They were all around me in a tight circle. I stared at their h.o.r.n.y shins, their sandaled feet, as alien as an alligator"s, and felt the icy sweat clammy on my face. Deathly sickness rose inside me in a wave that knotted my stomach and left me quivering like a beached jellyfish.

The legs around me stirred and gave way to a tall Drathian in the white serape of a Rule-keeper. Hard hands clamped on me, dragged me to my feet. A light glared in my face.

"Man, the Rule-keeper demands you produce the two slaves given as a gift to you by His least Greatness!"

"Gone," I gargled the words. "Trusted Srat. Filthy midget . . ."

"Man, you are guilty of a crime of the first category! Illegal manumission of slaves! To redress these crimes, the Rule-keeper demands a fine of twice the value of the slaves, plus triple bribes for himself and his attendants!"

"You"re out of luck," I said. "No money . . . no ship . . . all gone. . . ."

I felt myself blacking out then. I was dimly aware of being carried, of lights glaring on me, later of a pain that seemed to tear me open, like a rotten fruit; but it was all remote, far away, happening to someone else. . . .

6.

I came to myself lying on a hard pallet on a stone floor, still sick, but clear-headed now. For a while, I looked at the lone glare-bulb in the ceiling and tried to remember what had happened, but it was all a confused fog. I sat up and a red-hot hook grabbed at my side. I pulled back the short, coa.r.s.e-weave jacket I was wearing, and saw a livid, six-inch cut under my ribs, neatly st.i.tched with tough thread. It was the kind of wound that would heal in a few weeks and leave a welted scar; a scar like I"d seen recently, in the sides of Huvile and the Lady Raire. A scar that meant I was a slave.

CHAPTER NINE.

The controller made a small lump under the skin. It wasn"t painful-not unless you got too close to your overseer. At ten feet, it began to feel like a slight case of indigestion. At five, it was a stone knife being twisted in your chest. Once, in an experimental mood, I pushed in to four feet from him before he noticed and waved me back. It was like a fire in my chest. That was just the mild form of its action, of course. If he had pushed the little lever on the egg-shape strapped to his arm-or died, while the thing was tuned to his body inductance-the fire in my chest would be real. Once, months later, I saw three slaves whose keeper had been accidentally killed; the holes burned in their chests from the inside were as big as dinner plates.

As a rule, though, the Lesser Triarch believed in treating his slaves well, as valuable property deserved. Hruba dropped by twice a day for the first few days to be sure that my alien flesh was healing properly. I spent my time lying on the bed or hobbling up and down the small, windowless room, talking to myself: "You"re a smart boy, Billy Danger. You learned a lot, these last four years. Enough to get yourself a ship of your own, and bring it here, against all the odds there are, to find her. And then you handed her and the ship to the midget on a silver platter-for the second time. He must have had a good laugh. For a year he followed you like a sick pup, and wagged his tail every time you looked his way. But he was waiting. And you made it easy. While you sat there poisoning yourself, he strolled back to the ship, told Huvile you weren"t coming, and lifted off. The Lady Raire might have interfered, but she never knew; she didn"t see you. And now Srat has her right back where she started. . . ."

It wasn"t a line of thought that made me feel better, but it served the purpose of keeping me on my feet, pacing. With those ideas chewing at me, I wasn"t in a mood for long, restful naps.

When the wound had st.i.tched up, a Drathian overseer took me out of my private cell and herded me along to a big room that looked like a nineteenth century sweatshop. There were other slaves there, forty or fifty of them, all shapes, all sizes, even a few Drathians who"d run foul of the Rule-keepers. I was a.s.signed to a stool beside a big, broad-backed animal with a face like a Halloween mask snipped out of an old inner tube and fringed with feathery red gills. The overseer talked to him in the local buzz-buzz, and went away. He looked at me with big yellow eyes like a twin-yolked egg, and said, "Welcome to the club, friend," in perfect, unaccented lingua, in a voice that seemed to come from under a tin washtub.

He told me that his name was Fsha-fsha, that he had been left behind seventeen years before when the freighter he was shipping on had been condemned here on Drath after her linings went out, and that he had been a slave since his money ran out, three months after that.

"It"s not a bad life," he said. "Plenty of food, a place to sleep, and the work"s not arduous, after you"ve learned the routine."

