"Tomorrow! Tomorrow might be too late."
"That's ridiculous, Ker-jon. Even if the dream manifests itself again tonight, so what? Tomorrow is soon enough."
Ker-jon shook his head sadly, took his leave. He couldn't tell the psych-tech that tomorrow might be too late because by then his fellow-conspirators would be floundering in rebellion. It all depended on him, of course: he had access to the master controls in the 'ponics room. Few people did, and certainly no mutants. Ker-jon, then; but Ker-jon had a dream which bothered him, which awakened him, sweating and afraid, in the middle of the night....
Night-period. Dull blue lights casting eerie shadows in a little-used back room of the library. And six men who wove their plans for a coup-d'Ark when morning came.
Ker-jon sat on the floor with Cluny-ann, squatting near the dusty stacks which held the un-used physical science books. Not a volume here had been disturbed for perhaps a score of years—perhaps more. Why study the physical sciences when there was no real physical world with which to correlate your findings? Why study them when your universe was bounded with walls of glistening beryl-steel?
Cluny-ann sat near Ker-jon, but she kept her back to him, angrily. She'd hardly spoken a word since he returned from the psych-tech's office, and lunch had been a sorry social failure.
Now Flam-harol got up, paced back and forth for a time, the dome of his three-ridged head gleaming under the blue lights. He licked his lips, fingered for a moment the central flesh-ridge atop his skull. Then he spoke in his deep, booming voice. "I can't help it if I'm nervous; we mutants have waited long and long for this—"
A chorus of "ayes" seconded that, and Flam-harol went on. "We can afford no mistakes. We do or we die—tomorrow. One slip—just one—could be fatal. But in the end, if all goes well, we'll smash the Mutant-making machinery, we'll smash the rule of the Mutant-maker. I don't have to tell you what that means. Whither we came from, that doesn't matter. A world called Urth, but I cannot picture Urth—a huge world a hundred times or more larger than the Ark, a world where you live on the outside, not on the inside.
"I cannot picture it, and so I won't try. But this I can picture. A hundred years ago, they started making mutants, to satisfy a warped craving for superiority. Half the people on the Ark now are mutants. Ridge-head, scaled, toe-less—what's the difference? Mutants all, living in the worst quarters, relegated to inferior positions, scorned, ridiculed....