Nine Lives

She was alive inside but dead outside, her face a black and dun net of wrinkles, tumors, cracks. She was bald and blind. The tremors that crossed Libra's face were only quiverings of corruption; underneath, in the black corridors, the halls beneath the skin, there were crepitations in darkness, ferments, chemical nightmares that had gone on for centuries. "Oh, the damned flatulent planet." Pugh murmured, as the dome shook and a boil burst a kilometer to the southwest, spraying silver pus across the sunset. The sun had been setting for the past two days.

"I shall be glad to see a human face."

"Thanks," said Martin.

"Oh, yours is human, to be sure," said Pugh, "but I've seen it so long I can't see it."

A clutter of rad-vid signals crowded the communicator that Martin was operating, faded, returned as face and voice. The face filled the screen; young, powerful, the nose of an Assyrian king and the eyes of a samurai, the skin bronze, eyes the color of iron: magnificent. "Is that what humans look like?" said Pugh with awe. "I'd forgotten."

"Shut up, Owen, we're on."

"Libra Exploratory Mission Base, come in, please, this is Passerine launch."

"Libra here. Beam fixed. Come on down, launch."

"Expulsion in seven E seconds. Hold on." The screen blanked and sparkled.

"Do you think the whole lot of them look like that?" said Pugh, still bemused. "Martin, you and I are uglier men than I thought."

"Shut up, Owen...."

For 22 minutes, Martin followed the landing craft down by signal and then, through the (continued on page 132)Nine Lives(continued from page 129) cleared dome, they saw it, small star high in the blood-colored east, sinking. It came down neat and quiet, Libra's thin atmosphere carrying little sound. Pugh and Martin closed the headpieces of their imsuits, zipped out of the dome air locks and ran with soaring strides, Nijinsky and Nureyev, toward the boat. Three equipment modules came floating down at four-minute intervals and 100-meter intervals east of the boat. "Come on out," Martin said on his suit radio, "we're waiting at the door."

"Come on in, the methane's fine," said Pugh.

The hatch opened and the young man they had seen on the screen flung himself out with one athletic twist and leaped down onto the shaky dust and clinkers of Libra. Martin shook his hand, greeted him, but Pugh stared at the hatch, from which another young man emerged with the same neat twist and jump, followed by a young woman, who emerged with the same twist, ornamented by a wriggle, and the jump. Like the first one, they were tall, with bronze skin, black hair, high-bridged nose, epicanthic fold, the same face. They all had the same face. The fourth was emerging from the hatch with the identical neat jump movement of the three others. "Martin, bach," said Pugh, "we've got a clone."

"Right," said one of the newcomers, "we're a tenclone, John Chow's the name. You're Lieutenant Martin?"

"No, I'm Owen Pugh."

"Alvaro Guillen Martin," said Martin formally. Another girl was emerging, the same beautiful face: Martin stared at her and his eyes rolled like a nervous pony's. Evidently, he had never given any thought to cloning and was suffering technological shock.

"Steady," Pugh said in the Argentine dialect, "it's only excess twins." He stood close by Martin's elbow. He was glad of the contact.

It is hard to meet a stranger. Even the greatest extrovert meeting even the meekest stranger knows a certain dread, though he may not know he knows it. Will he make a fool of me, wreck my image of myself, invade me, destroy me, change me? Will he be different from me? Yes, that he will. There's the terrible thing: the strangeness of the stranger.

After two years on a dead planet, and the last half year spent as a team of two with only radio contact with the rest of their crew, two men working hard and seeing nobody else at all for six mortal months; after that, it's even harder to meet a stranger, however welcome he may be. For you're out of the habit, you've lost the touch; and so the fear revives, the primitive anxiety, the old dread.

The clone, five males and five females, had done in a couple of minutes what a man might have done in 20: It had greeted Pugh and Martin, had a look at Libra, unloaded the boat and now was ready to go. As they set off, Martin asked, "Which of you did I speak to during flight?" His voice was rather sharp.

"Me, John Aleph. Also Yod got a word in," one said, nodding at a second one, who appeared all at once to be younger and smaller.

"Big Aleph generally talks first," this one said. But the next moment, as they all float-bounced along, Pugh couldn't tell which one was Aleph and which one Yod.

The dome filled with them, a hive of golden bees. They hummed and buzzed quietly, filled up all silences, all spaces with a honey-brown flood of human presence. Martin looked bewilderedly at the long-limbed girls, whose smile was a little gentler than that of the boys, though no less radiantly self-possessed.

"Self-possessed," Owen Pugh murmured to his friend, "that's it. Think of it, to be oneself ten times over. Nine seconds for every motion, nine ayes on every vote. It would be glorious!" But Martin was asleep. And the John Chows had all gone to sleep at once. The dome was filled with their quiet breathing. They were young, they didn't snore. Martin sighed and snored, his Hershey bar-colored face relaxed in the dim afterglow of Libra's primary, set at last. Pugh had cleared the dome and stars looked in, Sol among them, a great company of lights, a clone of splendors. Pugh slept and dreamed of a one-eyed giant who chased him through the shaking halls of hell.

• • •

Pugh watched the clone's awakening from his sleeping bag. They all got up within a minute, except for one pair, a boy and a girl, who lay snugly tangled and still sleeping in one bag. Seeing this, there was a shock like one of Libra's earthquakes within Pugh, a very deep tremor. Yet consciously, he was pleased at the sight; there was no other such comfort on this dead hollow world. More power to them who made love. One of the others stepped gently on them; they woke; the girl sat up, flushed and sleepy, with bare golden breasts. One of her sisters murmured something to her, she shot a glance at Pugh and disappeared into the sleeping bag, followed by a faint giggle, from another direction a brief fierce stare, from yet another direction a voice: "Christ, we're used to having a room to ourselves. Hope you don't mind, Captain Pugh."

