At one time he went so far as to try to stare the guards into a hypnotic trance, gazing intently at them until his own eyeballs felt locked for keeps. It did not bother them in the least. They had the reptilian ability to remain motion-less and outstare him until kingdom come.
Mid-morning of the fourth day the officer strutted in, yelled, “Amash! Amash!” and gestured toward the door. His tone and manner were decidedly unfriendly. Evidently someone had identified the prisoner as an Allied space-louse.
Getting off his seat Leeming walked out, two guards ahead, two behind, the officer in the rear. A box-bodied car sheathed in steel waited on the road. They urged him into it, locked it. A pair of guards stood on the rear platform hard against the doors and clung to handrails. A third joined the driver at the front. The journey took thirteen hours the whole of which the inmate spent jouncing around in complete darkness.
By the time the car halted Leeming had invented one new and exceedingly repulsive word. He used it immediately the rear doors opened.
“Quilpole-enk?” he growled. “Enk?”
“Amash!” bawled the guard, unappreciative of alien contributions to the vocabulary of invective. He gave the other a powerful shove.
With poor grace Leeming amashed. He glimpsed great walls rearing against the night and a zone of brilliant light high up before he was pushed through a metal portal and into a large room. Here a reception committee of six thug-like samples awaited him. One of the six signed a paper presented by the escort. The guards withdrew, the door closed, the six eyed the arrival with complete lack of amiability.
One of them said something in an authoritative voice and made motions indicative of undressing.
Leeming called him a smelly quilpole conceived in an alien marsh.
It did him no good. The six grabbed him, stripped him naked, searched every vestige of his clothing, paying special attention to seams and linings. They displayed the expert technique of ones who’d done this job countless times already, knew exactly where to look and what to look for. None showed the slightest interest in his alien physique despite that he was posing fully revealed in the raw.
Everything he possessed was put on one side and his clothes shied back at him. He dressed himself while they pawed through the loot and gabbled together. Satisfied that the captive now owned nothing more than was necessary to hide his shame, they led him through the farther door, up a flight of thick stone stairs, along a stone corridor and into a cell. The door slammed with a sound like that of the crack of doom.
In the dark of night eight small stars and one tiny moon shone through a heavily barred opening high up in one wall. Along the bottom of the gap shone a faint yellow glow from some outside illumination.
Fumbling around in the gloom he found a wooden bench against one wall. It moved when he lugged it. Dragging it beneath the opening he stood upon it but found himself a couple of feet too low to get a view outside. Though heavy, he struggled with it until he had it propped at an angle against the wall, then he crawled carefully up it and had a look between the bars.
Forty feet below lay a bare stone-floored space fifty yards wide and extending to the limited distance he could see rightward and leftward. Beyond the space a smooth-surfaced stone wall rising to his own level. The top of the wall angled at about sixty degrees to form a sharp apex, ten inches above which ran a single line of taut wire, without barbs.
From unseeable sources to right and left poured powerful beams of light that flooded the entire area between cell-block and outer wall as well as a similarly wide space beyond the wall. There was no sign of life. There was only the wall, the flares of light, the overhanging night and the distant stars.
“So I’m in the jug,” he said. “That’s torn it!”
He jumped to the invisible floor and the slight thrust made the bench fall with a resounding crash. It sounded as if he had produced a rocket and let himself be whisked through the roof. Feet raced along the outside passage, light poured through a suddenly opened spyhole in the heavy metal door. An eye appeared in the hole.
“Sach invigia, faplap!” shouted the guard.
Leeming called him a flatfooted, duck-assed quilpole and added six more words, older, timeworn but still potent. He lay on the hard bench and tried to sleep.
An hour later he kicked hell out of the door and when the spyhole opened he said, “Faplap yourself!”
After that he did sleep.
Breakfast consisted of one lukewarm bowl of stewed grain resembling millet and a mug of water. Both were served with disdain and eaten with disgust. It wasn’t as good as the alien muck on which he had lived in the forest. But of course he hadn’t been on convict’s rations then; he’d been eating the meals of some unlucky helicopter crew.
Sometime later a thin-lipped specimen arrived in company with two guards. With a long series of complicated gestures this character explained that the prisoner was to learn a civilized language and, what was more, would learn it fast-by order. Education would commence forthwith.
Puzzled by the necessity; Leeming asked, “What about Major Klavith?”
“Snapnose?”
“Why can’t Klavith do the talking? Has he been struck dumb or something?”
A light dawned upon the other. Making stabbing motions with his forefinger; he said, “Klavith-fat, fat, fat!”
“Huh?”
“Klavith-fat, fat, fat!” He tapped his chest several times, pretended to crumple to the floor and succeeded in conveying that Klavith had expired with official assistance.
“Holy cow!” said Leeming.
In businesslike manner the tutor produced a stack of juvenile picture books and started the imparting process while the guards lounged against the wall and looked bored. Leeming co-operated as one does with the enemy, namely, by misunderstanding everything, mispronouncing everything and overlooking nothing that would prove him a linguistic moron.
The lesson ended at noon and was celebrated by the arrival of another bowl of gruel containing a hunk of stringy, rubbery substance resembling the hind end of a rat. He drank the gruel, sucked the portion of animal, shoved the bowl aside.
Then he pondered the significance of their decision to teach him how to talk. In bumping off the unfortunate Klavith they had become the victims of their own ruthlessness. They’d deprived themselves of the world’s only speaker of Cosmoglotta. Probably they had a few others who could speak it stationed on allied worlds but it would take time and trouble to bring one of those back here. Someone had blundered by ordering Klavith’s execution; he was going to cover up the mistake by teaching the prisoner to squeal.
Evidently they’d got nothing resembling Earth’s electronic brain-pryers and could extract information only by question-and-answer methods aided by unknown forms of persuasion. They wanted to know things and intended to learn them if possible. The slower he was to gain fluency the longer it would be before they put him on the rack, if that was their intention.
His speculations ended when the guards opened the door and ordered him out. Leading him along the corridor, down the stairs, they released him into a great yard filled with figures mooching aimlessly around under a bright sun. He halted in surprise.
Rigellians! About two thousand of them. These were allies, fighting friends of Terra. He looked them over with mounting excitement, seeking a few more familiar shapes amid the mob. Perhaps an Earthman or two. Or even a few humanlike Centaurians.
But there were none. Only rubber-limbed, pop-eyed Rigellians shuffling around in the dreary manner of those confronted with many wasted years and no conceivable future.