman was different. The look of stunned disbelief
on the scientist's face, as Sweeney was led into his high-
ceilinged, rock-walled office, was so total as to be frightening.
He said: "What's this!"
"We found him climbing the col. We thought he'd gotten
lost, but he says he belongs to the parent flight."
 "Impossible," Rullman said. "Quite impossible." And then
he fell silent, studying the newcomer from crown to toe. The
expression of shock dimmed only slightly.
The long scrutiny gave Sweeney time to look back. Rullman
was older than his pictures, but that was natural; if anything,
he looked a little less marked by age than Sweeney had an-
ticipated. He was spare, partly bald, and slope-shouldered,
but the comfortable pod under his belt-line which had shown
in the photos was almost gone now. Evidently living on Gany-
mede had hardened him some. The pictures bad failed to
prepare Sweeney for the man's eyes: they were as hooded and
unsettling as an owl's.
"You'd better tell me who you are," Rullman said at last.
"And how you got here. You aren't one of us, that's certain."
"I'm Donald Leverault Sweeney," Sweeney said. "Maybe
I'm not one of you, but my mother said I was. I got here in
her ship. She said you'd take me in."
Rullman shook his head. "That's impossible, too. Excuse
me, Mr. Sweeney; but you've probably no idea what a bomb-
shell you are. You must be Shirley Leverault's child, thenbut
how did you get here? How did you survive all this time?
Who kept you alive, and tended you, after we left the Moon?
And above all, how did you get away from the Port cops? We
knew that Port Earth found our Moon lab even before we
abandoned it. I can hardly believe that you even exist."
Nevertheless, the scientist's expression of flat incredulity
was softening moment by moment. He was, Sweeney judged,
already beginning to buy it. And necessarily: there Sweeney
stood before him, breathing Ganymede's air, standing easily
in Ganymede's gravity, with Ganymede's dust on his cold skin,
a fact among inarguable facts.
"The Port cops found the big dome, all right," Sweeney
said. "But they never found the little one, the pilot plant. Dad
blew up the tunnel between the two before they landed -he
was killed in the rock-slide. Of course I was still just. a cell in
a jug when that happened."
"I see," Rullman said thoughtfully. "We picked up an ex-
plosion on our ship's instruments before we took off. But we
thought it was the Port raiders beginning to bomb, unexpected
though that was. Then they didn't destroy the big lab either,
after all?"
"No," Sweeney said. Rullman surely must know that; radio
talk between Earth and Moon must be detectable at least oc-
casionally out here. "There were still some intercom lines left
through to there; my mother used to spend a lot of time lis-
tening in on what was going on. So did I, after I was old
enough to understand it. That was how we found out that the
Ganymedian colony hadn't been bombed out, either."
"But where did you get your power?"
"Most of it from our own strontium"" cell. Everything was
shielded so the cops couldn't detect any 'stray fields. When the
cell finally began to give out, we had to tap Port's main ac-
cumulator line -just for a little bit at first, but the drain kept
going up." He shrugged. "Sooner or later they were bound to
spot it and did."
Rullman was momentarily silent, and Sweeney knew that
he was doing the pertinent arithmetic in his head, comparing
the 20-year half-life of strontium"" with Sweeney's and the
Adapted Men's chronology. The figures would jibe, of course.
The Port cops' briefing had been thorough about little details
like that.
"It's still quite astounding, having to rethink this whole
episode after so many years," Rullman said. "With all due re-
spect, Mr. Sweeney, it's hard to imagine Shirley Leverault
going through such an ordeal and all alone, too, except for
a child she could never even touch, a child as difficult and
technical to tend as an atomic pile. I remember her as a frail,
low-spirited girl, trailing along after us listlessly because Rob-
ert was in the project." He frowned reminiscently. "She used
to say. It's his job.' She never thought of it as anything more
than that."
"/was her job," Sweeney said evenly. The Port cops had
tried to train him to speak bitterly when he mentioned his
mother, but he had never been able to capture the emotion
that they wanted him to imitate. He had found, however, that
if he rapped out the syllables almost without inflection, they
were satisfied with the effect. "You misjudged 'her. Dr. Rull-
manor else she changed after Dad was killed. She had guts
enough for ten. And she got paid for it in the end. In the only
coin the Port cops know how to pay."
"I'm sorry," Rullman said gently. "But at least you got
away. I'm sure that's as she would have wanted it. Where did
the ship you spoke of come from?"
"Why, we always had it. It belonged to Dad, I suppose. It
was stored in a natural chimney near our dome. When the
cops broke into the monitoring room, I went out the other
side of the dome, while they were busy with mother, and
beat it. There wasn't anything I could have done"
"Of course, of course," Rullman said, his voice low and
quiet. "You wouldn't have lasted a second in their air. You
did the right thing. Go on."
"Well, I got to the ship and got it off. I didn't have time to
save anything but myself. They followed me all the way, but
they didn't shoot. I think there's still one of them upstairs
now."
"We'll sweep for him, but there's nothing we can do about
him in any case except keep him located. You bailed out, I
gather."
"Yes. Otherwise I wouldn't have had a chance they
seemed to want me back in the worst way. They must have
the ship by now, and the coordinates for the colony too."
"Oh, they've had those coordinates since we first landed,"
Rullman said. "You were lucky, Mr. Sweeney, and bold. too.
You bring back a sense of immediacy that I haven't felt for
years, since our first escape. But there's one more problem."
"What is it? If I can help"
"There's a test we'll have to make," Rullman said. "Your
story seems to hold water; and I really don't see how you
could have become what you are, unless you were really one
of us. But we have to be certain."
"Sure," Sweeney said. "Let's go."
Rullman beckoned and led him out of the office through a
low stone door. The corridor through which they passed was
so like all those Sweeney had seen on the Moon that he scarce-
ly bothered to notice it. Even 'the natural gravity and circulat-
ing, unprocessed air were soothing rather than distracting.
It was the test that worried Sweeney, precisely because he
knew that he would be helpless to affect the outcome. Either
the Port Authority's experts had put him together cunningly
enough to pass any test, or
or he would never have the chance to become human.
Rullman nodded Sweeney through another door into a long,
low-ceilinged room furnished with half a dozen laboratory
benches and a good deal of glassware. The air was more active
here; as on the Moon, there were ventilators roiling it. Some-
one came around a towering, twisted fractionating apparatus
in which many small bubbles orbited, and moved toward
them. It was, Sweeney saw, a small glossy-haired girl, with
white hands and dark eyes and delicately precise feet. She was
wearing the typical technie's white jacket, and a plum-colored
skirt.
"Hello, Dr. Rullman. Can I help?"
"Sure, if you can neglect that percolator a while, Mike. I
want to run an ID typing; we've got a new man here. All
right?"
"Oh, I think so. It'll take a minute to get the sera out." She
moved away from them to another desk and began to take
out ampoules and shake them before a hooded light. Sweeney
watched her. He had seen female techniques before, but none
so modelled, so unconstrained, or so close as this. He felt
light-headed, and hoped that he would not be asked to speak
for a little while. There was sweat on his palms and a mum-
bling of blood in his inner ear, and he thought perhaps he
might cry.
He had been plunged into the midst of his untested, long-
delayed adolescence, and he liked it no better than anyone
ever had.
But his diamond-etched caution did not blur completely.
He remembered-to remember that the girl had been as little
surprised to see him as the two young men who had found
him climbing the col had been. Why? Surely Dr. Rullman was
not the only Adapted Man to know everyone in the colony by
sight, and hence the only one able to feel consternation at the
sight of a strange face. By this time, the settlers on Ganymede
should know each other's slightest wrinkles, should have com-
mitted to memory every gesture, mannerism, dimple, shad-
ing, flaw or virtue that would help them to tell each other
from the hostile remainder of overwhelming mankind.
The girl took Sweeney's hand, and for a moment the train
of thought fell apart completely. Then there was a sharp stab
in the tip of his right middle finger, and Mike was expressing
droplets of blood into little puddles of bluish solution, spotted
in sets of three on a great many slips of thin glass. Micro-
scope slides; Sweeney had seen them before. As for the blood,
she could have more if she wanted it.
But he returned doggedly to the question. Why had the
young men and Mike failed to be surprised by Sweeney? Was
it  their  age-group  that  counted?  The  original  colonists  of
Ganymede would know both each other and their children
by sight, while the youngsters to whom everything was es-
sentially new would see nothing strange in a new face.
Children: then the colonists were fertile. There had never
been a hint of that, back on the Moon. Of course it meant
nothing to Sweeney personally. Not a thing.
"Why, you're trembling," the girl said in a troubled voice.
"It was only a little nick. You'd better sit down."
"Of course," Rullman said immediately. "You've been
under quite a strain, Mr. Sweeney; forgive me for being so
thoughtless. This will be over in just a moment."
Sweeney sat down gratefully and tried to think about noth-
ing. Both the girl and Rullman were now also seated, at the
bench, examining with microscopes the little puddles of di-
luted blood Mike had taken from Sweeney.
"Type 0, Rh negative," the girl said. Rullman was taking
notes.  "MsMs,  P negative,  cdE/cde,  Lutheran a-negative,
Kell-Cellano negative, Lewis a-minus b-plus."
"Hmm," Rullman said, unilluminatingly, all as one sound.
"Also Duffy a-negative, Jk-a, U positive. Jay positive, Brad-
bury-immune, platelets IV, and non-sickling. A pretty clean
sweep. Mean anything to you, Mike?"
"It should," she said, looking at Sweeney speculatively.
"You want me to match him, then."
Rullman nodded. The girl came to Sweeney's side and the
spring-driven lancet went snick against another of his finger-
tips. After she went back to the bench, Sweeney heard the
sound again, and saw her brush her own left middle finger-
tip against a slide. Silence.
"Compatible, Dr. Rullman."
Rullman turned to Sweeney and smiled for the first time.
"You pass," he said. He seemed genuinely glad. "Welcome,
Mr. Sweeney. Now if you'll come back to my office, we'll see
what we can do about placing you in living quarters, and of
course in a job we've plenty of those. Thanks, Mike."
"You're welcome. Goodbye, Mr. Sweeney. It looks like I'll
be seeing a lot more of you."
Sweeney nodded and gulped. It was not until he was back
in Rullman's office that he could control his voice.
"What was that all about. Dr. Rullman? I mean, I know
you were typing my blood, but what did it tell you?"
"It told me your bona fides," Rullman said. "Blood groups
are inheritable; they follow the Mendelian laws very strictly.
Your blood pattern gave me your identity, not as an indi-
vidual, but as a member of a family. In other words, they
showed that you really are what you claim to be, a descendant
of Bob Sweeney and Shirley Leverault."
"I see. But you matched me against the girl, too. What did
that test?"
"The so-called private factors, the ones that appear only
within a family and not in the general population,"-Rullman
said. "You see, Mr. Sweeney, as we reckon such matters here,
Michaela Leverault is your niece."

