“I really am seeing you in a different way. This is the first time in my life that a person dear to me has been in the hands of a surgeon and I can well understand the emotions of those who have come in contact with your art — knowledge combined with unexcelled skill!”

“All right! Admire us, if you must. I shall have time to perform not only a second but even a third operation on your physicist.”

“What third operation?” asked Evda Nahl, immediately on the alert. Ahf Noot, however, squinted cunningly and pointed to the pathway leading to the observatory. Mven Mass, his head bowed, was hobbling down.

“Here’s another unwilling admirer of my art. Have a talk with him, if you can’t sleep, that is. I must sleep.”

The surgeon disappeared round an irregularity in the hill in the direction of the temporary home of the doctors. From afar Evda Nahl could see how haggard the Director of the Outer Stations had grown and how much he had aged: but then, Mven Mass was no longer Director. She told him everything she had learned from Ahf Noot and the African heaved a sigh of relief.

“Then I’ll go away in ten days’ time.”

“Are you doing the right thing, Mven? I’m still suffering too much from shock to be able to think over what has happened, but it doesn’t seem to me that your guilt is so great as to require such condemnation.”

Mven Mass frowned painfully.

“I was carried away by Renn Bose’s brilliant theories. I had no right to apply all Earth’s power to the first attempt.”

‘‘Renn Bose showed you that an attempt would be useless with less power,” she objected.

“That’s true, but we should have made indirect experiments first. I was insanely impatient and did not want to wait years. Don’t waste words — the Council will confirm my decision and the Control of Honour and Justice will not annul it.”

“I’m a member of the Control of Honour and Justice myself!”

“And apart from you there are ten other people. Since my case concerns the whole planet there will be a decision by the Joint Controls of North and South — twenty-one people besides you.”

Evda Nahl laid a hand on the African’s shoulder.

“Let’s sit down, Mven, you’re weak on your legs. Did you know that when the first doctors looked at Renn they decided to call a death concilium?”

“I know, they were two short. All doctors are conservative, and according to an old rule that they haven’t got down to changing, there must be twenty-two people to decide to give a patient an easy death.”

“Until recently the death concilium consisted of sixty doctors!”

“That is a relic of the days when there was a fear of the right to put a patient out of his suffering being misused; in those days doctors used to condemn the sick to long and useless suffering and their relatives to senseless moral torment, even when there was not the slightest hope and death would have been a quick and easy release. But still, you see how useful tradition has been in this case, they were two short and I was able to get Ahf Noot, thanks to Grom Orme.”

“That’s what I wanted to remind you of. Your own concilium of social death so far consists of only one man!”

Mven Mass took Evda’s hand and raised it to his lips and she permitted him this gesture of great and intimate friendship. She was, at the moment, the only friend of a strong man oppressed by moral responsibility. The only one? And if Chara had been in her place? No… to receive Chara now the African would need great spiritual uplift and he still had not found strength enough for that. Let everything go its own way until Renn Bose recovered and the Astronautical Council held its meeting.

“Do you know what the third operation is that Renn has to undergo?” asked Evda, to change the subject. Mven Mass thought for a moment and then recalled a conversation he had had with Ahf Noot.

“Noot wants to take advantage of Renn’s being opened up to cleanse his organs of accumulations of entropy. It is usually done by physiochemotherapy and takes a long time, but it can be done in conjunction with such extensive surgery much more quickly and thoroughly.”

Evda Nahl thought over everything she knew of the basis of longevity, the cleansing of the organism of entropy. Man’s fish, saurian and arboreal ancestors have left contradictory vestiges of ancient physiological structures in his organism each of which has its own specific way of forming entropic remnants of their activity. Thousands of years of study of these ancient centres of entropy accumulation, formerly the cause of senility and sickness, have resulted in the elaboration of cleansing by chemical and ray treatment and of methods of stimulating the aging organism with wave baths.

In nature living beings are freed of accumulated entropy through being born of different individuals coming from different places and possessing different lines of heredity. This juggling with heredity in the struggle against entropy and the absorption of fresh strength from the surrounding world is one of the most difficult riddles of science that biologists, physicists, palaeontologists and mathematicians have been battling with for thousands of years. But the struggle has been worth it, expectation of life is now almost two hundred years and, more important still, that exhausting period of decay in old age has been eliminated.

Mven Mass guessed the psychiatrist’s thoughts.

“I have been thinking of the new and great contradiction of our lives,” said the African. “I mean the power of biological medicine that fills the body with new strength and the constantly increasing creative labour of the brain that burns a man up so quickly. How complicated everything is in the laws of our world.”

“That’s true and explains why we are lagging behind with the development of man’s third system of signals[26],” agreed Evda Nahl. “Thought-reading greatly facilitates communication between individuals but requires a great expenditure of energy and weakens the inhibitory nerve centres. This latter effect is the most dangerous.”

“And still the majority of the people, the real workers, live only half the possible number of years owing to their tremendous nervous tension. As far as I can understand, medicine cannot combat this except by forbidding people to work. But, then, who will give up his work for the sake of a few extra years of life?”

“Nobody, naturally, because people only fear death and try to hang on to life when their lives have been passed in isolation and in sorrowful expectation of joys never experienced,” said Evda Nahl pensively; despite herself she could not help remembering that people live longer on the Island of Oblivion than anywhere else.

Mven Mass once again understood her unspoken thoughts and grimly suggested that they return to the observatory to rest. Evda consented.

Two months later Evda Nahl found Chara Nandi in the upper hall of the Palace of Information, whose tall columns gave it the appearance of a Gothic cathedral. The rays of the sun, slanting down from high windows, crossed at half the height of the hall creating a warm glow above and soft twilight below.

The girl stood leaning against a column, her hands folded behind and her legs crossed. Evda Nahl, as usual, could not help admiring her simple attire — a short grey dress trimmed with blue and with a very low-cut bodice.

Chara glanced over her shoulder as Evda approached and her sorrowful eyes lit up.

“What are you doing here, Chara? I thought you were practising a new dance to surprise us with.”

“Dances are a thing of the past,” said Chara, seriously. “I’m choosing a job in a field I’m acquainted with. There is a vacancy at a factory growing artificial leather somewhere in the South Seas near Celebes and another at the station developing perennial plants in the old Atakama Desert. I was happy working in the Atlantic Ocean, everything was so clear and bright and joyful there from the power of the sea and an unthinking contact with it… I enjoyed skilful play in competition with the waves, the big waves that are always there waiting for you and, as soon as you’ve finished work….”