The routine, he went on to explain, was Sorting. "It"s a high-level job," Fsha-fsha a.s.sured me. "Only the top-category workers get this slot. And let me tell you, friend, it"s better than duty in the mines, or on the pelagic harvesting rafts!"

He explained the work; it consisted of watching an endless line of glowing spheres as they came toward us along a conveyor belt, and sorting them into one of eight categories. He told me what the types were, and demonstrated; all the while he talked, the bulbs kept coming, and his big hands flicked the keys in front of him, shunting them their separate ways. But as far as I could tell, all the bulbs were exactly alike.

"You"ll learn," he said blandly, and flipped a switch that stopped the line. He fetched a lightweight a.s.sembly of straps from a wall locker.

"Training harness," he explained. "It helps you catch on in a hurry." He fitted it to me with the straps and wires crisscrossing my back and chest, along my arms, cinched up tight on each finger. When he finished, he climbed back on his stool, and switched on the line.

"Watch," he said. The glowing bulbs came toward him and his fingers played over the keys.

"Now you follow through on your console," he said. I put my hands on the b.u.t.tons and he reached across to attach a snap that held them there. A bulb came toward me and a sensation like a hot needle stabbed the middle finger on my right hand. I punched the key under it and the pain stopped, but there was another bulb coming, and the needle stabbed my little finger this time, and I jabbed with it, and there was another bulb coming. . . .

"It"s a surefire teaching system," Fsha-fsha said in his cheery, sub-cellar voice. "Your hands learn to sort without even bringing the forebrain into it. You can"t beat pain-a.s.sociation for fast results."

For the rest of the shift, I watched glorm-bulbs sail at me, trying to second-guess the pain circuits that were activated by Fsha-fsha"s selections. All I had to do was recognize a left-forefinger or right ring-finger bulb before he did, and punch the key first. By the end of the first hour my hands ached like unlanced boils. By the second hour, my arms were numb to the elbow. At the end of three hours I was throbbing all over.

"You did fine," Fsha-fsha told me when the gong rang that meant the shift was ended. "Old Hruba knew what he was doing when he a.s.signed you here. You"re a quick study. You were coding ten percent above random the last few minutes."

He took me along a damp-looking tunnel to a gloomy barracks where he and twenty-six other slaves lived. He showed me an empty alcove, got me a hammock and helped me sling it, then took me along to the mess. The cook was a warty creature with a ferocious set of ivory tusks, but he turned out to be a good-natured fellow. He cooked me up a sort of omelette that he a.s.sured me the other Man-slaves had liked. It wasn"t a gourmet"s delight, but it was better than the gruel I"d had in the hospital cell.

I slept then, until my new tutor shook me awake and led me back to the Sorting line.

The training sessions got worse for the next three shifts; then I started to catch on-or my eye and fingers did; I still couldn"t consciously tell one glorm-bulb from another. By the time I"d been at it for six weeks, I was as good as Fsha-fsha. I was promoted to a bulb-line of my own, and the harness went back in the locker.

The Sorting training, as it turned out, didn"t only apply to glorm-bulbs. One day the line appeared with what looked like tangles of colored spaghetti riding on it.

"Watch," Fsha-fsha said, and I followed through as he sorted them into six categories. Then I tried it, without much luck.

"You have to key-in your response patterns," he said. "Tie this one . . ." he flipped his sorting key, " . . . to one of your learned circuits. And this one . . ." he coded another gob of wires, " . . . to another. . . ."

I didn"t really understand all that, but I tried making a.n.a.logies to my subliminal distinctions among apparently identical glorm-bulbs-and it worked. After that, I sorted all kinds of things, and found that after a single run-through, I could pick them out unerringly.

"You"ve trained a new section of your brain," Fsha-fsha said. "And it isn"t just a Sorting line where this works; you can use it on any kind of categorical a.n.a.lysis."

During the off-shifts, we slaves were free to relax, talk, gamble with homemade cards and dice, commune with ourselves, or sleep. There was a small, walled court we could crowd into when the sun shone, to soak up a little vitamin D, and a cold, sulfury-smelling cave with a pool for swimming. Some of the slaves from watery worlds spent a lot of time there. I developed a habit of taking long walks-fifty laps up and down the barrack-room-with Fsha-fsha stumping along beside me, talking. He was a great storyteller. He"d spent a hundred and thirty years in s.p.a.ce before he"d been marooned here; he"d seen things that took the curl out of my hair to listen to.

