“It’s going to be a rough four miles back,” the lisping man said; and the tall, blond leader silently nodded agreement.
Outside, the explosion of a fuel reservoir superimposed itself over the constant blast and scream of Kyban attack…and the mere scream of human death.
The silence fell for an instant…the deadly silence of the battlefield that only signifies new horrors preparing…then before the new breath could be drawn, a screaming missile whined overhead and ripped through the face of an apartment building across the street. Metalwork and concrete flew in all directions, shattering on the blasted pavement, sending bits of stuff cascading over them.
They watched with tight faces for an instant; then, hauling their human burden, slipped quietly and quickly into the evening.
Behind them, the fat shopkeeper lay amidst the debris of his store, dead, safe, and uncaring.
II
Benno Tallant awoke during the operation, his throat burning with dryness, his head swimming in fatigue. He saw his stomach open, the bare organs—slick and wet in their own pulsing blood—staring up nakedly at him. A grizzled little man, with sharp spikes of white beard dotting his cheeks, was carefully settling a knobbed and calibrated block of metal into the flesh. He caught a glimpse of the operating lamp’s idiot glare above him, and promptly fainted again.
When he awoke the second time, he was in a cold, cold room, lying naked to the groin on an operating table, his head slightly higher than his feet. The red, puckered scar that ran from the bottom of his rib cage to the inside of his thigh stared up at him. It reminded him of a crimson river coursing through desert land. The pin-head gleam of a metal wire-tip stuck up in the center of the scar. Abruptly, he remembered.
They stopped his screaming by forcing a wadded-up towel into his mouth.
The tall blond man from the ruined shop stepped into Tallant’s arc of vision. He had washed the filth from his face, and he wore a dun-colored military uniform, with the triple studs of a Commander on the lapel. The man stared closely at Tallant for a moment, noting the riot of emotions washing the looter’s face.
“I’m Parkhurst, fellow. Head of Resistance, now that the President and his staff are dead.” He waited for the convulsions of Tallant’s face to cease. They continued, the eyes growing larger, the skin turning red, the neck tendons stretching taut.
“We have use for you, mister, but there isn’t much time left…so if you want to stay alive, calm down.”
Tallant’s face eased into quiet.
They pulled the towel from Benno Tallant’s mouth and for a moment his tongue felt like thick, prickly soup. The picture of his stomach, split and wet, came back to him once more. “What was that? What have you done to me? Why do this to me?” He was crying; the tears oozed out of the corners of his eyes, running ziggily down his cheeks into the corners of his mouth, and down his chin again.
“I wonder that, too,” said a voice from Tallant’s left. He turned his head painfully, small shafts of pain hitting him at the base of the neck. He saw the grizzled man with the spiky beard. It was a doctor; the doctor who had been inserting the metal square in Tallant’s stomach the first time he had awakened. Tallant assumed this was Doc Budder.
The nearly bald man continued, “Why this sniveling garbage, Parkhurst? There are a dozen men left in the post who would’ve volunteered. We would have lost a good man, but at least we’d know the thing was being carried by someone who could do the job.”
He caught his breath as he finished speaking; a thick, phlegmy cough made him steady himself on the edge of the operating table. “Too many cigarettes…” he managed to gasp, as Parkhurst helped him to a chair across the room.
Parkhurst shook his head and pointed at Tallant. “The best possible job can be done by somebody who’s afraid of the thing. By someone who will run. The running will take time, and that’s all that will be left to ensure our living till we get to Earth, or another outpost. What do you think, Doc?
“Do you have any doubt this man will run?”
Doc Budder rubbed the bristling stubble on his chin. It rasped in the silence of the room. “Mmm. I guess you’re right, Parkhurst—you usually are—it’s just that…”
Parkhurst cut him off with friendly impatience. “Never mind, Doc. How soon can we have this one up and around?”