"It's a pleasure," Pugh said half truthfully. He had to stand up then, wearing only the shorts he slept in, and he felt like a plucked rooster, all white scrawn and pimples. The United Kingdom had come through the Great Famines rather well, losing less than half its population: a record achieved by rigorous food control. Black-marketeers and hoarders had been executed. Crumbs had been shared. Where in richer lands many had died and a few had thrived, in Britain fewer died and none throve. They all got lean. Their sons were lean, their grandsons lean, small, brittle-boned, easily infected. They had replaced the survival of the fittest with the survival of the fairest. Owen Pugh was a scrawny little man. But he was there.

Just at the minute, he could have wished he wasn't.

At breakfast, a John said, "Now, if you'll brief us, Captain Pugh--"

"Owen, then."

"Owen, we can work out our schedule. Hs anything new concerning the mine turned up since your last report to your mission? We saw all your reports when Passerine was in orbit around Planet V."

Martin did not answer, though the mine was his discovery and project; Pugh did his best. It was hard to talk to them, the same expression of intelligent interest on the same faces, all leaning forward at almost the same angle. Over the Exploitation Corps insignia on their tunics, each had a name band, first name John and last name Chow, of course, but the middle names different. The men were Aleph, Kaph, Yod, Gimel and Samekh; the women Sadhe, Daleth, Zayin, Beth and Resh. Martin buttered and chewed his toast, and suddenly interrupted: "You're a team, aren't you?"

"Right," said two Johns.

"God, what a team! I hadn't seen the point. How much do you each know what the others are thinking?"

"Not at all, properly speaking," replied one of the girls, Zayin. The others watched her with the proprietary, approving look they had. "True ESP is still unachieved. But we do think alike, having the same equipment. So, given the same problem or stimulus, we are likely to be thinking the same thing at the same time. Explanations are easy, a word or two. We seldom misunderstand one another. It does facilitate our working as a team."

"Christ, yes," said Martin. "Pugh and I have spent seven hours out of ten for six months misunderstanding each other. What about emergencies--are you as good at meeting the unexpected problem as a nor-- an unrelated team?"

"Statistics so far indicate that we are," Zayin answered readily. "We can't brainstorm as singletons can, we can't profit from the interplay of varied minds; but we have a compensatory advantage. Clones are drawn from the best human material, individuals of I.I.Q. ninety-ninth percentile, genetic constitution alpha double A, and so on. So we have (continued on page 220)Nine Lives(continued from page 132) more to draw on than most individuals do."

"And it's multiplied by a factor of ten. Who is--who was John Chow?"

"A genius, surely," Pugh said politely. His interest in cloning was not so newly roused and hungry as Martin's.

"Leonardo Complex type," said Yod. "Biomath; also a cellist and an undersea hunter and interested in structural engineering problems, and so on. Died before he'd worked out his major theories."

"Then you each represent a different facet of his mind, his talents?"

"No," said Zayin, shaking her head in time with several others. "We share the basic equipment and tendencies, of course, but we're all engineers in the Planetary Exploitation line. A later clone might be trailed to develop other aspects of the basic equipment. It's merely a matter of education. The genetic substance is identical. We are John Chow. But we were trained differently."

Martin looked shell-shocked. "How old are you?"

"Twenty-three."

"You say he--died young. Had they taken some germ cells from him beforehand or something?"

Gimel took over: "He died at twenty-four in an air-car crash. They couldn't save the brain but took some intestinal cells and cultured them. Reproductive cells aren't used for cloning, since they have only half the chromosomes. Intestinal cells happen to be easy to despecialize and reprogram for total growth."

"All chips off the old block," Martin said valiantly. "But how can ... some of you be female ...?"

Beth took over: "It's easy to program half the clonal mass back to the female. Just delete the male gene from half the cells and they revert to the basic; that is, the female. It's trickier to go the other way, have to hook in artificial Y chromosomes. So they mostly clone from males, since clones function best when bisexual."

"It's an elaborate process," Aleph said. "Each new generation has to be cloned from cells, the fetuses incubated in Ngama Placentae, then given to trained foster-parent groups. Did you know that we cost the Government about $3,000,000 apiece?"

"But how about you, don't you--" Martin asked, still struggling.

"Breed?" Beth finished for him. "Yes and no. The men are permitted to crossbreed with approved singletons. But as for the women--we're sterile. Deleting the Y chromosome from our original cell makes us so. John Chow in his pure form dies with us--unless, of course, there is a decision to clone him again or a biological breakthrough that would create fertile clone females." They spoke in even, objective tones, as if none of this had any personal relevance whatsoever.

Question time was over. "Well," said one of the Johns, and all changed mood, like a flock of starlings that changes course in one wing flick, following a leader so fast that no eye can see which leads. They were ready to go. "How about a look at the mine? Then we'll unload the equipment. Some nice new models in the roboats, you'll want to see them. Right?" Had Pugh or Martin not agreed, they might have found it hard to say so. Polite as the Johns were, their decisions were unanimous, tenfold: They carried. Pugh, commander of Libra Base Two, felt a qualm. How could he boss this supermanwoman-entity-of-ten around? And a genius, at that. He stuck with Martin as they suited for outside. Neither said anything.

Four apiece in the three large air sleds, they slipped off north from the dome, over Libra's dun rugose skin, in starlight.

"Desolate," one said.

A boy and a girl were with Pugh and Martin. Pugh wondered if they were the two that had shared a sleeping bag last night. No doubt they wouldn't mind if he asked them. Sex must be as handy as breathing, to them. Did you two breathe last night?

"Yes," he said, "it is desolate."

"This is our first time Off, except training on Luna, of course," said the softer voice, the girl.

"How'd you take the big hop?"

"They doped us. I wanted to experience it." That was the boy, a bit wistful. They seemed to have more personality, only two at a time. Did repetition of the individual negate individuality?

