Martin caidin, p.54
Martin Caidin, page 54
Jake had never seen so swift a change of expression in Arbok before. "Can you stop him?"
"Hell, we're trying, man. So far no sign of him anywhere. But even if he gets where he wants, it's gong to take a while for him to get the right kind of audience to listen to him. He'll be an escaped convict with a crazy story. That will have to go up the political ladder step by step and they'll drill his ass day and night, and only then will they start to check it out. So we have a real chance of getting to him before he gets to wherever he wants to go. But it could be real trouble."
"I will tell you what kind of trouble, Jake Marden. What you call the hydrogen bomb. Many of them. Not even Frarsh can handle being in the heart of an exploding sun. It is poor consolation that we shall all be vaporized together."
"It won't happen quite that fast, Arbok. Our people, if it ever gets to that, will do everything they can to get this ship intact. And you with it to teach them how to run things. That means they'll want to negotiate.
And negotiation means a lot of time. So there's a lot of water to pass under this bridge before it gets down to punching the strike buttons."
"From everything you just said, which I'm not certain I understand, then there is no need for me to be concerned in terms of haste?"
Jake almost laughed aloud. Arbok had made that statement with ambassadorial finesse. It was beautiful.
He knew Jube and at least one more man, likely Luther, would be going over every word, and that last remark would ease a lot of sharp edges beneath anyone's ass.
"Yeah, that's the size of it," Jake replied.
"Is there anything else you need? Have you received the faxed list?"
Jake glanced to his side. "Yep. It's here. I'll get it going right away."
"Thank you."
"By the way, how's your gladiator doing?"
"Ah, Ytram. He took a terrible beating from your man. He
lives, not much more, but we tend him. For a primitive world, your medicines are really remarkable."
"Thanks a heap," Jake said drily. "I'll chisel that in stone when I get back to my cave." "I do not understand, Jake."
"Forget it," Jake snapped. "Over and out." He cut the connection. It wasn't a bad idea to end the exchange on a bit of a sour note.
Jake turned to the wide-eyed Alison, removing the handkerchief she really had stuffed into her mouth. He held his forefinger before his lips. "Time for that morning shower, lover. Let's go do it." He grasped her arm firmly but gently to steer her with him and, in the bedroom, hit the CD player for loud music. He slipped off his clothes and stood before her naked, motioning for her to do the same. Eyes wide again she went along with him, following him into the shower. He turned the water on full and when they had as much noise going from the shower and loud talking and laughing, and the music, their bodies pressed together, she tilted his head down to talk directly into his ear.
"Was I going crazy in there? Was that the same Arbok--"
"The one and the same with Michiko in Gainesville."
"But. . . but he's an alien! I mean, from outer space! From out there," her hand gestured wildly as he held
her tightly, "from all those stars!"
"Keep your voice down. That's right. He's also the master of that vessel. He's the big honcho aboard that thing."
"You told me he was a pilot-"
"Sure did. The truth."
"That he flew the big stuff-"
"You ever see a bigger starship?"
"And that he was grounded for a while ..." Her voice trailed away; Jake had told her the absolute truth.
"Tell me I'm still not crazy. That was my best friend with him, right?"
"Michiko. Right."
"But what, I mean-"
"The word is lovers."
"Mickey's sleeping with him?"
"I imagine they're doing more than sleeping. Their word for it is lifemates."
"You're not serious!"
"Okay, I'm lying."
"But you're not, are you?"
"No."
"My God, I can't believe all this-"
"Believe it. It's true."
"But . . . why?"
"Guess she loves him. And he, her."
"I can't believe it."
"Don't, then."
"Oh, shut up!"
"Okay."
"If Maddox gets to Washington, to the Pentagon, what happens?"
"Like I told Arbok, first they'll try to deal. They want the ship intact and its pilot alive and well. That gives us some time."
"To do what?"
"Everybody else will deal. Me, I don't like that. I feel like I'm thinking like an alien. There's no one more treacherous than the white man when it comes to deals. Ask the American Indian about the word of the white man. Nothing's changed."
