3
BUT THE CALMNESS of Will Jaimeson did not seem shaken by the frank disbelief in Cully’s gaze. The older man sat so quietly and serenely that Cully’s interest grew. Maybe the other was not mad, after all. Back when Cully had been a boy on Kalestin, when he had first come to that Frontier World with his emigrating parents, there had been stories of men who had known the alien Moldaug.
It was true enough, Cully remembered now—indeed, it was historical fact—that in the early years of the human settlements on the Frontier Worlds of the Pleiades, the Moldaug had seemed to class humans more as curiosities than as threats. But the stories had gone beyond this to claim that there had been humans then who had actually made friends with members of that bony, leathery-skinned but undeniably civilized alien race holding the stars beyond the Pleiades. These humans, said the stories, had even ridden on Moldaug ships between the newly human-settled Frontier Worlds circling the GO-type stars of the Pleiades. Stars, which had historically been hidden from Earth by distance and the cosmic dust of that interstellar area.
At that time the Moldaug, with their different psychological structure, had seemed to take humans much more for granted than humans took them. It was apparently neither wonderful nor terrible to the Moldaug, at first, to encounter another intelligent, space-going race. They, themselves, had seemed to have no great interest in the Pleiades Planets beyond making occasional scouting trips to them. Nor had they seemed to feel any resentment of the fact that humans were beginning to occupy those worlds.
But that had been in the beginning. At some time, somewhere along in the early years of human exploration and settlement of the Pleiades Planets, an emotional switch apparently had been thrown in the Moldaug psychology. The alien scout ships had ceased to visit the Pleiades Worlds and human spaceships were sternly warned off, if they ventured from the Pleiades inward toward the stars of the Moldaug region of space. As the Japanese in the seventeenth century had suddenly closed their borders to Europeans, so the Moldaug had closed theirs to humans—though from time to time there had still been stories of humans who had drifted into Moldaug territory before the aliens’ change of attitude, returning unharmed.
But nowadays it was hard to believe such stories, since the Moldaug had suddenly, incredibly, and apparently reasonlessly, laid claim to all the Pleiades region. Even at this moment, as Cully knew, their Ambassadors were here on Earth; in discussion with Members of the Tri-Worlds Council, they were calmly demanding that humans abandon all worlds they had settled in that region. While the Council wrangled among itself, refusing to admit to the aliens that it could no longer command the people of the Frontier to come home again, refusing to admit to itself that the Moldaug were evidently ready to attack the whole human race if the Pleiades were not evacuated immediately.
Over all, coloring all the negotiations made by the Tri-Worlds Council Members, was the spacephobia—in Frontier terms, not so much a fear-of-space as a fear of what that space might contain, beyond the bounds of the Solar System—that afflicted most of the Old Worlds people. It made them see the Frontiersmen as savages, the aliens as monsters—and warped their viewpoints toward the Frontier and the Frontier people in a way none of the Old World Leaders would admit. Even Alia, who was free from the spacephobia herself, would not admit its existence; and this, in fact, had been the main subject of disagreement between her and Cully on the trip back to Earth from Kalestin.
Yet the very reality of this place, and Cully’s own arrest, proved that existence. Cully’s train of thought peaked suddenly with a new, sharp interest.
But before he could begin to seriously examine this new idea, something silent as a moth flitted into the cubbyhole and folded up on the mattress beyond Will, so that it sat crosslegged, staring at Cully. Cully gazed back with interest. It was the little man he half-remembered seeing—the one Will had said was named Doak Townsend.
“He’s better?” asked the unemotional voice Cully remembered. Its flat, tenor tone made a statement, rather than a question, out of the words the small man had just spoken. Will nodded.
“Thanks,” said Cully, suddenly remembering what had happened outside the elevator. “Thanks, both of you.”
Doak did not reply at all. His expressionless, regular features—which might perhaps have seemed handsome if they had shown a little more animation—continued to stare calmly at Cully. It was a strange face, the kind of face that made Cully wonder if he had seen it somewhere before. But Will answered for both of them.
“We try to pick up any new men who get delivered in particularly bad shape,” Will said. “Doak’s the only prisoner here the guards are really afraid of. So we can get things done right away, like making them take off those restraints they had on your arms. It’s a wonder they hadn’t already crippled you. And to think those things were brought in as replacements for straitjackets because people thought they were more humane!”
Cully looked back at Will.
“You always take the newly delivered cripples in here with you?” Cully asked.
