Space gladiators, p.25
Space Gladiators, page 25
My body revolved around and around. Centrifugal force flung my arms and legs outward as I plunged through a narrow fissure.
I strained my back, neck and belly muscles to bring my turning to a stop but did not succeed. Light glimmered several hundred feet below and my frustrated mind focused on it until my spinning made it appear a whole galaxy of light particles swinging around me in tighter and tighter circles. My mind let go.
My back and head hit the water first. To this day, I am unaware of the extent of the true damage done to me in the fall.
V
How long did I lie there? Weeks? Days? Minutes? No one will ever know. I do know that hundreds of thousands of scraps of their educative process passed through my mind, only one of which I remembered on regaining consciousness.
“ ‘The time has come,’ the Walrus said, ‘to talk of many things: Of shoes—and ships—and sealing wax—Of cabbages— and kings—’ ”
Could any thought have been more out of place and foolish or less useful?
On returning to consciousness, I found my body to be whole and undamaged but bruised terribly. Water was washing over me. Some trickled into my open mouth and some laved my nose and ears, trailing my hair downstream like fine wires extended.
My right arm lay under me, touching the rocky stream bed below. My left arm lay partially submerged, the hand resting on a shallow bank.
My legs were upstream, resting on rock. My eyes were pasted shut by the dust around their rims. Soon I became aware of the mining tool’s soft hum and the gentle tugging and pulling of my flesh under its influence.
I waved my right hand around in a circle and felt the broken chain with which I had attached the mining tool to my chest. I scraped mud from my swollen eyes, opened them and found I could see. Phosphorescent particles emitted sufficient photons for me to view my surroundings dimly. The mining instrument was on and pointed steadily in my direction.
I drank until my shrunken belly was fully distended, then lay back to rest and to sleep peacefully under the gentle vibration and hum of the tractor-pressor beam. Probably never before in history had a human being been subjected so long to the rapid’ alternate pull and push of the tractor-pressor beam. Would its effect be harmful? I didn’t know.
When I awoke I crawled again to the stream, taking my fill. Below me I could see the shining shapes of water creatures, among them the unmistakably welcome shape of a fish. I struck with my right hand and grabbed the unwary creature tightly. Its cold flesh furnished my first nourishment in what seemed like months but may have been only days.
Again I slept, then ate and slept again. Later I walked over to my mining instrument and turned it off.
I felt light-headed, but oddly healthy and not in the least tired. I attributed this to the effect of poisons manufactured by my own system under unusual stress and at the time had no idea of the damage done to my body. I could have acted no differently under the conditions. Suffice it to say that I felt unusually alert and full of a sense of well-being, though attributing all of these characteristics to normal results of excessive stress.
I began my long walk along the stream hopefully toward light, air and freedom, packing the mining instrument on my back once more. The walls of the stream bed became narrower. Soon they reached a point where my broad shoulders could no longer squeeze through. My way forward was finally halted by granite blocks.
With almost a swagger of confidence, certainly more than the moment warranted, I unlimbered the tractor-pressor and blasted my way out.
The ship waited for me at my exit point. Of course—use of tractor or pressor beams anywhere on the planet could be easily followed by Strenger and his men.
I turned too late to reenter my cavern retreat. A rock bounded from my head and I fell forward to lie unconscious once again.
When I gained consciousness, my feet were trussed together, my arms tied behind my back and my head ached. I was in a cabin. Two gnarled men sat in front of me, alternately eating and gawking. Was I back in the arena? Were these my new keepers?
I strained at the bonds on my hands and feet but the ties were stronger than I. I humped my body to a sitting position and looked at my two captors, hatred washing through me in waves.
“Pretty, ain’t he?” the one on my left said to the other.
“Needs a bath though. Think we could oblige him?”
Both stopped eating. One tied a drag rope to my legs and hauled me outside the cabin to a nearby spring. My flesh was torn and bleeding from the sharp rocks and sticks over which I was dragged and my head was still dizzy from the blow on my head but I uttered no complaint.
They pulled the rope end over an overhanging rock until I was dangling upside down over the water, my head scant inches from its surface. I took a deep breath, expecting the worst. It came. I was dunked under water seven or eight times, probably saved from drowning only by my one-G physique and high lung capacity.
I was dragged back into the cabin, trussed up against the post and forgotten for the time being.
They finished their dinner, checked various instruments lying around the cabin, then turned back to me. The older one—grayhaired and with a stubble-covered chin—was the first to speak directly to me.
“You might as well tell us why you were snooping around our private weblon mine. It’s your only chance of saving your life.”
My mind, now quite confused, failed to function as quickly as it might have under gladiator conditions. 1 said nothing.
The one with black hair and coal-black eyes bent his bulk over me and said, “If you are a government agent we will let you go free on another planet. It’s to your advantage to tell us the truth.”
I coughed some water from my burning lungs and said, “I am a gladiator. I have no name.”
“All gladiators have names,” the first one said. “Besides, what would a gladiator be doing using pressor-tractor equipment in these mountains? Come on, fellow—if you value your life— tell us the truth.”
