Gradually his body recovered. After the first day or two Margaret
tired of the menial tasks of caring for his wants, as he had expected,
and turned them over to her mindless slaves. But first she assured
him carefully that it was all perfectly right and normal, and Eldon,
supposedly under the hypnotic influence of the drug, nodded docile,
unquestioning acceptance.
The slaves, two men and two girls, all carried crescent-shaped scars
upon their chests, duplicates of the one marring Krasna's loveliness.
One of the men had the racial characteristics of the Forest People. The
other three were Puvas, evidently of the non-mutant group. Carefully
Eldon suppressed the wave of indignant sympathy they aroused in him,
and almost as though he too were mindless submitted as they rubbed his
abraded skin with healing ointment, fed him, brought him clothes at
Margaret's command, dressed him.
But Margaret did not abandon him. Each day she visited him and sat near
him, often touching him. Her hypocritical, saccharine attentiveness
was so revolting that at times it was all he could do to maintain his
dazed, semi-idiotic pose. She spent the hours planting suggestions
in his supposedly vacant mind--about trusting her implicitly, about
obeying no one else, about preparing to exact a blood revenge from
Victor. Sasso and the Faith she did not mention.
At intervals she brought him more pills. After a terrifying experience
in which she remained with him so long that a small portion of the drug
dissolved in his mouth and left him unable to think for hours afterward
he adopted the expedient of tucking a small strip of cloth beneath his
tongue to absorb his saliva and keep the pills from melting before he
could spit them out. Just one would seal his doom--and that of Varda.
He was glad now of the long hours he had spent reading Krasna's
scrolls. One had been a medical treatise and the mental control he
had acquired in the Thin World enabled him to dilate the pupil of his
single eye, slow his pulse, and counterfeit the drug symptoms exactly.
On the sixth day Wor visited him, alone.
"Stand up!" he commanded. He spoke a queerly accented English,
evidently learned from Margaret.
Eldon obeyed.
"Turn around.... Bend over.... Walk to the door.... Now come back."
Eldon obeyed the warrior, although Margaret thought she had conditioned
him to take orders from no one but herself. The time for a showdown was
not yet ripe.
"Turn on the lights," Wor directed crisply.
Eldon hesitated.
"Turn them on!" Wor bellowed.
Eldon looked blank. It had been a trap, for the lights were mentally
controlled. Wor tried another trick.
"Catch!" He pulled a blast rod from its holster and tossed it. Eldon
caught it, but clumsily.
"Fire it out the window."
The weapon differed from the blast rods of the Forest People. This one
had a button, evidently a trigger, while Krasna's had been entirely
controlled by thought.
Eldon was sorely tempted. It would be so easy to whirl and burn Wor
down. But he resisted the impulse, knowing he would have only one
chance and must make it really count. And perhaps the weapon was
not charged. Wor was not altogether a fool. He pretended stupid
unfamiliarity with the device.
Wor appeared satisfied that Margaret had not been arranging some scheme
of her own.
"We will teach you to use this weapon later," he said. "You will use it
to kill Victor."
That gave Eldon his first ray of hope, a foundation upon which to build
a plan.
Wor's eyes narrowed with jealousy as he spoke the Earthman's name, and
Eldon had overheard enough to understand why. Since Victor Schenley's
arrival the officer had found himself with a formidable rival for
Sin's confidences and attentions. A smaller, physically weaker rival,
but sly, and one who could not be removed by force without incurring
Highness Sin's wrath.
* * * * *
It would have been pointless to hide the recovery of his body, but
the concealment of his true mental condition--that the experiences
he had undergone had not left him a mind-blasted dunce and that he
was not even under the influence of Margaret's drugs--was of supreme
importance. One incautious moment and he would die speedily, for the
leaders of the Faith feared one thing only, El-ve-don, and if they
suspected--
By a stroke of good fortune the room in which he was kept in luxurious
captivity adjoined the larger one in which Margaret and her companion
held most of their conversations. Eldon overheard everything, from
endless plotting to love-making.
Wor boasted endlessly, egged on by Margaret's open adulation and
flattery, of the deepening plight of the Rebels. The slave pits below
the Fortress were filling rapidly. In fact so many Rebels were being
captured that no more Puva slaves were being processed. Eldon clenched
his fist in helpless anger, and a nagging worry began to haunt him.
One thing puzzled Margaret. Several of the Luvans had dropped out of
sight.
"But they are not really of this plane at all," Wor dismissed the
matter. "They are a law unto themselves."
Eldon guessed what was happening. He had seen the first two Luvans sent
into nothingness by a bleeding, dying girl who had paid a great price
in discovering their secret.
Several score of Wor's mutant Puva soldiers had been killed in running
battles with Rebel bands, but Wor was not disturbed. He had ample
fighting men at his disposal and the troops had been indoctrinated to
believe that if killed in battle they went straight to Sasso. Margaret
patterned her attitude upon his.
Eldon felt a surge of admiration for the scattered remnants of the
Forest People who still fought against such overwhelming odds, even
though their sullenly suspicious minds had condemned Krasna's unborn
child--her child and his--to death. He could not blame them too much
for being overcautious.
One night he overheard the critical conversation which meant this
forced inaction would soon end.
Wor was singing as he entered Margaret's rooms, and despite the
mutation which had increased his intelligence his savage Puva ancestry
betrayed itself in the roaring vocal antics he considered music.
Margaret asked a sharp question.
"The next Observance of Sasso," Wor announced ponderously, "will be The
Night!"