"What do you plan to do?"
"You've got to seal those lovely lips."
"For God's sake, Marden, what the hell do you think I'm doing in here with you? Looking for Mr.
Goodbar?"
"You with me all the way?"
"Yes, damn you."
"I want to be sitting alongside Arbok when we lift ship."
She gaped, started to speak, spluttered and choked on water in her mouth from the shower. "My God, you're serious."
"Sure am."
"You'd really go?"
"Nothing here on this planet to keep me here. It's all new and huge out there. You can't beat infinity for a new chance. Besides, it won't be lonely. You're going with me."
"I am?"
"You want to be left standing at the altar alone back on Earth?"
"I-An alarm bell clamored. "Shit," Jake spat. He turned off the water, stepped out of the shower stall and hit a button on the wall. "This is Marden. What gives?"
"Jube here. You in the shower? Your voice echoes."
"Yes."
"The both of you, get on some duds and get down here to center as fast as you can. Don't stop to look pretty. I mean it, Jake. Hustle."
"You got it."
He dragged Alison from the shower. "Get dressed; fast," he snapped.
They cleared security in record time and walked into center. Jube Bailey and Luther Cogswell stood together on the fer side of the room in deep conversation, heads together. Several other men working at the consoles seemed as tight as virgins about to be gang-raped. Electric tension in the air could almost be felt. Jake and Alison joined the two men.
Luther cast a cold eye over Alison. "She listens in?" he asked Jube.
"Yes," he was told. No further explanations were necessary.
Jube turned to Jake and Alison. "It's Maddox. The senator won't be talking to anyone for a while. And he won't be doing much traveling, either."
"That's the kind of news I want to hear," Jake said with a sense of triumph that they'd averted a disaster.
"Alison, call off your dogs," he said to her. "Just cancel the-"
"No. Hold it," Jube said quickly, holding out his arm. "Not yet. Let the people out there keep passing the word we're looking for him. That the news lady is looking for him. We've left the APB stand. I want everyone to be looking for that son of a bitch. And to keep looking until we confirm his ass is dead."
"Where'd you find him?" Jake asked.
"I didn't. Luther, here, found him," Jube said, a trace of a smile refusing to leave his face.
Jake turned to Cogswell. "Luther?" No answer came for several moments. Jake took a long look at Luther. He'd never
seen the voodoo man shaking like one of his scared-shitless subjects. "What the hell's the matter with you?" Jake demanded.
Luther looked up, lower lip trembling slightly, and his face showed a mixture of disgust and hatred. "I'll show you what's the matter," Luther snarled.
Luther turned to Jube. "Full security. Jube, I want every guard armed to the teeth. All weapons load and lock and wherever we go I want everything sealed behind us." He turned to Jake. "That ship open at the main hatch?"
"As far as I know."
"All right, I want it to stay open."
"I'll call down to Arbok and tell him and-"
"No! Don't say a word to the son of a bitch!"
Jake bristled at Luther's tone to him. "Back it off, voodoo man," he said quietly. "I don't know what's eating you but you don't have that big a bite to come on to me like that."
"Easy, easy," Jube said from the side, his hand lightly touching Jake's arm. "Let him have some slack, Jake." He hesitated, then added, "For me, man."
Jake nodded.
"Come with me," Luther bid them. They followed him from center through the security blocks along the corridors leading toward the ship. Behind them heavy steel gates thudded shut with ominous booms.
"Where we going, Luther?" Jake asked, following Jube's request and keeping his tone easy.
"You know the room where we ship their food?"
"Yes."
"Well, the space geeks don't know it, but one of the walls of that room is polarized glass. It's opaque in ordinary light but it becomes transparent through infrared light. We're going to the room the wierdos know nothing about. It's an observation room. We've used it to see how they eat, how they behave, what they say when they're relaxed."
