Under the lowering membranous cusp that simulated a sky above the habinet, time had been lost amid the cries of the others and the give-and-take of action. Arnon's memory of the Opening Ceremony, when the ball had been presented to the players by the Heads of All Departments, faded in vibrancy as he strove to cooperate with his team-mates against the opposition.

     The Pre-Fusion Game proceeded according to its age-old dynamics on the Field of Honor adjacent to the Schools Center.  From the benches of the stadium, the lackluster expanse of Ertse could be seen across the Concourse, beyond Conversion Plaza, while overhead the arching structure-less sky-shield, clouded and vein-etched, was shot through with a sallow light, its worsening condition underscoring the fateful character of the contest this year.

     “Only one Game is played per Rising Generation,” Arnon's mother told the neophyte Teacher seated next to her.  Gaf presumably knew this already, but as her instructor during the young woman's final week of training, Dricke felt she needed to hold the Teacher's hand, speaking metaphorically.

     The team had been compiled at random, but they operated as intended in the first or competition phase of the Game, the perpetual running and the light contact honing the teenagers' skills as they instinctively learned to coordinate their movements. This phase was actually the “game” the children had been preparing for, drilling and training since childhood under the tutelage of their parents, the only coaches permitted on Valk.

     “Their play discloses the talents they possess, and therefore their employment-potential as adults.  Isn't that correct?” Gaf asked.  Her tone suggested that she was showing off rather than earnestly confirming a point of inquiry.

     “Not altogether.  You have a fairly accurate sense of the Game.  But you are going to teach, so you have to know precisely.”  As the colony's Archivist, Dricke was charged with providing Gaf with understanding to go along with the knowledge she'd received in school and during her Novitiate. 

     The quality of the game-play and the nature of the outcome would tell the audience—which, besides the parents, contained virtually all the Settlers except the children beneath the age of play—whether their young people had the insight and fortitude to ensure the Settlement's survival.  In other years, the colonists had known they had the latitude to correct the Charter if the game revealed deficiencies.

     “I always thought it was…just symbolic.”

     It concerned Dricke that such a fatuous woman was taking charge of the children.  She replied: “Over the centuries it has certainly achieved that status. But, as you suggested yourself, the Game serves some very critical functions.  This year”—she lifted her face to draw the other's attention to the visibly distended overhead cusp—“we are reminded how intimately our ‘symbols' are entwined in reality.”

     On the Field of Honor the young people charged and retreated, the defenders fighting to dislodge and capture the Ball from the attackers, absorbing body contact and returning punishment blow for blow, their voices raised in the unselfconscious keening of exuberance.  

     A feature of the Pre-Fusion Game of which the teens had been kept in ignorance until today was that the Field itself, manipulated by unseen operators, was made to corrugate, separating abruptly into furrows whenever one side approached the other's goal.  This increased the difficulty of play, but it also equalized the squads' chances.

     With difficulty, for this year her own son was playing, Dricke recalled her obligations to the Teacher-In-Training.  Rounding off her topic, she explained: “The perfect functionality of our society has resulted in many of the essentials being taken for granted, not to say forgotten.  Your job will be to ensure that complacency doesn't debilitate the young people, whom we count on for our preservation.”

     Her son's team appeared to be the weaker, although he and the other forwards, Forteller and Weina, never abated in their desire to elude Sinthe and Yannadot and steal the Ball from Mylish. These were the opposing forwards, whose surpassing agility had enabled them to charge towards an early goal. 

     The fear of disgrace had liberated Arnon from his pre-game timidity, and he was valiantly defending his terrain.  Since the action started he had undergone an array of never-before-experienced emotions, including a distracting appreciation of the differences between the way his own body functioned and the operations of Weina's and the other girls' bodies.

     “At this point we ‘know' everything,” said Dricke, doing her best to suppress her anguish on behalf of Arnon's maladroit allies.  “Our problem is remembering that we always need to test our knowledge against the sources it derives from, so that our life-designs reflect, embody and facilitate our aspirations, rather than being imposed on them.”

     Manifestly, the members of Arnon's team lacked cohesion, and as the play proceeded the other side inexorably ran up goals despite the corrugations.  Even before the third quarter was over, exhaustion eroded the optimism of the losing players and coalesced them into a static end-game defense.  However, they stood shoulder to shoulder and they willingly sacrificed their hopes of scoring in order to protect their precious goal from further violation.