2

For at least the tenth time in two months, Mike was looking
at Sweeney with astonishment, troubled and amused at once.
"Now where," she said, "did you get that idea?"
 The question, as usual, was dangerous, but Sweeney took
his time. Mike knew that he was always slow to answer ques-
tions, and sometimes seemed not to hear them at all. The need
for such a protective habit was luridly obvious to Sweeney,
and he was only postponing the moment when it should be-
come just as obvious to the Ganymedians; only the plainly
pathological introversion of his character as a whole had ex-
cused him even thus far from a suspicion that he was duck-
ing the hard ones.
Sooner or later, Sweeney "fas sure, that suspicion would
arise. Sweeney had had no experience of women, but he was
nevertheless convinced that Mike was an exceptional sample.
Her quickness of penetration sometimes seemed close to tele-
pathy. He mulled the question, leaning on the railing around
the hedge below the mountain, looking reflectively into the
Gouge, constructing his answer. Each day he had to shorten
that mulling-time, though the questions grew no less difficult
for his pains.
"From the Fort cops," he said. "I've got only two answers
to that question, Mike. Anything I didn't get from my mother,
I got from spying on the cops."
Mike, too, looked down into the mists of the Gouge. It was
a warm summer day, and a long onethree and a half Earth
days long, while the satellite was on the sunward side of Jup-
iter, and coming, with Jupiter, closer and closer to the sun.
The wind which blew over the flute-mouthpiece of rock on
this side of the mountain was as gentle and variable as a
flautist's breath, and did not stir the enormous tangled stolons
and runners which filled the bottom of the great valley, or
the wrap-around leaves which were plastered to them like so
many thousands of blue-green M6bius- strips.
It was not quiet down there, but it seemed quiet. There
were many more thrums and rummums of rolling rocks and
distant avalanches than one heard during the cold weather.
The granite-skinned roots were growing rapidly while their
short time was come, burrowing insistently into the walls of
the valley, starting new trees and new rocks. In the cliffs, the
warm weather changed water-of-crystallization from Ice IV to
Ice III, the bound water snapping suddenly from one volume
to another, breaking the rock strata apart. Sweeney knew how
that worked; that was exfoliation; it was common on the
Moon, though on the Moon it was caused by the re-freezing of
Ice I in the gypsum strata. But the end-result was the same:
rock-slides.
All these incessant erratic rumbles and muted thunders
were the sounds of high summer in the Gouge. They were as
peaceful to Sweeney's ears as bee-buzz is to an Earthman,
though Sweeney had never encountered bee-buzz except in
books.  And like growing things everywhere,  the terrific
gnarled creepers down below sent up into the Adapted Men's
air a fresh complacent odor, the specific smell of vegetable
battle-unto-death which  kills  animal  nostrils  and  animal
glands into forgetting past struggles of their own.
Ganymede was, as a matter of fact, a delightful world,
even for a dead man. Or solely for a dead man.
"I can't understand why the Port cops would waste time
batting lies back and forth," Mike said at last. "They know
we weren't doing any commerce-raiding. We've never been so
much as off Ganymede since we landed here. And we couldn't
get off if we wanted to, now. Why should they pretend that we
did? Why would they talk about it as if it was a fact, espe-
cially since they didn't know you were listening? It's sense-
less."
"I don't know," Sweeney said. "It never entered my head
that you weren't commerce-raiding. If I'd had any notion that
they weren't telling the truth. I'd have listened for clues to tell
me why they weren't. But it never entered my head. And now
it's too late; all I can do is guess."
"You must have heard something. Something you don't re-
member consciously. I can guess, too, but it's your guess that's
important. You were listening to them; I wasn't. Try, Don."
"Well," Sweeney said, "maybe they didn't know that what
they were saying was untrue. There's no law that says a Port
cop has to be told the truth by his bosses. They're back on
Earth; I was on the Moon, and so were they. And they
sounded pretty convinced; the subject kept coming up, all the
time, just casually, as if everybody knew about it. They all
believed that Ganymede was raiding passenger liners as far
m as the orbit of Mars. It was a settled fact. That's how I
heard it."
"That fits," Mike said. Nevertheless, she was not looking at
Sweeney; instead, she bent her head farther down over the rim
of the Gouge, her hands locked together before her in dim
space, until her small breasts were resting lightly on the rail-
ing. Sweeney took a long breath. The effluvium of the vines
suddenly seemed anything but lulling.
"Tell me, Don," she said. "When did you hear the cops
begin to talk this subject up? For the first time, I mean?".
His veering attention snapped back into the frigid center of
his being so suddenly that it left behind a bright weal, as if a
lash had been laid across his exposed brain. Mike was dan-
gerous; dangerous. He had to remember that.
"When?" he said. "I don't know, Mike. The days were all
alike. It was toward the end, I think. When I was a kid I used
to hear them talk about us as if we were criminals, but I
couldn't figure out why. I guessed that it was because we were
different, that's all. It was only at the end that they began to
talk about specific crimes, and even then it didn't make much
sense to me. My mother and I hadn't ever pirated any 'ships,
that was for sure."
"Only at the last. That's what I thought. They began to talk
like that for the first time when your power began to fail.
Isn't that right?"
Sweeney gave that one a long think, at least 'twice as long
as would ordinarily have been safe before Mike. He already
knew where Mike's questions were leading him. In this in-
stance, a quick answer would be fatal. He had to appear to be
attempting, with some pain, to dredge up information which
was meaningless to him. After a while, he said:
"Yes, it was about then. I was beginning to cut down on
tapping their calls; it didn't take much power, but we needed
all we bad. Maybe I missed hearing the important parts; that's
possible."
"No," Mike said grimly. "I think you heard all of it. Or all
you were meant to hear. And I think you interpreted what you
heard in exactly the way they wanted you to, Don."
"It could be," Sweeney said slowly. "I was-only a kid. I
would have taken what I heard at face value. But that would
mean that they knew we were there. I wonder. I don't remem-
ber exactly, but I don't think we had begun to sneak power
from them yet. We were still thinking about putting a sun-cell
on the surface, in those days."
"No, no. They must have known you were there years be-
fore you began to tap their power. Rullman's been talking
about that lately. There are simple ways of detecting even a
phone-line tap, and your strontium battery couldn't have been
undetected very long, either. They waited only until they
could be sure they'd get you when they finally raided you. It's
the way they think. In the meantime, they fed you hokum
when you eavesdropped."
So much for the story the cops had told Sweeney to tell.
Only the extreme of stupidity which it assumed in the
Adapted Men bad protected it this long; nobody defends him-
self, at least at first, upon the assumption that his opponent
thinks he is a microcephalic idiot. The deception had lasted
two months, but it would never last 300 days.
"Why would they do that?" Sweeney said. "They were going
to kill us as soon as they couldas soon as they could work
out a way to do it without damaging our equipment. What
did they care what we thought?"
"Torture," Mike said, straightening and locking her hands
around the railing with the automatic tetany of a bird's claws
touching a perch. She looked across the Gouge at the dis-
tant, heaped range on the other side. "They wanted you to
think that everything your people had planned and done had
come to nothingthat we had wound up as nothing but
vicious criminals. Since they couldn't get to you and your
mother immediately, they amused themselves with strafing
you while they worked. Maybe they thought ifd help soften
you up goad you into making some mistake that would
make the job of getting in to you easier. Or maybe they did it
just because they enjoyed it. Because it made them feel good."
After a short silence, Sweeney said, "Maybe that was it.
Maybe not. I don't know, Mike."
She turned to him suddenly and took him by the shoul-
ders. Her eyes were crystal blue. "How could you know?" she
said, her fingers digging into his deltoid muscles. "How could
you know anything when there was nobody to tell you? The
Earth must be full of lies about us nowlies, and nothing but
lies!  You've  got  to  forget  themforget  them  alljust  as
though you'd just been born. You have just been born, Don,
believe me. Only just. What they fed you on the Moon was
lies; you've got to start learning the truth here, learning it
from the beginning, like a child!"
She held him a moment longer. She was actually shaking
him. Sweeney did not know what to say; he did not even know
what emotion to mimic. The emotion he felt was still almost
unknown; he did not dare let it show, let alone let it loose.
While the girl looked furiously into his eyes, he could not
even blink.
After all, he really had been born some time ago. Born
dead.
The painful, tenfold pressure on his shoulders changed
suddenly to a residual tingling over a deep ache, and Mike's
hands dropped to her sides. She looked away, across the
Gouge again. "It's no use," she said indistinctly. "I'm sorry.
That's a hell of a way for a girl to talk to her uncle."
"That's all right, Mike. I was interested."
"I'm sure of it. . . . Let's go for a walk, Don. I'm sick of
looking into the Gouge." She was already striding back toward
the looming mountain under which the colony lived.
Sweeney watched her go, his icy blood sighing in his ears.
It was terrible to be unable to think; he had never known the
dizziness of it until he had met Mike Leverault, but now it
seemed determined never to leave himit abated sometimes,
but it never quite went away. He had been ruefully glad, at
the very beginning, that the close "blood" tie between himself
and Mike, a genetic tie which was quite real since he was in
fact Shirley Leverault's Adapted son, would prevent his be-
coming interested in the girl in accordance with Earth custom.
But in fact it had had no such effect. Earth tabus had no
force for him, and here on Ganymede, that particular tabu
had been jettisoned summarily. Rullman had told him why.
"Don't give it a second thought." he had said on that very
first day, grinning into Sweeney's stunned face. "We haven't
any genetic reasons for forbidding inbreeding; quite the con-
trary. In a small group like ours, the strongest and most im-
mediate evolutionary influence is genetic drift. Unless we took
steps to prevent it, there'd be a loss of unfixed genes with
every new generation. Obviously we can't allow that, or we'd
wind up with a group in which there'd be no real individ-
uals: everybody would be alike in some crucial and abso-
lutely unpredictable respect. No tabu is worth that kind of out-
come."
Rullman had gone on from there. He had said that simply
permitting inbreeding could not in itself halt genetic drift;
that in some respects it encouraged it; and that the colony was
taking positive measures to circumvent drift, measures which
would begin to bear fruit within eight generations. He had
begun by this time to talk in terms of alleles and isomorphs
and lethal recessives, and to scribble such cryptograms as
rrR:rRR/('rA)rr/R'Rr on the sheet of mica before him; and
then, suddenly, he had looked up and realized that he had
lost his audience. That, too, had amused him.
Sweeney bad not minded. He knew he was ignorant. Be-
sides, the colony's plans meant nothing to him; he was on
Ganymede to bring the colony to an end. As far as Mike was
concerned, he knew that nothing would govern him but his
monumental loneliness, as it governed everything else that he
did and felt.
But he had been astonished to discover that, covertly at
least, that same loneliness governed everyone else in the col-
ony, with the sole possible exception of RuUman.
