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you zombies!” When I had their attention I went on. “Everybody keep looking. Tear this plane apart. Don’t rest until the wimps start arriving, and don’t even rest then. I’m going uptime to see what I can do from there.”
    I hurried to the front of the plane and…stepped through.
    And landed on my ass at the bottom of the sorting floor.
    I saw instantly what had happened and started yelling bloody murder. That did me no good.
Every
goat through the Gate comes through yelling bloody murder.
    At the uptime end of the Gate is a complex series of cushioned, frictionless ramps. They’re designed to catch people who are unconscious or out of their minds with fear and shuffle them off very quickly before the next goat comes through. Sometimes this process breaks bones, but seldom important ones. Time is of the essence. We can’t be too fussy.
    But the system is designed to sort snatch team personnel from the goats: goats to the prep room and then the holding pen and then the deep freeze, snatchers to a well-deserved rest. We all carry a radio squealer on snatch runs. The sorter listens for that squeal. I knew where my squealer was: back in the ready-room.
    So I got a chance to see how the other half lives. I could have done without it.
    There was no way to get a grip on anything (that’s why they call it frictionless). I slid through a series of chutes and onto a flat surface coated with a sheet of plastic that clung to my skin. It all happened so fast I never did understand the sequence. At some point mechanical hands removed my pants and I found myself wrapped in a tight cocoon of clear plastic. I was straitjacketed, arms at my sides, feet together.
    I was tumbled in a blue light. It was frightening, even to me, and I knew what was happening. My body was being studied in minute detail, from the bones outward. The process took about two seconds. I was catalogued out to eighty decimal places and the Big Computer began thumbing through its card file of wimps, looking for the best match. That took about a picosecond. Miles away, a morgue drawer would be springing open in the wimp vaults. My slumbering double would then come rushing toward the prep room, pulling twenty gees of acceleration at the beginning and end of her trip. Twenty gees is a lot—enough to cause brain damage if sustained for any time, but that would be carrying coals to Newcastle. Compared to a wimp, a carrot is a mental giant.
    I knew the process was fast, but I’d never seen it. I was dumped on a slab no more than fifteen seconds after coming through the Gate. The wimp arrived five seconds later and was slapped onto the slab next to me. I was still being probed and prodded by mechanical examiners. When the human customizing team arrived everything would be in readiness.
    The plastic wrapping was permeable. I could breathe through it, but there was no hope of talking. So I lay there, simmering. I could turn my head just enough to see the wimp. The likenesswas very good: my vegetable twin sister. Of course, her left leg was real and mine wasn’t. I wondered how the BC would cope with that.
    I found out.
    A mechanical leg came down from an overhead conveyor and was deposited beside the sleeping wimp. Surely that would indicate something to the human operating team, which I was beginning to think would never arrive.
    But they did, and they gave me unwanted insight into why goats are so jumpy after going through customization.
    There were five in the team. I knew one of them to speak to, though not well. He looked right through me.
    They prodded me and turned me. They referred to the computer screen, consulted hastily, and apparently decided to pass the problem of the artificial leg on to others. All they were supposed to do was make the wimp look enough like me to fool FBI investigators in 1955. I was just a piece of meat wrapped up like a frozen steak in a supermarket.
    The team worked damn well together. Nobody got in anyone else’s way, everything