The Mountains of Merioneth showed leprotic in starlight to the east, a plume of freezing gas trailed silver from a venthole to the west, the sled tilted groundward. The twins braced for the stop at the same moment, each with a slight protective gesture to the other. Your skin is my skin, Pugh thought with admiring envy. What would it be like, then, to have somebody as close to you as that? Always to be answered when you spoke; never to be in pain alone. Love your neighbor as you love yourself.... That problem was solved. The neighbor was the self; the love was perfect.

And here was Hellmouth, the mine.

Pugh was the Libra Exploratory Mission's extraterrestrial geologist, Martin his technician and cartographer; but when, in the course of a local survey, Martin had discovered the uranium mine, Pugh had given him full credit, as well as the onus of prospecting the lode and planning the Exploit Crew's job. These kids had been sent out from Earth years before Martin's reports got there and had not known what their job would be until they got here; the Exploitation Corps had sent them only in the well-founded hope that there might be a job for them on Libra or the next planet out. The Government wanted uranium too urgently to wait while reports drifted home across the light-years. The stuff was like gold, old-fashioned but essential. Worth mining extraterrestrially and shipping interstellarly. Worth its weight in people, Pugh thought sourly, watching the tall young men and women go, one by one, glimmering in starlight, into the black hole Martin had named Hellmouth.

It was silent on Libra; it was silenter inside Libra. Dead black. Their homeostatic forehead lamps brightened. Twelve nodding gleams ran along the moist, wrinkled walls. Pugh heard Martin's radiation counter peeping 20 to the dozen up ahead. "Here's the drop-off," said Martin's voice in the suit intercom, drowning out the peeping and the dead silence around. "We're in a side fissure, this is the main vertical vent in front of us." The black void gaped, its far side not visible in the head-lamp beams. "Last traces of vulcanism from two thousand to twenty-five hundred E years ago. Nearest fault twenty-eight miles east, in the Trench. It's seismically as safe as anything you can find on Libra. The big basalt flow overhead stabilizes all these substructures, as long as it remains stable itself. Your central lode is thirty-six meters down, running in a series of five bubble caverns for two hundred and ten meters northeast. It is a lode, a pipe of very high-grade ore. You saw the percentage figures in the report Passerine picked up when it contacted our System Survey Team, right? Extraction's going to be no problem. All you've got to do is get the bubbles topside."

"Take off the lid and let 'em float up." He heard an identical-sounding voice from ten mouths. "Open the thing right up."--"Safer that way."--"Solid basalt roof: How thick, ten meters here?"--"Three to fifteen, the report said,"--"Blow good ore all over the lot."--"Use this access we're in, straighten it a bit and run slider rails."--"Import burros."--" Have we got enough propping material?"--"What's your estimate of total pay-load mass, Martin?"

"Well, say over five million kilos and under eight."

"The Transport Crew will be by here in ten E months; we'll have enough for them to start packaging."

The first one--Aleph? (Hebrew, the ox, the leader)--swung onto the ladder and down; the rest followed. Pugh and Martin stood alone at the cavern's edge. Pugh set his intercom to exchange only with Martin's suit and noticed Martin doing the same. It was a little wearing, hearing one person think aloud in ten voices.

"A great gut," Pugh said, looking down into the black pit, its veined and warted walls catching stray gleams of head lamps far below. "A cow's bowel. A bloody great constipated intestine."

They were silent. Martin's counter peeped like a lost chicken. They stood inside the dead but epileptic planet, breathing oxygen from tanks, wearing suits impermeable to corrosives and harmful radiations, resistant to a 200-degree range of temperatures, tearproof and as shock-resistant as possible, given the soft vulnerable stuff inside.

"I hate this place," Martin said. "I like mines, caves, you know. But this one's a bitch. Mean. You can't ever let down in here. I guess this lot can handle it, though. They know their stuff."

"Wave of the future, Martin, bach."

The wave of the future came swarming up the ladder, swept Martin to the shaft entrance, gabbled until one called order: "Martin can't understand us all at once."

"But we can," said another. "Let's get this thought out now. Do we have enough material for supports?"

"If we convert one of the extractor-servos to anneal, yes."

"Sufficient if we miniblast?"

"Kaph can calculate stress."

"How broad's that basalt lid?"

Pugh looked at them, so many thoughts jabbering in a busy brain, and at Martin standing silent among them, and at Hellmouth and the wrinkled plain.

"Settled. How does that strike you as a preliminary schedule, Martin?"

"It's your baby," Martin said.

• • •

By day five of their stay on Libra, the Johns had all their material and equipment unloaded and operating and were ready to start opening up the mine. They worked with total efficiency. Pugh was fascinated and frightened by their effectiveness, their confidence, their independence. A clone, he thought, might be, in fact, the first truly stable, self-reliant human being. It would be sufficient to itself sexually, emotionally, intellectually and ethically. Any member of it would always receive the complete support and approval of his peers. Nobody else was needed.

Two of the clone stayed in the dome, doing calculations and paperwork, with frequent sled trips to the mine for samples, measurements and tests. A girl and a boy, Zayin and Kaph, they were the mathematicians of the clone. That is, as Zayin explained, all ten had had thorough mathematical training from the ages of three to 21; but from 21 to 23, she and Kaph had gone on with math, while the others intensified other specialties--geology, mining engineering, electronic engineering, equipment robotics, applied atomics, and so on. "Kaph and I feel," she said, "that we're closer to what John Chow was in his lifetime. But, of course, he was principally in biomath, and they didn't take us very far in that."

"They needed us most in this field," Kaph said, with the patriotic priggishness they sometimes evinced.