Mike looked back, and then, her face hardening, quickened
her pace. Sweeney followed, as he knew he had to; but he was
still struggling to think.
Much of what he had learned about the colony, if it was
trueand at least everything be had been able to check had
passed that testhad involved his unlearning what he had
been taught by the Port cops. The cops, for instance, had said
that the alleged commerce-raiding had had- two purposes:
secondarily to replenish food and equipment, but primarily
to augment the colonists' numbers by capturing normal peo-
ple for Adaptation.
There was no commerce-raiding going on now, that much
was certain, and Sweeney was inclined to believe Mike's de-
nial that there had. ever been any in the past. Once one under-
stood the ballistics of space-travel, one understood also that
piracy is an impossible undertaking, simply because it is more
work than it is worth. But beyond this persuasive practical ob-
jection, there was the impossibility of the motive the Port
cops had imputed to the Ganymedians. The primary purpose
was nonsense. The colonists were fertile, and hence did not
need recruits; and besides, it was impossible to convert a nor-
mal adult human being into an Adapted Manpantropy had
to begin before conception, as it had been begun with Sween-
ey.
Calamitously, the reverse also appeared to be true. Sweeney
had been unable to find anybody in the colony who believed it
possible to convert an Adapted Man back into a human being.
The promise the Port cops had held out to himthough they
had never made it directlythus far appeared to be founded
upon nothing better than dust. If it were nevertheless possible
to bring a man like Sweeney back to life, only Ruttman knew
about it, and Sweeney had to be hypercautious in questioning
Rullman. The scientist had already made some uncomfortable
deductions from the sparse facts and ample lies with which
Sweeney had, by order of the Port cops, provided him. Like
everyone else on Ganymede, Sweeney had learned to respect
the determination and courage which were bodied forth in
everything Rullman did and said; but unlike anybody else on
Ganymede, he feared Rullman's understanding.
And in the meantimewhile Sweeney waited, with a fatal-
ism disturbed only by Mike Leverault, for Rullman to see
through him to the other side of the gouge which was Sween-
ey's frigid tangled substitute for a human soulthere re-
mained the question of the crime.
We must have those men back. Why? Because we need to
know what they know. Why not ask them? They won't tell us.
Why not? Because they're afraid. What of? They committed
a crime and must be punished. What did they do?
SILENCE
So the question of the crime still remained. It had not been
commerce-raiding; even had the Ganymedians achieved the
impossible and had pirated spacecraft, that would not have
been the first crime, the one which had made the Adapted
Men flee to Ganymede in the first place, the crime from which
the whole technique of pantropy had sprung. What high crime
had the parents of the Adapted Men committed, to force them
to maroon their children on Ganymede for what they must
have believed was to be forever?
The responsibility was not the children's, that much was
also obvious. The children had never been on the Earth at all.
They had been born and raised on the Moon, in strict secre-
cy. The cops' pretense that the colonists themselves were
wanted back for some old ,evil was another fraud, like the
story about commerce-raiding. If a crime had been com-
mitted on Earth, it had been committed by the normal Earth-
men whose frigid children roamed Ganymede now; it could
have been committed by no-one else.
Except, of course, by Rullman. Both on the Moon and on
Ganymede it was the common assumption that Rullman had
been an Earth-normal human being once. That was impossible,
but it was agreed to be so. Rullman himself turned the ques-
tion away rather than deny it. Perhaps the crime had been his
alone, since there was nobody else who could have com-
mitted it.
But what crime? Nobody on Ganymede could, or would,
tell Sweeney. None of the colonists believed in it. Most of
them thought that nothing was held against them but their
difference from normal human beings; the exceptional few
thought that the development of pantropy itself was the es-
sential crime. Of that, clearly, Rullman was guilty, if "guilty"
was the applicable word.
Why pantropy, or the responsibility for developing it,
should be considered criminal was a mystery to Sweeney, but
there was a great deal else that he didn't know about Earth
laws and standards, so he wasted no more time in puzzling
over it. If Earth said that inventing or using paniropy was a
crime, that was what it was; and the Port cops had already
told him that he must not fail to brins. back Rullman, no mat-
ter how grievously he failed to fulfill all his other instruc-
tions. It was an answer, and that was enough.
But why hadn't the cops said so in the first place? And
why, if pantropy was a crime, had the cops themselves com-
pounded that identical crimeby creating Sweeney?
Belatedly, he quickened his pace. Mike had already disap-
peared under the lowering brow of the great cavern. He. could
not remember noticing, now, which of the dozen smaller en-
trances she had used, and he himself did not know where
more than two of them led. He chose one at random.
Four turns later, he was hopelessly lost.
This was unusual, but it was not entirely unexpected. The
network of tunnels under Howe's pi was a labyrintb, not only
in fact but by intention. In drilling out their home, the
Adapted Men had taken into consideration the possibility
that gun-carrying men in .spacesuits might some day come
looking for them. Such a man would never find his way out
from under the mountain, unless an Adapted Man who had
memorized the maze led him out; and he would never find an
Adapted Man, either. MemorizatioTi was the only key, for no
maps of the maze existed, and the colonists had a strictly en-
forced law against drawing one.
Sweeney had perhaps half of the maze committed to mem-
ory. If he did not meet someone he knewfor after all, no-
body was hiding from himhe could count upon entering a
familiar section sooner or later. In the meantime, he was
curious to see anything that there was to be seen.
The first thing of interest that he saw was Dr. Rullman. The
scientist emerged froln a tunnel set at a 20 angle to the one
Sweeney was in at the moment, going away from Sweeney and
unaware of him. After an instant's hesitation, Sweeney fol-
lowed him, as silently as possible. The noisy ventilation sys-
tem helped to cover his footfalls.
Rullman had a habit of vanishing for periods ranging
from half a day to a week. Anybody who knew where he went
and what he did there did not talk about it. Now was a
chance, perhaps, for Sweeney to find out for himself. It was
possible, of course, that Rullman's disappearances were re-
lated to the forthcoming meteorological crisis on Ganymede,
about which Sweeney had been hearing an increasing number
of hints. On the other hand . . . what was on the other hand?
There could be no harm in investigating.
Rullman walked rapidly, his chin ducked into his chest, as
though he were travelling a route so familiar that habit could
be entrusted with carrying him along it. Once Sweeney al-
most lost him, and thereafter cautiously closed up the interval
between them a little; the labyrinth was sufficiently complex
to offer plenty of quick refuges should Rullman show signs of
turning back. As the scientist moved, there came from him an
unpredictable but patterned series of wordless sounds, intoned
rather than spoken. They communicated nothing, actuated no
mechanisms, gave Rullman no safe-conductas was evi-
denced by the fact that Sweeney was travelling the same
course without making any such noise. Indeed, Rullman him-
self seemed to be unaware that he was making it.
Sweeney was puzzled. He had never heard anybody hum
before.
The rock beneath Sweeney's feet began to slope downward,
gently but definitely. At the same time, he noticed that the
air was markedly warmer, and was becoming more so with
almost every step. A dim sound of laboring machinery was
pulsing in it.
It got hotter, and still hotter, but Rullman did not hesitate.
The noisewhich Sweeney could now identify definitely as
that of pumps, many of themalso increased. The two men
were now walking down a long, straight corridor, bordered
by closed doors rather than maze exits; it was badly lit, but
Sweeney nevertheless allowed Rullman to get farther ahead of
him. Toward the other end of this corridor, the heat began to
diminish, to Sweeney's relief, for he had begun to feel quite
dizzy. Rullman gave no indication that he even noticed it.
At this end Rullman ducked abruptly into a side entrance
which turned out to be the top of a flight of stone steps.
Quite a perceptible draft of warm air was blowing down it.
Warm air, Sweeney knew, was supposed to rise in a gravita-
tional field; why it should be going in the opposite direction he
could not imagine, especially since there appeared to be no
blowers in operation on this level. Since it was blowing toward
Rullman, it would also carry any noise Sweeney made ahead
of him. He tiptoed cautiously down.
Rullman was not in sight when Sweeney left the stairwell.
There was before Sweeney, instead, a long, high-ceilinged
passageway which curved gently to the right until vision was
cut off. Along the inside of the curve, regularly spaced, were
crouching machines, each one with a bank of laterally-coiled
metal tubing rearing before it. These were the sources of the
sounds Sweeney had heard.
Here, it was cold again; abnormally cold, despite the heavy
current of warm air blowing down the stab-well. Something,
Sweeney thought, was radically wrong with the behaviour of
the thermody-namic laws down here.
He slouched cautiously ahead. After only a few steps, past
the first of the laboring mechanismsyes, it was coldest by
the shining coils, as if cold were actually radiating from them
he found an undeniable aJrlock. Furthermore, it was in use:
the outer door was sealed, but a little light beside it said that
the lock was cycling. Opposite the lock, on the other wall, one
of a row of spacesuit lockers hung open and tenantless.
But it was the legend painted on the airlock valve which
finally made everything fall into place. It said:
PANTROPE LABORATORY ONE
Danger  Keep Out!
Sweeney dodged away from the airlock with a flash of pure
panic, as a man wanted for murder might jump upon seeing a
sign saying "50,000 volts." It was all clear now. There was
nothing wrong with the thermodynamics of this corridor that
was not similarly "wrong" inside any refrigerator. The huge
engines were pumps, all rightheat pumps. Their coils were
frost-free only because there was no water vapor in Gany-
mede's air; nevertheless, they were taking heat from that air
and transferring it to the other side of that rock wall, into the
pantrobe lab.
No wonder the laboratory was sealed off from the rest of
the maze by an airlockand that RuUman had had to put on
a spacesuit to go through it.
It was hot on the other side. Too hot for an Adapted Man.
But what Adapted Man?
What good was pantropy to Rullman here? That phase of
history was supposed to be over and done with. Yet what was
going on in this laboratory obviously was as alien to the en-
vironment of Ganymede as Ganymede's environment was to
Earth's.
A is to B as Bis towhat? To C? Or to A?
Was Rullman, in the face of the impossibility of such a
project, trying to re-adapt his people to Earth?
There should be dials or meters on this side of the wall
which would give more information as to what it was like on
the other side. And there they were, in a little hooded embra-
sure which Sweeney had overlooked in the first shock. They
said:

r 59 
Degrees F.

Millibars

047                        0140
Dew Point            02 Tens rnrn Hg
Some of these meant nothing to Sweeney: he had never
before encountered pressure expressed in millibars, let alone
the shorthand way it was registered on the meter before him;
nor did he know how to compute relative humidity from the
dew point. With the Fahrenheit scale he was vaguely familiar,
vaguely enough to have forgotten how to convert it into
Centigrade readings. But
Oxygen tension!
There was one planet, and one only, where such a measure-
ment could have any meaning.
Sweeney ran.
He was no longer running by the time he had reached Rull-
man's office, although he was still thoroughly out of breath.