     Gaf burbled, “Now I see the wisdom of spending my last week with you. Before I undertake to teach these----”

     Dricke held her hand up to indicate that Gaf should concentrate on the Field, where the first phase of the Game ended when the corrugations altered direction from the horizontal to the longitudinal, bringing the teams to a standstill in perplexity and turmoil, while the cheering in the stands crescendoed in a roar signifying the spectators' excitement at the onset of the Fusion Phase.  Arnon was standing slack-limbed, squinting with his mouth agape like everybody else in the arena, when a section of the stadium wall clattered open to admit the Settlement's Police Force onto the Field---seven black-clad, stern-faced, finely conditioned officers who set in play a new Ball that was twice as big as the one the children had been handling. The latter's paralysis lasted for nearly a minute while the officers deployed themselves with impassivity and adult self-assurance.  Then, instinctively, without consulting each other, the teams got underway again, to the boundless jubilation of the audience.  Combining into a single entity, they surged towards the menacing intruders.

     Arnon and the other two forwards on his team joined forces with Sinthe, Mylish and Yannadote, while in back of them the previously rival defenders fell into a solid corps of supporters.  It was a determined new amalgam of youthful forces that advanced against the uniformed grownups. Arnon was especially encouraged to do his best by the fact that his father, Muzat, was one of the policemen.  When their gazes coincided he could see that his father's eyes were glinting with pride.

     “Well, they did it,” uttered Gaf, adding with a self-aggrandizing personal note, “I'm glad it won't be my class that lets the habinet down.”

     Dricke was so relieved to see the teams cohering that she let the Teacher's silliness pass without comment, because the end of the Game occurred when Fusion took place, and she was glad to know that Arnon was no longer in danger of being harmed.  Her heart went out to him as she watched the boy react with renewed perplexity—a trait which was exhibited also by the other contestants, when the policemen broke rank and—in the ceremony called Here Is The Ball, The Ball Is Vilk—stepped forward to greet and congratulate them.  The officers' geniality soon relaxed the players and encouraged them to savor to the maximum the virtue of attainment.  By then the rest of the adults had left the stands and flooded onto the Field of Honor to embrace the young people, celebrating the zeal which they had evinced today and would soon be lavishing on the maintenance of the artificial sky.  In the lax swirl of bystanders, Gaf waited until Dricke hugged and kissed Arnon before she declared, “I'm due at the institute to collect my test materials, ma'am.  But I want to thank you for the illumination you have shed on my poor ignorance this week.”

     Her hurry to depart wasn't seemly, and she'd sounded brittle and insincere, but Dricke's duty to Gaf had ended with the New Ball Ceremony.  Standing with her arm about the shoulder of her son, the Archivist nodded to acknowledge the Teacher's thanks; then she disregarded Gaf as the latter made her way across the Field in the direction of the Schools Center. Muzat came to join them, and after Arnon and his mates had clasped hands and traded compliments, his parents walked with him toward the Plaza-side exit of the stadium, pleased to listen as he rehearsed his exploits, his chatter to some extent sidetracked by the involuntary glances he bestowed on Weina.  The young girl was trekking to the sidelines alone, and Arnon observed this sadly.  Weina's mother had been Converted after an accident, and her father Thorbe was a Manufacturer, a citizen so essential to the safety of the habinat that it had never been expected that he would attend the Game.  Because the girl had only minimal contact with Thorbe, she had received the distinction of being advanced into the next group beyond her age-level, in the hope that her association with older children might offset the absence of parental closeness.

     An incident took place when Muzat and his family reached the sideline that Dricke found alarming, and that cast a shadow over the post-Game festivity.  Someone had taken Arnon's shoes from the line of players' footwear along the margin of the Field. Dricke elected to treat the matter lightly so as not to dampen Arnon's joy.

     “Fortunately, your father is a member of the Police,” she said.  She then spoke to her husband.  “Sergeant, we expect you to do your duty.”

     Catching her tone, Muzat saluted entertainingly.  “I will get on the case at once.  You proceed to Conversion Chamber: Clothes while I look into this.  My mission should be accomplished in time for me to join you for the evening feeding.”

     Outside the arena, the Sergeant presented a manly, erect figure as he watched his wife and son walk towards the Concourse along the stripway that led to the Plaza, his lovely boy scooting ahead of Dricke to catch up with the lithe and angular-featured Weina.  The girl had shown skill and poise during the Game, in spite of being a year younger than the other contestants.  Muzat was proud of all the Settlement's children, but he was no longer basking in the outcome of their play.  Together with everybody else on Valk, he glanced repeatedly at the diaphanous encasement to gauge the rate of its deterioration, and he noted that the mineralized surfaces of the structures in the Settlement Center were not as refulgent with the canopy's reflected illumination as they'd been before the Pre-Fusion Game Ceremonies.  He said nothing to his Captain about the missing shoes until the spectators and players had vacated the stadium. 