Pugh and Martin continued to be able to distinguish this pair from the others, Zayin by Gestalt, Kaph only by a discolored left fourth fingernail, acquired from an ill-aimed hammer at the age of six. No doubt, there were many such differences, physical and psychological, among them: Nature might be identical, nurture could not be. But the differences were hard to find.

Social training partly disguised their basic indifference to others; they had the standardized American friendliness. "Do you come from Ireland, Owen?"

"Nobody comes from Ireland, Zayin."

"There are lots of Irish-Americans."

"To be sure, but almost no Irish. A couple of thousand in all the island, last I knew. By the third Famine, there were no Irish left at all but the priesthood, and they are all celibate; or nearly all."

Zayin and Kaph smiled stiffly. They didn't quite get Owen. "What are you, then, topologically?" Kaph asked.

Pugh replied, "A Welshman."

"Is that Welsh that you and Martin speak together?"

None of your business, Pugh thought, but said, "No, it's his dialect, not mine: Argentinean. Descendant of Spanish. We've had a world to ourselves for half a year.... Sometimes a man likes to speak his native language, that's all."

"Is Wells quaint?" asked Zayin.

"Wells? Oh, Wales, it's called. Yes. Wales is quaint." Pugh switched on his rock cutter, which prevented further conversation by a synapse-destroying whine; and while it whined, he turned his back and said a profane word in Welsh.

That night, he used the Argentine dialect for private communication. "Do they pair off in the same couples, or change every night?"

Martin looked surprised. A prudish expression, unsuited to his features, appeared for a moment. It faded. He, too, was curious. "I think it's random."

"Don't whisper, man, it sounds dirtymnded. I think they rotate on a schedule. So that nobody gets omitted."

Martin gave a vulgar laugh and smothered it. "What about us? Aren't we omitted?"

"That doesn't occur to them. It never will."

"What if I propositioned one of the girls?"

"She'd tell the others and they'd decide as a group."

"I am not a bull," Martin said, his dark, heavy face heating up. "I will not be judged--"

"Down, down, machismo," said Pugh. "Do you mean to proposition one?"

Martin shrugged, looking sullen. "Let 'em have their incest," he said.

"Incest or masturbation, is it?"

"I don't care, if they'd do it out of earshot!"

The clone's early attempts at modesty had soon worn off, unmotivated by any deep defensiveness of self or awareness of others. Pugh and Martin were daily deeper swamped under the intimacies of its constant emotional-sexual-mental interchange: swamped yet excluded.

"Two months to go," said Martin one evening.

In 60 days, the full crew of their Exploratory Mission was due back from a survey of the four other planets of the system. Pugh was aware of this.

"Are you crossing off the days on the calendar?" he jeered. He was irritable lately, while Martin was sullen.

"Pull yourself together, Owen."

"What do you mean?"

"What I say."

They parted in contempt and resentment.

• • •

Pugh came in after a day alone on the Pampas, a vast plain the nearest edge of which was two hours south by jet. He was tired, but refreshed by solitude. They were not supposed to take long trips alone but lately had often done so. Martin stooped under bright light, drawing one of his elegant, masterly charts: The whole face of Libra this one was, the cancerous profile. The dome was otherwise empty, seeming dim and large, as it had before the clone came. "Where's the golden horde?"

Martin grunted ignorance, crosshatching. He straightened his back to glance round at the sun, squatting feebly like a great red toad on the eastern plain, and at the clock, which said 18:45. "Some big jumps today," he said, returning to his map. "Lot of crates fell over. Take a look at the seismo."

The needle jiggled and wavered on the roll. It never stopped jiggling here. Back in midafternoon, the roll had recorded five quakes of major intensity; twice the needle had hopped off the roll. The attached computer had been activated to emit a slip reading, "Epicenter 61' N By 42'4" E."

"Not in the Trench this time."

"Wasn't it? It felt a bit different from usual. Sharper."

"In Dome One, I used to lie awake all night, feeling the ground jump. Queer how you get used to things."

"Go spla if you didn't. What's for dinner?"

"I thought you'd have cooked it."

"Waiting for the clone."

Feeling put-upon, Pugh got out a dozen dinner boxes, stuck two in the Instobake, pulled them out. "All right, here's dinner."

"Been thinking," Martin said, coming to table. "What if some clone cloned itself? Illegally, I mean. Made a thousand duplicates--ten thousand. Whole army. They could make a tidy power grab, couldn't they?"

"But how many millions would each of this lot cost to rear? Artificial placentae and all that. It would be impossible to keep secret, unless they got a planet to themselves.... Back before the Famines, when there were national governments, they talked about that: Clone your best soldiers, have whole regiments of them. But the food ran out before they could play that game." They were speaking amicably, as they used to.

"Funny," Martin said, chewing. "They left early this morning, didn't they?"

"Before I did, all but Kaph and Zayin. They thought they'd get the first pay load above ground today. What's up?"

"They weren't back for lunch," said Martin, immobile.

"They won't starve, to be sure."

"They left at seven."

"So they did." Then Pugh saw it. The air tanks held eight hours' supply.

"Kaph and Zayin carried out spare cans when they left. Or they've got a heap out there."

"They did, but they brought the whole lot in to recharge. There they are." He pointed to one of the stacks of stuff that cut the dome into rooms and alleys.

"There's an alarm signal on every imsuit."

"It's not automatic."

Pugh was tired and still hungry. "Sit down and eat, man. That lot can look after itself."

Martin sat down, but after a minute, he said, "There was a big quake, Owen. The first one. Big enough it scared me for a minute."

After a little pause, Pugh sighed and said, "All right."

