"_In a sense!_ I'm either a whole, complete human being or I'm not!
_Now which is it?_"
"Oh, no, no," cried the girl wearily. "Can't you see that's just the
idea we've been fighting against for so long? Look, Griffin. _You're
alive._ You've got sixty more years of life. A long, useful life. But
if it's not a useful life in the society where you lived before, does
that make it wrong? They have skill and techniques to give perfectly
good new bodies to men and women who would die without them. Could it
ever be right to deny that life to the people who wanted it? Could they
turn them back, and say 'No, we can give you life, but we've decided
not to use it.' Could they do that?"
Griffin shook his head. "What happened? Back when it first started.
What went wrong?"
The girl sat down, facing him. "Some didn't change at all. Some went
back, just as they were before. Others tried it, and went insane. Some
committed suicide. Others lived out lives of utter misery trying to fit
a pattern they could never be part of. They were a kind of human being
which had never existed before--an infant personality superimposed on a
grown, mature body, thrust out into a highly organized, rigid society.
They couldn't survive." She looked up at Griffin. "The government got
the Free Agent legislation through, finally. It helped some, but not
enough. Most of them were looking for something that just didn't exist.
They searched, and floundered, and tried one thing and another, and in
the end they were bitter, and confused, and utterly helpless. So they
went to the stars."
The girl walked out into the control room, and stared out at the bright
pinpoints of light in the blackness. Griffin followed her, his body and
mind both numb. "What about Mars, or Venus?" he said.
"No good. They were just the old Earth society in a different setting,
trying like crazy to duplicate things back on Earth. But on a new
planet, in a new solar system, a _new_ society would have a chance.
On a dozen planets a dozen societies could be created." She laughed
wryly. "You and your price-tag! You can go back to Earth, Griffin. But
you'll die there. You'd never have believed that if we'd told you at
the start. You remembered your old life too well. You thought it would
be so easy to go back to it. We had to let you try, and you tried.
Maybe now you can believe it. You can go back to Earth, if you want to,
or you can ship out and make your own world to live in. You're a Free
Agent. It's up to you."
He heard them coming aboard. He lay still on the acceleration couch,
his eyes closed, pretending to be asleep, but his ears strained for the
familiar sounds, and he heard the crane moving up the side of the ship,
and the people coming aboard.
There was little talking. They moved quietly, and they paid practically
no attention to him. He felt sure that they knew he was awake, but they
came aboard, and took their places, and began to strap themselves in
without a word.
The girl with the black hair was gone. She had work to do, back on
Earth--the same work she had done with him, another flounderer to bring
in, perhaps in a slightly different fashion, but essentially the same.
And someday she, too, would be on the way out--
He waited in silence, and he could not have put into words the thoughts
that flooded his mind. He waited, and his body grew tight; he heard
the sounds coming from below, an occasional shout, the screeching of
machinery, the hiss of airlocks closing. And then the ship was silent.
Still he waited--
A whir started, somewhere in the depths of the ship. It grew to a
growl, then to a roar. In a peal of thunder he felt himself crushed to
the cot, felt his eyelids pressed tight over his eyes, felt his face
muscles sag under the crush of the powerful acceleration, and he knew
the ship was rising in earnest this time.
A thought crossed his mind as he sank into the blackness of the
deep-sleep that would carry him through the acceleration. He would have
smiled, if he could have. They'd told him the truth. A Free Agent could
go anywhere he wanted to go--
Even to the stars.