Above the head of each, almost touching the hair, spun a many-colored globe about a foot across. These whirled and gashed and changed color, running through every hue in the spectrum. From time to time, the globes thrust out long hexagonal arms of green, of blue, of black, or of gleaming white. Then the arms would collapse, only to be succeeded by other hexagons.
Burton looked down. He was clad only in a black towel secured at his waist.
“I’ll forestall your first question by telling you we won’t give you any information on where you are.” The speaker was the red-haired man. He grinned at Burton, showing un-humanly white teeth.
“Very well,” Burton said. “What questions will you answer, Whoever you are? For instance, how did you find me?”
“My name is Loga,” the red-haired man said. “We found you through a combination of detective work and luck. It was a complicated procedure, but I’ll simplify it for you. We had a number of agents looking for you, a pitifully small number, considering the thirty-six billion, six million, nine thousand, six hundred and thirty-seven candidates that live along The River.”
Candidates? Burton thought. Candidates for what? For eternal life? Had Spruce told the truth about the purpose behind the Resurrection?
Loga said, “We had no idea that you were escaping us by suicide. Even when you were detected in areas so widely separated that you could not possibly have gotten to them except through resurrection, we did not suspect. We thought that you had been killed and then translated. The years went by. We had no idea where you were. There were other things for us to do, so we pulled all agents from the Burton Case, as we called it, except for some stationed at both ends of The River. Somehow, you had knowledge of the polar tower. Later we found out how. Your friends Goring and Collop were very helpful, although they did not know they were talking to Ethicals, of course!
“Who notified you that I was near The River’s end?” Burton said.
Lop smiled and said, “There’s no need for you to know. However, we would have caught you anyway. You see, every space in the restoration bubble – the place where you unaccountably awakened during the pre-resurrection phase – has an automatic counter. They were installed for statistical and research purposes. We like to keep records of what’s going on. For instance, any candidate who has a higher than average number of deaths sooner or later is a subject for study. Usually later, since we’re short-handed.
“It was not until your 777th death that we got around to looking at some of the higher frequency resurrections. Yours had the highest count. You may be congratulated on this, I suppose.”
“There were others, as well?’
“They’re not being pursued, if that’s what you mean. And, relatively speaking, they’re not many. We had no idea that it was you who had racked up this staggering number. Your space in the PR bubble was empty when we looked at it during our Statistical investigation. The two technicians who had seen you when you woke up in the PR chamber identified you by your photograph.
“We set the resurrector so that the next time your body was to be re-created, an alarm would notify us, and we would bring you here to this place.”
“Suppose I hadn’t died again?” Burton said.
“You were destined to die! You planned on trying to enter the polar sea via The River’s mouth, right?! That is impossible. The last hundred miles of The River go through an underground tunnel. Any boat would be torn to pieces. Like others who have dared the journey, you would have died.”
Burton said, “My photograph – the one I took from Agneau. That was obviously taken on Earth when I was an officer for John Company in India. How was that gotten?”
“Research, Mr. Burton,” Loga said, still smiling.
Burton wanted to smash the look of superiority on his face. He did not seem to be restrained by anything; he could, seemingly, walk over to Loga and strike him. But he knew that the Ethicals were not likely to sit in the same room with him without safeguards. They would as soon have given a rabid hyena its freedom.
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