Unenthusiastically, they got onto the two-man sled that was always left for them and headed it north. The long sunrise covered everything in poisonous red Jell-O. The horizontal light and shadow made it hard to see, raised walls of fake iron ahead of them, which they slid through, turned the convex plain beyond Hellmouth into a great dimple full of bloody water. They slowed, bumped down, jumped off. Around the tunnel entrance, a wilderness of machinery stood, cranes and cables and servos and wheels and diggers and robocarts and sliders and control huts, all slanting and bulking incoherently in the red light. Martin ran into the mine. He came out again and went straight to Pugh. "Oh, God, Owen, it's down," he said, Pugh went in and saw, five meters from the entrance, the shiny, moist, black wall that ended the tunnel. Newly exposed to air, it looked organic, like visceral tissue. The tunnel entrance, enlarged by blasting and double-tracked for robocarts, seemed unchanged till he noticed thousands of tiny spider-web cracks in the walls. The floor was wet with some sluggish fluid.

"They were inside," Martin said.

"They may be still, They surely had extra air cans--"

"Look, man, look, look, at the basalt flow, at the roof; don't you see what the quake did? Look at it."

The low hump of land that roofed the caves still looked queer, like an optical illusion. It seemed to have sunk down, leaving a vast dimple, or pit. It, too, was cracked with many tiny fissures, Pugh saw when he walked upon it. From some, a whitish gas was seeping, and the sunlight on the surface of the gas pool was shafted as if in the waters of a dim red lake.

"It isn't on the fault. There's no fault here!"

"They wouldn't all have been inside, Martin. Look at the mess here, the equipment; they may be up here, some of them."

Martin followed him and searched dully, then actively. He spotted the air sled. It had come down unguided and stuck at an angle in a pothole of colloidal dust. It had carried two riders. One was half sunk in the dust, but all his suit meters registered normal functioning; the other hung strapped onto the tilted sled. Her imsuit was cut open in several places on the broken legs and the body was frozen hard as any rock. That was all they found. As both regulation and custom demanded, they cremated the dead body at once with the laser guns they carried and had never used before. Pugh, knowing he was going to be sick, wrestled the survivor onto the two-man sled and sent Martin off to the dome with him. Then he vomited and flushed the waste out of his suit and, finding one four-man sled undamaged, followed after Martin, shaking as if the cold of Libra had got through to him.

The survivor was Kaph. He was in deep shock. They found a swelling on the occiput that might mean concussion, but no fracture showed on their tiny diagnoser.

Pugh brought two glasses of food concentrate and two chasers of aquavit. "Come on," he said. Martin obeyed, drinking off the tonic. They sat down near the cot and sipped the aquavit.

Kaph lay immobile, face like beeswax, hair bright black to the shoulders, lips stiffly parted for faintly gasping breaths.

"It must have been the first shock, the big one," Martin said. "It must have slid the whole structure sideways. Till it fell in on itself. Like on ball bearings. There must be gas layers in the lateral rocks, like those formations in the 31st Quadrant. But there wasn't any sign--" As he spoke, the world slid under them. Things leaped and clattered, hopped and jigged, shouted, Ha! Ha! Ha! "It was like this, only worse, at fourteen hundred hours," reason said shakily in Martin's voice, amid the unfastening and ruin of the world. But unreason sat up, as the tumult lessened and things ceased dancing, and screamed aloud.

Pugh leaped across his spilled aquavit and held Kaph down. The muscular body flailed him off. Martin pinned the shoulders down. Kaph screamed, struggled, choked; his face blackened. "Oxy," Pugh said, and his hand found the right needle in the medical kit as if by homing instinct; while Martin held the mask, he struck the needle home to the vagus nerve, restoring Kaph to life.

"Didn't know you knew that stunt," Martin said, breathing hard.

"The Lazarus Jab, my father was a doctor, it doesn't always work," Pugh said. "I want that drink I spilled. Is the quake over? I can't tell."

"Aftershocks. It's not just you shivering."

"Why did he suffocate like that?"

"I don't know, Owen. Look in the book."

Kaph was breathing normally and his color was restored; only the lips were still darkened. They poured a new shot of courage and sat down by him again, with the medical guide. "Nothing about cyanosis or asphyxiation under 'shock' or 'concussion.' He can't have breathed in anything with his imsuit on. I don't understand. Mother Mog's Home Herbalist would be more use than this.... 'Anal hemorrhoids,' fie!" Pugh said, riffling through the index, and pitched the guide to a crate table. It fell short, because either Pugh or the table was still unsteady.

"Why didn't he signal?"

"Sorry?"

"The eight inside the mine never had time. But he and the girl were outside, or in the vent. Maybe she was near the entrance and got hit by the first slides. He was outside, in the control hut, maybe. He ran in, pulled her out, got her onto the sled, started for the dome. And all that time, never pushed the panic button in his imsuit. Why not?"

"Well, he had that whack on the head. I doubt he realized the girl was dead, even. But I don't know if he'd have thought to signal us. They looked to one another for help. For everything."

Martin's face was like an Indian mask, grooves at the mouth corners, eyes of dull coal. "What must he have felt, then, when the quake came and he was outside, alone--"

As if in answer, Kaph screamed.

He came up off the cot in the heaving convulsions of one suffocating, knocked Pugh down with his flailing arm, staggered blindly into a stack of crates and fell to the floor, lips blue, eyes white. Martin dragged him back onto the cot and gave him a whiff of oxygen, then knelt by Pugh, who was just sitting up, and wiped at his cut cheekbone. "Owen, are you all right, are you going to be all right, Owen?"

"I think I am," Pugh said. "Why are you rubbing my face with that?"

It was a small length of computer tape, now spotted with Pugh's blood. Martin threw it away. "I thought it was a towel. You clipped your cheek on that box there."

"It didn't hurt till you rubbed it with the tape. Is he out of it?"

They stared down at Kaph lying stiff, his teeth a white line inside dark parted lips.

"Like epilepsy. Brain damage, maybe?"

"What about shooting him full of meprobamate?"

Pugh shook his head. "I don't know what's in that shot we gave him that the kit recommends for shock."

"Maybe he'll sleep it off now."

