"Dammit, Peerssa, have you been lying to me?"

"Calm down, Corbell. There is a way to make you young, if you're willing. You can understand why I didn't raise the subject before."

"I sure can. Why now? Why would you do this for someone who betrayed your precious State?"

"Things have changed, Corbell. By now we may be the last remnants of the State. And you weren't even a citizen."

"And you are?"

"I am a human personality imposed on a computer's memory banks. I could never be a citizen. You could have been. Such as you are, you may well represent the State. The State may not survive the seventy thousand years we will be gone. You are worth preserving."

"Thank you." Unreasonably, Corbell was touched.

"The State may exist only in your memory. I'm glad you forced me to teach you speech. I'm glad I told you so much about myself. You must live."

"Make me young," Corbell said with the fervor of a man growing old much too fast. "What does it take?"

"We have the equipment to take a clone from you. You surely find nothing strange about the concept of cloning?"

"We knew about it. Cloning of carrots, anyway. But-"

"We can clone men. We can clone you. Let the individual grow in sensory deprivation, in your cold-sleep tank. We can record your memories and play them into the clone's blank mind."

"How? Oh, of course, the computer link." The link was a direct telepathic control over the computer. Corbell had never dared use it. He had been doubly afraid of it since the computer became Pierce the checker. Peerssa might use it to take him over.

Peerssa said, "We must also have injections of your memory RNA."

Corbell yelped. "You're talking about grinding me up into chemically leeched hamburger!"

"I'm talking about making a young man of you."

"It wouldn't be me, you madman!"

"The new individual would be as much Jerome Branch Corbell as you are."

"Thanks! Thanks a lot! You told me what happened to the real Corbell. Ground up for hamburger and leeched for RNA and injected into a brain-wiped criminal!"

"The real Corbell must have been insane or stupid. At seventy degrees and below, the phospholipids in the glia in the brain freeze. The synapses are destroyed. Any educated man knows this," said Peerssa. "He and the other corpsicles never had a chance. You are an improvement on that Corbell. I will make the clone an improvement over you."

"I thought you might. No, thanks. There isn't going to be a CORBELL Mark III."

Six months later he was not ready for the cold-sleep tank. "You've been shirking your exercises," Peerssa said.

Corbell had just finished an exercise period. Tendonitis had led him to favor his arms these past two months, but they hurt anyway, two hot wires in his shoulders. "It's your schedule," he grumbled.

"I would have to thaw you early. Coming out of cold sleep is a trauma. You want to reach the galactic core in optimum condition. Take another two months awake."

"Fine. I hate that damn tank anyway." Corbell slumped in a web chair. In near free-fall he was too prone to lose muscle tone. His potbelly protruded.

He had nobody else to talk to, and Peerssa had endless patience. It should have been good timing when Peerssa said, "Have you given any thought to regaining your youth?"

Corbell shuddered. "Forget it." Hastily, "I don't mean that literally. If you wipe it from your memory banks you'll only think of it again later."

"I take it you've canceled your command. What is your objection?"

"It's ugly."

"As things stand now, you will die of aging on the return voyage. The cold-sleep treatment is not enough."

"I will not be ground up for hamburger. Not again."

"You know the details of Don Juan's excrement recycling system. Do you find that ugly?"

"Since you ask, yes."

"But you eat the food and drink the water."

Corbell didn't answer.

"You would be a young man when it was over."

"No. No, I would not." Corbell was shouting. "I would be hamburger! Contaminated hamburger, garbage to be recycled for the b-b.. benefit of your damn clone! He wouldn't even be a good copy, because you'd be shoving some of your own thoughts in through the computer link!"

"You have no loyalty to anything but yourself."

Corbell thought, I can shut him up. Anytime. He said, "Whatever it is I am, I'll settle for it."

"The only man who ever saw the galactic core. A wonderful thing." Peerssa had had time and practice to develop that sarcastic tone. "What will you do afterward, once your sole ambition in life is satisfied? Will you order me to self-destruct? A grand funeral pyre for your ending, a fusion flame that alien eyes might see?"

Then Corbell did Peerssa an injustice. "Is that what's been bothering you? Tell you what," he said. "After we have our look around the core suns, why don't we drop some package probes on appropriate planets? You can reach Earth alive. By the time the State sends ships, the algae will have turned some reducing atmospheres to oxygen atmospheres. You can take my mummy home, too, in the cold-sleep tank. Maybe they'll want it for a museum."

"You will not be young again?"

"We've been through that."

"Very well. Will you go to the Womb Room, please? I have a great deal to show you."

Mystified and suspicious, Corbell went.

Peerssa had set up displays on the Womb Room walls. There was a greatly enlarged, slightly blurred view of the galactic core as Corbell had seen it six months ago: drastically flattened, the glow of the suns blurred by interstellar matter. There was a contrasting enlargement of the center of the spiral galaxy in Andromeda. There was a diagram: an oddly contoured disk cut down the center. Corbell frowned, wondering where he had seen that before.

Peerssa spoke as he settled himself in the control chair. "I have never known why you chose the galactic axis as your destination. I may never understand that."

The core of Andromeda Galaxy glowed with colored lights. Corbell pointed. "For that. For beauty. For the same reason I once went through the Grand Canyon on mule back. Can you imagine a planet on the edge of that sphere? The nights?"

"I can do better. I can put it before you, by extrapolation." And Peerssa did. Corbell's chair floated above a dark landscape. The sky was jammed with stars competing for space, big and little, red and blue and pure white, and a spinning pair that threw out a spiral of red gas. The sky turned. A wall of blackness rose in the east, ten thousand cubic light-years of dust cloud... and then the Womb Room was as it had been, while Corbell was still gaping.

"I could have done that before your first term in the cold-sleep tank. We could have completed your mission, seeded the worlds assigned to you, and I could have displayed that sky for you at any time. Why didn't you say something?"

"It's not real. Peerssa, didn't any of your aristocrats ever go cruising through, say, Saturn's rings, just for the joy of it?"

"For the mining possibilities-"

"Mining. If they said that, they lied."

"Are you sorry you came?"

Why had he kept on? Knowing that the trip would take more than twenty-one years, that it would take his life, had not changed his mind. Corbell the reconstituted corpsicle would never carve out a normal life for himself. Very well, he would do something memorable.

"No. Why should I be sorry? I expected strangeness in the galactic core. I was right, wasn't I? It's nothing like other galaxies, and I'm the first to know it."

"You're insane. Imagine my amazement. Never mind. Your choice has had unforeseen consequences. State astronomers expected a close-packed sphere of millions of suns averaging a quarter to half a light-year apart, with red giant suns predominating. Instead, we find this: the matter in the core forced into a disk that flattens drastically toward the center, with a tremendously powerful source of infrared and radio energy at the axis."