"Hand me my rattle," he said. "I better practice. The asteroids are
falling down, falling down; the asteroids are falling down, my fair
lady...."
V
The panels to two adjacent chambers were open.
"Guess they don't trust us together," Cragin said. The dark blue
plastiglass of his Patrol tunic dully reflected the subdued half-light
that emanated into the tube-like corridor from beyond the panels. Like
a nightmare, he kept telling himself, like a nightmare. Impossible
impossible impossible....
Her face was the color of white sand, and it was the only indication
that she understood.
"Please try, Cragin."
"Sure."
"You want to try...."
"It's a cinch I can't arrest 'em, princess. And I know you want out.
You want to sink 'em all and so do I. If there's any way, believe me--"
Cragin knew he would not forget the look etched in the thin white lines
of her face as she was led into the testing place; there was something
in it that he had never seen before in the face of an Earthman. Not
an expression caused purely by reflex in time of danger or pain; not
one carefully controlled after finding an unpleasant solution to an
inescapable problem. Neither of those. But what others....
Cragin looked then to what he might be more successful in
understanding. The testing place which had been readied for him was
a small, independent laboratory, much like the control room of the
machine-planet, save for the complete absence of telescreens. And
awaiting him were two cloaked figures in red mail--technicians, second
grade. The Owners were taking no chances.
He lay at full length on a sheet of metal that was as comfortably
resilient and warm as an old-fashioned bed of feathers, and waited
expectantly.
"Are you prepared, Earthman?"
"Fire away, braintrust." He wondered at the absence of equipment.
Nothing was attached to him--no electrodes, none of the usual
electroencephalographic devices. There was only a low hum, and the pale
glow from the indistinct walls about him.
"The test begins, Earthman. Display your mind as you see fit."
The hum deepened. The walls became more indistinct, and the glow
somehow became a part of the sound that filled the tiny chamber.
Cragin flashed his mind to his first years of schooling. He had been 10
years old, had learned the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum
of the squares of the two opposite sides ... "i" represents the square
root of the quantity minus one, and is termed an imaginary number ...
for every action, there is an opposite and equal reaction....
He lost all sense of time, and guarded against thinking of it, lest
he betray even a basic knowledge of continuum dynamics. Had to keep
it simple, child-like, simple.... The intensity of light diminishes
inversely as the distance from its source is squared.
The voice inside his head was at length the signal that the test was
completed.
"From this examination, Earthman, it is evident that you stumbled where
you did purely by accident, and that the craft in which you traveled
was out of control, operating entirely beyond your understanding."
Cragin kept his thoughts diffuse and made no effort to reply.
"Do I serve or die?" he asked at length.
"On a probationary basis, you serve. Grade, twelfth."
The test was done, and Cragin had won the first cast of the dice.
The ruse had worked, Cragin knew, not because the Owners and their
test had been outwitted but because the test itself had been logically
constructed to measure the level of a mind which was functioning at
its maximum. The trick was based on folly--folly in which higher
level intelligences would not indulge, and which lower ones would not
recognize as a gamble for higher stakes than slavery. Cragin knew he
would not have indulged in it had the chance been up to him alone.
What surprised him of course was that so far it had worked. And it made
Lin Griffin all the more mystifying, almost inscrutable. Theoretically,
she should have dismissed such a plan as ridiculous. But logic and the
theory upon which it was based, and what Lin Griffin did, were two
different things. Cragin tried to put the puzzle from his mind. And
the girl. The probabilities were against his seeing her again. And
that, for reasons as puzzling as the girl herself, made him peculiarly
miserable.
* * * * *
Other slaves from a hundred other civilizations, ranging from the
shape of a man to shapes that Cragin could not identify with his three
dimensional senses had been packed into the hull of the spacecraft
with him; they were all of his assigned grade, and therefore would
constitute little problem. He could tell by their reactions to outside
stimuli that he was their mental superior.
The pilot might be a different matter. He carried arms much resembling
his own Krell guns, judging from their outward appearance of
construction and functional design. But there was one thing--they had a
fixed grip, like the ancient pistols of Earth. It meant they could be
used from only one hold, and indicated that they were copied from the
product of a civilization perhaps a hundred years behind his own. But
perhaps his slim margin of advantage would be enough.
A cloaked and red-mailed servant of the second grade had briefly
addressed the group prior to take-off, and for moments Cragin had
feared that he would accompany the consignment. But he had not.
The voice had simply said, "New servants of the Owners, you are
about to be transported to your place of work. As servants of the
twelfth, and lowest, rank, your duty will be the mining of unconsumed
zronon, employed by the Owners to maintain their home and their
glorious gateway on an equal level of brilliance to that of the stars
themselves. Death awaits that servant who lags in his output. Your
destination will be the eighth mining planet, nearest the edge of the
Trespass Limit. It was once, like all other mining planets, a live
star, extinguished and cooled by the Owners that its highly precious
and combustible substance be turned to their own desired ends.
"Are there any for whom this directive has not been reduced to
sufficiently simple terms?"
There was silence.
"Very well. Be it remembered among each of you that the Owners, those
who near the goal of the creation of life, and who are long since the
masters of death, command you."
Then it was over, and Cragin waited in the hot, dank hull, sweating
inside his helmet, in which there was an endless supply of his own
unique atmosphere. His own helmet, because it was far from being so
perfect, had been taken from him upon completion of the test. Such was
the case with each of the others, and the textures and colorations of
the stuff they breathed or absorbed was as varied as the planets on
which they were spawned. And there was hardly any helmet of the same
shape or design as another.
The waiting did not last long, but Cragin's plan was in his head as
completely as he could fashion it when he felt the landing jar. If
it were to work, it would be executed with split-second speed and
precision, or again, the alternative would be destruction. It was
evident that to use his advantage to the utmost, it must be coupled
with the dual advantages of immediacy and surprise.
The airlock opened; with the rest, Cragin filed through it. He took
glancing note of the positions of the few guards; kept their pattern of
surveillance stenciled in his memory.
The file was split--a quick maneuver placed him at the end of his own
section as it was led to the opening of a shaft even darker than the
leaden twilight which hung low like a weighted shroud over the entire
sphere.
It would be in a moment, or a month, or a year....
The slave ship had not prepared yet for take-off; its tubes smoked
lazily, cooling.
A month, even a day, would be too long. If it was to be attempted at
all, it was to be NOW.
* * * * *
And Cragin had the squat guard on a grip which broke his spine before
his heart had time to beat again. The gloom helped; the din that
issued dully from the mine's lower levels covered the near silence of
the death which Cragin had meted out. The weapon was the guard's only
insigne of identity, and Cragin had it cradled in his own arms before
the thick, broken body hit the ground.
Then he ran, laboring against a slightly stiffer gravity than his
Earth-muscles had been born to, waving the weapon above him with all
the strength he had!
Toward the ship and its smoking tubes--gesturing, pointing toward
the cave-mouth, and yelling his head off, wondering how closely the
time-lapse would match between the time he reached the ship and the
other guards, even now running their first steps toward the cave mouth
toward which he pointed, would realize that although he was giving
alarm, he was running away from, not toward, the indicated trouble
point.
He was within the airlock by the time the first guard to answer his cry
of distress had taken twenty running steps, and had, upon taking the
twenty-first, realized that Cragin was going in the wrong direction.
But the margin had been enough--
The lock slammed shut.
The pilot, returning to his control panels from the brief recess he had
taken elsewhere in the ship, only saw Cragin for as long as it took
the Earthman to unleash the weapon he had captured. There was a flat
explosion, the weapon bucked uncomfortably, and the pilot died with a
large, blue hole through what Cragin took to be his head.