"I think the State could last seventy or a hundred thousand. See, these water-monopoly empires, they don't collapse. They can rot from within, to the point where a single push from the barbarians outside can topple them. The levels of society lose touch with each other, and when it comes to the crunch, they can't fight. But it takes that push from outside. There's no revolution in a water empire."

"That's a very strong statement."

"Yeah. Do you know how the two-province system works? They used it in China. Say there are two provinces, A and B, and they're both having a famine. What you do is, you look at their records. If Province A has a record of cheating on its taxes or rioting, then you confiscate all the grain in Province A and ship it to B. If the records are about equal you pick at random. The result is that Province B is loyal forever, and Province A is wiped out so you don't worry about it."

"We rarely have famines. When we do..." It was rare for Peerssa not to finish a sentence.

"There's nothing more powerful than controlling everybody's water. A water-control empire can grow so feeble that a single barbarian horde can topple it. But, Peerssa, the State doesn't have any outside."

Much later, Corbell learned that he had changed his life again. At the time he only suspected, from Peerssa's silence, that he had offended Peerssa.

And Peerssa was not Pierce. The checker was long dead; the computer personality had never harmed Corbell. It was worth remembering. Corbell gave up talking about the State. Peerssa was loyal to the State; Corbell emphatically was not.

There was another topic he eventually gave up. Once too often he told Peerssa, "I still wish you'd sent a woman with me."

"Must I remind you that the life-support system is too small for two? Or that Sol is now a vast distance behind us? Or that your s.e.x urge tested low? If it had not, you would not be here."

"It was a matter of privacy privacy," Corbell said between his teeth.

"But the loving bunks in the dormitory were not the only test. In word a.s.sociation you tested low. Your testosterone level tested low."

"You ball-less wonder! How can you talk to me about low s.e.x urge!"

"The State has a superfluity of t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es," Peerssa said with no particular emphasis.

Would Pierce the checker have reacted that way? It was a weird response... but Peerssa meant it. Corbell stopped talking about women.

Six months pa.s.sed. Stars pa.s.sed, too. A few pa.s.sed close enough to show like violet windows into h.e.l.l, and receded like dim red fireb.a.l.l.s. Corbell was fat, too fat for his own tastes, fat enough for Peerssa's, when at last he climbed into the great coffin.

It happened seven times.

III.

"Corbell? Is something wrong? Speak, please."

Corbell sighed in the cold-sleep tank. He did not move. He had become very used to this routine: the terrible weakness, the hunger, the six months of exercises and of forcing insipid food down his throat, the climbing into the tank to start the cycle over. At this, his seventh awakening, he felt a deadly reluctance to wake up.

"Corbell, please say something. I can sense your heartbeat and respiration, but I can't see you. Have you turned catatonic? Shall I administer shock?"

"Don't administer shock."

"Can you move, or are you too weak?"

He sat up. It made him dizzy. Ship's thrust was very low. "Where are we?"

"Beyond midpoint of our course, thrusting laterally to force us back into the plane of the galaxy. Proceeding according to plan. Your plan, not mine. Now I want to monitor your health."

"Later. Make me soup. I'll take it to the Womb Room." He moved toward the Kitchen, bouncing oddly in the low gravity. He had aged more than the four years he bad been awake. After each awakening the exercises had taken longer to build him up again. He felt brittle, and ravenous.

The soup was good. The soup was always good. He settled himself in the Womb Room and let his eyes roam the dials. Some of the readings were frightening. The gamma-ray flux would have charred him in minutes, if the power of the ram fields were not guiding the particles aside. Other readings made no sense. Peerssa had told the truth: The seeder ramship was not designed for velocities this close to the speed of light. Neither were the instruments and dials.

And what about Peerssa's senses? Was he flying half blind?

"Give me a full view," he said.

The stellar rainbow had hardened and sharpened over seven decades. It had lost symmetry, too. To one side the stars were thickly cl.u.s.tered; the arc of blue-whites blazed like diamonds in an empress's necklace. To the other, the side that faced intergalactic s.p.a.ce, the rainbow was almost dark. Each star was sharply defined within its band of color. But within the central disk of violet stars (dimmer than the blue, but of a color that made one squint) was a soft white glow: the microwave background of the universe, at 30 absolute, boosted to visible light by Don Juan Don Juan's terrible speed.