They turned a corner and stopped before a heavy door. Luther tapped in an entry code in the electronic lock and the door slid aside noiselessly. "No noise. Keep your talking down to whispers. Come on."
They went inside. The room was dark except for several overhead lights in strong blue. "Jube, the door?"
Bailey closed the door behind them, brought it soundlessly back to its seal. "Step up against the wall. No
noise. When you're in position I'll kill the blue and go to infrared and you can see inside. It's also infrared in there," He spoke in a hushed whisper. He watched until the other three people with him had their faces against the wall. "Okay, now," Luther announced, still whispering.
The blue light winked out. For a moment they were in darkness and then a dusky red light grew about them. The wall seemed to fade away as it became transparent and they could see through the thickness between them and the other room.
Alison sank slowly to her knees, retching violently with gagging sounds muffled by both hands pressed hard against her mouth.
CHAPTER 27
Alison Harper never again looked through the window brought to transparency by the touch of glowing infrared light. She sat huddled on the floor of the observation room, her shoulder pressed hard against the leg of Jake Marden. Through that contact he felt her convulsive shuddering, the uncontrollable surges of gagging that wracked her body. He was surprised, and no less impressed, with her tremendous self-control that kept her almost completely silent as first she threw up violently into her hands, then pulled her blouse from her skirt to contain her vomitus and try to wipe her mouth clear of the reeking stench of her own insides. The convulsions subsided slowly, replaced with spontaneous dry heaves tearing at her, and at such moments he knew she was stuffing the blouse into her mouth to keep her suffering as silent as possible.
Jake held no fault with the woman.
There had been two times in all his life, through explosions ripping through bodies, through savage gun battles, knifings and machete slashings, through roaring flames, through the thudding impact of bodies hurled into propellers or helicopter tail rotors, to men smashed by speeding autos or torn open by brass knuckles and sharpened chains. He had been through all this and more, and only those two times in his life had he lost the contents of his stomach.
He almost did it again, feeling the growing ball of bittersweet stink of his guts struggling desperately to spew upward, into and through his throat, and away from his body. He fought it back, he tasted salt from his own blood as his teeth clamped down on his lip, and he forced his eyes to return to that other room.
They had built a table to their own design and specifications. Not your normal table at which to dine or even to eat voraciously. No flat surface. A table seven feet long by three feet wide, bowed high in a curving arch through its middle, a single curve starting upward from each long end and peaking through its center.
A human form on that table on his or her back, buttocks against the curving wood, would thus have his feet at one end and his head at the other considerably lower than his up-thrust stomach and loins. It would be a position of great discomfort, and with each passing minute growing ever more uncomfortable until real pain came to visit and remain with whoever was kept forcibly on the table.
"Whoever" was on the table in savage and unremitting agony. It wouldn't have been so bad had the senator been capable of twisting or kicking or throwing about his body in any kind of physical movement to block or divert or even deaden the terrible pain that was so obviously searing him inside and external to his body. Jeff Maddox was stretched across and along and arched on that table, worse than naked, his face a ghastly mass of horror. His teeth were extruded almost as if he were a living corpse filled with succulent sweets and fluids so that a dessicated form might have been pumped full and bulging, as would a huge and savory pudding, shaped and prodded and patted lovingly into a human form.
Jeff Maddox would gladly, wildly with joy have hurled himself into any open fire to burn to death slowly, flesh curling and crackling like fat-dripping bacon, rather than be restrained where he was at this moment.
But he could not twist, or turn, or even try to wrench his own body so violently that the Fates might be kind enough for him to so distort his structure so that he might somehow fracture or break his spinal cord to give him, if not death, surcease from pain through a crushing or break in his spinal nerves. It was
difficult to see with any clarity in the room through the walls become transparent from one side only, for the lighting in the room where Jeff Maddox hung in that
calamitous abyss between life and death, and where even madness was yet denied him, offered only light in the infrared band of the spectrum. A scene of dull, murky redness hung before them. They squinted as hard as they might to pierce this veil that left them frantic to see more clearly, even as they wished they were not seeing at all what lay before them.