     “Several of the cases I'm investigating now are mysterious,” he remarked.

     The tall Captain regarded him balefully.  “Nothing is ‘mysterious', Sergeant.  Which is not to say that certain things don't exist beyond our ken.  Most of the lore your wife preserves is but the product of our blindly evasive effort to conceal our tragedy from ourselves.”

     “You are speaking of the Origins Unknown?”

     “I am indeed.  When the war the Founders ventured here to avoid caught up with them, no more than a century after the Retreat Forward landed them on Valk, it might have been better for us in the long run if their pursuers had finished their work.  The survivors performed prodigies to keep the colony intact, but we are still ten millennia from the sort of knowledge that can re-unite us with our species—if there are any more of us left Out There.”

     Muzat regarded the overhead again.  “We may not have 10,000 minutes left, sir.” 

     His superior's eyes were pained and haunted, and he answered, “They say it happened once before, when the Regulating Plant lost power.  It nearly became extinct.”

     The Sergeant, who'd heard the story from his wife, stayed quiet.

     “The Settlers are hardly conscious of their reaction to the drain,” said the Captain.  “I mean to say that the reaction's not conscious, at least not at this stage—it's a slight feeling of dread tinged with subsurface urgency.  But that's enough to make them want to scrimp; and from there it's only a short step to hoarding.  Before it's over, they steal.”

     “Have the Engineering Elders reported back on their Departmental Analysis?”

     They hadn't.  The Captain never allowed his private feelings to become apparent to his men.  Muzat sought to emulate him, but as he stood before the Captain holding his uniform cap, having taken it off to show respect, he couldn't help turning the cap around repeatedly and even, with a subsurface urgency of his own, twisting it.

     “But you and I were not the only ones,” his chief pointed out, “to notice how easy it was for them to modulate the light for the Game.  Simple conversation doesn't deplete the power in the Overhead unless there's something wrong at the Regulating Plant.  It should have taken them half the morning to bring the light down.”

     “I'm aware of that.  Today we got it down in twenty-five minutes.”

     The Captain seemed to think it significant that Muzat had timed the amelioration process.  The Sergeant added: “Well, they'll soon be turning it up again, sir.  We'll see how long that takes.”

     “If the failure we all fear is real, it could take a week, my friend.  It could even take longer.”

     Continuing to discuss the situation, they set off for the Regulating Plant, where they arrived at about the time Arnon, his mother and the girl reached the Conversion Plaza and turned their steps towards the Chamber: Food.  Five times the length of the Concourse and ten times as wide, the Plaza on the stadium side abutted the Children's Learning Hall, Fusion School and the multi-tiered Residences, home to all the Settlers except the Manufacturers.  Beyond the Plaza to the west lay the Hard Goods and Canopy Factories, and on the other side the spires of the mansions of the plants' executives; to the north lay the Power Stations and the Regulating Plant, Colony Park and the Memorial Spaceport. The only building erected on the Plaza proper was the Administration Institute.  Conversion Chamber: Food and its analogue facility, Conversion Chamber: Clothes, stood at opposite ends of Settlement Square in the middle of the Plaza, the former in front of the Diversification Schools (attended by the Apprentices who, after five years' service “on the skin” outside the habinet, having displayed their qualities of mind and temperament, graduated into one or another of the professions and occupations) while the latter occupied a more idyllic setting on the shore of the monumental (and artificial) body of water known as Ertse, the name of which was held to be a corruption of the ancient word Erdsee.

     Despite her isolated upbringing, Weina was articulate and sociable, a sharp-eyed, ready-tongued girl, though maidenly.  Dricke asked if she had thought about a Development Track; but the young lady, her charming smile lapsing, shrugged the question off, maintaining she had her hands full keeping pace with her more advanced classmates.  Arnon watched his mother's features stiffen, and he knew what she was thinking: “How typical of the children of the Manufacturers not to have an idea in their heads.”  But Arnon found the girl's emphasis on the here and now beguiling, and by way of defending Weina, but also to point out a simple fact to his mother, he said, “There'll be time enough for her to figure out that during our Service Out There.  Not to mention that we have to get through Fusion School first.”

     Dricke conceded the point, suppressing her maternal tendency to protect the boy.  She and Arnon joined a line leading to one of the phalanges of the food conversion installation.