His ship's drive flame had become a blood-red fan of light facing intergalactic s.p.a.ce. Peerssa was thrusting laterally to bend their course back into the plane of the galaxy.

"Give me a corrected view," Corbell instructed.

Now Peerssa worked a kind of fiction. From the universe he perceived through the senses on Don Juan Don Juan's hull, he extrapolated a picture of the universe seen at rest, and he painted that picture around the wall of the Womb Room.

The galaxy was incomparably beautiful, a whirlpool of light spread out across half the universe. Corbell looked ahead of him for his first view of the galactic core. It was there, just brighter than the rest, and hazy, without definition. He was disappointed. He had thought the close-packed ball of stars would flame with colors. He could pick out no individual stars; only a vague glow around a central bright point. Behind him the stars were similarly blurred.

"I'm getting poor definition in the view aft," Peerssa volunteered. "The light is drastically red-shifted."

"And forward?"

"This is not according to theory. I would have expected more definition within the core. There must be a great deal of interstellar matter blocking the light. Even so... I need more data."

Corbell didn't answer. A multiple star cl.u.s.ter had caught his eye, half a dozen brilliant points whirling frantically as they came toward him. They pa.s.sed on the right, still jiggling madly, and froze in place as they came alongside.

"The next time that happens, I'd like to see an uncorrected view."

"I'll call you, but you won't see much."

So here he was at the halfway point, with his destination in sight. No man before him could have seen the glow of the galactic core, or the frantically spinning star cl.u.s.ter flashing past at this close to light-speed. His enemy's soul had become Corbell's slave.

Corbell flies toward the core suns like a moth toward a flame, expecting death. But he has his victories.

He finished his anonymous soup. Don Juan Don Juan's Kitchen and/or chemistry lab supplied just enough taste, just enough variety, to keep a State non-citizen from cutting his throat. On such fare he must grow fat... and exercise to distribute the fat. Lately it tended to settle in a potbelly, which was no help at all.

He was getting old. Despite the cold-sleep tank and all the medicines available, he would be decrepit before they reached the core suns.

His second life should have been more like his first. He had hoped to make friends, to carve out some kind of career... he had been frozen at age forty-four, there would have been time... time even for a marriage, children...

Things would look better when he had built up some strength. He could go on an oxygen drunk. On request Peerssa would fill the cabin with pure oxygen, while lecturing Corbell on the adverse medical effects for as long as Corbell would let him.

"About now you usually start telling me my duty," he said.

"There's no point," said Peerssa. "We're decelerating now. We'll be among the core suns before we can brake to a stop."

Corbell smiled. "Anyone but you would have given up sooner. Expand my view of the core suns, please."

The hub of the galaxy rushed toward him. Dark clouds with stars embedded in them surrounded a bright core. They looked like churning storm clouds. They had changed position since his last waking period.

But the core itself was a flat featureless glow, except for a single bright point at the center. "The interstellar matter must be almighty thick in there. Can our ram fields handle it?"

"If we give up thrust and settle for shielding the life-support system and nothing else, you'll be amazed at what we can handle."

"I'll be dying anyway, of old age."

"Corbell, there is a way you can go home again."

"Dammit, Peerssa, have you been lying to me?"

"Calm down, Corbell. There is a way to make you young, if you're willing. You can understand why I didn't raise the subject before."

"I sure can. Why now? Why would you do this for someone who betrayed your precious State?"

"Things have changed, Corbell. By now we may be the last remnants of the State. And you weren't even a citizen."

"And you are?"

"I am a human personality imposed on a computer's memory banks. I could never be a citizen. You could have been. Such as you are, you may well represent the State. The State may not survive the seventy thousand years we will be gone. You are worth preserving."

"Thank you." Unreasonably, Corbell was touched.

"The State may exist only in your memory. I'm glad you forced me to teach you speech. I'm glad I told you so much about myself. You must live."

