She hesitated. "In a sense—"
"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—