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come down and take a peek at me from time to time, at least from idle curiosity—me and the three others who probably were here as well.
    I also had time to reflect on what I knew of the Warden situation itself, the reason for its perfection as a prison. I had not, of course, swallowed that whole. Though there was no such thing as the perfect prison, this one had to be close. Shortly after I was landed on Medusa and started wading in and breathing its air I would be infected with an oddball submicroscopic organism that would set up housekeeping in every cell of my body. There it would live, feeding off me, even earning its keep by keeping disease organisms, infections, and the like in check. The one thing that stuff had was a will to live and it only lived if you did.
    But the organism needed something, some trace element or somesuch that was only present in the Warden system. Nobody knew what and nobody had been able to do the real work necessary to find out, but whatever it needed—other than you—was found only in the Warden system. Whatever it was wasn’t in the air, because they ran shuttles between the worlds of the Diamond and in them you breathed the purified, mechanically produced stuff with no ill effect. Not in the food, either. They’d tried that. It was possible for one of the Warden people to live comfortably on synthetics in a totally isolated lab such as a planetary space station. But get too far away, even with Warden food and Warden ah-, and the organism died. Since it had modified your cells to make itself at home, and those cells depended on the organism to keep working properly, you died, too—painfully and slowly, in horrible agony. That distance was roughly a quarter of a light-year from the sun, which explained the location of the base ship.
    All four worlds were more than climatologically different. The organism acted consistently in what it did to you on each planet. But—possibly because of distance from the sun, which seemed to be the determining factor in its life, the organism did different things to you depending on which world you were first exposed to it. Whatever it did stuck in just that fashion even if you went to a different world of the Diamond.
    The organism seemed to be vaguely telepathic, although nobody could explain quite how. It certainly wasn’t an intelligent organism, though it behaved predictably. Still, most of the changes seemed to involve the colony in one person affecting the colony in another—or others. The individual provided the conscious control, if he could, and that determined who bossed whom. A pretty simple system, even if nobody had yet been able to explain it. I vaguely understood, though, that Medusans were unique in the Diamond in that the Warden organism colony inside you affected you alone in some way, not others. Well, we would have to see.
    As for Medusa itself, all I really knew about it was that it was terribly cold and hostile. I cursed again at not having been fed the proper programming to prepare me fully—it would cost time, possibly a lot, just to learn the ropes.
    Almost six days—seventeen meals—after I’d arrived at the base ship there was a lurching and a lot of banging around that forced me to the cot and made me slightly seasick. Still, I wasn’t disappointed—it meant that they were making up the consignments and readying for the in-system drop of these cells. I faced what was to come with mixed emotions. On one hand, I desperately wanted to be out of this little box that had provided nothing but endless, terrible boredom for such a long time. The problem was, though, that when I next got out of the box I would just be in a much larger and probably more comfortable box—Medusa itself, no less a cell for being an entire planet. And if my new situation would provide diversion, challenge, excitement, or whatever, lacking in this box, it might also prove, unlike this box, very, very final.
    Shortly after the banging started, it