"I'd like to, myself. Between him and the earthquake, I'm getting a bit run down."

"Go on. I'm not sleepy."

Pugh cleaned his cut cheek and pulled off his shirt, then paused.

"No chance at all, you think?"

Martin shook his head.

Pugh lay down on top of his sleeping bag. After what seemed to be half a minute or so, he was wakened by a hideous, sucking, struggling sound. He staggered up, found the needle, tried three times to jab it in correctly and failed, began to massage over Kaph's heart. "Mouth-to-mouth," he said, and Martin obeyed. Presently, Kaph drew a deep harsh breath, his heartbeat steadied, his rigid muscles began to relax.

"How long did I sleep?"

"Half an hour."

They stood up, sweating. The ground shuddered, the fabric of the dome sagged and swayed. Libra was dancing her awful polka again, her Totentanz. The sun, though rising, seemed to have grown larger and redder. A lot of gas and particles must have been stirred up in the feeble dead atmosphere.

"What's wrong with him, Owen?"

"I think he's dying with them."

"Them--but they're dead--"

"Nine of them. They all died, they were crushed or suffocated. They were all him, he is all of them. They died, and now he's dying their deaths, one by one."

"Oh, pity of God," Martin said.

The next time was much the same. The fifth time was worse, for Kaph fought and raved, trying to speak but getting no words out, as if his mouth were stopped with rocks or clay. After that, the attacks grew weaker, but so did he. The eighth seizure came at about 4:30, and Pugh and Martin worked till 5:30, doing everything they could to keep life in the body that seemed to slide without protest into death. Martin said, "The next will finish him." And it did; but Pugh breathed his own breath into the inert lungs, until he himself passed out.

He woke. The dome was opaqued and no light on. He lay on his cot. He listened and heard the breathing of two sleeping men. He slept, and nothing woke him till hunger did.

The sun was well up over the dark plains and the planet had stopped dancing. Kaph lay asleep; Pugh and Martin drank tea and looked at him with proprietary triumph.

When he woke, Martin went to him: "How are you, old man?" There was no answer. Martin turned away.

Pugh took his place and looked into the brown, dull eyes that gazed toward but not into his own. Like Martin, he quickly turned away. He heated food concentrate and brought it to Kaph but did not meet his gaze. "Come on, drink."

Kaph drank a sip, choked. "Let me die," he said.

"You are not dying."

Kaph spoke with clarity and precision: "I am nine tenths dead," he said. "There is not enough of me left alive."

That precision convinced Pugh and, because he believed, he fought it. "No," he said, peremptorily. "They are dead. The others, your brothers and sisters. But you're alive. You're not even much hurt. You're them, you're him, John Chow. Your life's in your own hands now."

The boy lay still, looking into a darkness that was not there.

The second day after the quake, Martin took the Exploit Crew's hauler and a set of robos over to Hellmouth to salvage equipment and protect it from Libra's sinister atmosphere. Pugh stayed in the dome, doing paperwork, unwilling to leave Kaph by himself. Kaph sat or lay and stared into his darkness and never spoke. The days went by, silent.

The radio spat and spoke: the Mission calling from the ship. "We'll be down on Libra in five weeks, Owen. Thirty-four E days, nine hours, I make it, as of now. How's tricks in the old dome?"

"Not good, Chief. The Exploit Crew was killed, all but one of them, six days ago. In the mine, an earthquake."

The radio crackled and sang starsong. Sixteen seconds' lag each way; the ship was out around Planet III now. "Killed, the whole lot but one? Listen, you and Martin are all right?"

"We're all right here."

Thirty-two seconds.

"The Exploit Crew that Passerine left out here with us may take over the Hellmouth project, then, instead of the Quadrant Seven project. We'll settle that when we come down. One way or another, you and Martin will be relieved at Dome Two."

Later on, Pugh said to Kaph, "You may be asked to stay here with the other Exploit Crew, if they go to work at Hellmouth. The chief won't command it. But you know the ropes here." Knowing the exigencies of Far Out life, he wanted to warn the young man.

Kaph said nothing. Since he said, "There is not enough of me left alive," he had not spoken a word.

"Owen," Martin said on suit intercom, "he's spla. Insane. Psychotic."

"He's doing very well for a man who's died nine times."

"Well? Like a turned-off android is well? The only emotion he has left is hate."

"That's not hate, Martin. Listen, it is true that he has, in a sense, been dead. I cannot imagine what he feels. But it is not hatred. He can't even see us. It's too dark."

"Throats have been cut in the dark. He hates us because we're not Aleph and Yod. Because we outlived them."

"Maybe. But I think he's alone. He doesn't see us or hear us, that's the truth: He never had to see anyone else before. He never was alone before. He had himself to see, talk with, live with, nine other selves all his life. He doesn't know how you go it alone, he must learn. Give him time."

Martin shook his heavy head. "Spla," he said. "Just remember, when you're alone with him, that he could break your neck one-handed. What I can't stand is his eyes."

"He can't stand ours, I expect," said Pugh, a short, soft-voiced man with a bruised cheekbone. They were just outside the dome air lock, programming one of the Exploit servos to repair a damaged hauler. They could see Kaph sitting inside the great half egg of the dome like a fly in amber. "He'll get better, I think."

"Hand me the insert pack there. What makes you think so?"

"He has a strong personality, to be sure."

"Strong? Wrecked. Nine tenths dead, as he put it."

"But he is not dead. He is a live man: John Kaph Chow. He had a jolly queer upbringing, but after all, every boy has got to break free of his family. He will do it."

"I can't see it."

"Think about it a bit, Martin; what's this cloning for? To repair the human race, isn't it? We're in a bad way. Look at me. My I.I.Q. and G. C. are about half this John Chow's. Yet they wanted me so badly for the Far Out Service that when I volunteered, they took me and fitted me out with an artificial lung and corrected my myopia. Now, if there were enough good, sound men around, would they be taking one-lunged, shortsighted Welshmen?"

