Next of Kin Page 10

  He trapped a small group of them in a corner of the yard and demanded with ill-concealed irritation, “Any of you speak Terran?”

  They looked at the sky, the wall, the ground, or at each other and remained silent.

  “Anyone know Centaurian?”

  No answer.

  “Well, how about Cosmoglotta?”

  No reply.

  Riled, he walked away and tried another bunch. No luck. Within an hour he had fired questions at two or three hundred without getting a single response. It puzzled him completely. Their manner was not contemptuous or hostile but something else. He tried to analyse it, came to the conclusion that for an unknown reason they were wary; they were afraid to speak to him.

  Sitting on a stone step he watched them until a shrill whistle signalled that exercise-time was over. The Rigellians formed up in long lines in readiness to march back to their quarters. Leeming’s guards gave him a kick in the pants and chivvied him to his cell.

  Temporarily he dismissed the problem of unsociable allies. After dark was the time for thinking because then there was nothing else to do. He wanted to spend the remaining hours of daylight in studying the picture books and getting well ahead with the local lingo while appearing to lay far behind. Fluency might prove an advantage someday. Too bad that he had never learned Rigellian, for instance.

  So he applied himself fully to the task until print and pictures ceased to be visible. He ate his evening portion of mush after which he lay on the bench, closed his eyes, set his mind to work.

  In all of his hectic life he’d met no more than about twenty Rigellians. Never once had he visited their three closely bunched solar systens. What little he knew of them was hearsay evidence. It was said that their standard of intelligence was good, they were technologically efficient, they had been consistently friendly toward men of Earth since first contact nearly a thousand years ago. Fifty per cent of them spoke Cosmoglotta, about one per cent knew the Terran tongue.

  Therefore if the average held up several hundreds of those met in the yard should have been able to converse with him in one language or another. Why had they steered clear of him and maintained silence? And, why had they been mighty unanimous about it?

  Determined to solve this puzzle he invented, examined and discarded a dozen theories, all with sufficient flaws to strain the credulity. It was about two hours before he hit upon the obvious solution.

  These Rigellians were prisoners deprived of liberty for an unknown number of years to come. Some of them must have seen an Earthman at one time or another. But all of them knew that in the Combine’s ranks were a few species superficially humanlike. They couldn’t swear to it that a Terran really was a Terran and they were taking no chances on him being a spy, an ear of the enemy planted among them to listen for plots.

  That in turn meant something else when a big mob of prisoners become excessively suspicious of a possible traitor in their midst it’s because they have something to hide. Yes that was it! He slapped his knee in delight. The Rigellians had an escape scheme in process of hatching and meanwhile were taking no chances.

  They had been here plenty long enough to become at least bored, at most desperate, and seek the means to make a break. Having found a way out, or being in process of making one, they were refusing to take the risk of letting the plot be messed up by a stranger of doubtful origin. Now his problem was that of how to overcome their suspicions, gain their confidence and get himself included in whatever was afoot. To this he gave considerable thought.

  Next day, at the end of exercise-time, a guard swung a heavy leg and administered the usual kick Leeming promptly hauled off and punched him clean on the snout. Four guards jumped in and gave the culprit a thorough going over. They did it good and proper, with zest and effectiveness that no onlooking Rigellian could possibly mistake for a piece of dramatic play-acting. It was an object lesson and intended as such. The limp body was taken out of the yard and lugged upstairs, its face a mess of blood.

  SEVEN

  It was a week before Leeming was fit enough to reappear in the yard. The price of confidence had proved rough, tough and heavy and his features were still an ugly sight. He strolled through the crowd, ignored as before, chose a soft spot in the sun and sat.

  Soon afterward a prisoner sprawled tiredly on the ground a couple of yards away, watched distant guards and spoke in little more than a whisper.

  “Where d’you come from?”

  “Terra.”

  “How’d you get here?”

  Leeming told him briefly.

  “How’s the war going?”

  “We’re pushing them back slowly but surely. But it’ll take a long time to finish the job.”

  “How long do you suppose?”

  “I don’t know. It’s anyone’s guess.” Leeming eyed him curiously. “What brought your bunch here?”

  “We’re not combatants but civilian colonists. Our government placed advance parties, all male, on four new planets that were ours by right of discovery. Twelve thousand of us altogether.” The Rigellian paused while he looked carefully around, noted the positions of various guards. “The Combine descended on us in force. That was two years ago. It was easy. We weren’t prepared for trouble, weren’t adequately armed, didn’t even know that a war was on.”

  “They grabbed your four planets?”

  “You bet they did. And laughed in our faces.”

  Leeming nodded understanding, Cynical and ruthless claim-jumping had been the original cause of the fracas now extended across a great slice of the galaxy. On one planet a colony had put up an heroic resistance and died to the last man. The sacrifice had fired a blaze of fury, the Allies had struck back and were still striking good and hard.

  “Twelve thousands, you said. Where are the others?”

  “Scattered around in prisons like this one. You certainly picked a choice dump on which to sit out the war. The Combine had made this its chief penal planet. It’s far from the fighting front, unlikely ewer to be discovered. The local lifeform isn’t much good for space-battles but plenty good enough to hold what its allies have captured. They’re throwing up big jails all over the world. If the war goes on long enough this cosmic dump will become solid with prisoners.”