Doc Budder wheezingly hoisted himself from the chair. He coughed once more, deeply, said, “I had the epidermizer on him…he’s knitting nicely. I’ll put it back on him but, uh, say, Parkhurst, y’know, all those cigarettes, my nerves are a little jumpy…I wonder, uh, would you have a little, uh, something to sort of steady me?” A hopeful gleam appeared in the old man’s eyes, and Tallant recognized it at once for what it really was. The old man was a junkie, too. Or a winehead. He couldn’t name the specific poison, but there was the same unnatural craving eating at Doc Budder that he suddenly realized was eating at him, also.
Parkhurst shook his head firmly. “Nothing, Doc. We have to keep you right on hand in case something goes…”
“Goddam it, Parkhurst, I’m not a ward of the state! I’m a doctor, and I have a right to—”
Parkhurst turned away from staring at Tallant, staring at Tallant but thinking of Doc Budder. “Look, Doc. This is a bad time for everybody. This is rough on all of us, Doc, but my wife got burned down in the street when the Kyban struck three days ago, and my kids were burned in the school. Now I know it’s rough on you, Doc, but if you don’t so help me God stop bugging me for your whiskey, I’m going to kill you, Doc. I’m going to kill you.”
He had spoken softly, pacing his words for full effect and clear understanding, but the desperation in his voice was apparent. The tones of a man with a terrible anguish in him, and a terrible burden on his shoulders. He would not humor the old man any longer.
“Now. How soon can we get him out of here, Doc?”
Doc Budder’s eyes swept across the room hopelessly, and his tongue washed his lips. He spoke hurriedly, nervously.
“I’ll—I’ll put the epidermizer back on it. It should be set in another four hours. There’s no weight on the organs; it was a clean insertion. He shouldn’t feel a thing.”
Benno listened closely. He still didn’t know what had been done to him, what the operation had been about, and his overwhelming terror at this whole affair had been sublimated in the little tableau between Budder and Parkhurst. But now he ran a shaking hand over the scar.
The fear was gagging him, and he felt the nervous tics starting in his inner upper arm and his cheek. Doc Budder wheeled a slim, tentacled machine to the operating table, and lifted a telescoping arm from the shaft. On the end was a small rectangular nickel-steel box with a small hole in it. Budder threw a switch, and a shaft of light struck out from the hole, washed the scar.
Even as he watched, the wound seemed to lose color, pucker more. He couldn’t feel the thing they had put in his stomach, but he knew it was there.
A sudden cramp hit him.
He cried in pain.
Parkhurst’s face turned white. “What’s the matter with him?”
The words came out so quickly, they were one word.
Doc Budder pushed aside the telescoping arm of the epidermizer, leaned over Tallant, who lay there breathing with difficulty, his face wrenched into an expression of utter pain. “What’s the matter?”
“It hurts—it—here—” He indicated his stomach. “Pain, all over here, hurts like hell…do something!”
The fat little doctor stepped back with a sigh. He slapped the telescoping arm back into position with a careless motion. “It’s all right. Self-induced cramp. I didn’t think there’d be any deleterious after-effects.
“But,” he added, with a malicious glance at Parkhurst, “I’m not as good a doctor, as sober and upstanding a doctor, as the Resistance could use, if it had its choice, so you never know.”
Parkhurst waved a hand in annoyance. “Oh, shut up, Doc.”
Doc Budder pulled the sheet up over Ta
llant’s chest, and the looter whined in pain. Budder snarled down at him. “Shut up that goddammed whining, you miserable slug. The machine’s healing you through the sheet. You haven’t got a thing to worry about…right now. There are women and kids out there…” he waved toward the boarded-up window “…suffering a lot worse than you!”
He turned toward the door, Parkhurst following, lines of thought slicing across the blond man’s forehead.
Parkhurst stopped with a hand on the knob. “We’ll be back with food for you later.” He turned back to the door, then added, not looking at Tallant, “Don’t try to get out. Aside from the fact that there’s a guard on the door—and that’s the only way out unless you want to go to them through the window—aside from that, you might open that incision and bleed to death before we could find you.”
