by Ryder Stacy
“So you’re on a name basis with him! You like him, but not as a lover? You think he’s too cold, too distant? That’s right?” Rockson was torn by jealousy and confusion. But her little shrug was all the answer Rock needed. It made him feel better, to know that she was not screwing Dovine. Maybe Kimetta could be won over—why not? She had loved him just a few days ago. She could help him escape! If there was enough time on this trip, and there certainly ought to be, then he’d like to become very friendly again with the buxom young woman. No matter what might happen once the ship landed on Esmerelda, wherever that might be, at least he could give Kimetta and himself a good time along the way! Rock was starting to feel that she wouldn’t have any more objections than he did. She was smiling warmly at him. Just like the old days.
“It’s been decided to make your trip as easy as possible, your’s and the others’,” she said. “Instead of having to worry and be upset about your duties on Esmerelda, you’re to be put under for the balance of the day.”
“Under?” Rock didn’t understand. But it sounded ominous.
Kim rapidly undid part of his one-piece, touching the base of his neck with cold thumb and forefinger, pinching the area under his chin.
“What are you doing?”
“Raising the skin, finding a vein,” she replied.
She suddenly seemed distracted and instead of reaching for what Rock could now see was the long-needled syringe on the floating tray, she touched a strange blue disk medallion she wore on a chain about her pale neck. “Here, I will put this on you. Wear it forever. Never take it off. It will protect you from the Zrano.” She took it off and clasped the medallion around Rock’s neck. “My gift to you—in honor of our love.”
She smiled mysteriously.
He made a mental note to ask Sanders Bylor what in hell a Zrano might be. All his life as a playboy he had considered himself experienced and able to adapt, but he was going to have a harder time than ever before from now on. He had to have INFORMATION!
“What is a Zrano?”
No answer. Just a wink.
“What is the medallion for?”
“It’s a love token,” she said, looking down at the medallion. “As long as you wear it, nothing much can happen to you.”
Her full lips twitched briefly in a sort of amusement; and Kimetta leaned over him, kissed him; and as he responded with his burning lips Rock felt the sting of a hypodermic needle in his throat!
Ten
Five hours later he woke up in what he soon realized was another chamber. Rock had awakened in a medium-sized, Earth-style room with a comfortable bed and a bureau with half a dozen buttons to open the slots intended for shoes and one-pieces. There was a new one-piece in one of the open slots, and since he found he wasn’t strapped down, he sat up on his cot, took off the stale clothes he was wearing, then washed himself in an adjoining bathroom. He shut the bathroom door before stripping off the smelly suit and putting on the new, blue one-piece. It was the right size. There was a mirror, too. And a comb. Rock was able to comb his long, white-streaked black hair and look at the uncertain cast of his pale features. The sight of that mirror startled him, because he had sometimes seen movies about desperate men, desperate prisoners, taking a mirror and breaking it and cutting their wrists with the slivers. He was turning from the mirror when he heard two taps on the door. They were polite, soft, which surprised him.
“Can I come in?” A young man’s voice—the wall-man?
“I don’t think I could stop you,” he replied. “There’s no lock.”
“Certainly you can, if you want to. Just ask me to come back later.” But the door opened a crack. In stared a young man in a red jumpsuit with an emblem of a comet on the lapels.
“Are you one of the guards?”
“I work here, yes,” the blond man said apologetically.
“Well, if this is a prison ship, I can’t stop you. Come on in. Maybe I’ll find out something.”
The door was opened all the way. The blond man was a fresh-faced youth, a Venusian whose shiny skin reminded Rockson of Corporal Dovine as he must have been in his youth. He felt a moment’s pang at not having seen Kimetta since she put him under, and then winked at the newcomer. “What’s the score?” Rock asked. “You have a hypo for me too?”
“Are you comfortable here?” the man asked, looking around. “Everything in order?”
“I don’t suppose it’s bad, for a prison-ship,” Rock admitted.
“You keep using that word. It makes me feel rotten, if you know what I mean.”
