1
. . . Beyond this line we face the Aliens stars.
They may not lay their law on what is ours.
—For none but Man stands here.
—IIASEC’S CREED
A JERK, and a sudden rumbling vibration jolted Culihan O’Rourke When out of the pain-laced fog enfolding him. It had become almost comfortable lately, that fog.
“No rest for the foolish,” he thought with a feverishly lightheaded humor. The humor glimmered for a moment like a match in the mist of his mind, before reminding him of how obligingly he had cooperated with his own betrayal, into the hands of his present captors. That thought threatened once more to add a private mental torture to the physical hell of his situation.
It did not succeed if only because he still hung onto a powerful belief in his ability to straighten out almost anything, given time; but the mental effort just made had brought him up again into full consciousness. He identified the vibration now. It was the sound and movement of the engines restarting aboard the Space-and-Atmosphere vessel that carried him. The ship was readying itself for a landing, finally, after its long glide down from the near-orbital midpoint of its passage from New York Complex. Recognizing this, he woke all the way, once more, to the specific cramps and agonies of his body.
The most active pain was in his arms from shoulders to wrists, held locked behind him by a set of spring restraints. The arms felt fused together from the neck down. Which was hardly surprising—the restraints had not been taken off him in the last thirty-six hours.
They were one pair of the tools put to use during a process of questioning that had stayed just inside the legal limits during the past week and a half, ever since he had been detained on landing at the Long Island Sound Spaceport. During those ten days his World Police questioners had not tortured him—legally.
But in a practical sense he had been pushed near to the limits of his physical endurance. They had given him either no food or several times what he could eat at once. Also, the meals had either been burned or frozen to the point of inedibility. He had been locked in a room with a whimsical light switch that usually would not turn off the powerful lighting panel overhead, and with a water tap so set in the wall that it produced water only when a peculiarly shaped cup was pushed beneath it.
But that cup had turned out to leak water as fast as the tap supplied it. When Cully complained, his captors had brought him water otherwise—one ounce at a time in a tiny paper cup. He had been kept in restraints or under questioning for hours on end, and allowed to sleep only enough to stay sane. Yet, as Cully knew, the bald facts of his week and a half, as set down in the official record, would show that he had not been deprived of adequate shelter, rest, food or drink.
The World Police had questioned him about some supposed attempt by the Pleiades Frontier Worlds, backed by the Moldaug aliens, to take over the three Old Worlds of Earth, Mars and the expensively terra-formed Venus, in a coup d’état. The plain ridiculousness of this—of the few scattered millions of people on the Frontier attempting to conquer the eighty-odd billions of the three Solar System Worlds, who together controlled over eighty percent of the wealth and armed might of the human race—was so obvious that it took Cully some little time to realize that his interrogators were serious.
Fantastically, they were serious. And Cully’s inability, which they assumed to be a refusal, to tell them about the coup drove them nearly to illegal violence during the week and a half.
Perhaps, he thought lightheadedly now, he should not have damned them all for a bunch of paranoid space-phobes, once he had realized that the questions were not merely an excuse for holding him under arrest. But probably keeping his temper would have made no difference in what they had done to him anyway. Almost literally more dead than alive now, Cully’s lean, tall body lay helplessly where it had been dumped, upon what he took to be mailbags, in the rear of the passenger compartment of the World Police SA ship. He lay on his side, with his restrained arms locked behind him, just able to see out one of the curved windows in the side of the ceremetal ship.
He had not bothered to notice where they were taking him—had hardy cared, in fact, within the fog of pain and weakness enclosing him. But now, roused by the restarting of the engines, he lifted his head and tried to see out the window.
They were dropping swiftly toward the dark-blue surface of an ocean flecked with the peaceful gold of floating sargasso weed. Both sargasso weed and the high glare of the sun in the brilliantly blue sky testified to the fact that they were somewhere in the tropic latitudes.
Looking down through the window now at the expanse of blazing aquamarine sky and opalescent ocean, Cully saw a strange structure like an offshore oil-drilling rig, though much larger. As he blinked his eyes against the sun glare, however, and the SA ship dropped rapidly toward the structure, he saw that its similarity to an oil-drilling rig was less than he had first thought.
The resemblance was there, all right. There was a heavy metal platform and superstructure, supported on six legs going down into the water like the anchoring legs of an oil rig. But now Cully’s dulled mind, triggered to slow movement by the unquenchable reflexes of that belief in himself that had never deserted him, reminded him that here, far from land—and it must be far from land—the ocean would hardly be shallow enough to allow legs like that to rest on the sea floor.
