He set the helmet down, then scratched and rubbed his shaggy head, never taking his eyes from the man on the floor. He had not yet looked once at Maria, and she could look nowhere but at him. She had never seen a face so blank on a living person. This was what happened to a berserker’s prisoner!
And yet—and yet. Maria had seen brainwashed men before, ex-criminals on her own planet. She felt this man was something more—or something less.
The bearded man knelt beside the mate, with an air of hesitation, and reached out to touch him. The dying man stirred feebly, and looked up without comprehension. The floor under him was wet with blood.
The stranger took the mate’s limp arm and bent it back and forth, as if interested in the articulation of the human elbow. The mate groaned, and struggled feebly. The stranger suddenly shot out his metal-gauntleted hands and seized the dying man by the throat.
Maria could not move, or turn her eyes away, though the whole room seemed to spin slowly, then faster and faster, around the focus of those armored hands.
The bearded man released his grip and stood erect, still watching the body at his feet.
“Turned off,” he said distinctly.
Perhaps she moved. For whatever reason, the bearded man raised his sleepwalker’s face to look at her. He did not meet her eyes, or avoid them. His eye movements were quick and alert, but the muscles of his face just hung there under the skin. He came toward her.
Why, he’s young, she thought, hardly more than a boy. She backed against the wall and waited, standing. Women on her planet were not brought up to faint. Somehow, the closer he came, the less she feared him. But if he had smiled once, she would have screamed, on and on.
He stood before her, and reached out one hand to touch her face, her hair, her body. She stood still; she felt no lust in him, no meanness and no kindness. It was as if he radiated an emptiness.
“Not images,” said the young man as if to himself. Then another word, sounding like: “Badlife.”
Almost Maria dared to speak to him. The strangled man lay on the deck a few yards away.
The young man turned and shuffled deliberately away from her. She had never seen anyone who walked just like him. He picked up his helmet and went out the door without looking back.
A pipe streamed water into one corner of her little space, where it gurgled away through a hole in the floor. The gravity seemed to be set at about Earth level. Maria sat leaning against the wall, praying and listening to her heart pound. It almost stopped when the door opened again, very slightly at first, then enough for a large cake of pink and green stuff that seemed to be food. The machine walked around the dead man on its way out.
She had eaten a little of the cake when the door opened again, very slightly at first, then enough for a man to step quickly in. It was Hemphill, the cold-eyed one from the ship, leaning a bit to one side as if dragged down by the weight of the little bomb he carried under his arm. After a quick look around he shut the door behind him and crossed the room to her, hardly glancing down as he stepped over the body of the mate.
“How many of them are there?” Hemphill whispered, bending over her. She had remained seated on the floor, too surprised to move or speak.
“Who?” she finally managed.
He jerked his head toward the door impatiently.
“Them. The ones who live here inside it, and serve it. I saw one of them coming out of this room, when I was out in the passage. It’s fixed up a lot of living space for them.”
“I’ve only seen one man.”
His eyes glinted at that. He showed Maria how the bomb could be made to explode, and gave it to her to hold, while he began to burn through her chain with his laser pistol. They exchanged information on what had happened. She did not think she would ever be able to set off the bomb and kill herself, but she did not tell that to Hemphill.
Just as they stepped out of the prison room, Hemphill had a bad moment when three machines rolled toward them from around a corner. But the things ignored the two frozen humans and rolled silently past them, going on out of sight.
He turned to Maria with an exultant whisper: “The damned thing is three-quarters blind, here inside its own skin!”
She only waited, watching him with frightened eyes.
With the beginning of hope, a vague plan was forming in his mind. He led her along the passage, saying: “Now we’ll see about that man. Or men.” Was it too good to be true, that there was only one of them?
The corridors were badly lit, and full of uneven jogs and steps. Carelessly built concessions to life, he thought. He moved in the direction he had seen the man take.
After a few minutes of cautious advance, Hemphill heard the shuffling footsteps of one person ahead, coming nearer. He handed the bomb to Maria again, and pressed her behind him. They waited in a dark niche.
The footsteps approached with careless speed, a vague shadow bobbing ahead of them. The shaggy head swung so abruptly into view that Hemphill’s metal-fisted swing was almost too late. The blow only grazed the back of the skull; the man yelped and staggered off balance and fell down. He was wearing an old-model spacesuit, with no helmet.
Hemphill crouched over him, shoving the laser pistol almost into his face. “Make a sound and I’ll kill you. Where are the others?”
The face looking up at Hemphill was stunned—worse than stunned. It seemed more dead than alive, though the eyes moved alertly enough from Hemphill to Maria and back, disregarding the gun.
“He’s the same one,” Maria whispered.
“Where are your friends?” Hemphill demanded.
The man felt the back of his head, where he had been hit. “Damage,” he said tonelessly, as if to himself. Then he reached up for the pistol, so calmly and steadily that he was nearly able to touch it.
Hemphill jumped back a step, and barely kept himself from firing. “Sit down or I’ll kill you! Now tell me who you are, and how many others are here.”
The man sat there calmly, with his putty face showing nothing. He said: “Your speech is steady in tone from word to word, not like that of the machine. You hold a killing tool there. Give it to me and I will destroy you and—that one.”
It seemed this man was only a brainwashed ruin, instead of an unspeakable traitor. Now what use could be made of him? Hemphill moved back another step, slowly lowering the pistol.
Maria spoke to their prisoner. “Where are you from? What planet?”
A blank stare.
“Your home,” she persisted. “Where were you born?”
“From the birth tank.” Sometimes the tones of the man’s voice shifted like the berserker’s, as if he was a fearful comedian mocking it.
Hemphill gave an unstable laugh. “From a birth tank, of course. What else? Now for the last time, where are the others?”
“I do not understand.”
Hemphill sighed. “All right. Where’s this birth tank?” He had to start with something.
The place looked like the storeroom of a biology lab, badly lighted, piled and crowded with equipment, laced with pipes and conduits. Probably no living technician had ever worked here.
“You were born here?” Hemphill demanded.
“Yes.”
“He’s crazy.”
“No. Wait.” Maria’s voice sank to an even lower whisper, as if she was frightened anew. She took the hand of the slack-faced man. He bent his head to stare at their touching hands.