“As often as we can. But,” said Will, his eyes narrowing slightly, “your case is a little different. You’re Culihan O’Rourke When, the all-time champion spacelifter. The man who, singlehanded, hijacked more than a dozen Old Worlds spaceships during the Frontier Revolt four years ago. That gave us a special interest in you.”
“What special interest?” asked Cully. He was intrigued.
“No point in bothering you with it just yet,” said Will. “You’d better have something to eat now, and rest some more. In a day or so you’ll be stronger and ready to talk.”
He turned and searched among the bedclothes at the head of his mattress, coming up with a thick plastic container. There was a slight popping sound as he handled it, and a second or two later the aroma of hot beef soup reached Cully’s nostrils.
“Where do you get the food?” Cully asked, struggling to sit up in a posture that would make eating a little more practical.
“It’s issued to us,” Will answered quietly. “If you’d been able to move about, you could’ve gone to the requisition window and gotten your own. We just drew your rations for you.” He passed the now opened and steaming plastic container into Cully’s hands along with a detachable plastic spoon. “Here, get as much of this into you as you can hold, and then try to sleep some more.”
Cully obeyed without protest. The advice was good; and besides, at the moment, he had a good deal of new information to absorb.
In the several days that followed, Cully’s strength flowed back as he lay on his mattress under what was indeed a stairway between levels of their underwater prison. There were five levels in all, Will told him, all of them jammed with detainees, mainly from the Frontier Worlds, filling full all this bulbous underwater section of the ocean-encompassed structure known as Immigration Detention Station Number One. “Number One,” for short.
As his strength came back, Cully studied the two odd individuals who had taken him into their care. Except at rare intervals, either Will or Doak was alone with him in the cubbyhole. Doak, on these occasions, proved not much of a companion—evidently not because he did not want to talk, but because he had very little to say. He spent his time with Cully either sleeping—often as not seated upright and crosslegged with his back against a vertical wall—or sharpening a typical, handmade prisoner’s knife. One of those knives made of a strip of metal, whetted and honed to razor edge and needle point, and with its handle made out of rags wrapped around the tang of the blade and soaked in varnish to harden them. His only other occupation, as far as Cully could see, was sitting and contemplating whatever was in a locket that hung by a chain around his neck. He was always very careful to make sure that Cully could not also see what was in the locket; but whatever was there could hold the little man’s attention for hours.
The fifth day after Cully had begun to feel himself again, he chose a moment when he was alone with Will to ask bluntly about his partner.
Will hesitated, then shrugged.
“Of course, Doak’s not quite sane,” he said.
“I thought so,” said Cully. “So that’s why the guards are all afraid of him?”
“The guards are afraid of him,” said Will earnestly, “because Doak isn’t afraid of them; and it’s plain, even to men like them, that there’s nothing they can do to make him afraid. So that if they push him or it—or if Doak himself simply takes a notion—to do something to one of them, he’ll act without stopping to count the consequences. So they handle him with kid gloves. But, of course, sooner or—”
Will stopped suddenly.
“Of course . . . ?” Cully prompted.
“I think—” Will hesitated. “You asked me a couple of days ago why I took you in here, and I said I had a reason we’d talk about later.”
He paused, as if waiting for some response from Cully.
“Go on,” said Cully. “What was the reason?”
“It’s got to do with what this place is, here.”
“A prison,” said Cully flatly.
“Yes. But officially, as I told you earlier, it’s only a detention station—an Immigration Service Detention Station,” said Will, “and we actually have got a few illegal immigrants here, from Mars, or Venus, or the asteroids. But what the place really is, is an internment camp for anyone from the Frontier the Police have had an excuse to pick up and question these last three years.”
Cully nodded.
“You see,” said Will, “the point is, we prisoners out-number the guards a hundred to one, and since we aren’t really criminals, we’ve got our own government and our own laws. There’s half a dozen men on what we call the Board of Governors who run things down here. They’re all Frontiersmen who held positions of authority during the Frontier Revolt four years ago, and they’re all old fellow-revolutionists of yours. The minute they know you’re here”—Will looked steadily at Cully—“you’ll probably become a Board Member yourself. Even if you don’t, you’re bound to have a lot of influence with them.”
“What about it?” asked Cully flatly.
Will took a deep breath.
“I kept you here so I’d have a chance to talk to you before any of your old friends recognized you. As I just told you, the Board decides everything among us down here.”
He paused, looking at Cully.
“One of the decisions it makes,” he said slowly, “is who among us are going to get the chance to escape.”