  “So your crowd has been here about two years?”

  “Sure have and it seems more like ten.”

  “And done nothing about it?”

  “Nothing much,” agreed the Rigellian. “Just enough to get forty of us shot for trying.”

  “Sorry,” said Leeming sincerely.

  “Don’t let it bother you. I know exactly how you feel. The first few weeks are the worst. The idea of being pinned down for keeps can drive you crazy unless you learn to be philosophical about it.” He mused awhile, indicated a heavily. built guard patrolling by the farther wall. “A few days ago that lying swine boasted that already there are two hundred thousand Allied prisoners on this planet and added that by this time next year there would be two millions. I hope he never lives to see it.”

  “I’m getting out of here,” said Leeming.

  “How?”

  “I don’t know yet. But I’m getting out. I’m not going to stay here and rot.” He waited in the hope of some comment about others feeling the same way, perhaps evasive mention of a coming break, a hint that he might be invited to join in.

  Standing, up, the Rigellian murmured, “Well, I wish you luck. You’ll need all you can get.”

  He ambled away, having betrayed nothing. A whistle blew, the guards shouted; “Merse, faplaps! Amash!” And that was that.

  Over, the next four weeks he had frequent conversations with the same Rigellian and about twenty others, picking up odd items of information but finding them peculiarly evasive whenever the subject of freedom came up. They were friendly, in fact cordial, but remained determinedly tightmouthed.

  One day he was having a surreptitious chat and asked, “Why does everyone insist on talking to me secretively and in whispers? The g
uards don’t seem to care how much you gab to one another.”

  “You haven’t yet been cross-examined. If in the mean-time they notice that we’ve had plenty to say to you they will try to force out of you everything we’ve said—with, particular reference to ideas on escape.”

  Leeming immediately pounced upon the lovely word. “Ah escape, that’s all there is to live for right now. If anyone is thinking of making a bid maybe I can he1p them and they can help me. I’m a competent space-pilot and fact is worth something.”

  The other cooled at once. “Nothing doing.”

  “Why not?”

  “We’ve been behind walls a long time and have been taught many things that you’ve yet to learn.”

  “Such as?”

  “We’ve discovered at bitter cost that escape attempts fail when too many know what is going on. Some planted spy betrays us. Or some selfish fool messes things up by pushing in at the wrong moment.”

  “I am neither a spy nor a fool. I’m certainly not enough of an imbecile to spoil my own chance of breaking free.”

  “That may be,” the Rigellian conceded. “But imprisonment creates its own special conventions. One firm rule we have established here is that an escape-plot is the exclusive property of those who concocted it and only they can make the attempt by that method. Nobody else is told about it. Nobody else knows until the resulting hullabaloo starts going. Secrecy is a protective screen that would-be escapers must maintain at all costs. They’ll give nobody a momentary peek through it, not even a Terran and not even a qualified space-pilot.”

  “So I’m strictly on my own?”

  “Afraid so: You’re on your own in any case. We sleep in dormitories, fifty to a room. You’re in a cell all by yourself. You’re in no position to help with anything.”

  “I can damned well help myself,” Leeming retorted angrily.

  And it was his turn to walk away.

  He’d been in the pokey just thirteen weeks when the tutor handed him a metaphorical firecracker. Finishing a session distinguished only by Leeming’s dopiness and slowness to learn, the tutor scowled at him and gave forth to some point “You are pleased to wear the cloak of idiocy. But am I an idiot too? I do not think so! I am not deceived-you are far more fluent than you pretend. In seven days’ time I shall report to the Commandant that you are ready for examination.”

  “How’s that again?” asked Leeming, putting on a baffled frown.

  “You will be questioned by the Commandant seven days hence.”

  “I have already been questioned by Major Klavith.”

  “That was verbal, Klavith is dead and we have no record of what you told him.”

  Slam went the door. Came the gruel and a jaundiced lump of something unchewable. The local catering department seemed to be obsessed by the edibility of a rat’s buttocks. Exercise-time followed.

  “I’ve been told they’re going to put me through the mill a week from now.”

  “Don’t let that scare you,” advised the Rigellian. “They would as soon kill you as spit in the sink. But one thing keeps them in check.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The Allies are holding a stack of prisoners too.”

  “Yes, but what they don’t know they can’t grieve over.”

  “There’ll be more grief for the entire Zangastan species if the victor finds himself expected to exchange very live prisoners for very dead corpses.”

  “You’ve made a point there,” agreed Leeming. “Maybe it would help if I had nine feet of rape to dangle suggestively in front of the Commandant.”

  “It would help if I had a very large bottle of vitx and a shapely female to stroke my hair,” sighed the Rigellian.

  “If you can feel that way after two years of semi-starvation what are you like on a full diet?”

  “It’s all in the mind,” the Rigellian said. “I like to think of what might have been.”

  The whistle again. More intensive study while daylight lasted. Another bowl of ersatz porridge. Darkness and a few small stars peeping through the barred slot high up. Time seemed to be standing still, as it does with a high wall around it.