I strained every muscle of my body to burst the bonds. At last my body sagged. I knew a spasm of futility before I lost consciousness again.
I came to inside their ship. The interior was pure luxury and there I learned how the gawkers had searched for me in vain. I was one of the most popular heroes of all Sabre history—my life was public property and not even Trevic Strenger, dictator over all, would dare to violate it openly.
But no trace of me was found until my mining equipment had been sensed by these law-violating miners near their illegal mine.
I was kept bound inside their ship while they checked and double-checked my now clean-shaven features with pictures taken during my gladiator days.
Convinced I was truly the escaped Grand Champion, they struck my bonds, not knowing how close they were to true death at the moment.
I soon learned that everywhere I was loved by the people. But
I felt certain that I would still be unsafe anywhere on a planet ruled by Trevic Strenger and his type.
I stayed with the mining ship, hoping to get back to my brood world one day. But how could 1 flee when my two goals of hate and love were here? Not only would deserting them be unnatural to my brood training—it was unnatural to the unusual state of my biology, still deeply hidden from my conscious processes.
Still, in violation of every instinct, I left civilization behind to flee toward the Planet of Rocks of my birth. Seven long light-years lay ahead, meaning months of travel. Hundreds of thousands of strange worlds would be silently, unknowingly passed as we sped onward. How many contained brood worlds? How many had produced two-and-a-half-G monstrosities like Urut of Ewit? How many contained Patricia Strengers or Trevic Strengers? How many had educated barbarian champions and how many even held the humanoid form?
The days passed slowly. I became acquainted with the two outlaws. An objective study of their patterns of behavior gave me a certain recognition of their finer shadings of emotions. All three of us were outside the law but these two still subscribed to certain ethics and species-assisting patterns of behavior—much as each of the brood helps another for the sake of survival of the whole.
Unlike the brood, they had days when their minds were dominated by mixtures of pure emotions. They certainly exhibited pure forms of overt anger and calm complacency but they also showed fine shadings of moroseness and languor. I began to recognize emotional subtleties and, for the first time, began to question my pure hatred response to Trevic Strenger. Was he really as bad as I had projected or did he, too, have comprehensible feelings and behavior-motives mixed into his treatment of me?
One day I noted the outlaws’ deep concern for one dial on the ship’s panel. Daily the dial’s indicator swung upward and daily other instruments were checked and rechecked against it. Presently I read their concern—patrols were on our path. A whole fleet crawled toward us, closing in slowly.
There are no maneuvers that can deceive a determined fleet. Our only hope lay in an act of some god who, out of the goodness of his being and the emptiness of space, would reach outward and hand us some device or means by which to escape.
To make matters worse, I had no place to stand and make the fight mine, using my gladiator’s training. I felt trapped like an animal and could almost feel civilization’s magnetic cages crush through my bones again. My chest, where I had worn the metal band of servitude, had healed and was covered with keloids. I wanted no more slavery.
One slim hope remained to me. My captors searched the directory for any kind of planet with breathable air. Then they began long-range perturbation analysis of surrounding stars, hoping to spot planets within range.
One bright yellow sun on our pathway seemed to offer hope and they quickly adjusted our route slightly to pass near its planets. We swung inward in a giant cycloidal loop, and an automatic analysis assured us that one planet, fourth from center, had breathable, oxidizing air.
But now our range was within the patrol’s striking power and their beams reached out for hundreds of thousands of miles to vibrate our craft ceaselessly.
Though weakened structurally, we recklessly approached the planet’s atmosphere, dropping swiftly into its density to skip and skip again as the craft was buffeted by the force of its own passage. Now weakened further and red from heat, it plunged at even sharper angles until its tail section broke off and our front portion spun uncontrolled toward the water below.
VI
The miners must surely have been killed in the plunge. At the time I attributed my survival to my gladiator’s training and my powerful physique. I had bunched my muscles together and dived out the ship an instant before it splashed.
I hit hard, maybe as hard as Urut had hit me. Maybe a little harder—I don’t know. In any case my body sustained the shock and I swam to the surface, spotting land perhaps ten miles away. Toward this I swam and just before sundown reached the sandy beach where I lay in exhausted stupor.
The jungle ahead of me was unrecognizable. Whether fern or animal, flora or fauna, I could not tell. Only experience would show.
Food was my immediate concern. Next came shelter and water. I rose, rather unnaturally recovered, and strode confidently into the strange organic configurations ahead.
Suddenly my emotional complex dropped from open elation and overwhelming optimism to complete apathy. Death would have seemed a pleasant release. Striving always with my gladiator’s training and the stubbornness born of brood world, I consciously searched everywhere without success—no recognizable cause was creating my emotional void.
Down the scales of emotions my feelings plummeted—and slowly and silently the fibrous matting of the jungle undulated toward me. It was white with streaks of gray running through it and gave the appearance of some broad-patterned, supine foliage which moved like a leech. Who could tell what it really was? I wanted to back away but my apathy was too deep. I stood in an abandonment of despair, even squatting so the slimy thing could more easily flow up my body.
