Inside the ship there is a period of confusion and disorientation. None of the lighting is on; no one seems to know where the master controls are. Interviewing one another frantically, we find that none of us, being low in the hierarchy, had anything to do with the operating of the ship and only one hundred ninety-nine, whose field of speciality has been gravitational physics, has the slightest understanding of machinery. We stand in the lower re­ceiving gallery of the ship, huddled against one another in the darkness, small filters of light from the open ramps cutting across us occasionally so that I can see confused eyeball, troubled mouth, tensed forehead. “This is ridiculous,” Nala says. “We’re going to have to get some organization into this or we’ll never embark.”

“Close the ramps,” a male says. “That’s the first thing we should do. Seal the ship.”

“If we seal the ship we’ll have no light,” Nala says. “We can’t work in darkness. We’ve had no darkness for years, we’re not accustomed.” There is a slight edge of panic to her tone, I feel her fingers digging like hooks into my arm. “Quir,” she says, “do something.Do something, Quir. You’re the leader. I can’t do everything.”

“Yes,” I say. “Yes, yes.” I try to simulate authority, the kind of individual who would be able to create order of a situation as mad as this. “We’ll do something. We’ll have to find the control room. Wherever that room is, there’s an activator switch and if we find it the ship will do everything for us. It’s primed for launch.” Some half-remembered point of the training makes me repeat this. “They told us that. The program is already locked in the ship. When we are ready to leave there is nothing to do but hit the activator. The control room. We must find the control room.”

“You find it,” one of the males says. “I can’t move here.”

“I want to go back,” I hear a female say. “I’m afraid. I didn’t think we’d just be standing in the dark like this. I’m frightened. It was better in the enclosure.”

“Listen,” I say and try to bring systematization and order to bear against my own panic. “We must take this calmly and effi­ciently.” I take a few shuddering breaths, order myself to have control and detail one hundred ninety-nine to find the control room. “That would be easiest,” I say. “The rest of us can stay here until you find the activator and that way not disperse. Go.”

“I don’t want to go,” one hundred ninety-nine says sullenly. “Yougo. You’re supposed to be the leader.”

“The leader must stay with the others,” I say. “If you fail to find the controls, come back and we’ll detail someone else.” The grotesque nature of our situation overcomes me. Here we are, having escaped from the enclosure, in our own ship, and we are able to do less with that situation than with the guards. “Go on,” I say, “that’s an order.”

“Order? Where do you get—”

“I’m the leader,” I say. “And I outrank any of you in the hierarchy.”

“You fool,” one hundred ninety-nine says, “there is no more hierarchy. There has been no hierarchy for a long time. Are you going to start that again?”

“Please,” Nala says, in the darkness. “Don’t fight. I can’t stand to listen to this. I’ll go. I think I know where the room is.”

“No,” I say.

“Yes,” Nala says, moving away from me. Already she has left the central point of congregation. “I should have volunteered in the beginning. In a dream I thought I saw the ship and in the ship was the control room in a particular spot. I think I can visualize it. I have been doing a lot of dreaming in the enclosure; now everything comes back to me. Let me go, you stay here,” she says.

“I’ll go with you,” I say. “I can’t let you go alone.”

“That sounds reasonable,” one ninety-nine says. “The two of you as the leaders should go and we’ll stay here. Reasonable. It’s all reasonable. I’ll keep order here,” one ninety-nine says. “I’ll forestall panic.”

“I don’t care,” Nala says. “I don’t care what you do. I can find my way in the dark. Look.” She begins to make her way pur­posefully away from us, passing in and out of flashes of light. I follow with some confusion but determined to accompany her. In only a few steps we pass out of the receiving area and into total darkness, a long thin hallway. Nala waits, I bump into her. “This way,” she says. “It’s at the end of this corridor and then a door and then several steps down. I remember. I saw all this once.”

“Yes,” I say. We are in total darkness; I am frightened. It is the first time that fright has truly caught me since the session with the false therapist yesterday. Yesterday seems to be at a far remove; I have to explore fright all over again. In its edges and details it is as I remembered it. Nala stumbles forward, I follow her.

“You don’t understand, do you?” she says. “You don’t understand what’s going on here, Quir. I envy you; I envy you that. The innocence you have, Quir.”

“Please,” I say, “Nala—”

“Don’t talk,” she says, “I don’t want to hear you talk; I don’t want any more dialogue. I’m sorry, sometimes I just can’t control myself and I don’t know how to keep silence. But I want silence; just follow me.”

We move, the two of us, in utter dark, through a corridor so compressed and narrow that it seems to breathe around me. I blank my mind, try to think no more, do not consider implication, listen to the moaning sound of Nala’s breath as she staggers forward. The ship seems infested with small tics of sound, whis­pers, a beating against surfaces like small insects shattering themselves to death against metal. “The door,” Nala says after an inter-minable time, “I feel the door,” and I hear something move; there is a break in the passage and we are overtaken by light. Light sweeps upon us; light as harsh as the unfiltered sun, springing from the escapeway as the door is opened and in that light we look at one another, Nala and I. Her face is blotched with tension; her eyes somehow senseless and rolling in her head. She has held her hand in her mouth and is biting it; her clothing is askew from the long walk to the ship and the strain. I see in her eyes that she is shocked by how I look as well and then she begins to laugh, falls against me.

“All right, Quir,” she says, “all right, let’s get the machinery started. They left the safety light on; they knew somehow that they would not keep us forever. That someday some of us would return to the ship. The safety is on, Quir, the safety is on,” and she descends the steps, I follow her; she shakes with laughter but holds her footing and deep into the control sector we go. Wires surround me, wires and beams, small shrouds covering the machines and as we stand in the center of this vast room, pinned by a ceiling which my head almost touches, I am, for an instant, totally at a loss to understand what I must do. But with consum­mate efficiency Nala begins to walk among the machines. This one she touches, another she caresses, the third she divests of its shroud. She beings to work with switches. I hear a hum and the room fills with power. Another machine cuts in, Nala passes among them rapidly now, bestowing pats and caresses upon them like children and soon the room is shaking. I feel the machines tremble with energy and my body begins to shake slowly, insis­tently. Nala comes back to me. “It is on,” she says, “the ship has been reconstituted.” She puts her hands on me, her dirty, scratched hands and puts her face against mine. “Don’t you feel the machines, Quir?” she says. “Don’t you feel the power?” And I say “Yes I do,” and she says “What then?” and I say, “I don’t understand, Nala, I don’t understand,” and she says, “You poor fool, you poor unseeing fool, don’t you know what I want you to do to me now?” and I say, “The others, the others are waiting,” and she says, “The hell with the others; the ship can now run itself,” and her hands are upon me, touching my neck, almost strangling, and as much as I will myself to respond to her I cannot believe it, cannot believe that I can function, but she is maddened, in­censed, the machines have possessed her and with a cry she carries me to the smooth, hard floor, forces herself against me, presses into me and trembling I begin to respond. I reach toward her, feel her gather me in, and, still clothed, we begin to simulate the mo­tions of fucking, wildly upon the floor. I cannot enter her but she can feel the enjambment through her clothing, she sobs and opens. I feel the ship move. The ship fills with power, it seems, with Nala, to open, and it leaps toward the heavens. I find my genitals and hers and enter her dumbly as the ship spins in the air and then, settling, begins to drive its way toward home.