“Then your cooperation has had its reward.”
“Its only reward?” Brent turned away from his contemplative study of the busts along the corridor. “When may I hope to be set free?”
Caspay’s mouth was still smiling, but not his eyes.
“You may hope whenever you please, Mr. Brent. Have pleasant dreams.” With that, he waved his hand and continued along the corridor, his green robes rustling.
“I doubt it,” Brent answered drily, watching him until he diasppeared. The Negro now placed an unwelcome hand on Brent’s elbow and guided him to a passage turning left off the corridor’s far side. Here, low ceilings and closely distanced walls suggested a catacomb complex. The area was as labyrinthine as a grotto but white-walled and sourcelessly white-lighted. There was no telling where the illumination came from. Brent squinted against the glare.
“How can we let you loose on the eve of a war, Mr. Brent?” the Negro suddenly asked, mildly almost.
Another twist in the labyrinth. Another turn. Brent said nothing.
“You know too many of our secrets,” the Negro reminded him.
He halted Brent, for the corridor or passageway had suddenly come to a dead end. A cul-de-sac terminating at a closed door that bore no lettering, no identification of any kind. The Negro prodded Brent as he touched a wall button. “Like your friend,” he muttered. The door, hinged, opened inward and Brent gaped.
It was a bare white cell, no larger than a storage closet. But within it stood a tall giant of a man. Bearded, bronzed, his great shaggy head oddly in keeping with his garments of loincloth and tatters. The Negro lolled in the doorway, grinning like an ebony idol. Brent staggered forward, his pulse racing, his heart trip-hammering. The bronzed captive in the room blinked back at the open door. At Brent. And then an enormous smile split the almost graven face into a thousand lines of joy and incredible delight.
“Brent!” the giant roared, coming forward.
“TAYLOR!”
Brent fell into his arms, pounding, clapping, babbling excitedly. Taylor clasped him in a bear hug, lifting him off his feet.
The reunion was euphoric.
At first—
The Corridor of Busts echoed with the sound of the guard’s heels. Before him, Nova had been moving like a dead woman, her eyes listless and her muscles flaccid. But now, somehow, the shout of Brent’s voice echoing the only name she had ever understood came to her, like the call of a bugle. The effect was electrifying. With a wheeling speed more animal than human, she slipped out of the guard’s grasp, biting down on his bared hand like a tigress. The guard screamed and let go. Nova broke away from him, running like a gazelle toward the echoes of Brent’s cry. And the sound of the name, Tay-lor!
Before the guard could rally in lumbering pursuit, his damaged hand already bleeding, the girl had sprinted down the corridor, turned into the passage leading to the catacomb complex and vanished from sight.
Nova ran like the wind.
The guard pounded along behind her.
Her bared feet made slapping noises along the passageway floor.
“How the hell did you get here?” Taylor demanded. They had both simmered down from the unbounded joy of meeting again and were now both of them well aware of the tall Negro still positioned in the doorway. Brent forced a smile. The white of the cell was a glare.
“I came by subway, naturally.”
“You’re two thousand years late,” Taylor replied through cracked lips. His heroic face, which would have looked so proper on a coin or medallion, had always pleased the younger man.
“Service never was much good,” Brent agreed.
“Is your commander with you?”
“He’s dead. Went blind—and blew a lung on reentry.”
Taylor sighed. “Then how . . .?”
“Nova found me.”
“She’s here?” Taylor started forward, his big shoulders flexing. “Where is she?”
“They separated us—thank God.”
“Why thank God?”
“They were trying to make me kill her—” Suddenly, he stared at Taylor. “Come to that, why haven’t they killed you?”
From the doorway, the Negro’s voice lilted pleasantly in reply.
“You know why, Mr. Brent. We’re a peaceful people. We don’t kill our enemies.” Taylor and Brent saw his beatific smile. “We get our enemies to kill each other.” The Negro paused, then directed his next remark to Taylor. “It takes two to make a quarrel. With whom could you quarrel, Mr. Taylor, while you were alone?”
Brent shuddered, knowing what that could mean. Taylor didn’t. He advanced belligerently on the Negro, hands bunching.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” he snarled, showing the erosion that imprisonment had worked on him and his will power.
“But I do,” Brent said. “Unfortunately.”
The Negro closed his eyes.
Brent braced himself, steeling his will against the mental assault he knew was underway. Taylor gawked at him, puzzled. The gawk widened as he saw Brent’s hands come up, fashion themselves into fists. Brent had assumed an aggressive, fighting position! He could see the perspiration breaking out on Brent’s face. But, incredibly—impossibly—his own hands were coming up, knotting into fists, and he felt his brain grow cold with hate and the desire to crush, hurt, maim.
Taylor confronted Brent.
Brent confronted Taylor.
The Negro, eyes still closed, remained in the doorway.
The glare of the cell was white, stark, ugly.
The smiles had drained from the two astronauts. Both faces began to twitch under the hammer blows of hypnosis.
Vainly resisting, Brent gasped, “I am fighting an order! I . . . am . . . fighting . . . a FRIEND!”
With that, he lashed out with a terrible left to the jutting promontory of Taylor’s chin.
The fight was vicious, savage.
Both men, friends, in the grip of a power willing them not merely to hurt, but to murder each other—with no lethal holds barred and no dirty killer’s tricks left untried—collided in the center of the room. Taylor gouged at Brent’s eyes. Brent swung a violent foot into Taylor’s groin. The sound of the encounter was prodigious. They locked in the death grip of brutal close combat. Kicking, gouging, biting, clawing, tearing at each other like two wild animals. Grunts, groans and curses filled the cell. The Negro, eyes screwed tightly shut, stood unmoving in the doorway. His face might have been carved out of marble.
Taylor caught Brent in a powerful viselike hold, swung him like a rag doll and then battered him with his head, butting like a ram. Brent kicked out with his legs. He caught Taylor in the pit of the stomach. Taylor let go and Brent broke loose. For a long second both men were free of each other, circling warily, waiting for the next opening. Their faces were bloody masks, their teeth exposed in brutal animal snarls. They were all but spitting at one another. The savage code of the jungle. Survival of the fittest, the law of fang and claw. They were slavering, gasping and grunting. Two mockeries of intelligent life.
The Negro, eyes still shut, dug into his white robes and produced two weapons. Two shining short knives with hafts of ebony. These he threw unseeing into the center of the room. The knives clattered onto the floor. As if they had been thrown a bone, Taylor and Brent instantly swept up the weapons. Now the fight assumed a deadlier overtone. An aura of the slaughter house hung about the cell, a charnel atmosphere which had eons and eras of brutality, prehistoric violence and unthinking savagery as its questionable guide.
Brent and Taylor went at each other still more viciously.
There was the sharp, ringing strike of metal against metal, the fierce muted thunder of men breathing like animals, gulping oxygen with bestial rapidity. Snarling, snapping, biting, digging at one another as if the universe depended on this one single encounter to give anything of life meaning, sense.