"Make me young," Corbell said with the fervor of a man growing old much too fast. "What does it take?"

"We have the equipment to take a clone from you. You surely find nothing strange about the concept of cloning?"

"We knew about it. Cloning of carrots, anyway. But-"

"We can clone men. We can clone you. Let the individual grow in sensory deprivation, in your cold-sleep tank. We can record your memories and play them into the clone's blank mind."

"How? Oh, of course, the computer link." The link was a direct telepathic control over the computer. Corbell had never dared use it. He had been doubly afraid of it since the computer became Pierce the checker. Peerssa might use it to take him over.

Peerssa said, "We must also have injections of your memory RNA."

Corbell yelped. "You're talking about grinding me up into chemically leeched hamburger!"

"I'm talking about making a young man of you."

"It wouldn't be me, me, you madman!" you madman!"

"The new individual would be as much Jerome Branch Corbell as you are."

"Thanks! Thanks a lot! You told me what happened to the real Corbell. Ground up for hamburger and leeched for RNA and injected into a brain-wiped criminal!"

"The real Corbell must have been insane or stupid. At seventy degrees and below, the phospholipids in the glia in the brain freeze. The synapses are destroyed. Any educated man knows this," said Peerssa. "He and the other corpsicles never had a chance. You are an improvement on that Corbell. I will make the clone an improvement over you."

"I thought you might. No, thanks. There isn't going to be a CORBELL Mark III."

Six months later he was not ready for the cold-sleep tank. "You've been shirking your exercises," Peerssa said.

Corbell had just finished an exercise period. Tendonitis had led him to favor his arms these past two months, but they hurt anyway, two hot wires in his shoulders. "It's your schedule," he grumbled.

"I would have to thaw you early. Coming out of cold sleep is a trauma. You want to reach the galactic core in optimum condition. Take another two months awake."

"Fine. I hate that d.a.m.n tank anyway." Corbell slumped in a web chair. In near free-fall he was too p.r.o.ne to lose muscle tone. His potbelly protruded.

He had n.o.body else to talk to, and Peerssa had endless patience. It should have been good timing when Peerssa said, "Have you given any thought to regaining your youth?"

Corbell shuddered. "Forget it." Hastily, "I don't mean that literally. If you wipe it from your memory banks you'll only think of it again later."

"I take it you've canceled your command. What is your objection?"

"It's ugly."

"As things stand now, you will die of aging on the return voyage. The cold-sleep treatment is not enough."

"I will not be ground up for hamburger. Not again."

"You know the details of Don Juan Don Juan's excrement recycling system. Do you find that ugly?"

"Since you ask, yes."

"But you eat the food and drink the water."

Corbell didn't answer.

"You would be a young man when it was over."

"No. No, I would not." Corbell was shouting. "I would be hamburger! Contaminated hamburger, garbage to be recycled for the b-b.. benefit of your d.a.m.n clone! He wouldn't even be a good copy, because you'd be shoving some of your own thoughts in through the computer link!"

"You have no loyalty to anything but yourself."

Corbell thought, I can shut him up. Anytime. I can shut him up. Anytime. He said, "Whatever it is I am, I'll settle for it." He said, "Whatever it is I am, I'll settle for it."

"The only man who ever saw the galactic core. A wonderful thing." Peerssa had had time and practice to develop that sarcastic tone. "What will you do afterward, once your sole ambition in life is satisfied? Will you order me to self-destruct? A grand funeral pyre for your ending, a fusion flame that alien eyes might see?"

Then Corbell did Peerssa an injustice. "Is that what's been bothering you? Tell you what," he said. "After we have our look around the core suns, why don't we drop some package probes on appropriate planets? You can reach Earth alive. By the time the State sends ships, the algae will have turned some reducing atmospheres to oxygen atmospheres. You can take my mummy home, too, in the cold-sleep tank. Maybe they'll want it for a museum."

"You will not be young again?"

"We've been through that."

"Very well. Will you go to the Womb Room, please? I have a great deal to show you."

Mystified and suspicious, Corbell went.