_Torture_
When Sime awoke it was to the rattling of the door. Murray stirred.
The light was even weaker than before.
"If they offer you a drink, drink hearty!" Murray muttered, sitting
up. "I've got an idea it's going to be a hard day."
But they were not offered any water. Instead they were again conducted
before Scar Balta, who looked at them morosely. At last he remarked
gruffly:
"If you tin sojers weren't so cursed stubborn, you could get yourself
a nice berth in the Martian army. Ever consider that?"
"Talk sense!" Sime said contemptously. "If I threw down the service
how could you trust me?"
"That'd be easy," Balta rejoined. "Once the I. F. P. finds out you
joined us you'd have to stick with us to save your skin."
He laughed at his prisoners' look of surprise.
"Come, come!" he bantered. "You didn't think that I was ignorant of
your purpose here? You, Murray; your spying was excellent, I'll admit.
You were the first to give away certain plans of ours. Well, well! We
don't hold that against you. Wheels within wheels, eh? It would
perhaps astonish certain braided gentleman of our high command to
learn that I, a mere colonel, control their destinies. As our
ancestors would say, it's dog eat dog.
"Now, how about it? I can make a place for you in my organization. It
seems to run to secret service, oddly enough. You will be rewarded far
beyond anything you could expect in your present career of chasing
petty crooks from Mercury to Pluto and back again."
"Is that all?" Murray asked softly, with a bearded grin.
"Oh no. You will turn over to me all the information you can about the
I. F. P. helio code. You will name and describe to me each and every
plainclothes operative of the service--and you should have an
extensive acquaintance."
"Before you answer," Murray said quietly at Sime's side, "let me
suggest that you consider what's in store for us--or you--if you don't
take up this offer."
"Why, you--" Sime whirled in astonished fury upon his companion.
"Didn't you--"
* * * * *
But he did not complete his reference to last night's surreptitious
conversation. It seemed that he saw the merest ghost of a flicker in
Murray's left eye.
"--Didn't you say you'd stick no matter what they did?" he finished
lamely.
Murray hung his head.
"I'm getting along," he muttered. "Not as young as I used to be. This
life is getting me nowhere. Why be a fool? Come along with me!"
"Why, you dirty, double-crossing hound!" Sime's exasperation knew no
bounds. For an instant he had believed that Murray was enacting a
little side-play in the pursuit of a suddenly conceived plan. But he
looked so obviously hangdog--so guiltily defiant....
_Crack!_ Sime's fist struck Murray's solid jaw, scraping the skin off
his knuckles, but Murray swayed to the blow, sapping its force, and
came in to clinch. They rolled on the floor. Murray twisted Sime's
head painfully, bit his ear. But in the next split second he was
whispering:
"Keep your head, Sime. Can't you see I'm stringing him? Take that!"
And he planted a vicious short hook to Sime's midriff.
Balta had squalled orders, and now Martian soldiers were bursting the
buttons off their uniforms in the scrimmage to separate the battlers.
Bruised and battered, they were dragged apart. Murray's one eye was
now authentically closed, and rapidly coloring up. Unsteadily he got
to his feet. With mock delicacy he threw a kiss to his late
antagonist.
"Farewell, Trueheart!" He bowed ironically, and the men all laughed.
Balta grinned too. "Still the same mind, Hemingway? All right, men,
take him up to the observation post. Here, Murray, have a drink."
* * * * *
Sime was led up a seemingly endless circular staircase. After an
interminable climb he saw the purplish Martian sky through the glass
doors of an airlock. Then they were outside, in the rarefied
atmosphere that sorely tried Sime's lungs, still laboring after the
fight and long ascent. The Sun, smaller than on Earth but intensely
bright, struck down vindictively.
"A good place to see the country," laughed the corporal in charge.
"Off with his clothes!"
It was but a matter of seconds to strip Sime's garment from him. They
dragged him to an upright post, one of several on the roof, and with
his back to the post, tied his wrists behind it with rawhide. His
ankles they also tied, and so left him.
It was indeed an excellent point of vantage from which to see the
country. The fortress was high enough to clear the nearby cliffs of
low elevation, and on all sides the Gray Mountains tumbled to the
horizon. To the north, beyond that sharply cut, ragged horizon, lay
the big cities, the industrial heart of the planet. To the south, at
Sime's back, was the narrow agricultural belt, the region of small
seas, of bitter lakes, of controlled irrigation. Here the canals,
natural fissures long observed by astronomers and at first believed to
be artificial, were actually put to the use specified by ancient
conjecture, just as further north they had been preempted as causeways
of civilization. Sime painfully worked his way around the post so that
he could look south. But here too nothing met his eye but the orange
cliffs with their patches of gray lichen. There was no comfort to be
had in that desolate landscape. Nevertheless, Sime kept moving
around, to keep the post between himself and the Sun. Already it was
beginning to scorch his skin uncomfortably.
By the time it was directly overhead Sime had stopped sweating. The
dry atmosphere was sucking the moisture out of his body greedily, and
his skin was burned red. His suffering was acute.