"Didn't know you had an artificial lung."

"I do, though. Not tin, you know. Human, grown in a tank from a bit of somebody else's lung; cloned, if you like. That's how they make replacement organs, you know, the same general idea as cloning, but bits and pieces, instead of whole people. It's my own lung now. But my point is, there are too many like me these days and not enough like John Chow. They're trying to raise the level of the human genetic pool, which must be a pretty mucky little puddle since the population crash. So if a man is cloned, he's a tough, sound man. It's only logic, to be sure."

Martin grunted; the servo began to hum.

Kaph had been eating little; he had trouble swallowing his food, choking on it, so that he would give up trying after a few bites. He had lost eight or ten kilos. Along about three weeks after the earthquake, his appetite began to pick up; and one day, he began to look through the clone's possessions, its sleeping bags, kits and papers, which Pugh and Martin had stacked neatly in a far angle of a packing-crate "room." He sorted, destroyed a heap of papers and oddments, made a small packet of what remained, then relapsed into his walking coma.

Two days later, he spoke. Pugh was trying to correct a flutter in the tape player, a job for Martin, but Martin had the jet out, checking their maps of the West Pampas. "Do you want me to do that?" Kaph said tonelessly.

Pugh jumped, controlled himself, gave the machine to Kaph. The young man took the player apart, put it back together and left it on the table.

"Put on a tape," Pugh, busy at another table, said with careful casualness.

Kaph put on the topmost tape, a chorale. He lay down on his cot and seemed to pay no attention to the music.

After that, he took over several routine jobs one by one. He undertook nothing that wanted initiative; and if asked to do anything, he made no response at all, impassive as the deaf.

"He's doing well," Pugh said in Argentinean.

"He's not. He's settling into a machine role. Does what he's programmed to do, no reaction to anything else, including other humans. He's worse off than he was when he didn't function at all. He's not human anymore."

"What is he, then?"

"Dead."

Owen winced. "Well, good night," he said in English. "Good night, Kaph."

Martin responded; Kaph did not.

Next morning at breakfast, Kaph reached across Martin's plate for the butter. "Why don't you ask for it?" Martin said with the geniality of repressed exasperation. "I can pass it."

"I can reach it," Kaph said in his flat voice.

Martin shrugged and laughed. Pugh, tense, jumped up and turned on the rock cutter.

Later on, "Lay off that, please, Martin," he said.

"Manners are important in small isolated crews, some kind of manners, whatever you work out together. He's been taught that, everybody in Far Out knows it; why does he deliberately flout it?"

"Don't you see, Kaph's never known anybody but himself?"

Martin brooded and then broke out, "Then, by God, this cloning business is dead wrong. It won't do. What are a lot of duplicate geniuses going to do for us when they don't even know we exist?"

Pugh nodded. "They might be wiser to separate the clones and bring them up with others. But they make such a grand team, too useful to waste."

"Do they? I wonder. If this bunch had been ten average inefficient ET engineers, would they all have been in the same place at the same time? Would they all have got killed but one? What if, when the cave-in started, what if all those kids ran the same way--farther into the mine, maybe, to save the one that was farthest in? Even Kaph was outside and went in.... It's hypothetical. But I keep thinking, out of ten ordinary confused guys, more might have got out."

"I don't know. It's true that identical twins tend to die at about the same age, even when they have never seen each other. Identity and death, it is very strange."

The days went on. Kaph went on the same way. Pugh and Martin snapped at each other a good deal. Pugh complained of Martin's snoring; offended, Martin moved his cot clear across the dome and did not speak to Pugh for 30 hours. Kaph spoke to neither, except when compelled.

The day before the Mission ship was to come in, Martin announced he was going over to Merioneth.

"We haven't done some of the paperwork we had six months to do; I thought at least you'd be giving me a hand with the computer to finish the rock analyses." Pugh's tone was aggrieved.

"Kaph can do that. I want one more look at the Trench. Have fun," Martin added in dialect, and laughed, and left.

"What is the language you and he speak?"

"Argentinean. I told you that once, didn't I?"

"I don't know." After a while, the young man added, "I have forgotten a lot of things, I think."

"It wasn't important, to be sure," Pugh said gently. "Will you give me a hand running the computer, Kaph?"

He nodded.

Pugh had left a lot of loose ends and the job took them all day. Though Kaph's flat voice got on Pugh's nerves, he was a good co-worker, quick and systematic, much more so than Pugh himself. And then, there was only this one day left before the ship came, the old crew, comrades and friends.

During tea break, Kaph said, "What would happen if the Mission ship crashed?"

"They'd be killed."

"What would happen to you?"

"We'd radio SOS all signals and live on half rations till the rescue cruiser from Area Three Base came. Four and a half E years away, it is. We have life support here for three men for, let's see, maybe between four and five years. A bit tight, it would be."

"Would they come for three men?"

"Of course."

Kaph said no more.

"Enough cheerful speculations," Pugh said cheerfully, rising to get back to work. He slipped sideways and the chair avoided his hand; trying to regain balance, he brought up hard against the dome hide. "My goodness," he said, reverting to his native idiom, "what is it?"

"Quake," said Kaph.

The teacups bounced on the table with a plastic cackle, a litter of papers slid off a box, the skin of the dome swelled and sagged. Underfoot, there was a huge noise, half sound, half shaking, a subsonic boom.

Kaph sat unmoved. An earthquake would not frighten a man who had died in an earthquake.

Pugh, white-faced, his wiry black hair sticking out, a frightened man, said, "Martin's in the Trench."

"What trench?"

"The big fault line. The epicenter for these local quakes. Look at the seismograph." Pugh struggled with the stuck door of a still-jittering locker.