     Weina piped up, “If I didn't have to meet my guardian, I'd gladly go with you to Conversion Chamber: Clothes.  The only thing I've got to wear to Fusion School is sports outfits.  I can't wear my Primary uniform, and Fusion School starts tomorrow!”

     “You look good anyway,” Arnon blurted.  The unexampled feelings for her which had overtaken him on the Field of Honor had surfaced in a way that led the females to gaze frankly at each other.  Then the boy relaxed again when Weina went off in search of her guardian, a slope-shouldered youth named Trillom with a dismal mien who had followed them at a distance well within the crowd of meandering colonists.  The guardian served as a cautionary example to the adolescents, because to be assigned to Nonessential Duty at such an early age meant that Trillom, in his Novitiate, had been judged as lacking any skill valuable to the welfare of the habinet.

    In the aftermath of the Game, Conversion Plaza hosted more than the number of Settlers usually found idling, socializing and conversing at this time of day.  Dricke greeted neighbors and acquaintances, yet after she and Arnon had received their daily provender she guided her son towards Conversion Chamber: Clothes with resolute haste, because the tenor of the citizens' behavior struck the Archivist as being ominous.  Had she not been an Administration Worker as well as the spouse of a policeman, she might have ascribed the deliberately suppressed voices, restless and assessive eyes and wary postures of the colonists to post-Game blasé.  However, not only had her son's slippers been purloined, but that morning Muzat had disclosed that petty crimes involving garments were on the increase.

     Clothes, like its counterpart, Food, was a cylindrical housing of impossibly large dimensions surfaced with an estrellite facing that was all but featureless.  Within the complex, structurally demarcated sub-chambers yielded up specific items: Body Garments, Head Gear, Footwear and so forth.  Not more than five people were ahead of Arnon when he got in line for the Footwear, this time unaccompanied by his mother.  The lighting in the chambers was abnormally poor today, but the sight of machinery had always fascinated the lad.  As he gazed up at the installation's ceiling, where the tapering blades of its divisions joined, his questing soul aspired to fill up all that dim intriguing space, and he could barely remember the code required to get shoes for thinking about the next five years, during which he'd toil as a student Engineer on the surface of the Membrane. 

     Arnon shifted his weight from one foot to the other, thinking, “This is the last time I'll get clothing here until I'm certified as an Apprentice.”  Fusion School possessed its own Chamber for supplying the graduates with their extra-planetary work-suits.

     His sense of duty and of being born for service to the Settlement ran deeply in his blood.  Dricke had been promoted to the position of Archivist on the strength of her conscientiousness in carrying out her previous duties, whereas Muzat was a policeman of the third generation, and he'd already been advised that he would succeed his Captain as Police Leader when the latter, on his sixtieth birthday, retired to Elder Service in the Senate.

     This afternoon the Sergeant wondered if he were fit to follow in the Captain's footsteps, for he could not determine whether the activity he was investigating was criminal in intent, or whether it resulted from the demoralization and suppressed panic initiated by the fading of the tenebrous sky covering.  He favored the latter explanation because he felt his own malaise resulted from the same pair of causes.  At the Regulating Plant, he and the Captain met with the Engineering Elders, who had come back from the Rendering Station to report that its machinery operated without defect.  Yet the Elders conveyed this information in the very process of confirming—at the Data Reporting Center in its transparent cockpit above the equipment floor—that it was still losing power.

     “Each mutational transaction,” stated Controls Engineer Predeke, “is currently taking .891%  longer to complete itself than is prescribed by the Statistical Averaging Staff. The light will not be back to normal for another four hours.”

     The policemen, in order to speak frankly without being heard by hypersensitive ears, went for a stroll along the margin of Conversion Plaza.  Even so, they kept their voices low, and the Captain practiced prototypical Valkian indirection when he opined, “Fusion School is getting underway at a propitious time this Session.”

     Muzat was blunter, a man aware of his own rough edges.  “We need all the children Out There we can muster, and as soon as we can get their suits on them.”

     The Captain only murmured, for he was lucubrating.  He scanned the colonists still foregathered in uneasy leisure on the Plaza, but Muzat didn't think he actually saw them.

     “We're left with the Manufacturers, Muzat.  Interviewing them will call for diplomacy, not to say discretion.  I would deal with them myself, but I think it's even more essential that I mobilize the off-duty staff and activate our safeguards.”

     Muzat saluted, but before the Captain returned the gesture he held the Sergeant's gaze compellingly.  The older man imparted another sentiment:  “Twenty thousand years is not a bad run, from what we know about the profligate habits of our forefathers.  Maybe we've made an error all this time to lament and bewail our isolation.”