Knowing that he would be unable to cross back over the top
of the pantrobe lab again, feeling that heat beating up at him
and knowing at least in part what it meant, he had gone in the
opposite direction, past the gigantic heat-exchangers, and
blundered his way up from the other side. The route he had
followed had covered over three erratic miles, and several ad-
ditional discoveries which bad shaken him almost as hard as
had the first one.
He was entirely unsure that he was even rational any more.
But he had to know. Nothing was important to him now but
the answer to the main question, the permanent founding or
dashing of the hope under which he had lived so long.
RuUman was already back in the office, almost surrounded
by his staff. Sweeney pushed his way forward among the
Ganymedians, his jaw set, his diaphragm laboring.
"This time we're going to close all the safety doors," Rull-
man said into the phone. "The pressure fronts are going to be
too steep to allow us to rely on the outside locks alone. See to
it that everybody knows where he's to be as soon as the alert
sounds, and this time make it stick; we don't want anybody
trapped between doors for the duration. This time it may
swoop down on us at damn short notice."
The phone murmured and cut out.
"Hallam, how's the harvesting? You've got less than a week,
you know."
"Yes, Dr. Rullmanwe'll be through in time."
"And another thingoh, hello, Donald. What's the mat-
ter? You're looking a little pasty. I'm pretty busy, so make it
fast, please."
"I'll make it fast," Sweeney said. "I can put it all into one
question if I can talk to you privately. For just a few sec-
onds,"
Rullman's reddish eyebrows went up, but after examining
Sweeney's face more closely, the scientist nodded and rose.
"Come next door, then. . . . Now then, youngster, spit it out.
With the storm coming up, we don't have time for shilly-
shallying."
"All right," Sweeney said, taking a long breath. "This is it:
Is it possible to change an Adapted Man back into a human
being? An Earth-normal human being?"
Rullman's eyes narrowed very slowly; and for what seemed
a long time, he said nothing. Sweeney looked back. He was
afraid, but he was -no longer afraid of Rullman.
"You've been down below, I see," the scientist said at last,
drumming at the base of his chin with two fingers. "And from
the terms you use, it strikes me that Shirley Leverault's edu-
cational methods leftwell, the cliche springs to mind
something to be desired. But we'll let those things pass for
now.
"The answer to your question, in any case, is: No. You will
never be able to live a normal life in any other place than
Ganymede, Donald. And 111 tell you something else that your
mother should have told you: You ought to be damned glad
of it."
"Why should I?" Sweeney said, almost emotionlessly.
"Because, like every other person in this colony, you have
a Jay-positive blood type. This wasn't concealed from you
when we found it, on the first day you joined us, but evidently
it didn't registeror had no special significance for you. Jay-
positive blood doesn't mean anything on Ganymede, true
enough. But Jay-positive Earth-normal people are cancer-
prones. They are as susceptible to cancer as hemophiliacs
are to bleeding to deathand upon equally short notice.
"If by some miracle you should be changed to an Earth-
normal man, Donald, you would be under immediate sentence
of death. So I say you should be glad that it can't happen
damn glad I"

3

The crisis on Ganymedethough of course it would not even
be an incident, were there nobody there to live through it
comes to fruition roughly every eleven years and nine months.
It is at the end of this period that Jupiterand hence his fif-
teen-fold family of moons and moonletsmakes his closest
approach to the Sun.
The eccentricity of Jupiter's orbit is only 0.0484, which
amounts to very little for an ellipse which averages 483,300,-
000 miles from its focal points. Nevertheless, at perihelion
Jupiter is nearly ten million miles closer to the Sun than he is
at aphelion; and the weather on Jupiter, never anything less
than hellish, becomes indescribable during that approach. So,
on a smaller but sufficient scale, does the weather on Gany-
mede.
The perihelion temperature on Ganymede never rises high
enough to melt the ice of Neptune's Trident, but it does lift
through the few niggardly degrees necessary to make the
vapor pressure of Ice III known in Ganymede's air. Nobody
on Earth could dream of calling the resulting condition "hu-
midity," but Ganymede's weather turns upon such microscopic
changes; an atmosphere containing no water will react rapidly
to even a fractional vapor content. For one thing, it will pick
up more heat. The resulting cycle does not go through more
than a few turns before it flattens out, but the end-product is
no less vicious.
The colony, Sweeney gathered, had come through one such
period without any but minor difficulties, simply by withdraw-
ing entirely under the mountain; but for many reasons that
course was no longer possible. There were now semi-perma-
nent installationsweather stations, observatories, radio bea-
cons, bench-marks and other surveying monumentswhich
could be dismantled only with the loss of much time before
the crisis, and re-established with still more loss afterwards.
Furthermore, some of them would be needed to report and
record the progress of the crisis itself, and hence had to stay
where they were.
"And don't get the idea," Rullman told a mass meeting of
the colonists, gathered, in the biggest cavern of the maze,
"that even the mountain can protect us all the way through
this one. I've told you before, but I'll remind you again, that
the climax this year coincides with the peak of the sunspot
cycle. Everybody's seen what that does to the weather on Ju-
piter proper. We can expect similar effects, to scale, on Gany-
mede. There's going to be trouble no matter how well we pre-
pare. All we can hope for is that the inevitable damage will
be minor. Anybody who thinks we're going to get off scot-free
has only to listen for a minute."
In the calculated, dramatic pause which followed, every-
body listened. The wind was audible even down here, howl-
ing over the outlets and intakes of the ventilation system, car-
ried, amplified and encrusted with innumerable echoes, by
the metal miles of the air ducts. The noise was a reminder
that, at the height of the coming storm, the exterior ports
would all be closed, so that everyone under the mountain
would have to breathe recirculated air. After a moment, a
mass sighan involuntary intake of breath against 'the easily
imagined futurepassed through RuUman's audience. He
grinned.
"I don't mean to frighten you," he said. "We'll get along.
But I don't want any complacency either, and above all, I
won't stand for any sloppiness in the preparations. It's parti-
cularly important that we keep the outside installations intact
this time, because we're going to need them before the end of
.the next Jovian yeara long time before that, if everything
continues to go well."
The grin was suddenly quenched. "I don't need to tell some
of you how important it is that we get that project completed
on schedule," Rullman said, quietly. "We may not have much
time left before the Port cops decide to move in on usit
amazes me that they haven't already done so, particularly
since we're harboring a fugitive the cops troubled to chase
almost into our atmosphereand we can't plan on their giv-
ing us any leeway.
"For those of you who know about the project only in out-
line, let me emphasize that there is a good deal more hanging
from it than immediately meets the eye. Man's whole future
in space may be determined by how well we carry it off; we
can't afford to be lickedneither by the Earth nor by the
weather. If we are, our whole long struggle for survival will
have been meaningless. I'm counting on everyone here to see
to it that that doesn't happen."
It was difficult to be sure of what Rullman was talking
about when he got onto the subject of the "project." It had
something to do with the pantrope labs, that much was clear;
and it bad to do also with the colony's original spaceship,
which Sweeney had run across that same day, stored in a
launching chimney almost identical with the one on the Moon
out of which Sweeney had been rocketed to begin his own
free life, and fittedif judgment based upon a single brief
look could be trustedeither for a long voyage by a few
people, or for a short trip by a large group.
Beyond that, Sweeney knew nothing about the "project,"
except for one additional fact of which he could make noth-
ing: it had something to do with the colony's long-term ar-
rangements for circumventing the loss of unfixed penes. Pos-
sibly-nobody would be less abTe to assess the possibility than
Sweeneythe only connection this fact had with the "pro-
ject" was that it was long-term.
Sweeney, in any event, knew better than to ask questions.
The storm that was going on inside him took precedence,
anyhow; as far as he was concerned, it was even more im-
portant than the storms that were sweeping Ganymede, or any
that might sweep that world in the foreseeable future. He was
not used to thinking in terms of a society, even a small one;
Pullman's appeals to that Ideal were simply incomprehensible
to him He was the solar system's most thorough-going indi-
vidualistnot bynature, but by design.
Perhaps Rullman sensed it. Whether he did or not, the as-
signment he gave Sweeney might have been perfectly calcu-
lated to throw a lonely man into the ultimate isolation he
feared; to put the burden of an agonizing decision entirely
upon the shoulders of the man who had to carry it; orto
isolate a Port spy where he could do the least harm while the
colony's attention was fully occupied elsewhere. Or possibly,
even probably, he had none of these motives in mind; what
counted, in any event, was what he did.
He assigned Sweeney to the South polar weather station,
for the duration of the emergency.'
There was almost nothing to do there but watch the crys-
tals of methane "snow" bank against the windows, and keep
the station tight. The' instruments reported back to base by
themselves, and needed no further attention. At the height of
the crisis, perhaps, Sweeney might find himself busy for a
while; or, he might not. That remained to be seen.
In the meantime, he had plenty of time to ask questions
and nobody to ask them of but himself, and the hooting, con-
stantly rising wind.
There was an interlude. Sweeney hiked, on foot, back to
Howe's H to recover the radio transceiver he had buried there,
and then hiked back to the weather station. It took him eleven
days, and efforts and privations of which Jack London might
have made a whole novel. To Sweeney it meant nothing; he
did not know whether or not he would want to use the radio
after he got back with it; and as for the saga of his solo jour-
ney, he did not know that it was a saga, or even that it had
been unusually difficult and painful. He had nothing against
which to compare it, not even fiction; he had never read any.
He measured things by the changes they made in his situation,
and possession of the radio had not changed the questions he
was asking himself; it had only made it possible to act upon
the answers, once he had any answers.
Coming back to the station, he saw a pinnah-bird. It bur-
rowed into the nearest drift as soon as it saw him, but for the
preceding instant he had had company. He never saw it again,
but now and then he thought about it.
The question, put simply, was: What was he going to do now?
That he was thoroughly in love with Mike Leverault could
no longer be argued. It was doubly difficult to come to grips
with the emotion, however, because he did not know the name
of it, and so had to reason each time with the raw experience
itself, rather than with the more convenient symbol.  Each
time be thought about it, it shook him all over again. But
there it was.
As for the colonists, he was certain that they were not
criminals in any way, except by Earth's arbitary fiat. They
were a hard-working, courageous, decent lot, and had offered
to Sweeney the first disinterested friendliness he had ever
known.
And, like all the colonists, Sweeney could not help but ad-
mire RuUman.
There, in those three propositions, rested the case against
using the radio.
The time for reporting to Meikiejon was almost up. The
inert transceiver on the table before Sweeney had only to
send a single one of five notes, and the colony on Ganymede
would be ended. The notes were coded: -
WAVVY: Have custody need pickup
NAVVY: Have custody need help
WANY: Need custody have help
AAVYV:  Need custody need pickup
YYAWY: Have custody have pickup
What response the computer on board the ship would make,
what course of action it would dictate in response to any one
of those signals was unknown, but that was now almost be-
side the point. Any response would be inappropriate, since
not one of the five signals fitted the actual situationdespite
all the intellectual travail which had gone into tailoring them.