The weeks pa.s.sed and I sorted, watched, and listened. The place I was in was an underground factory, located, according to Fsha-fsha, in the heart of the city. There was only one exit, along a tunnel and up a flight of stairs barred by a steel gate that was guarded day and night.

"How do they bring in supplies?" I asked my sidekick. "How do they ship the finished products out? They can"t run everything up and down one little stairway."

Fsha-fsha gave me what I had learned to interpret as a shrug. "I don"t know, Danger. I"ve seen the stairs, because I"ve been out that way quite a few times-"

I stopped him and asked for a little more detail on that point.

"Now and then it happens a slave is needed for labors above-ground," he explained. "As for me, I prefer the peacefulness of my familiar routine; still, so long as the finger of the Triarch rests here-" he tapped a welted purple scar along his side- "I follow all orders with no argument."

"Listen, Fsha-fsha," I said. "Tell me everything you remember about your trips out: the route you took, the number of guards. How long were you out? How close did they watch you? What kind of weapons did they carry? Any chains or handcuffs? Many people around? Was it day or night? Did you work inside or outside-"

"No, Danger!" Fsha-fsha waved a square purple-palmed hand at me. "I see the way your mind"s working; but forget the idea! Escape is impossible-and if you did break away from a work detail, you"d still be alone in the middle of Drath, an alien, not knowing the language, with every Rule-keeper in the city ready to pounce on you-"

"I know all that. But if you think I"m going to settle down here for the rest of my life, you"re dead wrong. Now start telling me: How many guards escorted you?"

"Just one. As long as he has my controller in his pocket, one is all that"s needed, even if I were the most intractable slave in the pens."

"How can I get picked for an outside detail?"

"When you"re needed, you"ll be called."

"Meanwhile, I"ll be getting ready. Now give."

Fsha-fsha"s memory was good. I was surprised to hear that for as much as an hour at a time, he had worked unsupervised.

"It"s no use creeping off and hiding out under an overturned cart or in an unused root-cellar," he said. "One touch of the controller, and you"re mewling aloud for your keeper."

"That means we"ll have to get our hands on the control devices before we break."

"They"ve thought of that; the thing is tuned to your neuronic carrier frequency. If you get within three feet of it, it"s triggered automatically. If the holder dies, it"s triggered. And if it"s taken off of the overseer"s body, the same thing."

"We can stand it long enough to smash them."

"If the controller"s destroyed, you die," he said flatly. "It"s covered any way you play it."

"That"s where you"re wrong, Fsha-fsha." I told him about crushing the controller the night I had been arrested. "Huvile didn"t die. The Rule-keeper saw him board Jongo II, an hour afterward."

"Strange-it"s common knowledge among the slaves that if your controller is damaged, it kills you."

"It"s a useful story for the slave-owners to spread."

"Maybe that"s why they grabbed you so fast. You might have given the game away. h.e.l.l"s ice, if the slaves knew. . . ."

"How about it, Fsha-fsha? Are you with me?"

He stared at me in the gloom of the comer where we"d drifted to talk in private. "You"re a strange, restless creature, Danger," he said. "For a being as frail as you are, with that soft skin and brittle bones, you"ve got an almighty urge to look for trouble. Why not take a tip from me and make the best of it-"

"I"ll get out of here, Fsha-fsha-and get clear of the planet, too-or die trying. I"d as soon be dead as here, so I"m not risking much."

Fsha-fsha made the noise that served him as a sigh. "You know, we Rinths see the Universe differently from your Propagators," he said. "With us, it"s the Great Parent that produces the spores. We workers have the mobility, the intelligence-but no future, except the Parent. We have the instinct to protect the Tree, fertilize it and water it, prune it, insure its survival; but we"ve got no personal stake in the future, the way you have. Your instincts tell you to stay alive and propagate. Your body knows this is a dead end as far as offspring go, so it tells you to get out or die." He sighed again. "When I left Rinth, it was hard; for a long time, I had a homesickness that you wouldn"t be able to understand-any more than I can really understand the way you feel now. But I can remember how it was. And if it"s anything like that with you-yes; I can see you"ve got to try."

"That"s right; I"ve got to try. But not you, Fsha-fsha. If you"re really content here, stay. I"ll make it on my own."

