Stiff and dry out of the Earthman's aquamarine mask, came the words,
"You'll learn. There's no hope, MacVickers, and the men have all they
can bear without pain.
"If you bring them more suffering, MacVickers, they'll kill you."
Heat. Oil and reeking metal, and white stiff faces filmed with sweat.
Eyes shining, hot and glittering with fear. Rocking floor and sucking
pumps and a clutching nausea in his belly. Birek, standing straight and
still, watching him. Watching. Everybody, watching.
MacVickers put his hand flat on the engine-housing beside him. "There's
more to it than duty," he said softly, and smiled, without humor, the
vertical lines deep in his cheeks. His gaunt Celtic head had a grim
beauty.
His voice rang clear across the roar of the machines. "I'm Christopher
Rory MacVickers. I'm the most important thing in the universe. And if I
have to give my life, it'll not be without return on the value of it!"
Janu the Martian, away on the other side of the pit, made a shrill
wailing cry. Loris and Pendleton flinched away like dogs afraid of the
whip, looking upward.
MacVickers glimpsed a dark tentacled shape on the catwalk above, just
before the shattering electricity coursed through him. He screamed,
once. And then Birek moved.
He struck Loris and Pendleton and the blue-sheathed Earthman out of the
way like children. His left leg took MacVickers behind the knees in the
same instant that his right hand pushed MacVickers' face.
MacVickers fell heavily on his back, screaming at the contact of the
metal floor. Then Birek sprawled over him, shielding his body with the
bulk of his own.
The awful shocking pain was lessened. Lying there, looking up into
Birek's pale eyes, MacVickers made his twitching lips say, "Why?"
Birek smiled. "The current doesn't hurt much any more. And I want you
for myself--to break."
MacVickers drew a deep, shuddering breath and smiled back, the lines
deep in his lean cheeks.
* * * * *
He had no clear memories of that shift. Heat and motion and strangling
air, and Janu coughing with a terrible, steady rhythm, his own hands
trying to guide the oil can. Toward the end of the time he fainted, and
it was Birek who carried him up the ladder.
He had no way of knowing how long after that he came to. There was
no time in that little hell. The first thing he noticed, with the
hair-trigger senses of a man trained to ships, that the motion of the
room was different.
He sat up straight on the bunk where Birek had laid him. "The tidal
wave," he said, over a quick stab of fear. "What...."
"We ride it out," said Loris bitterly. "We always have."
MacVickers knew the Jovian Moons pretty well. Remembering the
tremendous tides and winds caused by the gravitational pull of Jupiter,
he shuddered. There was no solid earth on Io, nothing but mud. And the
extraction plant, from the feel of it, was a hollow bell sunk under it,
perfectly free.
It had to be free. No mooring cable made could stand the pull of a
Jupiter-tide.
"One thing about it," said Pendleton with quiet viciousness. "It makes
the bloody Jovies seasick."
Janu the Martian made a cracked, harsh laugh. "So they keep a weak
current on us all the time." His hatchet-face was drawn, his yellow
cat-eyes lambent in the dim light.
The men sprawled on their bunks, not talking much. Birek sat on the
end of his, watching MacVickers with his pale still eyes. There was a
tightness in the room.
It was coming. They were going to break him now, before he hurt them.
Break him, or kill him.