More importantly, why was such a thing here at all? Only to goad a few gladiators on to livelier deaths? Possibly. Mitch glanced at this temple’s towering bronze god, riding his chariot over the world, and shivered. He suspected something worse than the simple brutality of Roman games.
He took a few more pictures, and then remembered seeing an intercom station near the first temple he had entered. He walked back there, and punched out the number of Ship’s Records on the intercom keys.
When the automated voice answered, he ordered: “I want some information about the design of this arena, particularly the three structures spaced around the upper rim.”
The voice asked if he wanted diagrams.
“No. At least not yet. Just tell me what you can about the designer’s basic plan.”
There was a delay of several seconds. Then the voice said: “The basic designer was a man named Oliver Mical, since deceased. In his design programming, frequent reference is made to descriptive passages within a literary work by one Geoffrey Chaucer of Ancient Earth. The quote fantastic unquote work is titled The Knight’s Tale.”
The name of Chaucer rang only the faintest of bells for Mitch. But he remembered that Oliver Mical had been one of Nogara’s brainwashing experts, and also a classical scholar.
“What kind of psycho-electronic devices are built into these three structures?”
“There is no record aboard of any such installation.”
Mitch was sure about the hate-projector. It might have been built in secretly; it probably had been, if his worst suspicions were true.
He ordered: ”Read me some of the relevant passages of this literary work.”
“The three temples are those of Mars, Diana, and Venus,” said the intercom.”A passage relevant to the temple of Mars follows, in original language:
“First on the wal was peynted a forest
In which there dwelleth neither man ne beast
With knotty, knarry, barreyn trees olde
Of stubbes sharp and hidous to biholde.”
Mitch knew just enough of ancient languages to catch a word here and there, but he was not really listening now. His mind had stopped on that phrase “temple of Mars.” He had heard it before, recently, applied to a newly risen secret cult of berserker-worshippers .
“And downward from a hill, under a bente
Ther stood the temple of Mars armipotente
Wrought all of burned steel, of which the entree
Was long and streit, and gastly for to see.”
There was a soft sound behind Mitch, and he turned quickly. Katsulos stood there. He was smiling, but his eyes reminded Mitch of Mars’ statue.
“Do you understand the ancient language, Spain? No? Then I shall translate.” He took up the verse in a chanting voice:
“Then saw I first the dark imagining
Of felony, and all its compassing
The cruel ire, red as any fire
The pickpurse, and also the pale dread
The smiler with the knife under his cloak
The stable burning with the black smoke
The treason of the murdering in the bed
The open war, with all the wounds that bled . . . ”
“Who are you, really?” Mitch demanded. He wanted it out in the open. And he wanted to gain time, for Katsulos wore a pistol at his belt. “What is this to you? Some kind of religion?”
“Not some religion!” Katsulos shook his head, while his eyes glowed steadily at Mitch. “Not a mythology of distant gods, not a system of pale ethics for dusty philosophers. No!” He took a step closer. “Spain, there is no time now for me to proselytize with craft and subtlety. I say only this—the temple of Mars stands open to you. The new god of all creation will accept your sacrifice and your love.”
“You pray to that bronze statue?” Mitch shifted his weight slightly, getting ready.
“No!” The fanatic’s words poured out faster and louder. “The figure with helmet and sword is our symbol and no more. Our god is new, and real, and worthy. He wields deathbeam and missile, and his glory is as the nova sun. He is the descendant of Life, and feeds on Life as is his right. And we who give ourselves to any of his units become immortal in him, though our flesh perish at his touch!”
“I’ve heard there were men who prayed to berserkers,” said Mitch. “Somehow I never expected to meet one.” Faintly in the distance he heard a man shouting, and feet pounding down a corridor. Suddenly he wondered if he, or Katsulos, was more likely to receive reinforcement.
“Soon we will be everywhere,” said Katsulos loudly. ”We are here now, and we are seizing this ship. We will use it to save the unit of our god orbiting the hypermass. And we will give the badlife Karlsen to Mars, and we will give ourselves. And through Mars we will live forever!”
He looked into Mitch’s face and started to draw his gun, just as Mitch hurled himself forward.
Katsulos tried to spin away, Mitch failed to get a solid grip on him, and both men fell sprawling. Mitch saw the gun muzzle swing round on him, and dived desperately for shelter behind a row of seats. Splinters flew around him as the gun blasted. In an instant he was moving again, in a crouching run that carried him into the temple of Venus by one door and out by another. Before Katsulos could sight at him for another shot, Mitch had leaped down an exit stairway, out of the arena.
As he emerged into a corridor, he heard gunfire from the direction of the crew’s quarters. He went the other way, heading for Hemphill’s cabin. At a turn in the passage a black uniform stepped out to bar his way, aiming a pistol. Mitch charged without hesitation, taking the policeman by surprise. The gun fired as Mitch knocked it aside, and then his rush bowled the black-uniform over. Mitch sat on the man and clobbered him with fists and elbows until he was quiet.
Then, captured gun in hand, Mitch hurried on to Hemphill’s door. It slid open before he could pound on it, and closed again as soon as he had jumped inside.
A dead black-uniform sat leaning against the wall, unseeing eyes aimed at Mitch, bullet-holes patterned across his chest.
“Welcome,” said Hemphill drily. He stood with his left hand on an elaborate control console that had been raised from a place of concealment inside the huge desk. In his right hand a machine pistol hung casually. “It seems we face greater difficulties than we expected.”
Lucinda sat in the darkened cabin that was Jor’s hiding place, watching him eat. Immediately after his escape she had started roaming the ship’s passages, looking for him, whispering his name, until at last he had answered her. Since then she had been smuggling him food and drink.
He was older than she had thought at first glance; a man of about her own age, with tiny lines at the corners of his suspicious eyes. Paradoxically, the more she helped him, the more suspicious his eyes became.
Now he paused in his eating to ask: “What do you plan to do when we reach Nogara, and a hundred men come aboard to search for me? They’ll soon find me, then.”
She wanted to tell Jor about Hemphill’s plan for rescuing Karlsen. Once Johann Karlsen was aboard, no one on this ship would have to fear Nogara, or so she felt. But just because Jor still seemed suspicious of her, she hesitated to trust him with a secret.
“You knew you’d be caught eventually,” she countered. “So why did you run away?”
“You don’t know what it’s like, being their prisoner.”
“I do know.”
He ignored her contradiction. “They trained me to fight in the arena with the others. And then they singled me out, and began to train me for something even worse. Now they flick a switch somewhere, and I start to kill, like a berserker.”