"You wouldn"t have a chance, Danger. I know the language, the routes around the town. You need me. Not that it"ll do any good in the end. But knowing about the controllers will make a difference."

"Forget it. You can teach me the language, and tell me all you can about the town. But there"s no point in your getting killed-"

"That"s another advantage a Rinth has," Fsha-fsha cut me off. "No instinct for self-preservation. Now, let"s get started planning the details."

2.

The weeks went by. I sorted, slept, took my language lesson, and worked to memorize the map of the city I drew up from Fsha-fsha"s descriptions. About two months after our decision to crash out, Fsha-fsha got a call for an outside detail. He vetoed my suggestion that I volunteer to go along.

"This is a lucky break," he said. "It will give me a chance to look over the ground again, in the light of our plans. Rest easy. We"ll get our chance."

"We Propagators aren"t as patient as you Tree-farmers," I told him. "It may be another six months before an outside detail comes up again."

"Better to propagate in your old age than not at all, eh?" he reminded me, and I had to bite my teeth and watch him go. I got one quick look at the pa.s.sage as he left. It was narrow, dim-lit; the Drathians didn"t like a high level of illumination. I wondered if there was a useful tip for me in that.

Fsha-fsha came back rippling his gill-flaps in a way that I knew meant he was excited. But it turned out not to be pleased antic.i.p.ation.

"It"s hopeless, Danger," he a.s.sured me. "The Wormface in charge of the detail carries the controllers in a special rack, strapped to his chest for quick access. He keeps his distance; ten feet was as close as I could get before he warned me back."

"What weapons did he carry?" I asked him.

"What weapon does he need? He holds your life in his hand as it is!"

"Too bad," I said. "We"ll have to get our armaments somewhere else then."

Fsha-fsha goggled at me. "You"re an amazing creature, Danger. If you were cornered by a Fangmaster, I think you"d complain that his teeth weren"t larger, so as to provide you with a better dagger!"

The routine settled in again then. Every day was like the one before; the glorm-bulbs rushed at me in a stream that never ended, never changed. I ate omelettes, played revo and tikal and a dozen other games, walked my two miles a day, up and down the dark room; and waited. And one day, I made a blunder that ended our plans with total finality.

3.

The work-shift had ended half an hour before. Fsha-fsha and I had settled down in his alcove to play our favorite game of telling each other what we"d do, once we were clear of Drath. A big Drathian slave who"d been a.s.signed to the Sorting crew a few hours earlier came lumbering over, breathing out fumes that reminded me of a package of rotten broccoli I"d opened once by mistake.

"I"ll take this alcove," he said to Fsha-fsha. "Get out, animal."

"Makes himself right at home, doesn"t he?" I pointed across the room to an empty alcove. "Try over there, sport," I said to the broccoli-breather. "Lots of room-" I got that far when he reached out with a couple of arms like boa constrictors and ripped down the hammock. He yanked again, and tore the other end free. He tossed it aside and swung his own kit down onto the floor. I stood up.

"Wait," Fsha-fsha said quickly. "The overseer will deal with this one. Don"t-"

The big Drathian took a quick step, threw a punch at me. I ducked, came up with a three-foot length of steel pipe the Rinth had tucked under the hammock for possible future use, and brought it down in a two-handed blow across the Drathian"s shoulder. He gave a bleat like a branded steer and went down bucking and kicking. In his convulsion, he beat his head against the floor, whipped his body against the wall hard enough to give off a dull boom! like a whale slapping the water with his tail. Thick, yellowish blood spattered. Every slave in the barracks came crowding around to see what was going on, but in thirty seconds it was all over. The big Drathian was dead. The Rule-keepers got there a minute or two later and took me away, up the stairs I"d looked forward to seeing for so long.

My hearing didn"t amount to much. I explained to Hruba that the dead slave had attacked me, that I didn"t know Drathians kept their brains under their shoulder blades; but it was an open-and-shut case. I"d killed a fellow slave. My Sorting days were over.

"Transportation to the harvesting rafts," the majordomo intoned in Drathian and repeated it in lingua. "Too bad, Man," he added in his unofficial voice. "You were a valuable Sorter-but like your kind, you have a savage streak in you most unbecoming in a chattel."

They clamped my wrists in a steel ring and hustled me out into a courtyard where a big, tarry-smelling air-barge was waiting. I climbed aboard, and was kicked into a metal-walled broom-closet. They slammed the door on me, and I lay in the dark and felt the barge lift off.

