house, and questioning. "It's partly for your protection, Mrs. Dukas," was one honest comment from the detectives. But Eddie sensed that there was more to it than that. Subtly, the interpretation of law had changed since the lunar blowup. It went backward, as grief sought people to blame. Catastrophe had been too big for reason or fairness. And the scapegoat himself was not around to be mobbed.

A freckle-faced brat from the Youth Center—her name, Barbara Day, had been drawn out of a hat, for of course she had no known parents—offered advice: "You ought to go far away, Eddie, where folks don't know you. It would be better."

Ed knew that this was good advice. Many people were saying and shouting and whispering that too much knowledge was a dangerous possession. And Ed's uncle still represented such a thing. More than once Ed had to run fast, with some big lug chasing him. Black eyes he collected with great frequency, and delivered some, too. Still, he ached inside. It was as if Uncle Mitch were part of him.

The world began to look normal and green again. But the undercurrents of memory were still there. And Ed Dukas began to answer hate with hate, though he didn't like to.

There was a crowd of young toughs with rocks to throw, in front of the house one night. "This is the place," Eddie heard one of them say. "Both my parents are gone. And the bums that live here were in on the reason."

Ed had seen the boy around before: Ash Parker. Now the rocks flew for a while, and Ed and his mother crouched behind locked doors. There might have been a lynching, except that Les Payten found a neighbor with a tear-gas vial and some other neighbors with sharp tongues and courage.

It was the final straw, however. "Will we have to leave, Eddie?" his mother asked.

"It's best," he growled. "But I'll be back!"

Next day the house was being boarded up. Packing began even before the colonial travel permits were prepared.

It was goodbye to Les Payten and Barbara Day, and the newly ringed planet, Earth, with its billions of inhabitants and its great shops that still worked to give the whole solar system to mankind and maybe a segment of the larger universe as well. The pattern of the future seemed set, and specialists still didn't think that there was any real reason to make a change. In fact, they denied that any change was possible. Nobody would give up the threshold of immortality, once it was gained. Nor would they relinquish other triumphs that could bring idleness and decay if they were not used to accomplish bigger and bigger tasks. So, even the fearful ones were caught in the rushing current of the times.

Ed Dukas was soon on a crowded liner. Because she might need him, he kept close to his mother. Around them were other colonists—young graduates from technical schools, newlyweds and people who were physically young, too, though they were fresh from the rejuvenation vats. They were the aged, awed by another lifetime before them.

The liner blasted off. A week later it landed on an asteroid of middling size. The Dukases were assigned to one of a group of trim cottages that were not even all alike. Under the great glass roof, which kept in the synthetic air, the new gardens and fruit trees were already growing. And in coiled tubes of clear plastic filled with water, circulated green algae from which almost any kind of basic food could be made.

To Eddie it was a satisfying dip into space that he had so much anticipated. Amid great heaps of steel and plastic and house parts and atomic machines to maintain a normal temperature so far from the sun, life went on. Eddie's mother worked in the office of a shop for robot machines. He worked too—when and where he could—when he was not at school.

There was a little more of peace, for a while anyway. There was the usual psychological treatment to subdue possible devils of the lunar catastrophe which might remain in his mind. There were sports and an artificial lake to swim in with his companions. However, Ed Dukas was wary of making deep friendships.

He was then a sullen, overly matured youth of thirteen, earnest about everything he did—for he knew that the years ahead were grimly earnest. Carefully he kept up with the reports in scientific journals: about the laying of the keel of the first star ship on a minute asteroid with only a number and no name. Harwell was in charge. The propellant would be pure radiant energy—the best of them all; energy so concentrated that it would be truly massive and hurled at the speed of light, which was not remarkable, since it would be light, far more intense per unit area than the noval explosion of a star!

This was by no means the only major advance that had been accomplished and was reported. Technological progress was steady in all fields, across the board, making a solid front. Others of its facets also had a special appeal to Ed Dukas. Biological science, in its newest interpretations, he knew to be the most important of these. Now it was no longer just simple rejuvenation—restoring rusty organs. It was a thing that could start from a single cell, in warm, sticky fluids, giving rebirth to something that had already been. And it had a further development—bringing the same results but more swiftly and easily, and with different, far more rugged flesh. It was frightening and fascinating. Knowing was like feeling the shadow of a demon or an angel.

Ed Dukas and his mother spent four years on their asteroid. Then one day a letter fluttered in her hand. And she seemed not to know whether to look happy or terrified. She did not show her son the letter.

"We've had enough of being here," she stated. "We're going home."

So they went back across the millions of miles. They cleaned up the house, on which obscene insults had been scribbled in chalk. On two successive days Eddie was jumped by gangs. He fought free and escaped. But on the third evening he was cornered. This time Ash Parker was the ringleader. Ed battled like a bobcat, but eight opponents were too many. He was flat on his back, and they were kicking him. His own blood was in his mouth. What might happen when he blacked out was anybody's guess. Once, before medical knowledge had advanced to where it was, it would have been murder for sure.

Somebody intervened—a big guy in a gray business suit who had come striding along the block with an eager attention.

He didn't say anything at first. He just collared the toughs, two at a time in swift succession, and thrust them away.

Eddie staggered up and faced his benefactor, intent on giving him sincere thanks. "Mister ... I ..."

"Hello, Eddie!" the man said, chuckling. "I see you turned out hardy. Seventeen you'd be now."

Young Ed Dukas heard the voice and looked at the face. He stiffened. Then he made a statement in a flat tone that sounded very formal and unemotional, which it was not: "Sir, you're my father."

The man nodded. "Just off the assembly line, pal. The same guy—because you and your mother, and some other people, remembered what I was like. There was no record of me or of my mind. So, okay, they made one, fella. From the memories of me left in other minds. Thanks, Eddie."

"Thanks?" Ed Dukas said in a choked voice.

Bloody and dirty, he stepped forward. Father and son clung to each other. It was a moment of great triumph.

Ed's mind pictured filaments, as fragile at first as pink spiderweb but already outlining a human shape, held suspended in a kind of jelly—growing there, forming according to a record. Now even the record could be synthesized. It seemed like real freedom from death at last.

Ash Parker had not fled. Now he spoke, sounding awed, "Jeez, Mr. Dukas. I didn't believe it. Maybe my folks can come back, too."

"Your parents will come back," Jack Dukas affirmed. "I am the first 'memory man' to be resurrected. Among those killed who had had their bodies and minds recorded as was recommended, about a hundred thousand are