[Illustration]
Pinlighting is a hell of a way to earn a living. Underhill was furious
as he closed the door behind himself. It didn't make much sense to
wear a uniform and look like a soldier if people didn't appreciate
what you did.
He sat down in his chair, laid his head back in the headrest and
pulled the helmet down over his forehead.
As he waited for the pin-set to warm up, he remembered the girl in the
outer corridor. She had looked at it, then looked at him scornfully.
"Meow." That was all she had said. Yet it had cut him like a knife.
What did she think he was--a fool, a loafer, a uniformed nonentity?
Didn't she know that for every half hour of pinlighting, he got a
minimum of two months' recuperation in the hospital?
By now the set was warm. He felt the squares of space around him,
sensed himself at the middle of an immense grid, a cubic grid, full
of nothing. Out in that nothingness, he could sense the hollow aching
horror of space itself and could feel the terrible anxiety which his
mind encountered whenever it met the faintest trace of inert dust.
As he relaxed, the comforting solidity of the Sun, the clock-work of
the familiar planets and the Moon rang in on him. Our own solar system
was as charming and as simple as an ancient cuckoo clock filled with
familiar ticking and with reassuring noises. The odd little moons of
Mars swung around their planet like frantic mice, yet their regularity
was itself an assurance that all was well. Far above the plane of the
ecliptic, he could feel half a ton of dust more or less drifting
outside the lanes of human travel.
Here there was nothing to fight, nothing to challenge the mind, to
tear the living soul out of a body with its roots dripping in
effluvium as tangible as blood.
Nothing ever moved in on the Solar System. He could wear the pin-set
forever and be nothing more than a sort of telepathic astronomer, a
man who could feel the hot, warm protection of the Sun throbbing and
burning against his living mind.
* * * * *
Woodley came in.
"Same old ticking world," said Underhill. "Nothing to report. No
wonder they didn't develop the pin-set until they began to planoform.
Down here with the hot Sun around us, it feels so good and so quiet.
You can feel everything spinning and turning. It's nice and sharp and
compact. It's sort of like sitting around home."
Woodley grunted. He was not much given to flights of fantasy.
Undeterred, Underhill went on, "It must have been pretty good to have
been an Ancient Man. I wonder why they burned up their world with war.
They didn't have to planoform. They didn't have to go out to earn
their livings among the stars. They didn't have to dodge the Rats or
play the Game. They couldn't have invented pinlighting because they
didn't have any need of it, did they, Woodley?"
Woodley grunted, "Uh-huh." Woodley was twenty-six years old and due to
retire in one more year. He already had a farm picked out. He had
gotten through ten years of hard work pinlighting with the best of
them. He had kept his sanity by not thinking very much about his job,
meeting the strains of the task whenever he had to meet them and
thinking nothing more about his duties until the next emergency arose.
Woodley never made a point of getting popular among the Partners.
None of the Partners liked him very much. Some of them even resented
him. He was suspected of thinking ugly thoughts of the Partners on
occasion, but since none of the Partners ever thought a complaint in
articulate form, the other pinlighters and the Chiefs of the
Instrumentality left him alone.
Underhill was still full of the wonder of their job. Happily he
babbled on, "What does happen to us when we planoform? Do you think
it's sort of like dying? Did you ever see anybody who had his soul
pulled out?"
"Pulling souls is just a way of talking about it," said Woodley.
"After all these years, nobody knows whether we have souls or not."
"But I saw one once. I saw what Dogwood looked like when he came
apart. There was something funny. It looked wet and sort of sticky as
if it were bleeding and it went out of him--and you know what they did
to Dogwood? They took him away, up in that part of the hospital where
you and I never go--way up at the top part where the others are, where
the others always have to go if they are alive after the Rats of the
Up-and-Out have gotten them."
Woodley sat down and lit an ancient pipe. He was burning something
called tobacco in it. It was a dirty sort of habit, but it made him
look very dashing and adventurous.
"Look here, youngster. You don't have to worry about that stuff.
Pinlighting is getting better all the time. The Partners are getting
better. I've seen them pinlight two Rats forty-six million miles apart
in one and a half milliseconds. As long as people had to try to work
the pin-sets themselves, there was always the chance that with a
minimum of four hundred milliseconds for the human mind to set a
pinlight, we wouldn't light the Rats up fast enough to protect our
planoforming ships. The Partners have changed all that. Once they get
going, they're faster than Rats. And they always will be. I know it's
not easy, letting a Partner share your mind--"
"It's not easy for them, either," said Underhill.
"Don't worry about them. They're not human. Let them take care of
themselves. I've seen more pinlighters go crazy from monkeying around
with Partners than I have ever seen caught by the Rats. How many do
you actually know of them that got grabbed by Rats?"
* * * * *
Underhill looked down at his fingers, which shone green and purple in
the vivid light thrown by the tuned-in pin-set, and counted ships.
The thumb for the _Andromeda_, lost with crew and passengers, the
index finger and the middle finger for _Release Ships_ 43 and 56,
found with their pin-sets burned out and every man, woman, and child
on board dead or insane. The ring finger, the little finger, and the
thumb of the other hand were the first three battleships to be lost to
the Rats--lost as people realized that there was something out there
_underneath space itself_ which was alive, capricious and malevolent.