If no note were sent, Meikiejon would go away at the end
of 300 days. That might mean that Pullman's "project," what-
ever that was, would go throughbut that wouldn't save the
colony. It would take Earth a minimum of two generations to
breed and mature another Sweeney from the artificially main-
tained ovaries of mercifully long-dead Shirley Leverault, and
it was hardly likely that Earth would even try. Earth probably.
knew more than Sweeney did about the "project"it would
be difficult to know lessand if Sweeney himself failed to
stop it, the next attempt would most likely arrive as a bomb.
Earth would stop wanting "those men" back, once it became
evident that she couldn't get them even through so subtle a
double agent as Sweeney.
Item: chain reaction. There was, Sweeney knew, a consider-
able amount of deuterium on Ganymede, some of it locked in
the icy wastes of Neptune's Trident, a lesser amount scat-
tered through the rocks in the form of lithium deuteride. A
fission bomb going off here would stand an excellent chance
of starting a fusion explosion which would detonate the whole
satellite. If any still-active fragment of that explosion should
hit Jupiter, only a bare 665,000 miles away now, that. planet
would be quite large enough to sustain a Beth~ or carbon
cycle; it was diffuse, but it alone among the planets had the
mass. The wave front of that unimaginable catastrophe would
boil Earth's seas in their beds; it might alsothe probability
was about ~s -triggerr a nova outburst from the Sun,
though nobody would stay alive to be grateful very long if it
didn't.
Since Sweeney knew this, he had to assume that it was com-
mon knowledge, and that Earth would use chemical explosives
only on Ganymede. But would it? Common knowledge and
Sweeney had had precious little contact so far.
Still,  it hardly mattered.  If Earth bombed the colony, it
would be all up with him, regardless. Even the limited com-
panionship, the wordless love, the sense that he might yet be
born, all would be gone. He would be gone. So might the
little world.
But if he signalled Meikiejon and the computer, ha would
be taken alive away from Mike, away from RuUman, away
from the colony, away and away. He would stay his own
dead self. He might even have a new chance to learn that same
endless lesson about the shapes loneliness can take; or, Earth
might work a miracle and turn him into a live, Jay-positive
human being.                                    -
The wind rose and rose. The congruent furies of the storms
inside and outside Sweeney mounted together. Their con-
gruence made a classic example, had he been able to rec-
ognize it, of the literary device called "the pathetic fallacy"
but Sweeney had never read any fiction, and recognizing na-
ture in the process of imitating art would have been of no use
to him anyhow.
He did not even know that, when the crisis of the exterior
storm began to wear away the windward edge of the weather
station's foundations with a million teeth of invisible wrath,
his lonely battle to save the station might have made an epic.
Whole chapters, whole cantos, whole acts of what might have
been conscious heroism in another man, in a human being,
were thrown away while Sweeney went about his business,
his mind on his lonely debate.
There was no signal he could send that would tell Meikie-
jon or the computer the truth. He did not have custody of the
men Earth wanted, and he didn't want to have it, so it would
be idiotic to ask for help to get it. He no longer believed that
Earth "must have those men back," either for Earth's pur-
posesmysterious though they remainedor for his own,
essentially hopeless though his own appeared to be.
But any signal would take him off Ganymedeif he wanted
to be taken.
The crisis, he saw, was over. He made the station fast.
He checked the radio once more. It worked. He snapped
the turning pointer to one of its copper contacts and closed
the key, sending Meikiejon VVANY. After half an hour. the
set's oscillator began to peep rhythmically,  indicating that
Meikiejon was still in Ganymede's sky, and had heard.
Sweeney left the set on the table in the station, went back
to the mountain, and told Rullman what he was and what he
had done.
Rullman's fury was completely quiet, and a thousand times
more frightening than the most uncontrolled rage could have
been. He simply sat behind his desk and looked at Sweeney,
all the kindness gone out of his face, and the warmth out of
his eyes. After a few moments, Sweeney realized that the
blankness of Rullman's eyes meant that he was not seeing
him at all; his mind was turned inward. So was his rage.
"I'm astonished," he said, in a voice so even that it seemed
to contain no surprise at all. "Most of all, I'm astonished at
myself. I should have anticipated something like this. But I
didn't dream that they had the knowledge, or the guile, to
stake everything on a -long-term program like this. I have
been, in short, an idiot."
His voice took on, for a moment, a shade of color, but it
was so scathing that it made Sweeney recoil. And yet no sin-
gle word of condemnation of Sweeney had yet been forth-
coming from Rullman; the man was, instead, strafing himself.
Sweeney said tentatively:
"How could you have known? There were a lot of points
where I might have given myself away, but I was doing my
damndest not to. I might have kept the secret still longer, if
I'd wanted it that way."
"You?" Rullman said. The single syllable was worse than a
blow. "You're as blameless as a machine, Donald. I know too
much about pantropy to think otherwise. It's very easy to iso-
late an Adapted infant, prevent him from becoming a human
being at all, if you've sufficient ill-will to want to. Your be-
havior was predictable, after all."
"Was it?" Sweeney said, a little grimly. "I came and told
you, didn't I?"
"And what if you did? Can that change matters now? I'm
sure that Earth included that very high probability in its
plans. Insofar as you have loyalties at all, they were bound to
become divided; but it was probably calculated that they
would stay dividedthat is, would not change completely.
And so here you are, trying to play both ends against the mid-
dleyou yourself being the middleby betraying your mas-
querade to me at the same time you betray the colony to
Earth. Nothing can be accomplished by that."
"Are you sure?"
"Quite sure," Rullman said stonily. '1 suppose they offered
you an inducement. Judging by the questions you've asked me
before, they must have promised to make an Earth-normal
human being out of youas soon as they found out from us
how to do that. But the fact of the matter is that it can't be
done at all, and you know it. And now there's no future for
you with us, either. I'm sorry for you, Donald, believe me; it's
not your fault that they made you into a creature instead of a
person. But you are nothing now but a bomb that's already
gone off."
Sweeney had never known his father, and the hegemony of
the Port cops had been too diffuse to instill in him any fo-
cussed, automatic respect for persons standing in loco par-
entis. He discovered, suddenly, that he was furious with Rull-
man.
"That's a silly damn speech," he said, staring down and
across the desk at the seated, slightly bowed man. "Nothing's
gone off yet. There's plenty of information I can give you that
you might use, if you waat to work to get it. Of course if
you've given up in advance"
Rullman looked up. "What do you know?" he said, with
some puzzlement. "You said yourself that it would be the
computer on board this Capt. Meikiejon's ship that would
decide the course of action. And you can't communicate ef-
fectively with Meikiejon. This is a strange time to be bluffing,
Donald."
"Why would I bluff? I know more about what Earth is
likely to do with my message than anybody else in the colony.
My experience with Earth is more recent. I wouldn't have come
to you at all if I'd thought the situation to be hopelessand
if I hadn't carefully picked the one message to send to Meik-
iejon that I thought left the colony some hope. I'm not strad-
dling. I'm on your side. To send no message at all would have
been the worst possible thing to do. This way, we may have
a grace period."
"And just how," Rullman said slowly, "can you expect me
to trust you?"
"That's your problem," Sweeney said brusquely. "If I really
am still straddling, it's because the colony's failed to convince
me that my future lies here. And if that's the case, l's not
aloneand it's the colony's own fault for being so secretive
with its own people."
"Secretive?" Rullman said, with open astonishment now.
"About what?"
"About the 'project.' About the original crime Earth wants
you for. About why Earth wants you backyou in particular,
Dr. Rullman."
"Butthat's common knowledge, Donald. All of it."
"Maybe so. But it isn't common to meand most of the
original settlers take it all so much for granted that they can't
talk about it, except in little cryptic references, like a private
joke everybody's supposed to know. But everybody doesn't;
did you know .that? I've found that about half your second
generation here has only the foggiest notion of the past.
The amount of information available here to a newcomer
whether he's newly arrived like me, or just plain newborn
you could stick in a pinnah-bird's eye. And that's dangerous.
It's why I could have betrayed the colony completely -if I
hadn't decided against it, and you couldn't have stopped me."
Rullman leaned back and was quiet for quite a long time.
"Children often don't ask questions when they think they're
already expected to know the answers," he murmured. He
looked considerably more thunderstnick than he had when
Sweeney made his original announcement. "They like to ap-
pear knowing even when they aren't. It gives them status in
their own eyes."
"Children and spies," Sweeney said. "There are certain
questions neither of them can ask, and for almost the same
reasons. And the phonier the children's knowledge actually is,
the easier for the spy to get around among the adults."
"I begin to see," Rullman said. "We thought we were im-
mune to spying, because an Earth spy couldn't live here with-
out elaborate, detectable protections. But that was a problem
in physics, and that kind of problem is soluble. We should
have assumed so from the beginning. Instead, we made our-
selves socially as vulnerable as possible."
"That's how I see it. I'll bet that my father wouldn't have
let you get away with it if he'd been able to get away with
you. He was supposed to have been an expert in that kind of
thing. I don't know; I never knew him. And I suppose it's be-
side the point, anyhow."
"No," Rullman said. "It's very much to the point, and I
think you've just. proven it, Donald. Your father couldn't pre-
vent it, but perhaps he's given us an instrument for repairing
it."
"Meaning me?"
"Yes. Ringer or no ringer, the blood you carryand the
geneshave been with us from the beginning, and I know
how they show their effects. I see them now. Sit down, Don-
ald. I begin to hope. What shall we do?"
"First of all," Sweeney said, "please, please tell me what
this colony is all about!"
It was a difficult assignment.
Item: the Authorities. Long before space travel, big cities
in the United States had fallen so far behind any possibility
of controlling their own traffic problems as to make purely
political solutions chimerical. No city administration could
spend the amount of money needed for a radical cure, with-
out being ousted in the next elections by the enraged drivers
and pedestrians who most needed the help.
Increasingly, the traffic problems were turned over, with
gratitude and many privileges, to semi-public Port, Bridge
and Highway Authorities: huge capital-investment ventures
modelled upon the Port of New York Authority, which had
 shown its ability to build and/or run such huge operations
as the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels, the George Washington
Bridge, Teterboro, LaGuardia, Idlewild and Newark airports,
and many lesser facilities. By 1960 it was possible to travel
from the tip of Florida to the border of Maine entirely over
Authority-owned territory, if one could pay the appropriate
tolls (and didn't mind being shot at iq the Poconos by embat-
tled land-owners who were still resisting the gigantic Incadel
project).
item', the tolls. The Authorities were creations of the states,
usually acting in pairs, and as such en)oyed legal protections
not available to other private firms engaged in interstate com-
merce. Among these protections, in the typical enabling act,
was a provision that "the two said states will not . . . diminish
or impair the power of the Authority to establish, levy and
collect tolls and other charges . . ." The federal government
helped; although the Federal Bridge Act of 1946 required that
the collection of tolls must cease with the payment of amor-
tization, Congress almost never invoked the Act against any
Authority. Conseq.uently, the tolls never dropped; by 1953
the Port of New York Authority was reporting a profit of over
twenty million dollars a year, and annual collections were in-
creasing at the rate of ten per cent a year.