It was true that the steadiness of the structure gave it all the appearance of being so anchored. But Cully’s knowledge of architecture and engineering gradually formed for him a picture of the legs as containing something like machinery or elevators, and reaching no more than a hundred feet or so beneath the surface. At which point they would terminate in a balancing body the volume and weight of the platform above.
Such a body, plus the fact that the legs went below the area of wave disturbance, would steady the total, floating structure as well as legs anchored in the sea bed—and with a great deal more practicality. While at the same time, the balance between the masses in air and water held the upper platform fifty to eighty feet above the most furious tossing of the waves.
This much Cully saw, and dully concluded, before the strain of stretching up to see out the window drained the small reserves of energy left in him. He fell back on the mailbags, and the scene around him went swimming away into darkness . . .
The next thing he remembered, he was being half-dragged, half-carried across a metal deck in an upright position between two men in the familiar black uniforms of the Police. The pain and effort of the movement jarred him back to consciousness, and he opened his eyes to catch a fleeting glimpse about the platform he had seen from the air. Then he was dragged into what seemed to be a metal-walled, oil-smelling room and dumped in a corner there.
There was a short delay. Then the room darkened and descended, dropping away elevator-fashion beneath him. It fell for some slow seconds, and the air became thickly warm about him. It jarred to a stop.
Somehow, Cully must have passed out again. Because next he found himself half-standing, half-slumped, upheld by a single individual in a green uniform.
There was a clashing sound and heavy, metal doors opened before them.
“All right! Get out!” said the guard.
His hands shoved Cully, thrust him, staggering, forward out through the elevator doors into semidarkness heavy with odors of human bodies. Under the impetus of that shove, Cully tottered forward blindly half a dozen steps, then fell. He lay, blissfully content to be no longer on his feet, the metal deck beneath him feeling soft as the softest mattress he could remember, its cold surface against his cheek as gentle as the touch of a down pillow.
“Get up!” boomed and echoed the voice of the guard, far and distant above him. Cully ignored it. His eyes were accustoming themselves to the gloom around him. As they focused in now, he saw a pair of Frontier-made brush boots approaching. They came up to within a foot of his nose, and stopped, their toe caps pointing back past Cully in the direction from which the guard’s voice had come. A new, quiet voice echoed and sounded, more softly than the guard’s, above Cully’s head.
“We’ll take care of him, Busher.”
“Suits me, Jaimeson,” answered the guard’s voice. “The more you prisoners take care of yourselves, the better I like it.”
There was the sound of feet from the direction in which the guard’s voice had come, starting to move off.
“Wait a minute!” It was the voice belonging to the brush boots. “Hold on, Busher. He’s still got those restraints on.”
“Now, that’s sad.” It was the guard’s voice. “No one told me to take them off.”
“But you can’t leave them on any longer. Look how they’ve cut into his arms. They’ve been on him for hours.”
The guard’s boots drew near again, walking heavily.
“Listen, Jaimeson. You want to take care of him, that’s up to you. But I told you I didn’t have any orders to take off the springs. And my orders don’t come from you. Until I get orders—”
The guard’s voice broke off on a suddenly squeaking note that, in spite of Cully’s pain-shot wooziness, evoked the ghost of a silent chuckle in the back of Cully’s mind. There was a long pause, a silence during which Cully became aware that a second pair of brush boots had silently joined the first. Cully stared at the new pair in fascination, for they were no larger than the boots of a boy of twelve. The guard’s voice spoke again.
“You don’t scare me, Doak!”
The words were brave enough, but the new, high pitch of the voice betrayed them.
“Take”—it was a different voice, a strange voice, unremarkable but oddly unyielding, a flat, boyish tenor that somehow failed to sound either boyish or flat—“them off.”
There was a little moment of silence.
“They’re hurting him,” went on the Doak voice unemotionally. “You know I don’t like that, Busher—seeing you hurt anyone.”
Cully felt heavy fingers hastily fumbling with the restraints, holding his forearms and wrists together behind his back. There was the sudden, twanging sound of the lock snapping open, and the touch of the tight metal coils fell from him.
Wonderingly, he attempted to bring his arms around in front of him—and hot agony lanced through his shoulders, back and body like the flame of a welding torch. He never knew whether the scream that formed in him then actually came from his throat, or merely echoed itself in his brain. Because darkness, this time complete and unrelenting, closed down about him.