     The continuous production of the skyskin material, the very source of life for the Settlement and the same matter within which occurred the transformations yielding Valk its food, clothing and hard goods, was entrusted to a quadrivium of Manufacturers, each of whom held office for ten years, following which they ceded power to appointees from the elite layer of the Fusion Phalanxes.  Manufacturing itself was automated, and the factory staffs consisted of the Manufacturer, his deputy, the Engineering Party, technicians, and a squad of protectors. The ancient and at one time discredited principle of competition had been revived when it was discovered that only such activity, free of both the inertia and the constraints of central planning, resulted in reliable sourcing and the highest quality material.  With competition came prizes, and so it was that, alone among the professional classes, the Manufacturers were rewarded for their services with dwelling-rights to the four estates sited along the shores of Ertse.  However, to offset any tendency to self-aggrandizement, at the end of their service period the Manufacturers were inducted into the Consultative body to the Senate, a strictly honorary posting that effectively distanced these shrewd pragmatists from the levers of legislative power.  The habinet-disruptive dangers of ambition and greed were further held in check by the Oversight and Review Board of the Valkian Bureaucracy.

    Muzat agreed that competition was essential to the production of consistently prime-grade material, yet the prerequisites they enjoyed had prompted the Manufacturers to adopt a certain high-handedness that wasn't characteristic of the other professions and that made more difficult investigations requiring their cooperation.  For example, the fabrication masters liked to keep petitioners waiting, and while Muzat was scarcely a “petitioner”, he knew the Manufacturers regarded him as such, and he also knew that any effort on his part to assert the primacy of public rights over private would be met with further prevarication.  This was a fight which would ultimately win but which he couldn't afford to set in motion, for time was at a premium.  As it was, he consumed two entire days making his inquiries among the arrogant obstructionists.

     The first of those days found his good son Arnon embarking with his age-mates on the enterprise which they'd been looking forward to since childhood.  The boy's excitement grew ever greater when the lovely Weina, entering Transformation Class, elected to sit next to him, her friendly presence obviating his urge to add to the boisterousness that marked the other boys' behavior as they waited for the Teacher to appear.  During the next five years, the children attending Fusion School today would carry out their service on the space-side skin of the Membrane; and then, in the second phase of Fusionhood, also five years, they would labor in the ore mines, where those who became adept in exercising the skills they'd learned were designated Engineers-in-Training, while those showing less initiative were slated for the Bureaucracy.  The culling process actually began before the students even put on their spacesuits. 

     “Before your entry into the Void, I'm going to test your aptitudes,” the Teacher let them know in her opening address.  This was Gaf, the woman who'd accompanied Dricke onto the Field of Play following the pre-Fusion Game.  She offered the class a brief smile.  “This is the place where I'm supposed to assure the ones whose tests place them in the bottom half of the Aptitude Scale that they shouldn't lose heart.  You will all serve a function on the skin.”

     Her drone induced torpor in the classroom.  The students were greenhorns, lacking patience.  They wanted to make history, not listen to speeches.

     “The not so practical,” Gaf continued, “will be assigned to Research and will observe, record and analyze the work of the others.  I myself am a graduate of Research.”

     With this statement, Gaf's smile expanded, and, quivering, looked natural.  Having salved the students' adolescent fears, she introduced a docu-vid highlighting the previous Phalanx's activities as Membrane Tenders.  During the showing the Teacher reinforced her theme that the Fusion of the cohort during its five-year Novitiate and its members' Differentiation as to Specialty occurred simultaneously.  At the docu-vid's conclusion, Praknod raised his hand.  The Teacher, who had anticipated his question, permitted him to ask it.

     “Those suits the Apprentice Engineers wear, Teacher.  When do we get ours?”

     “The School has its own Conversion Chamber: Clothes.”  She activated a mechanism in her lectern which caused the graphics wall to separate and retract, revealing a metal-ringed oval portrait of imposing size and businesslike solidity.  “Your graduation exercise will consist of your passing through it.  Your exit from Suits will be directly into space itself.”

     When the class was released for afternoon exercise, Gaf stood in the doorway and viewed the stimulated, excited students discussing the life they expected to lead on the bioskin.  Like the other colonists that day, she sporadically assessed the quality of the Membrane's illumination, but if she felt concern at its progressive wastage, her expression of complacency gave no indication of it.