My apathy was dense—as dense as thick glue—and the thing nearly covered my back. I squatted lower to let it cover more of me, then felt its acid trickle over my skin. Apathy prevailed— nonetheless, under the stimulus of pain, my gladiator’s instinct snapped my body erect and my hands and feet flung the horrible thing from me.
Acid had etched the skin all over my back, neck, arms and shoulders. Just as suddenly as the skin had been destroyed my body began its preconditioned, rapid repairs, though at the time I was too busy to give the phenomenon thought.
I was not yet safe, however. The thing flowed toward me as before and my apathy was as leaden as before. Why should I move when all of life seemed so useless, so hopeless? W. Shakespeare did not quite say it, but my mind, sunken in depths beyond conscious control and mired in the facts of the educators, paraphrased it as: “O mighty barbarian—dost thou lie low? Are all thy conquests, glories, triumphs, spoils, shrunk to this little measure?”
I will say this about the paraphrase—at least there was some relation between its semantics and my condition of the moment, though there was little else to recommend it.
Yet my fighting instinct had been aroused and at another level of my being I exploringly fought back. First I strove for excitement and the adrenalin lift which accompanies it. Then I strove to force enthusiasm into the cellular portions of my body—to no avail. Whatever force the thing had, my manufactured enthusiasm was not the answer.
I let my body freely wage swift endocrine war as my emotions tore from cheerfulness through antagonism, overt anger, covert anger, resentment, fear, grief and apathy. Nothing manufactured by my body for my body helped.
As the thing crawled closer I switched my endocrine war outward against the whole world of loops and snakelike whorls around me, raging within my soul but nonetheless subtly spouting torrents of emotion outward through some unseen orifice of my stilled body.
It was when I again hit the apathy band that the thing stilled. Each time my body broadcast apathy, it retreated a little farther. My body had instinctively found the key to survival on this planet. The thing’s emotional load lifted from my body. Again I felt lighthearted and full of a sense of health, though I still poured tons of black apathy at the crawling thing now scurrying away so rapidly.
I turned back to the tangle of organic misshapes and little by little ferreted out its secrets. The ropy black serpent-like form dangling from above responded to fear. The flapping fan-like objects responded to overt anger and the other dangers responded to other emotions either singly or in combination.
No single entity could easily be identified as food, but now that I was learning to walk though the jungle by casting my emotions externally here and there, I followed the first stream upward with hopes of learning what was edible and what was not. Clearly the acid and base-forming entities were inedible. Time after time I succumbed to all their emotional complexities, learning only after their acidic or basic sting to fling them off and redirect my emotions outward. Time after time, my skin rapidly healed itself.
Order began to appear from the chaos surrounding me. I watched the slinker root, a slob of jellylike flesh that looked like a weathered tree-root from my Planet of the Rocks, as it flushed out its quarry, a small blob of milksac covered with homy projections.
Using almost pure fear, its emotion swept outward to cover growths of pink and purple velvety layers of some vertical materials. From the bottom of this growth the milksac animals—if that’s what they were—rushed directly toward the jellylike growth.
There they were easily held until the chemical base dissolved their vital layers, after which they were absorbed into the attacker’s system.
For lack of better hunch, I followed the next jellylike sack. It captured a victim. I tore it away from its grasp, using my hands for the act of tearing and my emotions for the act of neutralizing the strange beast.
I placed the juices of the injured beast on my tongue and found them sweet—but some poisons are sweet. I didn’t know the difference but my body did—or so I thought at the time.
I chewed and swallowed and stayed healthy. Looking back on the experience now, I wonder. Did my body adapt to the alien food or did my instinct determine what was food and what was not?
I ate my way across thousands of miles of outrageous growths and forms as I traveled from coast to coast across one great continent. Occasionally I hid from search ships—the Patrol would not rest until our bodies were discovered, I reasoned. I left no daily trail by use of tractor or pressor beam and my human body could hide among the fibrous, gelatinous, oozing, slinking, stinking mess around me.
I crossed two mountain ranges, walking high above the life-plateau, living for weeks on air, water, fat and determination. Lonely pools of water were to be found at these higher levels.
The longer I survived in that emotional jungle the more grip I had on my own emotions—until I could instantly turn up the emotion of hate against Trevic Strenger or the passion and hunger of love for his daughter.
I soon was aware of his ships less often and rightly assumed their surveillance of the planet to be more or less precautionary and automatic.
Now I wanted the ships down, but only under my own terms. The problem was to attract their attention in order to make them a bit suspicious—but not overly so—and to trap the trappers.
Fire is common to most planets—but during a year’s survival on this one, I had never seen a conflagration. I assumed that the patrol would also have observed this obvious fact. Could I make the unnatural happen by natural means?
The unnatural did happen but in a different way. I found a large piece of metal with fused pieces and burned spots. Either our ship or another had caused this piece to be flung across the continent where it had burned and fused on entry into the atmosphere; but whatever the true case, I had the part I needed to attract Strenger’s persistent watchers.