“I don’t see why it should. I’m being sent to Esmerelda. Isn’t that true?”
“Obviously,” the man smiled, but his eyes were sorrowful.
“What for? Is there a reason?”
“Of course! You are a criminal!”
“What is my sentence? How long?”
“You’ll find out very soon now. You’re bound to know before we land. I’ve got to go now.”
“Will you answer one more question? You don’t have to say yes or no. Maybe I can guess the answer by how you look when I ask—even if you don’t tell me. Fair enough?”
The young man turned to leave, unwilling to let Rock see his face give away any response—not everybody on this space craft was as grim and impassive as Dovine, it seemed. Rock realized he could see the man’s face in the mirror, and quickly asked: “Has my sentence got anything to do with somebody or something named Zrano?”
He had remembered Kimetta’s words about Zrano, and the medallion he wore—her gift—protecting him. But Rock was not absolutely sure that he remembered them exactly. The young guard’s face showed a furtive discomfort, as if Rock had mentioned something very unpleasant. And then the guard left, saying only, “You’ll see! Heaven help you, you’ll see!” His hands were at his sides, lips almost prim. “But don’t think of tomorrow. There is a treat in store today! If you come out to the hall in an hour, you’ll be on the way to a pleasant surprise!”
The compartment door closed in back of him. Rock figured he could have dived after the young man, made it into the corridor, could have held the man as a hostage. But then what?
Rock looked in the desk slots for any audi-reads, but found none. Not even a Bible. He went back and stared at his face in the bathroom mirror, then shrugged and looked away. He was used to taking pleasure from others and giving it to them, but not used to plotting. Still, he would escape. Somehow, he would escape.
The outside door didn’t open until an hour had drifted past. When it did, there was no one there. He went through the door. He was alone in a long and antiseptically white corridor, facing five closed doors, two others on the same side of the corridor as his room. There wasn’t any indication of where to go, or what to do. Right or left? If a long, white corridor could be called confusing, he was certainly confused. His hand went to the circular blue medallion.
A door far down the hall to the right opened halfway. Rock headed in that direction. He half-imagined a pretty girl, maybe Kimetta herself, beckoning with another syringe. He’d not let her put him “under” this time! No way!
Just as he started in that direction, a burly and unshaven man came out of the closer of the other two doors, glanced at him, cocked his head alertly, and then took a step toward Rock.
“I never seen you in my life,” the man said, in a harsh voice, the same voice from the wall Rock didn’t think he’d ever forget. “You’re not from Venus Prison. Who are you?”
“You’ve spoken to me and I’ve listened to you,” Rock told him calmly. “Don’t you recognize my voice?”
“Oh. Oh, yeah. You’re in the next cube! Well, lots of luck, sonny.” The man squinted again. “You’re no older than ’bout forty, I’d guess. Did you have a nice life?”
Rock said, “More or less.” Funny, he wasn’t at all sure how old he was! Effect of the drug?
“Things like this, they hadn’t ought to happen to guys like me who never had a break, shoved from prison world to priso
n world. Unlucky, that’s me. I, who haven’t been around, haven’t seen much.”
Rock wasn’t going to comment about that. “What’s going to happen to us?” he asked instead.
The burly man seemed distracted. “As I said, my name’s Sanders Bylor.” He shoved forward a ham hock hand. “Pleased to meet you.”
“Rock’s my name. Niles Rockson.”
He took the huge hand. To his astonishment, something seemed to tickle his palm and he realized that the handshake was a ruse. Something had been put into his hand! Rockson drew his hand back and looked down at it. A gray audi-writing square! A message!
Sanders Bylor made an urgent gesture toward a flap of the new one-piece that Rock was wearing. He put the audi-writing square away, supposing that Sanders, as a longtime prisoner, was used to living with small intrigues. Everything he did that authority wouldn’t know about was a triumph perhaps; a small but solid triumph . . .
Rock looked down the corridor at the door that had opened. Nothing. No one had come out there.