     Muzat, concerned about the habinet's skin, had difficulty getting to the Manufacturers, having first to penetrate a system of mini-bureaucracies in which delays were instigated merely to remind the inquirer of the Manufacturers' importance; then he had to cool his heels in their antechambers while the point was driven home.  Three of these egoists, Diapareen, Gackmost and Qiik, he found ensconced in their villas—or in Qiik's case, on his pleasure boat.  None shed any light on the dilemma of the Membrane, and all produced test results certifying that the material they turned out was in compliance with all specifications.  The fourth manufacturer was Thorbe, father of the young girl who'd smitten Arnon.  In contrast to his fellows, he almost never left the factory, but rather gloried in being as dedicated to his calling as he was proficient in executing its demands. 

     The next morning, Muzat took the promenade that curved along the Plaza from the seaside to the site of Thorbe's plant.  He saw a pall of haze coalescing about the upper stories of the Administration Institute, a new and ominous emblem of the Settlement's affliction.  He was concerned to see that patches of the bioskin had lost sufficient substance now to reveal the presence beyond it of the Void that would engulf and vaporize Valk unless the power drain dould be arrested.  Across Conversion  Plaza, to the policeman's rear, the students in the classroom at Fusion School were no longer rambunctious and disorderly.  The Membrane's waning had subdued them no less than it had their elders, but the teens were affected also by another factor.  In back of Gaf, the graphics wall sections had been retracted once again to display the elegant engineering and provocative intricacy of the portal of Suits. 

     “When you pass through, I'm going to envy you,” the Teacher declared.  “Later you'll be promoted to work that's more sophisticated, but nothing you experience will ever equal in excitement and awe your first weeks of service on the skin.  I'd like to announce, however, that I, too, am setting off on a new adventure.”

     Arnon and Weina traded wry, jocular glances.  He'd already told her what his mother thought of Gaf, based on the week they'd spent together.  “Since she knows she's not going to be a Teacher permanently, she's spared herself a deep-enough immersion in the subjects to mature emotionally much beyond her students.”  “When you've been ejected,” Gaf was saying, “I will close the School and proceed to the Administrative Institute where I will be inducted  into the Executive Bureaucracy, the first person ever to enjoy this honor after less then—”  Weina leaned to the side until their foreheads connected.

     “Look at your shoe,” she whispered.  “What's happening to it, Arnon?”

     He tingled romantically but did as she suggested and regarded his footwear.  Both soles had come loose.

     “I can't imagine,” he whispered back.  “I just got them—after the Pre-Fusion Game, remember?  When somebody took my other pair.”

     Raising her own voice instead of admonishing the talkers, Gaf finished her anecdote: “…help our Senators in the legislation of those periodical calibrations of the Charter necessary to perpetuate the Settlement's tranquility.”

     She may have thought it was her verbiage that inspired the silence in the classroom when she was through, but in fact, the students had tuned Gaf out. Unanimously, they dreamed of the enterprise they'd soon be launched upon, Arnon and the whole Fusion Class: Weina, Mylish, Fortella, Sinthe, Yannadot and all the other Game-tested stalwarts.

     While their asperations took flight, Arnon's father, profiting from his experiences, arrived at Thorbe's factory provided with copies of records from the Regulating Plant, expecting that he'd have to cool his heels at length and wanting to use the time to confirm the status reports the other Manufacturers had made available to him.  Factory Maintainer Trillom, the ungifted attendant of Thorbe's daughter, while in the act of refurbishing the plant lobby, gave signs of wanting to have a conversation with the officer.  Muzat would have forsaken his record search to accommodate the guardian, but, at that point, and much sooner than he had expected, he was ushered into the isolation chamber of the executive.

     Thorbe had a bald spherical skull which he succeeded in bearing with dignity by eschewing the facial jewelry favored by his rivals and arraying himself in the plainest design of tunic provided by Clothes.  His personal manner as well was unaffected as he invited Muzat to take a seat across the upright work structure from him and begin his questioning. The policeman was relieved to find the maker so accessible, and his evaluation of Thorbe might have been positive had the latter, unlike the other Manufacturers, who disdained even to utter the names of their fellow industrialists, not freely deprecated the other men and sought to cast doubt on their performance.

     “I hate to betray my class, but the threat to Valk is so alarming that I've no alternative,” the magnate stated.  “My competitors are engaged in a childish contest that is not about wealth-accumulation, as one might anticipate, but about which of them can lead the most luxurious lifestyle.  In their villas there are secret underground zones in which they wallow in the enjoyment of customized hard goods—clothing, utensils and art objects—all produced within their factories by diverting power from the Membrane.”

     Such a charge, if true, Muzat reflected, would do more than solve the problem of the bioskin's drainage.  It would unmask a colony-endangering cesspool of corruption at the very core of the Valkian system.  “But such a diversion,” he pointed out, “would show up in their records.”