* * * * *
The Martian day is only a little more than a day on Earth, but to Sime
that afternoon seemed like an eternity. Small and vicious, with deadly
deliberation, the sun burned its way down a reluctant groove in the
purple heavens. Long before it reached the horizon, Sime was almost
unconscious. He did not see its sudden dive into the saw-edge of the
western mountains--knew only that night had come by the icy whistle of
the sunset wind that stirred and moaned for a brief interval among the
rocks. The keen, thin wind that first brought relief and then new
tortures, to be followed by freezing numbness.
Above, in the blackness, the stars burned malignantly. Drug to his
misery they were, those familiar constellations, which are about the
only things that look the same on all planets of the solar system. But
they were not friendly. They seemed to mock the motionless human
figure, so tiny, so inconsequential, that stared at them, numerous
tiny pinpricks of light, so remote.
There was no dawn, but after aeons Sime saw the familiar green disk of
Earth coming up in the east, one of the brightest stars. Sime fancied
he saw the tiny light flick of the moon. There would be a game of
blackjack going on somewhere there about now. He groaned. The Sun
would not be far behind now.
But he must have slept. The Sun was up before he was aware of it. A
man with a caduceus on his blouse collar was holding his wrist,
feeling his pulse. He seemed to be a medical officer of the Martian
army. His smooth, coral face was serious as he prodded Sime's
shriveled tongue.
"Water, quick!" he snapped,--"or he's done for."
* * * * *
His head was tipped back and water poured into his mouth, but Sime
could not swallow. The soldier with the bucket poured dutifully,
however, almost drowning the helpless man. It helped, anyway; and Sime
returned to half-consciousness. A few minutes later, when Scar Balta
came to inquire if he had changed his mind, Sime was able to curse
thickly. And around noon, when Murray, jauntily dressed in the uniform
of a Martian captain, bid him a cheerful good-by, Sime was almost
fluent.
His torture had now reached the pitch of exquisite keenness that made
it something spiritual. Solicitously they kept him alive, and far back
in his mind Sime wondered why they bothered to do that. Couldn't they
be satisfied with what they could learn from Murray?
So passed the second day, and the third.
On the fourth day Sime was able to drink water freely, and to eat the
food they placed into his mouth, a fact which the medical officer
noted. The torture was wearing itself out. Sime's body was emaciated,
stringy, burnt black. But his extraordinary toughness was weathering
conditions that would kill most men. Balta shook his head in
wonderment when this was reported to him.
"Can't wait any longer for him. Must get back to Tarog. You might as
well put him out of his misery. By the way, I'm convinced that Murray
is double-timing me. But I'll attend to that personally."
From his post of pain Sime saw the official car leave toward Tarog.
Had he known of Balta's remark he would not have been puzzled so much
by what he saw.
As the ship was about to disappear over the ragged northern horizon,
Sime's bleared eyes saw, or he thought they saw, a human figure
silhouetted against the pitiless sky. It was a tiny-seeming figure at
that distance, but it was clear-cut in the rare atmosphere. Then it
plunged from sight.
"Somebody taken for a ride," he muttered, half grateful for the brief
distraction from his own misery.
* * * * *
The medical officer, to whom the long climb was arduous, delayed his
mission to the roof, and that was why, several hours later, Sime was
still alive to see another ship appear to the north. It was large,
sumptuous, evidently a private yacht. Its course would bring it within
a mile of the fortress, and with sudden wild hope Sime realized that
if he were seen he might expect relief. He began to tug at his bonds.
They were tough, but they would stretch a little. His haphazard
movements had already worn them against the rough post, and now he
began to struggle violently. If he could only get his hands loose, he
could wave....
The thongs cut into his flesh, but his wrists were numb and swollen,
and he did not mind the pain. His muscles stood out hard and sharp,
and with a supreme effort, aided by the growing brittleness of the
rawhide in the dry atmosphere, he snapped his bonds.
The ship was now quite near, and he waved frantically. He fancied he
saw movement back of the pilot ports. Faintly he heard the hum of the
levitators. Now it turned--no! It yawed, now toward him, now away,
purposelessly, like a ship in distress. It made an abrupt downward
plunge that scraped a crag, and just missed a canyon wall.
Again it twisted, came down with a long, twisting motion, struck a
rock upside down, slitting a long gash in its skin, clattered to the
rocks so close to the fortress that Sime could not see it. Now
desperation gave the prisoner superhuman strength. Regardless of the
pain, he burst the thongs about his ankles, tottered to the edge of
the roof.
There was a battle going on below. Men seemed to be running, shouting.
Someone, using a massive plate of metal as a partial shield against
the neuro-pistols, was creating havoc. Sime tried to focus his giddy
eyes on the scene. It seemed always to be turning to the left, to be
circling around him. With tottering steps he tried to follow it,
keeping to the brink of that lofty tower--uselessly. Now it was
rocking, flying straight toward him, and, gratefully, Sime gave up the
struggle, closed his eyes.