Suddenly the voice of the intercom again: “Shut it off, you fool! You’ll destroy the ship!”
He said nothing, but waited in tense silence, watching the other end of the corridor. Suddenly the ventilator fans died. Then the bulkhead door opened a crack, and paused.
“Throw out your weapon first!” he barked.
A gun fell through the crack and to the floor. A Solarian slipped through, sneezed, and rubbed his eyes. “Turn around and back down the corridor.”
The crewman obeyed slowly. Roki stood a few feet behind him, using him for a shield while the others emerged. The fight was gone out of them. It was strange, he thought; they were willing to risk the danger of the Idiot’s C-drive, but they couldn’t stand being locked up with a runaway reactor. They could see death coming then. He throttled back the reactors, and prodded the men toward the storage rooms. There was only one door that suggested a lockup. He halted the prisoners in the hallway and tried the bolt.
“Not in there, manthing!” growled one of the Solarians.
“Why not?”
“There are—”
A muffled wail from within the compartment interrupted the explanation. It was the cry of a child. His hand trembled on the bolt.
“They are wild, and we are weaponless,” pleaded the Solarian.
“How many are in there?”
“Four adults, three children.”
Roki paused. “There’s nowhere else to put you. One of you—you there—go inside, and we’ll see what happens.”
The man shook his head stubbornly in refusal. Roki repeated the order. Again the man refused. The predator, unarmed, was afraid of its prey. The Cophian aimed low and calmly shot him through the leg.
“Throw him inside,” he ordered tonelessly.
With ill-concealed fright for their own safety, the other two lifted their screaming comrade. Roki swung open the door and caught a brief glimpse of several human shadows in the gloom. Then the Solarian was thrown through the doorway and the bolt snapped closed.
At first there was silence, then a bull-roar from some angry throat. Stamping feet—then the Solarian’s shriek—and a body was being dashed against the inside walls while several savage voices roared approval. The two remaining crewmen stood in stunned silence.
“Doesn’t work so well, does it?” Roki murmured with ruthless unconcern.
After a brief search, he found a closet to lock them in, and went to relieve Daleth at the key. When the last signal came, at the end of the four hours, she was asleep from exhaustion. And curled up on the floor, she looked less like a tough little frontier urchin than a frightened bedraggled kitten. He grinned at her for a moment, then went back to inspect the damage to the briefly overloaded reactors. It was not as bad as it might have been. He worked for two hours, replacing fused focusing sections. The jets would carry them home.
The Idiot was left drifting in space to await the coming of a repair ship. And Daleth was not anxious to fly it back alone. Roki set the Solarian vessel on a course with a variable C-level, so that no Sol ship could track them without warp lockers. As far as Roki was concerned the job was done. He had a shipful of evidence and two live Solarians who could be forced to confirm it.
“What will they do about it?” Daleth asked as the captured ship jetted them back toward the Sixty-Star Cluster.
“Crush the Solarian race immediately.”
“I thought we were supposed to keep hands-off non-human races?”
“We are, unless they try to exploit human beings. That is automatically an act of war. But I imagine an Ultimatum will bring a surrender. They can’t fight without warp lockers.”
“What will happen on Earth when they do surrender?” Roki turned to grin. “Go ask the human Earthers. Climb in their cage.”
She shuddered, and murmured, “Some day—they’ll be a civilized race again, won’t they?”
He sobered, and stared thoughtfully at the star-lanced cosmos. “Theirs is the past, Daleth. Theirs is the glory of having founded the race of man. They sent us into space. They gave the galaxy to man—in the beginning. We would do well to let them alone.”
He watched her for a moment. She had lost cockiness, temporarily.
“Stop grinning at me like that!” she snapped.
Roki went to feed the Solarian captives: canned cabbage.
1952
BIG JOE AND THE Nth GENERATION
A thief, he was about to die like a thief.
He hung from the post by his wrists. The wan sunlight glistened faintly on his naked back as he waited, eyes tightly closed, lips moving slowly as he pressed his face against the rough wood and stood on tiptoe to relieve the growing ache in his shoulders. When his ankles ached, he hung by the nails that pierced his forearms just above the wrists.
He was young, perhaps in his tenth Marsyear, and his crisp black hair was close-cropped in the fashion of the bachelor who had not yet sired a pup, or not yet admitted that he had. Lithe and sleek, with the quick knotty muscles and slender rawhide limbs of a wild thing, half-fed and hungry with a quick furious hunger that crouched in ambush. His face, though twisted with pain and fright, remained that of a cocky pup.
When he opened his eyes he could see the low hills of Mars, sun-washed and gray-green with trees, trees brought down from the heavens by the Ancient Fathers. But he could also see the executioner in the foreground, sitting spraddle legged and calm while he chewed a blade of grass and waited. A squat man with a thick face, he occasionally peered at the thief with empty blue eyes—while he casually played mumblety-peg with the bleeding-blade. His stare was blank.
“Ready for me yet, Asir?” he grumbled, not unpleasantly.
The knifeman sat beyond spitting range, but Asir spat, and tried to wipe his chin on the post. “Your dirty mother!” he mumbled.
The executioner chuckled and played mumblety-peg.
After three hours of dangling from the spikes that pierced his arms, Asir was weakening, and the blood throbbed hard in his temples, with each jolt of his heart a separate pulse of pain. The red stickiness had stopped oozing down his arms; they knew how to drive the spike just right. But the heartbeats labored in his head like a hammer beating at red-hot iron.
How many heartbeats in a lifetime—and how many left to him now?
He whimpered and writhed, beginning to lose all hope. Mara had gone to see the Chief Commoner, to plead with him for the pilferer’s life—but Mara was about as trustworthy as a wild hiiffen, and he had visions of them chuckling together in Tokra’s villa over a glass of amber wine, while life drained slowly from a young thief.
Asir regretted nothing. His father had been a renegade before him, had squandered his last ritual formula to buy a wife, then impoverished, had taken her away to the hills. Asir was born in the hills, but he came back to the village of his ancestors to work as a servant and steal the rituals of his masters. No thief could last for long. A ritual-thief caused havoc in the community. The owner of a holy phrase, not knowing that it had been stolen, tried to spend it—and eventually counterclaims would come to light, and a general accounting had to be called. The thief was always found out.
Asir had stolen more than wealth, he had stolen the strength of their souls. For this they hung him by his wrists and waited for him to beg for the bleeding-blade.
A rhyme from his childhood, a childish chant, an eenie-meenie-miney for determining who should drink first from a nectar-cactus. He groaned and tried to shift his weight more comfortably. Where was Mara?