He clicked the light switch, stepped out, and closed the door behind himself. Tallant heard voices outside the door, softly, as though coming through a blanket of moss, and he knew the guard was standing ready outside.
Tallant’s thoughts weren’t deterred by the darkness. He remembered the dream-dust, and the pains shot up in him again; he remembered the past, and his mouth chocked up; he remembered awakening during the operation, and he wanted to scream. The darkness did not interfere with Benno Tallant’s thoughts.
They became luminous and the next six hours were a bright, thinking hell.
III
The lisping man, Shep, came for him. He had cleaned up, also, but there were fine tracings of dirt around his nose, and under his nails, and in the lines of pocketing beneath his eyes. He had one thing in common with the other men Tallant had seen; he was weary, to the core.
Shep shot the telescoping arm of the epidermizer into its shank hole, and rolled the machine back against the wall. Tallant watched him carefully, and when Shep turned down the sheet, examining the now-gone thin, white line that had been the incision, Benno raised himself on his elbows, and asked, “How’s it going outside?” His tones were friendly, the way a child trying to make up to someone who has been angry with him is friendly.
Shep raised his gray eyes and did not answer.
He left the room, reappeared a few minutes later with a bundle of clothes. He threw them on the operating table next to Tallant, and helped the looter sit up. “Get dressed,” he said shortly.
Tallant sat up, and for a moment the crawling of his belly-hunger for the dream-dust made him gag. He hung his head down and opened his mouth, making retching noises deep in his throat. But he was nausea-dry, and nothing came.
He straightened up and put a shaking hand through his brown hair. “L-listen,” he began, speaking confidentially to the Resistance man, “do y-you know where I can lay my hands on some dream-dust? I-I can make it worth your while, I’ve got—”
Shep turned on him, and the lisping man’s hand slammed against Tallant’s face, leaving a burning red mark. “No, mister, you listen to me. In case you don’t know it, there’s a Kyban battle armada on its way across space, headed directly for Deald’s World. We’ve only been hit by an advance scout party, and they’ve nearly demolished the planet as it is.
“About two million people are dead out there, buddy. Do you know how many people that is? That’s almost the entire population of this planet.
“And you sit there asking me to get you your snuff!
“If I had any say in the matter, I’d kick you to death right here, right now.
“Now you get into those goddammed clothes, and don’t say another word to me, or so help me bleeding Jesus I’m not responsible for what happens to you!”
He turned away, and Tallant stared after him. There was no fight in him, merely a desire to lie down and cry. Why was this happening to him? He’d try anything to get the dust now…it was getting bad inside him…real bad…and he’d tried to stay out of the fighting…he’d only been getting the money from that shop to find a pusher…why were they badgering him…what had they done to him?
“Get dressed!” Shep shouted, the cords in his neck tightening, his face screwing into an expression of rage.
Tallant hurriedly slipped into the jumper and hood, the boots, and buckled the belt around himself.
“Come on.” Shep prodded him off the table.
Tallant stood up, nearly fell; he clung to Shep in terror, feeling the unsteadiness washing through him.
Shep shrugged his hands off, commanded, “Walk, you slimy, yellow bastard! Walk!”
He walked, and they went down the hall, into another sealed-tight compartment, and Tallant realized they must be underground.
He walked slightly behind Shep, knowing there was no place else to go, and the lisping man seemed to pay him no attention; knowing the looter would follow.
Through the walls—and through the very ground, Tallant estimated—he could hear the reverberations of shock bombs hitting the planet. He knew only vaguely what was happening.
The Earth-Kyban War had been a long and costly battle—they had been fighting for sixteen years—but this was the first time a Kyban fleet had broken through this far into the Terran dominion.
But it had obviously been a sudden, sneak attack, and Deald’s World was the first planet to be hit. He had seen the devastation, while aboveground, and he knew that if these men were alive and working to defend Deald’s World, they were the last pocket of the Resistance left.
But what did they want with him?
Shep turned right down a corridor, and palmed a loktite open. He stepped aside and Tallant walked into what appeared to be a communications room.