Some of the take went into the development of new facili-
tiesmost of them so placed as to increase the take, rather
than solve the traffic problem. Again the Port of New York
Authority led the way; it built, against all sense, a third tube
for the Lincoln Tunnel, thus pouring eight and a half million
more cars per year into Manhattan's mid-town area, where
the city was already strangling for want of any adequate
ducts to take away the then-current traffic.
Item: the Port cops. The Authorities had been authorized
from the beginning to police their own prertises. As the Au-
thorities got bigger, so did the private police forces.
By the time space travel arrived, the Authorities owned it.
They had taken pains to see that it fell to them; they had
learned from their airport operationswhich, almost alone
among their projects, always showed a losstba.t nothing less
than total control is good enough. And characteristically, they
never took any interest in any form of space-travel which did
not involve enormous expenditures; otherwise they could take
no profits from sub-contracting, no profits from fast amortiza-
tion of loans, no profits from the laws allowing them fast tax
writeoffs for new construction, no profits from the indefi-
nitely protracted collection of tolls and fees after the initial
cost and the upkeep had been recovered.
At the world's first commercial spaceport, Port Earth, it cost
ship owners $5000 each and every time their ships touched
the ground. Landing fees had been outlawed in private at-
mosphere flying for years, but the Greater Earth Port Autho-
rity operated under its own set of precedents; it made land-
ing fees for spacecraft routine. And it maintained the first
Port police force which was bigger than the armed forces of
the nation which had given it its franchise; after a while, the
distinction was wiped out, and the Port cops were the armed
farces of the United States. It was not difficult to do, since the
Greater Earth Port authority was actually a holding com-
pany embracing every other Authority in the country, includ-
ing Port Earth.
And when people, soon after spaceflight, began to ask each
other, "How shall we colonize the planets?," the Greater
Earth Port Authority had its answer ready.
Item: terrafonning.
Terraformingremaking the planets into near-images of
the Earth, so that Earth-normal people could live on them.
Port Earth was prepared to start small. Port Earth wanted to
move Mars out of its orbit to a point somewhat closer to the
sun, and make the minor adjustments needed in the orbits of
the other planets; to transport to Mars about enough water to
empty the Indian Oceanonly a pittance to Earth, after all,
and not 10 per cent of what would be needed later to terra-
form Venus; to carry to the little planet top-soil about
equal in area to the state of Iowa, in order to get started at
growing plants which would slowly change the atmosphere
of Mars; and so on. The whole thing, Port Earth pointed out
reasonably, was perfectly feasible from the point of view of
the available supplies and energy resources, and it would cost
less than thirty-three billion dollars. The Greater Earth Port
Authority was prepared to recover that sum at no cost in taxes
in less thap a century, through such items as $50 rocket-
mail stamps, $10,000 Mars landing fees, $1,000 one-way
strap-down tickets, 100-per-desert-acre land titles, and so on.
Of course the fees would continue after the cost was re-
coveredfor maintenance.
And what, after all, the Authority asked reasonably, was the
alternative? Nothing but domes. The Greater Earth Port Au-
thority hated domes. They cost too little to begin with, and the
volume of traffic to and from them would always be miniscule.
Experience on the Moon had made that painfully clear. And
the public hated domes, too; it had already shown a mass re-
luctance to live under them.
As for the governments, other than that of the United
States, that the Authority still tolerated, none of them had
any love for domes, or for the kind of limited colonization
that the domes stood for. They needed to get rid of their pul-
lulating masses by the bucket-full, not by the eye-dropper-fuU.
If the Authority knew that emigration increases the home
population rather than cuts it, the Authority carefully re-
framed from saying so to the governments involved; they
could redisoover Franklin's Law for themselves. Domes were
out; terraforming was in.
Then came pantropy.
If this third alternative to the problem of colonizing the
planets had come as a surprise to the Authority, and to Port
Earth, they had nobody to blame for it but themselves.
There had been plenty of harbingers. The notion of modi-
fying the human stock genetically to live on the planets as
they were found, rather than changing the planets to accom-
modate the people, had been old with Olaf Stapledon; it had
been touched upon by many later writers; it went back, in es-
sence, as far as Proteus,-and as deep into the human mind as
the werewolf, the vampire, the fairy changeling, the trans-
migrated soul.
But suddenly it was possible; and, not very long afterwards,
it was a fact.
The Authority hated it. Pantropy involved a high initial in-
vestment to produce the first colonists, but it was a method
which with refinement would become cheaper arid cheaper.
Once the colonists were planted, it required no investment at
all;  the colonists were comfortable on their adopted world,
and could produce new colonists without outside help. Pan-
tropy, furthermore, was at its most expensive less than half -as
costly as the setting-up of the smallest and least difficult dome.
Compared to the cost of terraforming even so favorable a
planet as Mars, it cost nothing at all, from the Authority's
point of view.
And there was no way to collect tolls against even the ini-
tial expense. It was too cheap to bother with.
WILL YOUR CHILD BE A MONSTER?
If a number of influential scientists have their way,
some child or grandchild of yours may eke out his life in
the frozen wastes of Pluto, where even the sun is only a
spark in the skyand will be unable to return to Earth
until after he dies, if then!
Yes, even now there are plans afoot to change inno-
cent unborn children into alien creatures who would die
terribly the moment that they set foot upon the green
planet of their ancestors. Impatient with the slow but
steady pace of man's conquest of Mars, prominent ivory-.
tower thinkers are working out ways to produce all kinds
of travesties upon the human formtfavesties which will
be able to survive, somehow, in the bitterest and most
untamed of planetary infernos.
The process which may produce these pitiful freaks
at enormous expenseis called "pantropy." It is al-
ready in imperfect and dangerous existence. Chief among
its  prophets  is  white-haired,  dreamy-eyed  Dr.  Jacob
Rullman, who. . .
"Stop," Sweeney said.
He put his fingertips to his temples, and then, trembling,
took them away again and looked at Rullman. The scientist
put down the old magazine clipping, which even in its telfon
sheath was as yellow as paelta after its half-life in Gany-
mede's air. Rullman's own hands were quite steady; and what
there was left of his hair was as reddish-brown as ever.
"Those lies II'm sorry. But they work, I know they work.
That's what they filled me up with. It's different when you
realize how vicious they are."
"I know," Rullman said, gently. "It's easy to do. Bringing
up an Adapted child is a special process, the child is always
isolated and anxious to imitate, you may tell it anything you
wish; it has no choice but to believe, it's desperate for closer
contact, for acceptance, for the embraces 'it can never have.
It's the ultimate in bottle-babies: the breast that might have
fed it may be just on the other side of the glass, but it also lies
generations in the past. Even the voice of 'the mother comes
along a wireif it comes along at all. I know, Donald, believe
me. It happened to me, too. And it's very hard."
"Jacob Rullman was"
"My remote, immediate father. My mother died early. They
often do, of the deprivation, I believe; like yours. But my
father taught me the truth, there in the Moon caves, before he
was killed."
Sweeney took a deep breath. "I'm learning all that now.
Go on."
"Are you sure, Donald?"
"Go on. I need to know, arid it's not too late. Please."
"Well," Rullman said reflectively, "the Authority got laws
passed against pantropy, but for a while the laws didn't have
many teeth; Congress was leary of forbidding vivisection at
the same time, and didn't know exactly what it was being
asked to forbid; Port didn't want to be too explicit. My father
was detennined to see pantropy tried while the laws still pro
vided some loopholeshe knew well enough that they'd be
stiffened as soon as Port thought it safe to stiffen them. And
he was convinced that we'd never colonize the stars by dome-
building or terraforming. Those might work on some of our
local planetsMars, Venusbut not outside."
"Outside? How would anybody get there?"
"With the interstellar drive, Donald. It's been in existence
for decades, in fact for nearly half a century. Several explor-
atory voyages were made with it right after it was discovered,
all of them highly successfulthough you'll find no mention
of them in the press of the time. Port couldn't see any profit
emerging out of interstellar flight and suppressed the news,
sequestered the patents, destroyed the records of the trips
insofar as it could. But all the Port ships have the overdrive,
just in case. Even our ship has it. So does your ferry-pilot
friend up there."
Sweeney shut up.
"The thing is this: most planets, even right here inside the
solar system, won't sustain domes to begin with, and can't be
terraformed in any even imaginable way. Jupiter, for in-
stance. And too many others will yield to either procedure too
slowly, and too unprofitably, to tempt Port. Over interstellar
distances, Port won't even try, since there'd be no trade or
traffic it could collect against.
"Pantropy was the obvious answernot for Port, certainly,
but for man's future in general. Somehow, my father sold
that idea to some politicians, and to some people with money,
too. He was even able to find several survivors of those early
interstellar expeditions, people who knew some of the extra-
solar planets and the operation of the overdrive. All these
people wanted to make at least one demonstration experiment
in pantropy, an open-ended one which would lead to others
if it succeeded. .
"We are that experiment: this colony on Ganymede.
"Port had it outlawed before it was fairly started, but by
the time they found the Moon labs it was too late; we got
away. It was then that they put teeth into the laws, and made
them retroactive; they had to kill pantropy, and they knew it.
"And that is why, our very existence is a crime, Donald.
And it is an absolute requirement of Port's policy that the
colony be a failure, and that they be able to prove it. That's
why they want us back. They want to be able to exhibit us, to
show what helpless freaks we are on Earth, and to fell their
people that we couldn't get along on Ganymede either, and
had to be bailed out of our own mess.
"After thatwell, there are those phony commerce-raiding
charges you told me about. We'll be tried. We'll be executed,
most likely, by exposing us in public to Earth-normal condi-
tions. It would be a fine object-lesson; indeed, the finishing
touch."
Sweeney crouched down in his chair, utterly revolted by the
first complete emotion he had ever experienced: loathing for
himself.  He understood, now, the overtones in Pullman's
voice. Everyone had been betrayedeveryone!
The voice went on without mercy, piling up the ashes. "Now,
as for the project, our project that is, that's equally as simple.
We know that in the long run human beings can't colo-
nize the stars without pantropy. We know that Port won't
allow pantropy to be used. And we know, therefore, that we
ourselves have to carry pantropy to the stars, before Port can
head us off. One, two, three, infinity.
"So that's what we're going to do, or were going to do.