     The other man grinned skeletally with skeptical amusement. “You're a policeman.  Would it surprise you to learn the wretches falsify their data?”

     Muzat was tempted to flourish the papers he was holding, the reports from the Regulating Plant substantiating the very claims Thorbe was impugning.  His instinct to wait and see stayed his hand, and , rising from his seat, he thanked the Manufacturer for his “civic-minded sharing of information,” then took his leave, anxious to investigate the man's version of events, if only to discount it before advancing to another possibility which had already taken shape in his mind.  In the lobby he was appealed to directly and openly by Trillom, who could no longer suppress the sense of urgency that gripped him.  “I have something to tell you that will have a bearing on your inquiries.”  Muzat was disposed to favor the ill-starred youth because he'd learned from Arnon that Trillom guarded Weina with unwavering fidelity.

     “In my Novitiate, I was paired with the young female, Gaf,” the Maintainer imparted, “during our E.P.E.P.  We were being vetted for our competence in the hard goods sector when we uncovered a ‘research project' Thorbe had initiated without the Senate's authorization. Our findings were unmistakable—the Manufacturer's project was cannibalizing power. The case was clear, and yet we tarried in uncertainty due to our lowly status.  The Manufacturer intercepted us before we were able to report—”  With a nod, Muzat indicated the portal leading out of the lobby, and Trillom ceased talking until the two men had moved outdoors.  “He invited us to our villa,” Trillom resumed dourly, “where he closeted himself with Gaf.  During their conference, I was entertained by Thorbe's young daughter.  I gamed with her in the garden, and found the child's sprightly company enchanting after five years of relentless self-discipline.  She notified me of her mother's Conversion, which increased the sympathy I felt for her, because my own mother had been Converted before her time.  After several pleasant hours had gone by, Thorbe summoned me to his retiring zone.  I thought it peculiar that whereas Gaf had met with him in private, she remained in the zone when my turn came, standing by a window/door leading to the garden.  The Manufacturer told me that he was developing a hard goods replacement for the bioskin that would eliminate the need for constant total-energy transformations, and he said that his invention was going to liberate Valk to realize the full potential of his resources.  He vowed he'd create new categories of products.”

     Muzat began walking, the better to absorb Trillom's narrative.  The Maintainer came with him as he strolled along the stripway.  “Such a thing would also have the effect of eliminating the other three makers,” Muzat observed.  “His competitors.”

     “Officer, you don't know the half of it. Thorbe proposes to manufacture nonessential possessions for the settlers to enjoy in order to gain the popularity necessary to enable him to overthrow the Senate and replace it with himself—as his invitation is meant to supplant the Membrane—as our source of government.  In return for her silence, Gaf is going to serve as something called the Main Speaker when the plan takes effect.  She's ambitious but she lacks the qualifications to be a professional, so she ‘arranged' to get her a place in the Education Division.  From there the Teacher will progress, after a single class in Pre-Fusion School, to the Executive Bureaucracy, where she'll be situated conveniently when the usurper ‘throws the switch.'”

     The enormity of the evil Trillom related was surreal, and Muzat would have dismissed it as the fantasizing of a misfit had Dricke not mentioned that Gaf had been recruited as a Teacher following the ACCIDENTAL CONVERSION of the Apprentice originally scheduled for the Fusion School post.  “Even I,” he told the Maintainer, “a policeman, cannot conceive that the accomplished and to all appearances civilized individual I just interviewed possesses the character of a Conversion instigator.”

     “As I said before, you don't know the half of it.  He offered me the position of the Supervisor, Systems, the highest-level technical post in the habinet.  When I declined, saying I wouldn't be ready for such a job for forty or more years, if ever, Thorbe pointed out the window/door at his fetching, romping daughter, who had stayed in the garden when I left her. ‘Gaf and I,' he said, ‘witnessed your salacious interest in my child.  He can easily make a case against you as a preddie (predatory deviant), and I promise you we will unless you keep what you have learned today secret.  This is my final offer, Trillom.  I will sweeten it to the extent of permitting you to serve as Weina's guardian and companion if you accept.'”

     Musat's patience gave out.  “No father in his right mind would employ his child in such a malignant enterprise.”

     “If you really think that, Officer, why don't you look at your hat and tell me what's happening to it.”

     The surprised policeman did as the other requested, and he saw that his uniform cap had shredded in his hands.  During their conversation, he'd twisted and turned the hat continuously—agitated by the dread Trillom had inspired—although he was sure he hadn't exerted sufficient torque to damage it under ordinary circumstances.  “It's the energy drain,” he acknowledged.  “I've never seen it so advanced before.”

