Morbidity ran knee-deep on the ship.

“Riila killed herself a little bit ago,” Bedzyk said carelessly. There was no other way to say it.

“I figured as much,” Samswope explained. “I saw them carrying her past the galley to the garbage lock. That’s number six this week alone. You going to do anything, Bedzyk?”

Bedzyk twisted abruptly in his chair. He leveled a gaze at a spot directly between Samswope’s two heads. His words were bitter with helplessness and anger that the burden should be placed upon him. “What do you mean, what am I going to do? I’m a prisoner here, too. When they had the big roundup, I got snatched away from a wife and three kids, the same as you got pulled away from your used car lot. What the hell do you want me to do? Beg them not to bash their heads against the Lucite, it’ll smear our nice north view of space?”

Samswope wiped both hands across his faces simultaneously in a weary pattern. The blue eyes of his left head closed, and the brown eyes of his right head blinked quickly. His left head, which had been speaking till now, nodded onto his chest. His right head, the nearly-dumb one, mumbled incoherently — Samswope’s left head jerked up, and a look of disgust and hatred clouded his eyes. “Shut up, you — fucking moron!” He cracked his right head with a full fist.

Bedzyk watched without pity. The first time he had seen Samswope flail himself — would flagellate be a better term? — he had pitied the mutant. But it was a constant thing now, the way Samswope took his agony out on the dumb head. And there were times Bedzyk thought Samswope was better off than most. At least he had a release valve, an object of hate.

“Take it easy, Sam. Nothing’s going to help us, not a single, lousy th —”

Samswope snapped a look at Bedzyk, then catalogued the thick arms and huge chest of the man, and wearily murmured: “Oh, I don’t know, Bedzyk, I don’t know.” He dropped his left head into his hands. The right one winked at Bedzyk with the archness of an imbecile. Bedzyk shuddered and looked away.

“If only we could have made that landing on Venus,” Samswope intoned from the depths of his hands. “If only they’d let us in.”

“You ought to know by now, Sam,” Bedzyk reminded him bitterly, “there’s no room for us in the System at all. No room on Earth and nowhere else. They’ve got allocations and quotas and assignments. So many to Io, so many to Callisto, so many to Luna and Venus and Mars and anyplace else you might want to settle down. No room for Discards. No room in space, at all.”

Across the saloon three fish-men, their heads encased in bubbling clear helmets, had gotten into a squabble, and two of them were trying to open the petcock on the third’s helmet. This was something else again; the third fish-man was struggling, he didn’t want to die gasping. This was not a suicide, but a murder, if they let it go unchecked.

Bedzyk leaped to his feet and hurled himself at the two attacking fish-men. He caught one by the bicep and spun him. His fist was half-cocked before he realized one solid blow would shatter the water-globe surrounding the fish-face, would kill the mutant. Instead, he took him around and shoved him solidly by the back of the shoulders, toward the compartment door. The fish-man stumbled away, breathing bubbly imprecations into his life water, casting furious glances back at his companions. The second fish-man came away of his own accord and followed the first from the saloon.

Bedzyk helped the last fish-man to a relaxer and watched disinterestedly as the mutant let a fresh supply of air bubbles into the circulating water in the globe. The fish-man mouthed a lipless thanks, and Bedzyk passed it away with a gesture. He went back to his seat.

Samswope was massaging the dumb head. “Those three’ll never grow up.”

Bedzyk fell into the chair. “You wouldn’t be too happy living inside a goldfish bowl yourself, Swope.”

Samswope stopped massaging the wrinkled yellow skin of the dumb head, seemed prepared to snap a retort, but a blip and clear-squawk from the intercom stopped him.

“Bedzyk! Bedzyk, you down there?” It was the voice of Harmony Teat up in the drive room. Why was it they always called him? Why did they persist in making him their arbiter?

“Yeah, I’m here, in the saloon. What’s up?”

The squawk-box blipped again and Harmony Teat’s mellow voice came to him from the ceiling. “I just registered a ship coming in on us, off about three-thirty. I checked through the ephemeris and the shipping schedules. Nothing supposed to be out there. What should I do? You think it’s a customs ship from Earth?”

Bedzyk heaved himself to his feet. He sighed. “No, I don’t think it’s a customs ship. They threw us out, but I doubt if they have the imagination or gall to extract tithe from us for being here. I don’t know what it might be, Harmony. Hold everything and record any signals they send. I’m on my way upship.”

He strode quickly out of the saloon, and up the cross-leveled ramps toward the drive room. Not till he had passed the hydroponics level did he realize Samswope was behind him. “I, uh, thought I’d come along, Bed,” Samswope said apologetically, wringing his small, red hands. “I didn’t want to stay down there with those — those freaks.”

His dumb head hung off to one side, sleeping fitfully.

Bedzyk did not answer. He turned on his heel and casually strode updecks, not looking back.

There was no trouble. The ship identified itself when it was well away. It was an Attaché Carrier from System Central in Butte, Montana, Earth. The supercargo was a SpecAttaché named Curran. When the ship pulled alongside the Discard vessel and jockeyed for grappling position, Harmony Teat (her long grey-green hair reaching down past the spiked projections on her spinal column) threw on the attract field for that section of the hull. The Earth ship clunked against the Discard vessel, and the locks were synched in.

Curran came across without a suit.

He was a slim, incredibly tanned young man with a crew cut clipped so short a patch of nearly-bald showed at the center of his scalp. His eyes were alert and his manner was brisk and friendly, that of the professional dignitary in the Foreign Service.

Bedzyk did not bother with amenities.

“What do you want?”

“Who may I be addressing, sir, if I may ask?” Curran was the perfect model of diplomacy.

“Bedzyk is what I was called on Earth.” Cool, disdainful, I may-be-hideous-but-I-still-have-a-little-pride.

“My name is Curran, Mr. Curran, Mr. Bedzyk. Alan Curran of System Central. I’ve been asked to come out and speak to you about —”

Bedzyk settled against the bulkhead opposite the lock, not even offering the attaché an invitation to return to the saloon.

“You want us to get out of your sky, is that it? You stinking lousy …” He faltered in fury. He could not finish the sentence, so steeped in anger was he. “You set off too many bombs down there, and eventually some of us with something in our bloodstreams react to it, and we turn into monsters. What do you do … you call it the Sickness and you pack us up whether we want to go or not, and you shove us into space.”

“Mr. Bedzyk, I —”

“You what? You damned well what , Mr. System Central? With your straight, clean body and your nice home on Earth, and your allocations of how many people live where, to keep the balance of culture just so! You what? You want to invite us to leave? Okay, we’ll go!” He was nearly screeching, his face crimson with emotion, his big hands knotted at his sides for fear he would strike this emissary.

“We’ll get out of your sky. We’ve been all the way out to the Edge, Mr. Curran, and there’s no room in space for us anywhere. They won’t let us land even on the frontier worlds where we can pay our way. Oh no; contamination, they think. Okay, don’t shove, Curran, we’ll be going.”