We've got our old ship fitted out for the trip, and we've got a
new generation of childrenjust a small numbertrained to
operate it, and adapted forwell, for someplace. The kids
can't live on Earth, and they can't live on Ganymede; but
they can live on one of six different extra-solar planets we've
picked outeach one of which is at a different compass-point,
and at a different distance from Sol. I know the names of only
two of them, the kids are the only ones who know the rest.
Which one they'll actually go to will be decided only after
they're aloft and on their way. Nobody who stays behind will
be able to betray them. Earth will never find them.
'There will be the beginning of the most immense 'seed-
ing program' in man's history: seeding the stars with people.
"// we can still manage to get it off the ground."
In the silence that followed, the door of RuUman's office
opened quietly, and Mike Leverault came in, looking pre-
occupied and carrying a clipboard. She stopped when she saw
them, and Sweeney's heart constricted on the thawing slush
inside its stiffly pumping chambers.
"Excuse me," she said. "I thought . . . Is there something
wrong? You both look so grim"
"There's something wrong," RuUman said. He looked at
Sweeney.
A corner of Sweeney's mouth twitched, without his willing
it.  He  wondered  if he were trying to smile,  and if so,  about
what.
"There's no help for it," he said. "Dr. Rullman, your colo-
nists will have to revolt against you."
The starshell burst high, perhaps three miles up. Though it
was over the western edge of the plateau, enough light spilled
down to the floor of the Gouge to checker the rocking, growl-
ing halftrack.
The sound, however, was too faint to break through the
noise of the turbines, and Sweeney wasn't worried about the
brief light. The truck, pushing its way north at a good twenty
miles an hour beneath the wild growth, would be as difficult to
detect from the air as a mouse running among roots.
Besides, nobody would be likely to be looking into the
Gouge now. The evidences of battle sweeping the high-
lands were too compelling; Sweeney himself was following
them tensely.
Mike was doing the driving, leaving Sweeney free to crouch
in the tool- and instrument-littered tonneau by the big alum-
inum keg, watching the radar screen. The paraboloid basket-
work of the radar antenna atop the truck was not sweeping;
it was pointing straight back along the way he and Mike had
come, picking up a microwave relay from the last automatic
station that they had passed. The sweeping was being done
for Sweeney, by the big radio-telescope atop Howe's pi.
Sweeney paid little attention to the near, low, fast streaks
on the screen. They were painted there by rocket ordnance of
low calibrea part of the fighting which had no bearing on
the overall pattern. That pattern was already clear: it showed,
as it had for days, that the insurgent forces still held the
mountain and its heavy weapons, but that the attacking salient
from the loyalists' camp up north was maintaining the ini-
tiative, and was gathering strength.
It had developed into a running stalemate. Though the in-
surgents had obviously managed to drive the loyalists out of
Howe's pi, perhaps by some trick with the ventilators, perhaps
by some form of guerrilla warfare, they were equally evi-
dently no match for the loyalists in the field. There they were
losing ground twice as fast as they had originally taken it.
The supporting fire from the mountain didn't seem to be
helping them much; it was heavy, but it was terribly inaccur-
rate. The frequent starshells told their own story of bad visi-
bility and worse intelligence. And the loyalists, ousted though
they were, had all the planes; they had the effrontery to fly
them over the lines with riding lights.
What the loyalists would do when confronted with the
problem of retaking the mountain was another question.
Nothing short of very heavy stuff would make much of a
dent on Howe's pi. And, even overlooking the fact that the
heavy stuff was all inside the mountain, it would be suicide
for either force to use it on Ganymede. The fighting hadn't
become that bitter, yet. But it yet might.
And the Earth ships that showed on the screen inside the
halftrack knew it. That much showed clearly by their dispo-
sition. They were there, almost surely, because they had de-
duced that Sweeney was leading the insurgentsbut they
showed no desire to draw in and give Sweeney a hand. In-
stead, they stood off, a little inside the orbit of Callisto, about
900,000 miles from Ganymedefar enough to give them-
selves a good running start if they saw an atomic spark on
Ganymede, close enough to bail Sweeney out once it seemed
that he had gained the victory anyhow.
Mike's voice, shouting something unintelligible, came back
to him mixed in with the roaring of the halftrack's turbines.
"What's the matter?" he shouted, cocking his head.
". . . that rock-tumble ahead. If it's as . . . before . . . prob-
ably break the beam."
"Stop her," Sweeney shouted. "Want another reading."
The halftrack halted obediently, and Sweeney checked his
screen against RuUman's readings, which showed on tumblers
snicking over on a counter near his elbow. It checked; 900,-
000 was close enough. Maybe a little closer, .but not much.
The wave-front of a full satellary explosion would cross that
distance in about five seconds, carrying instant obliteration
with it; but five seconds would be long enough to allow the
automatics on the Earth ships to slam them away on trans-
. finite drive.
He slapped her on the shoulder, twice. "Okay so far. Go
ahead."
Her reply was lost, but he saw her crash-helmet nod, and
the truck began to cant itself slowly and crazily up a long,
helter-skelter causeway of boulders and rubble:  a sort of
talus-slope, one of many rolled each year into the Gouge by
exfoliation in the cliffs. Mike turned and smiled back at him
gleefully, and he smiled back; the treads were clanking too
loudly to permit any other answer.
The whole scheme had depended from the beginning upon
so long a chain of ifs that it could still fall apart at any mo-
ment and at any flawed link. It had been dependable only at
the beginning. The signal Sweeacy had sent Meikiejon
WANYhad told Meikiejon nothing, since he didn't know
the code; but it had told the computer that Sweeney still
lacked custody of the Adapted Men that Earth wanted, but
that he had the help he thought he would need in getting that
custody eventually. That much was a known. What orders
the computer would rap out for Meikiejon in response com-
prised the first of the ifs.
The computer might, of course, react with some incredibly
bold piece of gamemanship too remote from normal human
thinking to be even guessable; Shannon's chess-playing ma-
chines sometimes won games from masters that way, though
more usually they could barely hold their own against dubs.
Since there was no way to anticipate what such a gambit
would be like, neither Sweeney nor Rullman had wasted any
time trying to pretend that there was.
But the other alternative was much more likely. The ma-
chine would assume that Sweeney was safe, as was evidenced
by the arrival of the coded signal; and that if he had help he
could only have gathered about him a secret core of disaf-
fected colonists,  a "Loyal Ganymedian Underground" or
equivalent. Earth would assume, and would build the assump-
tion into the computer, that many of the colonists were dis-
satisfied with their lives; it was a hope that Earth could turn
into a fact without being aware of the delusion, since nobody
on Earth could suspect how beautiful Ganymede was. And
the computer would assume, too, that it might be only a mat-
ter of time before Sweeney also had custody, and would be
sending Meikiejon WAWYor maybe even YYAWY.
"How will we know if it does?" Rullman had demanded.
"If it does, then the deadline will pass without Meikiejon'a
making a move. He'll just stick to his orbit until the computer
changes his mind. What else could it tell him to do, anyhow?
He's just one man in a small ship without heavy armament.
And he's an Earthman at thathe couldn't come down here
and join my supposed underground group even if the idea oc-
curred to him. He'll sit tight."
The halftrack heaved itself over an almost cubical boulder,
slid sidewise along its tilted face, and dropped heavily to the
bed of smaller rounded stones. Sweeney looked up from the
radar controls to see how the big aluminum keg was taking
the ride. It was awash in a sea of hand toolsrpicks, adzes,
sledges, spikes, coils of line rapidly unwindingbut it was se-
curely strapped down. The miracle of fireworks chemistry
Cand .specifically, Ganymedian chemistry) still slumbered in-
side it. He clambered forward into the cab beside Mike and
strapped himself down to enjoy the ride.
There was no way to predict or to calculate how long an
extension of the deadline the machine on Meikiejon's ship
would allow Sweeney for the launching of his insurrection.
The colony worked as though there would be no grace period
at all. When the deadline passed without any sign that Meikie-
jon even existedthough the radio-telescope showed that he
was still thereSweeney and Rullman did not congratulate
each other. They could not be sure that the silence and the
delay meant what they had every good reason to hope that it
meant. They could only go on working.
The movements of machines, men, and energy displays
which should look to Meikiejon like a revolt of the colonists
burst away from Howe's pi eleven days later. All the signs
showed that it had been the loyalists who had set up their
base near the north pole of Ganymede. Sweeney and Mike
had driven through the Gouge before, for that purpose, plant-
ing in a radar-crazy jungle a whole series of small devices, all
automatic, all designed to register on Meikiejon's detectors as
a vast bustle of heavy machinery. The visible stragetic move-
ments of the opposing armies had suggested the same loyalist
concentration at the pole.
And now Sweeney and Mike were on their way back.
The computer appeared to be v/aiting it out; Meikiejon had
evidently fed the data to it as a real rebellion. Sweeney's side
obviously was carrying the field-at first. The computer had no
reason to run a new extrapolation up to the first day the loy-
alist forces had managed to hold their lines; and then it had
to run squarely up against the question of how. the loyalists
could take the mountain even if, in the succeeding weeks,
they should sweep the field clear of Sweeney.
"Kid stuff," Sweeney had said. "It hasn't any reason to
think differently. Too simple to make it extrapolate beyond the
first derivative."
"You're very confident, Donald."
Sweeney stirred uneasily in the bucket seat as he recalled
RuUman's smile. No Adapted Man, least of all Sweeney, had
had any real childhood; no "kid stuff." Fortunately the Port
cops had thought it essential to Sweeney's task that he know
theory of games.
The halftrack settled down to relatively smooth progress
once more, and Sweeney got up to check the screen. The
talus-slope, as Mike had anticipated, cut off reception from the
radar relay station behind them; Sweeney started the antenna
sweeping. Much of the field was cropped by the near edge of
the Gouge, but that effect would begin to disappear gradually
from the screen now. The floor of the Gouge rose steadily as
one approached the north pole, although it never quite reached
the level of the plains. He could already capture enough sky to
be satisfied that the Earth ships were just where they had been
before.
That had been the last risk: that Meikiejon, alarmed at the
computer's continued counsels of inaction, would radio Earth
for advice from higher authorities. Obviously a colonists' re-
volt on Ganymede, one that could be painted as a "We want
to go home" movement, would be ideal for Earth's purposes.
Earth would not only insist on Meikiejon's sitting tight as his
computer had told him to dobut would also hasten to bring
up reinforcements for Sweeney, just in case.
Both Sweeney and RuUman had known how likely that was
to happen, and had decided to take the chance, and make
preparations against it. The chance had not paid offthe
Earth ships were herebut it still looked as though the prep-
arations might.
As content as was possible under the circumstances,
Sweeney went forward. Before reaching for his safety belt, he
stopped to kiss Mike, to the considerable detriment of her
control of the lurching truck.
The explosion threw him, hard, halfway across the empty
bucket seat.
He struggled up, his head ringing. The truck's engines
seemed to have stopped; beneath the ringing, he could hear
nothing but the sound of the blowers.
