Behind him, had he only been there to see and hear, a cataract of laughter had engulfed the great Hall, and His Benevolence, surrounded by his favorites and the most magnificently beautiful girls of the empire, shook in paroxysms of mocking laughter.
But Guerlan knew nothing of this. His muscles ached from the battle and his brain was awhirl. Once out in space again, he noted that a great storm was in progress.
Hurtling under guard through the stormy reaches of space, he idly watched through the plane's transparent dome how lightning danced a drunken saraband. But although Guerlan strove to re-direct his thoughts, the echoes of His Benevolence's voice were like a sunset gun in his brain—final, incontestable, a sentence to the obscurity of the Second Order, and problems ... he had mentioned a specific problem. And Guerlan remembered with chill apprehension the sentence for failure to solve problems in the second order. Three failures brought a warning, five a probation and the sixth ... final judgment.
The upper air of the First Level, reserved for the Scientists of the First Order, had the exhilarating quality of Burgundy. As far as Guerlan's eyes could reach, the opaline and prismatic domes of the First Level's exquisite structures extended in every direction. The light was soft and caressing, thanks to the illumination and climate conditioning of the mammoth Weather Stations. A soft, lilting melody reminiscent of the ancient ballets of another age of centuries past, was like a ripple of melodic laughter, enhancing a background of ineffable peace. But Guerlan knew how illusory all this was for him. Only enough time—a few hours to arrange his affairs and move to the Second Level had been granted him. A profound pang of regret was like a dull ache in his heart.
He had been trained from childhood to be a scientist of the First Order, his mental coordinates had warranted it. So he had never seen any other level but the First. Vaguely he had heard of that Second level where spartan simplicity was a virtue, luxury-less, where toil was constant, and thinking—a dangerous luxury, except where work-problems were concerned. And the columbium steel band around his young heart seemed to constrict more and more. Quickly he finished packing his personal possessions. Nothing else was allowed him—a sentence of demotion entailed complete personal loss.
II
"In twenty-seven seconds," an impassive voice vaguely reminiscent, predicted from the inter-connecting catwalk above, "the vat will burst, flooding the safety moat with acid."
The marvelous tonal quality was startling, for in its depths there was no emotional content—almost as if it were a sexless voice prophesying the most natural thing in the world.
With a swift movement that sent the muscles rippling along a Leander-like torso, Vyrl Guerlan abandoned the precision tool with which he had tackled a gigantic refractory coupling. Gleaming with perspiration, his square-cut mouth compressed into a line of fury, he gazed up at the speaker and wondered where he'd heard that voice before. Above him rose the titanic vat of processing acid, that treated the materials and converted them into gelatinous masses in the first process.