Oakes glanced at the blank holofocus beside his couch. A touch of the buttons would call up real-time images of the planet. To what avail? He had tried a sensor search of the Black Dragon coastline from space. Too many clouds . . . not enough detail.

He could identify the coastal bay where the Redoubt was being built, could even see glinting reflections during the diurn passages of Alki or Rega.

Oakes took a deep breath to calm himself. This planet was not going to beat him.

You’re mine, Pandora!

As he had told Legata, anything was possible down there. They could fulfill any fantasy.

Oakes examined his hands, rubbed them across his bulging stomach. He was determined that he would never under any circumstances grub out a living on the surface of a planet. Especially on a planet he owned. This was only natural.

The ship conditioned me to be what I am.

More than any other person he had ever known, Oakes felt that he knew the nature of the ship’s conditioning processes—the differences from what they had been when they had lived free to scatter on Earth’s surface.

It’s the crush of people . . . too many people too close together.

Shipside congestion had been transported groundside. This way of life demanded special adaptations. All Shipmen adjusted the same way at bottom. They drugged themselves, gambled—risked everything . . . even their own lives. Running the Colony perimeter naked except for thonged feet. And for what? A bet! A dare! To hide from themselves. In his long walks through the ship, Oakes knew how he screened out the comings and goings of others. Like most Shipmen, he could retreat into the deepest interior of his mind for privacy, for entertainment, for living.

In these times of food shortage, this faculty had been especially valuable to him. Oakes knew himself to be the . . . heaviest man shipside. He knew there was envy and angry questioning, but even so no one stared directly at him with such thoughts openly readable.

Yes, I know these people. They need me.

Under Edmond Kingston’s tutelage, he had studied well for the psychiatric side of his specialty—all the banks of records handed down for generations . . . eons maybe. The way the ship had put them in and out of hyb, the passage of real time had been lost.

That unknown length of time bothered Oakes. And the translations from the records produced too many anomalies. Popular apology for the ship said the confusion arose from Ship’s attempt to rescue as many people as possible. Oakes did not believe this. The translations hinted at too many other explanations. Translation? The ship controlled even that. You asked a computer to render the unintelligible intelligible. But linguists pointed out that among the languages found in Records were some which existed in a free-floating universe of their own—without discernible beginnings nor descendants.

What happened to the folk of those rich linguistic heritages?