4.

The harvesting rafts were mile-square constructions of metal floats linked by woven-rope mats and carpeted with rotting vegetable husks and the refuse of the canning sheds, which worked night and day processing the marine life hoisted aboard by the seining derricks. A pair of husky Drathians threw me off the side of the barge into foul-odored ankle-deep muck, and another pair grabbed me, knocked me around a little just to keep in practice, and dragged me away to a long lean-to which served to keep the worst of the subtropical rains off any of the workers who were lucky enough to be on off-shift. They took off the wrist-irons and rigged a fine-gauge fiber loop around my neck, not tight enough to choke me, but plenty snug enough to wear the skin raw, until it toughened and formed a half-inch-wide scar that itched and burned day and night. There was a limp bladder attached to the rope, designed to inflate and keep my head above water if I happened to fall overboard; slaves weren"t allowed to evade their labors by anything as easy as drowning, intentionally or otherwise. I learned all this later; the first night the only orientation I got was what I could deduce from being dragged to a line of workers who were sh.e.l.ling out big crustaceans, and yelled at to get to work. The command was emphasized with a kick, but I had been watching for that; I slid aside from it and smashed my fist into the short ribs of the Drathian and chopped him again as he scrambled back. My reward for this effort was a solid beating, administered by three Drathians, two holding and one swinging a rod as heavy and limber as a golf club. They finished after a while, threw water over me, and someone shoved a sea-lobster at me.

"Better look busy," the slave on my left tipped me off. He was a medium-sized Drathian with a badly scarred face; that made us pals on two counts. I followed his advice.

There wasn"t anything complicated about the work; you grabbed your chzik, held him by the blunt end, hooked a finger under his carapace, and stripped it off him. Then you captured his four flailing limbs, and with a neat twist of the wrist, removed them. The chziks were active creatures, and they showed their resentment of this treatment by writhing frantically during the operation. When you found yourself tackling a big fellow-weight ten pounds or more-it could sometimes be a little difficult to carry out the job as smoothly as the overseers desired. They usually let you know when this was the case by hitting you across the back with the golf club.

At first, my fingers had a tendency to bleed, since the carapaces were razor-sharp and as tough as plexigla.s.s, and the barbs on the legs had a way of lodging in my palms. But the wounds healed cleanly; the microorganisms of Drath were too alien to my metabolism to give rise to infections. And after a while calluses formed.

I was lucky in timing my arrival near the end of a shift; I was able to look busy enough to keep the overseer away, and make it under my own power to the shed. There were no bunks, no a.s.signed s.p.a.ces. You just crowded in as far as possible from the weather side and dropped. There was no insomnia on the rafts. The scarred Drathian-the same one who had given me some good advice the first night-helped me out again the next shift, by showing me how to nip off a chunk of raw chzik and suck it for the water content. The meat itself was spongy and inedible as far as I was concerned; but the slop dipped up to us at the regular feeding time was specially designed to be a.s.similable by a wide variety of species. When an off-brand worker showed up who couldn"t live on the stuff, he soon starved, thus solving the problem.

Instead of the regular cycle of alternating work- and rest-shifts, we harvesters worked two shifts out of three, which effectively prevented any chance of boredom. For six hours at a stretch, we manned our places by the chute with the squirming heaps of chziks arriving just a little faster than we could sh.e.l.l them out. The slippery mat under foot rose and fell in its never-ending rhythm, and beyond its edge, the steel-gray sea stretched to the horizon. Sometimes the sun beat down in a dead calm, and the unbelievable stink rose around us like a foul tide. At night floodlights glared from high on the derricks, and the insects swarmed in to fly into our mouths and eyes and be trampled underfoot to add to the carpet. Sometimes rain came, hot and torrential, but the line never slowed. And later, when gray sleet coated the rigging and decks with soft ice, and the wind cut at us like sabers, we worked on, those of us who could stand the cold; the others settled into the muck and were hauled away and put over the side. And some of us who were still alive envied them.

I remembered reading, years before, back on old Earth, of concentration camp prisoners, and I wondered what it was that kept men going under conditions that made life a torture that never ended. Now I knew; it wasn"t a high-minded determination to endure, or a dauntless will to take a blood-curdling revenge. It was an instinct older than thought, older than hate, that said: "Survive!"