     “This is the doing of Thorbe,” Trillom reiterated.

     “I know that you believe what you say, my friend.  But your career was frustrated, and for some reason you targeted your anger on a man who'd have to be the most unnatural parent—”

     “Please, Officer Muzat.  Think,” Trillom exhorted.  “Where is Weina right now?”

     The question propelled Muzat into reflection.  She was with his son in school, and today—momentarily, in fact—the students were going to graduate to their extra-colonial service.  The officer didn't speak, for there was no time for further conversation.  Leaving the guardian where he stood, he released the tatters of his uniform cap, his legs already scissoring.  The waters of Ertse roiled darkly in the undernourished light of the Membrane.  The policeman gained the Plaza and oriented himself by picking out the upper tier of the stadium through the pall shrouding the Administrative Institute.  The monumental quality of the structures about the Plaza recalled Dricke's legends of the Settlement's heroic precursors and the generations of productive and peaceful colonists they had spawned.  Despite the selfless labor of millennia, man's old evil had surfaced in the habinet in the form of power-lust, and if Muzat  reached the Fusion School too late, it would be as if his forebears had never existed.  Having escaped the cataclysm in which the rest of the species immolated itself, they had unwittingly borne in their genes the seed of humanity's final destruction.  Unfortunately, the guardian of the laws had learned the truth too late to keep the Rising Class from being inadequately shielded against the forces of extinction Out There.  Arnon, Weina and the others had filed through Suits while the melancholy Trillom was still leading Muzat to an enlightened understanding of the crisis.  So that when the officer burst into the Fusion School classroom, the adolescents had already exited the Settlement to begin their Novitiate.  The graphics wall still displayed the metal-ringed portal, but only the Teacher Gaf remained in the classroom.  She was collecting the materials of instruction she had used to ready the students for their exodus into the Void.  Muzat shouted in a voice more anguished than enraged, “The power's dying.  Call them back!  Their suits are going to fail!”

     Taken unawares, Gaf shed her self-possession.  The sight of the policeman stalking between the youngsters' desks in a determined gait, his face rigid with anger, indicated that the strategy of her patron had gone awry.  Throwing down the school texts, Gaf wheeled the weighty portal open and bolted into Suits.  Muzat accused:

     “Your ambition has destroyed our future!”  But his fury was impotent, for by the time he got to the portal, not only had Gaf locked the flywheel in place, but the control panel had it that she had initiated Energy Transformation.  Muzat pounded his fists on the wall, his frustration that of the upright over the devastations wrought by the willful, and he took no satisfaction in knowing that when Gaf left the Chamber, she'd pay in full for her act.

     The identical thought beset the Teacher as the Transformation Exchange completed itself.  The Chamber was programmed to expel its student occupant into space before he or she experienced fear or developed second thoughts about the mission.  As the suit accreted about her body, its spinning filaments at first apparent individually but then weaving busily into the fabric of the garment while the helmet materialized abruptly as a military construct, enclosing her head as though in a glass-fronted bell, Gaf had barely yielded to relief at her evasion of the officer's retribution when the space-side portal began disintegrating before her eyes and an expelling force from behind catapulted her through the portal's dissolving substance into the Void.  She cartwheeled across the Membrane's surface as its guttering light extinguished in a last flaring emanation that no sooner pulsed than it was fading, while the Teacher's own consciousness faded, so that the suffocation of Muzat and the race of Settlers on Valk was  cloaked in darkness absolute as befit the ignominy of their extinction at the hands of a credulous fool.  Out There the students had detected that their suits were failing, and they understood that they were doomed.  Through visors seamy with fissures their eyes beseeched each other's even as their disillusionment transitioned into a somber and stoic acceptance of their fate.  Their young dreams expired while they drifted like rudderless Ertsean sailcraft, attempting to grasp hands but not succeeding because their erratic trajectories never coincided.

     Before he lost sight of Weina, Arnon saw her mouth form the words I LOVE YOU while she tumbled away in agonizingly slow motion, her arms reaching out futilely to embrace him.  And with his last ounces of energy Arnon beheld the power-starved Membrane, recalling his parents and the way his classmates had come together during that wonderful act of Fusion during the Game, but he didn't perish until he'd witnessed the sight of the Teacher, wearing a suit more recently assembled and even less capable than theirs of giving safety, exploding in a fiery cataclysm of human waste.

     All, or almost all,  was death and silence after that.

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