He couldn’t help asking, “What were you arrested for?”
“Smuggling, if that makes any difference now. How I figured to get away with a smuggling job on Venus I’ll never know. The way it is, kid, is that you hear stories about other people who did things, and you suppose you can do ’em. So you smuggle slumph-crystals from the Alpha Centauri quadrant and you get caught and you get put in the cruncher. That’s all there is to it. After that—it’s up to them. Your life isn’t your own anymore. What are you in for?”
“I don’t know. I think for being a playboy. Didn’t know it was illegal!”
“Oh yeah! Retroactive laws are a bummer aren’t they,” the man said.
“What’s going to happen to us on Esmerelda?” Rock asked, coming back to the subject of greatest interest to both of them.
“Kid, I’m not exactly sure. If it was some ordinary prison planet we’d been taken to, I’d say it was a so-called medical experiment with us prisoners to be used as material. On Esmerelda, I doubt it. From what I’ve heard, they’re pretty much a no-nonsense group there. Into the work ethic. Period. And lots of rules. Anything that gets done around there, kid, there’s a rule. Know what I mean?”
Rock nodded, though he didn’t, and asked, “Do you think it’s got anything to do with somebody named Zrano? Our being brought to Esmerelda in the first place, I mean.”
Sanders Bylor’s reaction wasn’t measured, like the guard’s. The burly man pulled back as if Rock had developed some contagious disease. His eyes widened in horror and he drew up one large hand as if to fend off an attack.
“Oh my God, no,” he whispered. “They can’t do that to you! They can’t do that to me! Not just for being a smuggler! Heaven help us kid. I’ll pray for you and me, I swear!”
A bell rang. Another door opened. A voice could be heard over a public address system. “This is the captain. If you haven’t opened your door yet, you can now open it.” It was a sexless voice without feeling, a voice that could have belonged to a machine. “You must walk to the right end of the corridor, the end with a purple light over the exit door. You then walk through that door and to the next door and open it.”
Men came out of each door. Six men in all, counting Rock. The men looked awkwardly at each other, nodded. “All in the same boat,” their expressions stated glumly. Sanders broke the silence by smiling. He walked toward the purple sign. They drew apart to give him room. “Don’t any of you men want to have something good happen?” Sanders asked. “Come on! Let’s have fun!”
Rock followed. They all filed into a long hallway that wasn’t as well lighted, but was more comfortable to the eyes than the harsh light of their corridor. He could hear murmurs and grunts back of him, and realized that the remaining prisoners were walking more slowly, discussing something under their breaths.
Rock and Sanders came to another slide-up door. Sanders put a thumb just above the door lock and it drew up. Rock’s mouth opened in astonishment at what the slowly opening door revealed: a set up for a party. Balloons on the ceiling, red and blue. A bunting-decorated banquet room containing a long table with three chairs on each side. On a dais was another table, this one with three chairs. In front of each place setting at the lower table was a dish with food that fairly steamed, and enticing smells rose in waves of seductive warmth.
Food! When was the last time he ate! Rock hadn’t eaten a good meal since before he slept with Kimetta on Venus; this was like finding gold in a tar pit. The other prisoners behind him let out deep breaths.
“You think they’d bring us this far so they could poison us?” one skinny prisoner asked suspiciously. “This looks too good!”
And then came Sanders Bylor’s harsh voice: “No, it’ll be a whole lot worse than that, guys, when they get around to finishing us off. This is the good part, to make the bad part that much worse!”
Rock was already on his way to a place setting to the right. He forked up some meat. At his taste of the first mouthful, he smiled. “Pot roast—or synth-roast at least! I think I’m going to enjoy being on this prison ship for a while.” Of course, he said that because he suspected They listened.
Eleven
The meal wasn’t like any that Rock had ever eaten. Only the sight of the empty chairs at the table on the dais kept him from enjoying completely a meal that was made up of clams à la Mars Canal, chicken con Jupiter with garnish Ursa Majors, and octagonal-shaped meat-bun pastries à la Orion. Over his synth-coffee, Rock looked around at the others. They had finished, and were leaning back well satisfied.
