And so promotion. And so power. And so all of the wealth and position that Radamand was afraid he would lose because now someone shared his guilty secret.

Jas came to the tube and got on going away from his home.

Then he got off at the second stop and changed to the first tube leaving for anywhere.

Then got off and caught another.

And another.

And then left the tubestop and went to a computer terminal and pushed in his card. Dangerous? Perhaps — but access to the master files of the computer was closely guarded by Mother's Little Boys, and Jas doubted that Radamand's consider able influence was quite that considerable. No, it would be the constables that Radamand had on his trail, not the computer police, not the listeners in the walls.

So probably the computers were safe.

Jas punched for a readout on criminal law. He specified. And specified again. "Exemptions from all class 2–8b felonies and all misdemeanors."

Then Jas specified for exemptions accessible to juveniles. There were only two: the Service and the Colonies.

Never the Colonies. Not the one shot of somec, and then waking up fifty light–years away on an empty planet, doomed to live out the normal hundred or so years of life and then die, with neither fame nor power nor hope of the somec doses of immortality. Colonies were for the despairing, not for the merely desperate. Jas still had hope.

Had to be the Service. There at the end of the somec sleep through space the captains awoke, fought a battle or did a short term of duty and then went back under the somec to return to Capitol, where they were heroes — at least the successful ones — and wealthy, whether spectacularly successful or not; and, most important, the captains were on somec, waking only one year out of every thirty or forty or fifty, watching the centuries slip by and laughing at time —