  He lay on the bench and produced thoughts like bubbles from a fountain. No place, positively no place is absolutely impregnable. Given brawn and brains, time and patience, there’s always a way in or out. Escapees shot down as they bolted had chosen the wrong time and wrong place, or the right time but the wrong place, or the right place but the wrong time. Or they had neglected brawn in favour of brains, a common fault of the overcautious. Or they’d neglected brains in favour of, brawn, a fault of the reckless.

  With eyes closed he carefully reviewed the situation. He was in a cell with rock walls of granite hardness at least four feet thick. The only openings were a narrow gap blocked by five massive steel bars, also an armour-plated door in constant view of patrolling guards.

  On his person he had no hack-saw, no lock-pin, no implement of any sort, nothing but the bedraggled clothes in which he reposed. If he pulled the bench to pieces and somehow succeeded in doing it unheard he’d acquire several large lumps of wood, a dozen six-inch nails and a couple of steel bolts. None of that junk would serve to open the door or cut the window-bars. And there was no other material available.

  Outside stretched a brilliantly illuminated gap fifty yards wide that must be crossed to gain freedom. Then a smooth stone wall forty feet high, devoid of handholds. Atop the wall an apex much too sharp to give grip to the feet while stepping over an alarm-wire that would set the sirens going if either touched or cut.

  The great wall completely encircled the entire prison. It was octagonal in shape and topped at each angle by a watch-tower containing guards, floodlights and guns. To get out, the wall would have to be surmounted right under the noses of itchy-fingered watchers, in bright light, without touching the wire. That wouldn’t be the end of it either; beyond the wall was another illuminated area also to be crossed. An unlucky last-lapper could get over the wall by some kind of miracle only to be shot to bloody shreds during his subsequent dash for darkness.

  Yes, the whole set-up had the professional touch of those who knew what to do to keep prisoners in prison. Escape over the wall was well nigh impossible though not completely so. If somebody got out of his cell or dormitory armed with a rope and grapnel, and if he had a daring confederate who’d break into the power-room and switch off everything at exactly the right moment, he might make it. Up the wall and over the dead, unresponsive, alarm-wire in total darkness.

  In a solitary cell there is no rope, no grapnel, nothing capable of being adapted as either. There is no desperate and trustworthy confederate. Even if these things had been available he’d have considered such a project as near suicidal.

  If he pondered once the most remote possibilities and took stock of the minimum resources needed, he pondered them a hundred times. By long after midnight he’d been beating his brains sufficiently hard to make them come up with anything, including ideas that were slightly mad.

  For example: he could pull a plastic button from his jacket, swallow it and hope that the result would get him a transfer to hospital. True, the hospital was within the prison’s confines but it might offer better opportunity to escape. Then he thought a second time, decided that an intestinal blockage would not guarantee his removal elsewhere. They might do no more than force a powerful purgative down his neck and thus add to his present discomforts.

  As dawn broke he arrived at a final conclusion. Thirty, forty or fifty Rigellians working in a patient, determined group might tunnel under the wall and both illuminated areas and get away. But he had one resource and one only. That was guile. There was nothing else he could employ. He let a loud groan and complained to himself, “So I’ll have to use both my heads!”

  This inane remark percolated through the innermost recesses of his mind and began to ferment like yeast. After a while he sat up startled, gazed at what he could see of the brightening sky and said in a tone approaching a
yelp, “Yes, sure, that’s it—both heads!”

  Stewing the idea over and over again, Leeming decided by exercise-time that it was essential to have a gadget. A crucifix or a crystal ball provides psychological advantages too good to miss. His gadget could be of any shape, size or design, made of any material so long as it was visibly and undeniably a contraption. Moreover, its potency would be greater if not made from items obtainable within his cell such as parts of his clothing or pieces of the bench. Preferably it should be constructed of stuff from somewhere else and should convey the irresistible suggestion of a strange, unknown technology.

  He doubted whether the Rigellians could help. Twelve hours per day they slaved in the prison’s workshops, a fate that he would share after he’d been questioned and his aptitudes defined. The Rigellians made military pants and jackets, harness and boots, a small range of light engineering and electrical components. They detested producing for the enemy but their choice was a simple one: work or starve.

  According to what he’d been told they hadn’t the remotest chance of smuggling out of the workshops anything really useful such as a knife, chisel, hammer or hacksaw blade. At the end of, each work period the slaves were paraded and none allowed to break ranks until every machine had been checked, every loose tool accounted for and locked away.

  The first fifteen minutes of the mid-day break he spent searching the yard for any loose item that might somehow be turned to advantage. He wandered around with his gaze fixed on the ground like a worried kid seeking a lost coin. The only things he found were a couple of pieces of wood four inches square by one inch thick and these he slipped into his pocket without having the vaguest nation of what he intended to do with them.

  Finishing the hunt, he squatted by the wall, had a whispered chat with a couple of Rigellians. His mind wasn’t on the conversation and the pair mooched off when a curious guard came near. Later another Rigellian edged up to him.

  “Earthman, are you still going to get out of here?”