The flesh in the furnace

minutes to free herself from Wissa's weight and regain her breath.
        Outside, Sebastian still slept.
        She muscled Wissa over the rim without regard to bruising or cutting the small woman. Finally the stepmother was balanced there precariously, her belly creased by the metal edge, free from the waist up. Had she been awake, her breasts would have pained her terribly for the way she had been handled. But she was not awake, Bitty Belina reminded herself, and there was no time for gentleness. Drawing renewed strength from a thirty-second rest period, Belina grabbed one of Wissa's feet in each hand and strained to force her away. The stepmother was pushed another few inches into the open. Only her legs remained suspended over the womb recession, and these were not heavy enough to cause her to fall back inside. Belina leaped, caught the edges of the escape hatch with her fingers, curled them over and held on tight.
        She muscled herself, but found that she was too exhausted to get out. She let go and fell onto the forming tray, breathing so harshly that she was certain she would wake the idiot.
        Time passed.
        Around her, things hummed and thumped.
        She tried it again, managed to force herself to waist level with the rim, looked out on the fiat field of the machine's surface, at the only two prominences which were the control knobs.
        Her face was red, and she could feel the blood pounding in her temples. Every muscle in her face ached.
        She caught the edge with her belly, tried to get a better hold with her hands and slipped back inside, striking the forming tray with her forehead and slipping mercifully into unconsciousness.
        She woke up with Sebastian's face hanging over her like a moon, his fat fingers jabbing at her. She sat up, pushing his fingers away, and cursed him. Against her will, he took her out of the womb.
        She watched while he fed Wissa's unawakened body back into the machine. Her identity wafer popped out and was jammed into the file.
        Now she wished she had killed him when she had the scissors at his throat. Even if she had failed to get Wissa from the womb and wakened, she would not, at least, have been forced to look at the long, pallid face and those deep-set, hollow eyes that always looked so damned melancholy.
        He placed her on the floor and this time allowed the Olmescian amoeba to shield the machine. He did not know if it would keep her out of trouble, but he seemed to remember that the alien organism only responded to either Pertos or himself.
        "Hurt yourself," he warned.
        But she was already curled up, asleep. He watched her for a while, wondering why she had tried such a foolish thing as crawling into the womb. He wondered, too, where Wissa had come from. It did not occur to him that Belina could be responsible for that. She was a puppet, after all, and not a puppet master.
        In time, he went to sleep.
        When he began to snore, Belina's eyes opened, fresh and observant. For a long time, she watched him, loathing him. But there was nothing she could do about him. Yet. Move cautiously, she told herself, and soon you'll be able to jam those shears clear through the bastard's windpipe.
        She slept unsoundly.
        
        They drove farther the following day than they had gone in any single stretch in quite some time. The winds had grown fierce, but the idiot still managed to keep the truck near the roadbed where, when the air cushion blasted the snow aside, it could find a good beater surface to keep itself aloft. The snow had given up the form of flakes in favor of gritty, rock-hard granules. The minuscule pellets rang off the metal hide of the vehicle, hissed on the windscreen as they drove into the storm.
        
        When Earth had set out to beautify and modernize the world, there had been no need to conserve money. The old economic system was dead. There were so few left behind after the Emigration that anyone could have anything that he wanted. For some, this was not enough. They were the workers and the visionaries who were only satisfied when they saw their dreams taking form before them. It was these several thousand who reshaped a world, and the waste of putting a superhighway through hundreds of miles of barren land did not occur to them. It was the completed project itself, not what it would accomplish, that made the effort worth their time and