"Where are you going?"

"Take the jet and go locate him."

"Martin took the jet. Sleds aren't safe to use during quakes. They go out of control."

"For God's sake man, shut up."

Kaph stood up, frowning, speaking slowly, as usual. "It's unnecessary to go out after him now. It's taking an unnecessary risk."

"If his alarm goes off, radio me," Pugh said, closed the headpiece of his suit and ran to the lock. As he went out, Libra picked up her ragged skirts and danced a belly dance from under his feet clear to the red horizon. A vent south of the dome belched up a slow-flowing bile of black gas.

Inside the dome, Kaph saw the sled go up, tremble like a meteor in the dull red daylight and vanish to the northeast. The hide of the dome quivered, the earth coughed.

A bell rang loudly, a red light flashed on and off on the central control board. The sign under the light read suit 2 and, scribbled under that, A. G. M. Kaph did not turn the signal off. He tried to radio both Pugh and Martin but got no reply.

He went back to work when the aftershocks decreased, and finished up Pugh's job. It took him about two hours. Every half hour, he tried to radio Suit One and got no reply, then Suit Two and got no reply. The red light had stopped flashing after an hour. It was dinnertime, so Kaph cooked dinner for one and ate it.

He lay down on his cot.

The aftershocks had ceased, except for faint rolling tremors at long intervals. The sun hung in the west, oblate, palered, immense. It did not sink visibly. There was no sound at all.

Kaph got up and began to walk around the messy, half-packed-up, overcrowded, empty dome. The silence continued. He went to the player and put on the first tape that came to hand. It was music, pure electronically produced notes, no voices. It ended. The silence continued.

The child's dream: There is no one else alive in the world but me. In all the world.

Low, north of the dome, a meteor flickered.

Kaph's mouth opened, as if he were trying to say something, but no sound came. He went hastily to the north wall and peered out into the gelatinous red light.

The sled came in, sank, the light went out. Two figures blurred the air lock. When they came in, Kaph stood close by the lock. Martin's imsuit was covered with some kind of dust, so that he looked raddled and warty, like the surface of Libra. Pugh had him by the arm.

"Is he hurt?"

Pugh shucked his imsuit, helped Martin peel off his. "Shaken up," he said, curt.

"A bit of cliff fell onto the jet," said Martin, sitting down at the table and waving his arms. "Not while I was in it, though. I was parked, see, and poking about that carbon-dust area, when I felt things humping. So I ran out onto a nice bit of early igneous I'd noticed from above. Good footing, and out from under the cliffs. Then I saw this piece of the cliff fall over onto the flier, quite a sight it was; and after a while, I thought the spare air cans were in the flier, so I started leaning on my panic button. But I didn't get any radio reception; that's happened before during quakes, so I didn't know if the signal was getting through. And things went on jumping around and pieces of the cliff coming off. Got so dusty it was hard to see anything. I was really beginning to wonder what I'd do for breathing in the small hours, you know, when I saw old Owen zigging up the Trench in all that dust and junk, like a big ugly bat--"

"Want to eat?" said Pugh.

"Of course, I want to eat. How did you come through the quake here, Kaph? No damage I can see. It wasn't a big one, actually, was it, what's the seismo say? My trouble was I was in the middle of it. Felt like Richter ten there--total destruction of planet--"

"Sit down," Pugh said. "Eat."

After dinner, Martin's spate of talk ran dry and he went off to his cot, still in the remote angle where he had removed it when Pugh complained of his snoring. "Good night, you one-lunged Welshman," he said across the dome.

"Good night, then."

There was no more out of Martin. Pugh opaqued the dome, turned the lamp down to a yellow glow less than a candle's light and sat doing nothing, saying nothing, withdrawn.

"I finished up the computations," Kaph said.

Silence.

"The signal from Martin's suit came through, but I couldn't get through to you or him."

Pugh said with effort, "I should have waited. He had two hours of air left, even with only one can. He might have been heading home when I left."

The silence came back, but punctuated now by Martin's long, soft snores.

"Do you love Martin?"

Pugh looked up with an angry face. "Martin is my friend. We've worked together a long time. He's a good man." After a while, he asked, less belligerently, "Why did you ask that?"

Kaph said nothing, but he looked up at Pugh. His face was changed, as if he were glimpsing something he had not seen before. His voice was also changed. "How can you.... How do you...."

But Pugh could not tell him. "I don't know," he said. "It's practice, partly. I don't know. We're each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark?"

Kaph's strange glance dropped, burned out by its own intensity.

"I'm tired," Pugh said. "That was no picnic, looking for him, in all that black dust and muck, and mouths opening and shutting in the ground.... I'm going to bed. The ship will be transmitting to us by six or so." He stood up and stretched.

"It's a clone," Kaph said. "The other Exploit Crew they're bringing with them."

"Is it, then?"

"Yes. They came out with us on the Passerine. A twelveclone."

Kaph sat in the small yellow aura of the lamp, seeming to look past it at what he feared: the new clone, the multiple self of which he was not a part. A lost piece of a broken set, a fragment, inexpert at solitude, not knowing even how you go about giving love to another individual, now he must face the tremendous closed self-sufficiency of a clone of 12; that was a lot to ask of the poor fellow, to be sure. Pugh put a hand on his shoulder in passing. "You won't be asked to stay here, then. You can go home. Or, since you're Far Out, maybe come on farther out with us. We need men. No hurry deciding. You'll make out all right."

Pugh's quiet voice trailed off; he stood unbuttoning his coat, stooped a little with fatigue. Kaph looked at him, as if he were seeing a thing he had never seen before; saw him: Owen Pugh, the other, the stranger who held his hand out in the dark.

"Good night," Pugh mumbled, crawling into his sleeping bag and half asleep already, so that he did not hear Kaph reply after a pause, repeating, across darkness, benediction.