Any man of normal intelligence would have come to suspect
that the hints were less than well founded upon any. real ex-
pectation, and Sweeney’s training helped to make him sus-
picious early; but in the long run he did not care. The hints
offered his only hope and he accepted them with hope but
without expectation. Besides, the few opening words of such
quarrels which he had overheard before the intercom clicked
off had suggested that there was more to the disagreement
than simple doubt of the convertibility of an Adapted Man.
It had been Emory, for instance, who had burst out unex-
pectedly and explosively:
“But suppose Rullman was right?”
Click.
Right about what? Is a lawbreaker ever “right?” Sweeney
could not know. Then there had been the technie who had
said “It’s the cost that’s the trouble with terra-forming”
what did that mean? -and had been hustled out of the mon-
itoring chamber on some trumped-up errand hardly a minute
later. There were many such instances, but inevitably Sween-
ey failed to put the fragments together into any pattern. He
decided only that they did not bear directly upon his chances
of becoming human, and promptly abandoned them in the
vast desert of his general ignorance.
In the long run, only the command was real the com-
mand and the nightmares. We must have those men back.
Those six words were the reason .why Sweeney, like a man
whose last effort to awaken has failed, was falling head first
toward Ganymede.
The Adapted Men found Sweeney halfway up the great col
which provided the only access to their cliff-edge colony from