"Doni Are you all right? What was that?"
"Ugh," he said, sitting down. "Nothing broken. Hit my
head a crack. It was high explosive, from the sound. A big
one."
Her face was pinched and anxious in the soft glow from
the dashboard. "One of ours? Or"
"I don't know, Mike. Sounded like it hit back down the
ravine a distance.. What's the matter with the engine?"
She touched the starter. It whined, and the engine caught at
once. "I must have stalled it," she said apologetically. She put
it in gear.  "But it doesn't feel right. The traction's bad on
your side."
Sweeney swung the cab door open and dropped to the
stony ground. Then he whistled.
"What is it?"
"That was closer than I thought," he called back. "The
righthand track is cut almost in half. A flying rock splinter, I
suppose. Toss me the torch."
She leaned far out across his seat, reaching the are-cutter
to him, and then the goggles. He made his way to the rear of
the truck and snapped the switch. The electric arc burned
sulfur-blue; a moment later, the damaged track was unwind-
ing from around the four big snowmobile tires like an ex-
piring snake. Dragging the cord behind him, Sweeney cut the
left track off, too, and then returned to the cab, rewinding
the cord as he went.
"Okay, but take it slow. Those tires are going to be cut to
ribbons by the time we hit that base."
Her face was still white, but she asked no more questions.
The halftrack began to crawl forward, a halftrack no longer.
At a little over two miles farther on, the first of the eight
tires blew, making them both jump. A hasty check showed
that it was the right outside rear one. Another two and a half
miles, and the right inside drive tire blew out, too. It was
bad to have two gone on the same side of the truck, but at
least .they were on different axles and in alternate position. The
next one to go, five miles farther onthe ground became
less littered as it rosewas the left inside rear.
"Don."
"Yes, Mike."
"Do you think that was an Earth bomb?"
"I don't know, Mike. I doubt it; they're too far away to
be throwing stuff at Ganymede except at random, and why
would they do that? More likely it was one of our torpedoes,
out of control." He snapped his fingers. "Wait a minute. If
we're throwing H.E. at each other, now, the cops will have
noticed, and that we can check."
Bang!
The halftrack settled down to the right and began to slob-
ber at the ground. No check was needed to tell Sweeney that
that one had been the right outside driver. Those two wheels
would be hitting on bare rims within the next thousand feet
or so of travel; the main weight of the vehicle was back there
the steering tires took very little punishment, comparative-
ly.
Gritting his teeth, he unbuckled the safety and scrambled
back to the radar set, checking the aluminum drum auto-
matically as he went.
There was much more sky showing on the screen now. It
was impossible totriangulate the positions of the Earth ships
now that the transmission from Howe's pi was cut off, but the
pips on the screen were markedly dimmer. Sweeney guessed
that they had retreated at least another hundred thousand
miles. He grinned and leaned into Mike's ear.
"It was one of ours," he said. "Rullman's stepping up on
the heavy artillery, that's all. One of his torpedo pilots must
have lost one in the Gouge. The Port cops have detected the
step-up, all rightthey've backed off. It's beginning to look
more and more as though the rebels might try to smear the
loyalist base with a fission bomb, and they don't want to be
cheek to cheek with the planet "when that happens. How far
do we have to go, still?"
Mikesaid,"We're"                
Bang! Mike grabbed for the switch, and the engine died.
"here," she finished, and then, amazingly, began to gig-
gle.
Sweeney swallowed, and then discovered that he was grin-
ning, too. "With three track-tires intact," he said. "Hooray for
us. Let's get on the job."
Another starshell broke open in the sky, not as near as be-
fore. Sweeney went around to the back of the truck, Mike
picking her way after him, both of them looking ruefully at
the wreathes of shredded silicone rubber which once had
been two excellent tires. Two of the rims were quite bare;
the fifth deflated tire, which had not been driven on, was only
a puncture and might be salvaged.
"Unstrap the barrel and roll 'er out the tailgate," Sweeney
said. "Easy. Now let's lower 'er to the ground, and over there."
All around them, concealed among the rocks and the mas-
sive, gnarled trunks, were the little instruments whose busy
electronic chattering made this spot sound like a major mili-
tary encampment to the ships lying off Ganymede. Photo-
graphs, of course, would not be expected to show it: the visi-
ble light was insufficient, the infra-red still weaker, and ultra-
violet plates would be stopped by the atmosphere. Nobody
would expect to see anything from space by any method, not
in the Gouge; but the detectors would report power being ex-
pended, and power sources moving aboutand rebel torpedoes
homing purposefully on the area. That should be enough.
With Mike's help, Sweeney stood the aluminum barrel on
end roughly in the center of this assemblage. "I'm going to
take that punctured tire off," he said. "We've got fifteen min-
utes until take-off time, and we may need it later. Know how
 to wire up this thing?"
"I'm not an idiot. Go change your tire."
While Sweeney worked, Mike located the main input lead
for the little invisible chatterers and spliced a line into it.
To this she rigged a spring-driven switch which would snap to
"Off" as soon as current was delivered to a solenoid which
actuated its trigger. One strand of reel-wound cable went to
the solenoid, another to a red-splashed terminal on the side
of the aluminum keg. She checked the thumb-plunger at the
other end of the cable. Everything was ready. When that
plunger was pushed, the little chatterers would go Off, at the
same moment that the barrel went On.
"AH set, Mike?"
"Ready and waiting. Five minutes until take-off time."
"Good," Sweeney said, taking the reel from her. "You'd
~ better get in the truck and take it on across the poleover
the horizon from here."
"Why? There's no real danger. And if there is, what good
would I be over there alone?"
"Look, Mike," Sweeney said. He was already walking back-
wards, still to the north, paying out cable. "I just want to get
that truck out of here; maybe we can use it, and once that
barrel starts, it just might set the truck on fire. Besides, sup-
posing the cops decide to take a close look down here? The
truck's visible, or at least it's suspiciously regular. But they
couldn't see me. It'd be far better to have the truck over the
horizon. Fair enough?"
"Oh, all right. Just don't get yourself killed, that's all."
"I won't. I'll be along after the show's over. Go on, beat it."
Scowling, though not very convincingly, she climbed back
into the truck, which pulled slowly away up the grade. Sween-
ey could hear its bare rims screeching against upthrusts of
rock long after it had disappeared, but finally it was out of
earshot as well.
He continued to walk backward, unwinding the cable from
the reel until it was all gone, and the phony encampment was
a full mile south of him. He took the thumb switch in his
right hand, checked his watch, and crouched down behind a
long low spur to wait.
A whole series of starshells made a train of blue suns across
the sky. Somewhere a missile screamed, and then the ground
shook heavily. Sweeney fervently hoped that the "insurgent"
torpedomen weren't shaving it too fine.
But it wouldn't be long now. In just a few seconds, the sur-
vival shipthe ship aimed at one of six unknown stars, and
carrying the new generation of Adapted childrenwould take
off from Howe's pi.
Twenty seconds.
Fifteen.
Ten.
Nine.
Eight.
Seven.
Six.
Sweeney pushed the plunger.
The aluminum keg ignited with a hollow cough, and all
intense ball of light, far too bright to be shut out either by
the welding goggles or by closed eyelids or by both, rose into
Ganymede's sky. The heat struck against Sweeney's skin as
strongly as the backwash of the JATO unit had done, so. long
 ago.  The concussion, which followed about nine seconds
later, flattened him and made his nose bleed.
Uncaring, he rolled over and looked upward. The light had
already almost died. There was now a roiling column of white
smoke, shot through with lurid, incandescent colors, hurling
itself skyward at close to a mile a minute.
It was  altogether a  hell  of  a  convincing-looking fission
bombfor a fake.
The column didn't begin to mushroom until it was almost
five miles high, but by that time Sweeney was sure that there
wasn't an Earth ship anywhere within ten astronomical units
of Ganymede. Nobody would stop to make inquiries, espe-
cially when  all the instruments in the "encampment" had
stopped transmitting simultaneouly with the "blast."
It might perhaps occur to Port later that the "blast" might
have been a huge, single-shot Roman candle fired from an
aluminum keg, propelled by a mixture of smoke-flare com-
pounds and low-grade chemical explosives. But by that time,
the survival ship would be gone beyond all possibility of trac-
ing its path.
As a matter of fact, it was gone already. It had left on the
count, uncounted, by Sweeney, of Zero.
Sweeney got up, humming cheerfullyand quite as tune-
lessly as Rullmanand continued to plod north. On the other
side of the pole, the Gouge was supposed to continue to be-
come shallower as it proceeded into the Jupiter-ward hemis-
phere of Ganymede. There was a twilight zone there, illumi-
nated by the sun irregularly because of libration while Gany-
mede was on the sunward side of Jupiter, and quite regularly
as the satellite went toward and away from occultation with
the big primary. Of course the occultation periods would be
rather cold, but they lasted less than eight hours apiece.
Elsewhere on Ganymede, the other colonists were heading
for similar spots, their spurious war equipment destroyed,
their purpose fulfilled. They were equipped variously, but all
as well as Sweeney; and he had a sound ten-wheeled snow-
mobile, on which the six remaining tires could be redistributed
to make the vehicle suitable for heavy tractoring, and with a
tonneau loaded with tools, seeds, slips and cuttings, medical
supplies, reserve food and fuel. He also had a wife.
Earth wo'Jld visit Ganymede, of course. But it would find
nothing. The inside of Howe's pi had been razed when the
survival ship had taken off. As for the people, they would be
harmless, ignorant, and widely scattered.
Peasants, Sweeney thought. Whistling, be crossed the north
pole. Nothing but peasants.
At last be saw the squat shape of the truck, crouched at the
mouth of a valley. At first Mike was not visible, but finally
he spotted her, standing with her back to him on a rise. He
clambered up beside her.
.The valley was narrow for about a hundred feet ahead, and
then it opened out in a broad fan of level land. A faint haze
hovered over it. To an Earthman, nothing could have looked
more desolatebut no Earthman was looking at it.
"I'll bet that's the best farm land on Ganymede," Sweeney
whispered. "I wish"
Mike turned and looked at him. He cut the wish off un-
spoken, but there was no doubt that Mike had fathomed it.
But RuUman was no longer on Ganymede to share its beau-
tiesthis one, or any other. Though he would never see the
end of the journey, and could not have survived at its goal,
he had gone with the children on the shipand taken his ex-
portable knowledge with him.
He had been, Sweeney knew, a great man. Greater, per-
haps, than his father.
"Go on ahead with the truck, Mike," Sweeney said softly.
"I'll walk on behind you."
"Why? It'll ride easy on that soiltfie extra weight won't
matter."
"I'm not worrying about the weight. It's just that I want to
walk it. It's-well, hell, Mike, don't you know that I'm just
about to be born? Whoever heard of a kid arriving with a
fourteen-ton truck?"