High banks of dials and switches, tubes and speaker rigs covered the walls. Parkhurst was there, holding a hand-mike carelessly, talking to a technician.
The blond man turned as Tallant stepped through. He nodded to himself, as though setting everything right in his mind, as though satisfied that all was going as planned, now that the looter was here. “We thought you’d like to know what this is all about.” He hesitated. “We owe you that, at any rate.”
The technician waved his hand in a circle, one finger extended, indicating they had started something turning, perhaps indicating the batteries were being warmed.
Parkhurst pursed his lips for a moment, then said almost apologetically, “We don’t hate you, fellow.” Tallant realized that they had not even bothered to find out his name yet. “We have a job to do,” Parkhurst continued, half-watching Tallant, half-watching the technician, “and more is at stake than you or me or the life of anyone left here on Deald’s World. Much more.
“We had a job to do, and for the job we needed a certain type of man. You fit the bill so beautifully, you’ll never quite know. There was no premeditation; it just happened to be you. If it hadn’t been you, it would have been someone like you.” He shrugged with finality.
Tallant felt the shivers beginning. He stood quaking, wishing he had just a sniff of the dust, just a miserable sniff. He wasn’t interested in all this high-flown patriotic gabble Parkhurst was throwing at him; all he wanted was to be let alone, let back out there, even if the Kyban were burning the planet, just to get back out there. Perhaps he could find a cache of the dust…because he knew he wouldn’t get it from these men. If Doc Budder couldn’t get his hootch, then they wouldn’t give Tallant any dream-dust.
Yes, that was it. He knew it now. It was a plot, a conspiracy to keep him from his beloved dust. He had to have it, he was going to have it—but he would wait, he would be sly and cautious, and wait till these madmen were out of the way, till they weren’t watching, then he would get away. There were no Kyban aboveground, it was only a foul, despicable plot to keep him from his beloved dust. His eyes narrowed.
Then the memory of the metal thing in his stomach jerked him instantly to reality. Tallant stood quaking. He had still not gotten over his terror at seeing the metal thing placed in his stomach.
His sallow face was dotted with sweat and streaked with dirt, though they had washed him several times during the six hours it had taken
the scar to heal.
He was a lean man; the gray tuberous sort of man who always brings the wolf or pack-rat to mind. Brown hair and small, deep-set eyes. A face that seemed to taper to a rodent-like tip.
“What—what are you going to do with me now?” He touched himself lightly, almost fearfully, on the stomach. “What is that thing you did to me?”
A high, keening whine broke from one of the many speakers on the wall, and the tight-lipped technician gestured wildly at Parkhurst, finally tapping him on the shoulder. Parkhurst turned to the technician, and the man gave him a go-ahead signal. Parkhurst motioned Tallant to silence, motioned Shep to stand close by the shaking looter.
Then he spoke into the hand-mike. A bit too clearly, a bit too loudly, as though he were speaking to someone a great distance away, as though he wanted every word precise and easily understood.
“This is the headquarters of Resistance on Deald’s World. We are subjects of Earth, and we are speaking to the Kyban fleet.
“Are you listening? This call is being broadcast over all tight beams, so we are certain you receive us. We’ll wait ten minutes for you to rig up a translator and to hook in with your superiors, so they can hear this announcement.
“This is of vital importance to you Kyban, so we suggest as soon as you’ve translated what I’ve just said, you make the proper arrangements, and contact your officers.”
He signaled the technician to cut off.
Then Parkhurst once again turned to Tallant. “They’ll translate. They’ll have to…they knew the best way to attack, so they must have had contact with Earth Traders, or Terran ships that went too far into the Coalsack. They will be able to decipher us.”
Tallant ran a thin hand up his neck. “What are you going to do with me? What are you going to do?” He felt hysteria building in him, but could not stop the flow of words. He was afraid! “This isn’t fair! You’ve got to tell me!” His voice became shrill. Shep moved in closer behind him, clasped the looter’s arm above the elbow. Tallant stopped just as another torrent of words was about to burst forth.