Gyde was gleeful. “The more this scum dares, the easier it will be to find him and the more merits we’ll get when we bring him down!”

Pol almost said “if we bring him down,” but he bit it back. Gyde’s confidence made him angry. He didn’t know why. He wanted to find the terrorist, but that wasn’t the same thing as wanting Gyde to find him.

“He has access to a copier and supplies. The lab is checking now on the paper…”

Gyde went on. Pol shut him out. He shut out the anger, too, and his own confusion. One thing at a time. When your mind was wounded you had to grasp reality one fistful at a time. He tried to focus on the pamphlet’s message. He read it over several times, waiting for it to stick. Suddenly the paper was shaking in his hands.

It took him a moment to realize it. Meanwhile he stood there, shaking. He put the paper down carefully and made his way past Gyde with what he believed was a stony face, heading into the service room down the hall. For once it was empty, thank the gods.

It was his scarping hands. They were trembling, the traitors. He stuck them under his armpits, leaned forward from the waist, squeezing them tight, and his eyes, too.

Their spies have infiltrated our society.

He had opened the letter from the Department of Health. Gyde was right. It was his yearly physical, scheduled for one month hence. No, it was the yearly physical of Pol 137, scheduled for one month hence. Pol 137 would not be showing up.

Had he known about the physicals when he killed the Silver? No. He had thought of many things: of the hair color and the eyes, of removing the head and hands. The Silver had been just what he’d needed. Pol 137 had come to Marcus for some black-market hooch, and he’d mentioned that he was leaving the next day for Centalia and had Marcus ever been there? Kalim N2 had slipped from the house and followed the dashing officer, had later broken into his hotel room and found the letters of commission. He’d been retired from active battle duty, reassigned as monitor, detective class, in Centalia. Kalim had made up his mind instantly. He knew it was dangerous and chances were high that he would be caught. But at the time, he thought he would rather die than remain a servant. Perhaps he had not been thinking clearly after all. Craftily but not clearly.

He had not counted on the physicals. But even if he had thought about them, would it have made any difference? He tried to think back. He remembered wondering if he and Pol 137 were the same blood type.

He wanted to laugh, gripping his stomach. The same blood type! He couldn’t even roll up his sleeves or pull out his dick in public! What would they find in his scarping veins?

In the cafeteria over lunch, Gyde was still going on about the pamphlet. He puzzled over a copy while eating his soup. “ ‘I have been in contact with aliens, beings from other worlds,’” he quoted. “What a lunatic.”

“Perhaps that’s the angle,” Pol said. “Can we check records of anyone with known mental disturbances?”

Gyde gave him a peculiar look. “Not much tolerance for that.”

Meaning, Pol understood, that mental deviants simply “disappeared.” There would be no such records.

“Any other ideas?” Gyde prompted.

“We’ve eliminated Irons. What if he’s higher than a Bronze?”

“Scarp! No Silver or Gold is gong to hang around construction sites. Besides, this sociopath is too sick to be from the upper classes.”

Pol didn’t respond, but he must have looked unconvinced.

“No Silver or Gold is going to think up scarp like this! When he wrote the other messages I thought he was talking about foreign spies. But aliens from other planets? By the blood, what does that mean?”

Pol looked at the pamphlet, a reflective finger stroking his lip.

“Who ever heard of such a thing?” Gyde insisted, requiring an answer.

Pol’s cold blue eyes looked into Gyde’s. He could sense shifting sand under his feet.

“Have you ever heard of such a thing?” Gyde asked.

“No.”

“Everyone knows there are only four planets and ours is the only one capable of sustaining life.”

The finger stroking Pol’s lips faltered.

“You’ve…” Gyde lowered his voice, “you’ve never heard of Bronzies being taught anything different, have you?” His baffled tone suggested that the state would certainly be capable of teaching the Bronze class something else—anything else—if it was in their best interests to do so.

“Not to my knowledge.”

Gyde shook his head in disgust. “It had to come from somewhere. This slag can’t be that original.”

“There was nothing about aliens in the Archives.” And now Pol realized how odd that was. The “aliens” search had yielded not one word about extraterrestrials in the Archives, not even a claim from the state that such things didn’t exist.

“It came from somewhere.” Gyde’s eyes glinted with calculation.

The communal library at the dorm was empty. Only a few older Silvers were spending their evening in the lounge through the open archway. Pol scanned the bookcases of state-sanctioned titles and found what he was looking for—a book on astronomy.

He took it to a big leather chair and sat down. The lamp beside him cast a rosy glow. He thumbed through the pages and found a large color chart at the center of the book.

There: the sun and around it in elliptical orbits… four planets. Recalia, this planet, was the closest to the sun. Beyond it, cold and lifeless, were three smaller planets. None of the planets had any moons. And around this small solar system was a black encircling dome, affixed with pinpoints of light that were meant to be the stars. And that was all.

In the comfortable library, a fire not all that far away, Pol shivered. Bullshit, he thought, a word from his old language. Bullshit.

Why would the state teach this? It was wrong, all wrong. He didn’t know how he knew this, but he knew. It was part of that embedded knowledge inside him. It was like a strange conviction he had that the sun ought to shine, that he ought to be able to look up and see blue sky, at least once in a while. For the longest time, he had thought the weather was simply terrible, kept waiting for the dense cloud cover to break. Finally he’d asked one of the Irons at Marcus’s house, Is it always like this? They’d thought he was crazy when he said the sun was visible where he came from, that there were such things as sunny days. There was also the certainty that things were heavier than they should be. At first, he took it for a symptom of his illness, but after that passed, he still retained a conviction, sometimes when he had to step up onto a bus or pick up something simple, like a pen, that everything weighed more than it was supposed to.

Now this. He stared at the chart for a long time, as if it might trigger something in his brain, something, no matter how small and forgotten, that might enable him to fit the pieces into a reasonable pattern. Instead, the longer he looked at the chart the more that chasm in his brain solidified, deepened, yawned, threatened to suck him down into its icy darkness until at last he snapped the book shut.

In his bathroom he propped the chair against the door and ran the shower. He removed his clothes and stood under the water, the dust of the air raid washing down the drain. He could feel something hard inside him; maybe it was his will or maybe something he couldn’t even name, but he felt it shift, break, collapse, and wash away like the dirt down the drain. And for the first time since Marcus had picked him from that battlefield he cried, deep, shuddering wracks, shaking until the warmth softened his muscles to limpness.