Yet, beyond the thick gauze of the one-way see-through wall and the dull blood-red fog of light, there was illumination sufficient to see the devices that would have done proud the grand torturers of the Spanish Inquisition. Not for their crude pincers and mashers, their squeezers and cutters, the things that gouged and raked and stripped. Oh, no; not here, for torture was not their intent in this room, pain was not their purpose, and they sought no evil. Their purpose was totally self-contained, and it was in their own sense, delicate and aromatic, and whatever pain, horror, agony, and edge-of-madness that prevailed, that stalked every cubic inch of that room was incidental.
Which, perhaps, because of its indifference to the subject at hand, Senator Jeff Maddox, lately of the world of free will and sanity, seemed only to inject into and squeeze from the moment even greater sweet hell.
Long needles, silvery and gleaming with a dull sheen, perhaps with some form of energy from within, had pierced his palms, and his arms were stretched tight between his head and behind and down along the arch of the table. So that the needles, for want of a better description, were at the very end of the table, and they went down through the palms of Maddox's hands, and into the table itself.
"Why the hell doesn't he just pull free? Yank his goddamn hands loose?" Jake Marden spoke in a hoarse, ragged whisper to the others, but especially to Jubal Bailey, who had, for him, remained completely quiet to this point. Jake did not concern himself with what Alison heard or felt or endured; the worst of what she might experience was visual, no matter how it hurtled like a blazing fireball within her brain. So long as she lay on that floor, back to the wall, shoulder against his muscled leg, her arms clinging to one of his legs for support, he need not concern himself with her welfare or mental state.
K1K
If she had spoken to him he would have told her, and not unkindly, that there is no Easter Bunny, that the world is a bad neighborhood at three o'clock in the morning, and in a hundred years of trying she couldn't even begin to describe the many voracious, incredible, stomach-tearing manners of one form of life ingesting another form. Nor would Alison Harper have given a damn. None of this mattered to her as she fought her largely silent struggle to keep her own intestines from hurtling violently from her own body.
Jube didn't respond to Jake's remarks. "Goddamnit," Jake hissed at him, "just look at those needles or whatever they are. A man can yank free of those-"
"No," Luther Cogswell answered, his head turned to Jake. "He can't do that."
Anger welled up in Jake, a mixture of emotions from what was going on within the room to which their attention was riveted, the seeming helplessness or willingness to be savaged by Maddox, and what he judged wrongly to be a know-it-all attitude by Luther.
"Why the hell not?" Jake snarled.
"I watched this for a while before," Luther admitted. "Now, I know maybe I should have done something, but, I don't know, Jesus, it was like being hypnotized. I've seen men cut up and sliced and diced before, Jake. There's a lot of that in the voodoo rites, and they kill chickens and goats and pigs, and they stick needles and spikes into people, and slice open their arms and bellies, but the people they do that to don't feel no pain. It ain't just drugs, man, though there's plenty of that. They get whipped up into a fit and they just don't hurt none, and so, when I saw this, and I remembered all those things, it seemed a lot more important to have you and Jube down here to see it with your own eyes, because sure as hell
I couldn't describe-"
"Shut the fuck up," Jube growled, an animal warning issuing from his throat.
Luther swallowed hard, aware he sounded like an asshole with a runaway mouth, but Holy Mother of Christ, he couldn't help himself, this thrust into a surrealism that made a paltry mockery of any voodoo
rite he had ever seen or known, seemed to overload his capacity to handle the situation. He knew he babbled now like a brain-damaged child but there
was "Don't you think for a moment, not one goddamned second," Jube continued, his voice still an animal sound, a mixture of distress and growing ferocity, "that the senator is feeling nothing. You look at that quivering, the way them muscles is snapping like giant rubber bands, and," his voice faltered, "his eyes, the way they whippin' back and forth like they was in hell trying to get out, or kill themselves to stop what's going on-holy fucking shit, see them needles? They're through his ankles also, right into the table
