“A good point, of course. The ship’s main nuclear reactor has fuel for another five hundred years, so we’re okay there. As for propulsion fuel, we can send probes to gather hydrogen three and deuterium from Planet F’s atmosphere. We would collect the same amount that we burned to decelerate coming in, and then burn it to accelerate out.”

“But if we use it for accelerating,” Badim said, “how will we decelerate when we get back to the solar system?”

“That too will have to be reversed. We’ll have to ask the people in the solar system to point the laser beam that accelerated us back at us as we come in, to slow us down the same way they speeded us up. Possibly the same laser generator orbiting Saturn will be available.”

“Really?” Badim said. “This is the plan?”

Then came a knock at the door.

There were thirty-two people outside that door, twenty-six men and six women, several of the men taller and heavier than the median size of the population. Most of them were from Ring A biomes. When they were all in the room it was extremely crowded.

One of the men, one Sangey, from the Steppes, flanked by three of the biggest of the men, said, “This is an illegal meeting. You are discussing public policy in a private gathering of political leaders, as specifically forbidden by the riot laws of Year 68. So we are placing you under arrest. If you come peacefully we’ll let you walk. If you resist you’ll be tied to gurneys and carried.”

“There is no law against private discussions of the health of the ship!” Aram said angrily. “It’s you breaking the law here!”

All their voices were now at least twice as loud as normal.

“Will you walk or be carried?” Sangey said.

“You’ll definitely have to carry me,” Aram said, and then charged Sangey. In a melee filled with shouting, he was subdued by the men flanking Sangey. Aram lashed out at Sangey over one guard’s shoulder as he was lifted off his feet, and his fist landed on Sangey’s nose. At the sight of blood the others stuffing the room surged in toward Aram, shouting furiously.

Badim stood over Freya in her chair, preventing her from rising to her feet. “Stay out of this,” he cried at her, face-to-face. “This is not our fight here!”

“Yes it is!” Freya shouted, but as she could not rise without throwing her father to the side, she kicked viciously past him as they clung to each other, striking nearby knees and causing some of their assailants to crash together and then fall to the floor, crying out angrily. Those still standing shouted and wrestled Badim and Freya both to the ground, pummeling and kicking them. Seeing this Aram flew into a rage and struck out convulsively. More punched noses and cracked lips made several faces bloody, so that the white-eyed shouting redoubled again in volume and intensity.

The sight of blood during a fight causes a very intense adrenaline surge. Voices shout hoarsely; eyes go round, such that white is visible all the way around the iris; movements are faster and stronger; heart rate and blood pressure rise. This was demonstrated many times in Year 68.

The strategic foresight in bringing many large men to arrest the group in the room soon paid off, as the seven people in the meeting were, despite the close quarters and resultant chaos, knocked down, subdued, held fast, secured by medical restraints, lifted kicking out of the room and the building, laid onto gurneys in the street outside, and tied down to them. Badim and Freya were handled like all the rest, and Freya had a swollen left eye.

The crowd that gathered to witness this action was composed almost entirely of people from Ring A biomes. Residents of the Fetch were slow to realize what was happening in their midst, and there was no effective resistance to this outside group. The gurneys were all conveyed up to the spine and along it to Spoke Three, and down it to the infirmary in Kiev, which had been used as a jail in Year 68, though no one alive knew that. The seven arrested ones were locked up in three rooms there.

Elsewhere in the ship, news of the incarceration of Aram’s group spread fast. When their friends and supporters heard about it, they gathered in San Jose’s plaza and loudly protested the action. The administrators of Costa Rica said they did not know what had happened, and suggested discussing what to do in a regathering of a general assembly similar to the one just recently held. A significant number of the protestors refused to debate what they called a criminal action; their friends had to be released immediately, and only then could any outstanding issues be discussed. Kidnapping could never be rewarded with political legitimacy, people shouted, or else it would happen again and again, and there would be no more political discourse in the ship, or rational planning of any kind.

As that afternoon passed, the shouting became much like the sound of broken waves striking the corniche at the seawall of Long Pond. It was a roar.

Three hours after gathering, the crowd in San Jose had inspired itself to action and began marching toward Kiev, chanting slogans and singing songs. There were approximately 140 people in the crowd, and they had made it to the entryway of Spoke Four, packed around the tunnel there to a depth of around two hundred meters, when a smaller crowd of approximately fifty people poured out of the spoke tunnel, throwing rocks and shouting.

It was as if fire and combustible fuel had come in contact: a furious fight erupted. It was still mostly a matter of shoving and hitting, but photos and clips of the melee were sent through the ship right in the midst of it, alerting all to the situation. Meanwhile, in all twelve biomes of Ring A, gangs stormed the government houses and took possession of them. Groups also seized and closed all the locks between Ring A’s biomes, and likewise closed the six entryways to the A spokes. It seemed likely that these were coordinated actions, planned in spaces where the ship had no microphones, or where the microphones had somehow been rendered inoperative. Either that or spontaneous actions self-organized very quickly, which of course they did in many phenomena.

In the Spoke Four lock where the fighting still went on, news of developments elsewhere spread, and it became clear that the fight there was a kind of invasion of Ring B by the groups in Ring A that had taken possession of the government houses. The fight at the entry to Spoke Four then became a pitched battle, with people from everywhere in Ring B rushing around through the locks to join the fray. Nonetheless, the attacking group continued to emerge from the spoke entryway, more every minute, and they were taking over much of Costa Rica and many of the streets of San Jose. Rocks began to fly through the air. One struck a man in the head, and down he went, unconscious and bleeding. Now people were screaming. Reinforcements from around Ring B arrived, enough so that the group emerging from the spoke was stopped in its advance on the Government House. People on both sides now were hurling rocks from the parks, paving stones from the plazas, knives from kitchens, plates, other objects. Furniture was thrown out of buildings into the streets and piled into barricades, some of which were set on fire.

Fire anywhere in the ship was extremely dangerous.

Against such ferocious resistance, the invasive group could not hold its ground. More than a dozen people lay on the ground bleeding. As the invaders retreated to the lock of Spoke Four, still throwing objects at their opponents, there were groups elsewhere around Ring B hurrying up the other spokes toward the spine. The spine was already occupied by groups from Ring A, and they closed the entryway doors of B’s inner ring all the way around, so that no matter how intense the assaults by people from Ring B, they could make no further progress toward the spine. And the spine held the power plant, along with all the other crucial central functions of the ship, including the ship’s operating AI.