“At least we’ve all got a good meal under our belts,” Rock said, eyeing the men, gauging them.
“You have,” the skinny, pock-faced prisoner growled. “I never seen anybody eat the way you do, kid, like every bite was heaven on a plate.”
Another prisoner said, “You probably haven’t got stomach trouble, like the rest of us. The stuff they give you in Venus Prison could kill a space pilot!”
Rock remarked, “I’ve eaten all of these fine dishes before, not too long ago, and they all tasted half as good.”
“A dinner like this at Jupiter Work Release Detention Center I could believe,” one of the older men remarked. He was shaking his head slowly. “On a prison ship—well, a dinner like this has got to be paid for in some way. And in heavy credits, too, if you ask me.”
Sanders said grimly, “I’d feel a little better if we’d had bread and water instead of being fattened up.”
Rock thought they were being too suspicious.
There was a sudden attention-getting cough from the direction of the dais. Corporal Dovine stood behind a table, his shiny skin reflecting the ceiling light. Two attractive girls in modest blue dresses were seating themselves in the other chairs. They folded their hands demurely before them, and modestly cast down their blue eyes. Neither was as pretty as Kimetta and Rock lost interest in them for the moment. A sharp intake of breath could be heard from the other men at this table though, and Rockson realized that they probably hadn’t been this close to any women in a long, long while.
Dovine said, “I’m going to assume that all of you are resentful at having been brought forcibly aboard. I ask you to remember a few facts about our destination before you go overboard in detesting it and those of us who live there. No doubt you’re all aware that life on an asteroid is always hard, that asteroids have been settled only because of overpopulation on larger planets. I wonder if you understand many of the problems involved in creating a livable space on an asteroid. I trust that the good meal you have been given will dispose you to thinking about this.”
He paused to look at each prisoner. His eyes might have narrowed when they reached Rock, but it was impossible to be sure. Probably a man such as Dovine would have preferred to die before showing his true feelings. His personality would have suited a hermit-stoic, but his work was always putting him in front of people. Had anybody ever laughed with Dovine? Touched the man? What makes a man like th
at?
“For example, there is no atmosphere on Esmerelda, as that word is generally understood. The air you will breathe is,” Dovine went on, “entirely artificial. There is no true sun, no moons. In order to survive with the benefits of technology all of you who will live on the asteroid must take pills that have the side effects of making your skin gleam as mine does. I have been told that the result—cosmetically—is considered bad by many of those on Earth and Venus, and even by some spacers.”
Rockson heard a muttered remark from Sanders but couldn’t make out the words. If Dovine heard anything, he gave no sign. He continued, “Life on this asteroid revolves itself into patterns of hard work.” Dovine continued, “I too will live there most of this year—and work hard. Even such amusements as we have aboard this ship are absent there. I think you can understand, those of you who have been imprisoned elsewhere, that amusements on this planetoid, because they are hard to come by, thus are cherished. Those who provide the scant entertainment are highly regarded.”
He stopped long enough to drink from a yellow cup emblazoned with twin comets. Perhaps it was strong alcohol, for he gasped a little before he continued.
“In your cases, all of you—and I assume that you would rather hear about yourselves—are to be sent there to work hard, as do all the many fine natives of this asteroid. If you succeed, honor and glory and a lifetime of freedom without want will be waiting for you.”
He paused, allowing time for somebody to ask what would happen if the prisoners failed. No one spoke. The answer was clear. All the same, Dovine, being the man he was, had to make the point clearly:
“If you fail, none of those desirable consequences will be yours. Not one, not even a longer lifetime. It will be over for your miserable lives. I hope I’ve made myself understood! You’ll have a chance, a perfectly fair chance to obtain what you want. But you must work for it.”
Sanders made a soft hissing sound between his teeth, more of a reflex than a comment.
