feet tall was waiting for him. It was humanoid but repulsive and carried a whip, which it instantly put to work driving Jerry before it, tossing a sack of credits back over its shoulder as it left. Jerry moved along quickly enough under this impetus and soon after found himself chained to a bar in the metal wall between two other slaves. They looked at him apathetically as is the slave's wont, but he took a greater interest in them.
'How do you do,' he said to the slave on his right, a creature who was very humanoid, though bright red even to the eyeballs, and who had what might be called a normal left hand – if seven fingers are normal – but instead of a right hand the arm had a bony sword from the elbow down. This sword looked hard and efficient and rather sharp so that when the creature only answered with a guttural snarl and a jab at Jerry with the sword, he adroitly dodged aside and caught the red jaw of the other cleanly with his fist and laid him out for the count.
'Very neatly done,' a deep voice resounded from beside him. 'One should never waste time talking with the red swordsmen of Vindaloo. They have tiny minds and only know fighting, whereas my people of Bachtria are civilized and intelligent. May I introduce myself – I am called Pipa Pipa, but you may call me Pipa if that pleases you.'
The individual who spoke was chained to Jerry's left. A fat, green, dampish sort of alien with a great white belly. His eyes protruded from his head, and his mouth slashed across the entire width of his great head. He must have come from a water world because his knobby fingers were connected by webs.
'My pleasure,' Jerry said. 'My name is Jerry Courteney.'
'Then I may call you Courteney?'
'Jerry would be better.'
'I understand,' Pipa croaked. 'Hist, the overseer comes, we must not be seen talking or it means the lash.' He sighed deeply. 'Not that it matters. Everything means the lash.'
He sighed again as the whip fell across his back, and the overseer went down the line lashing right and left.
'On your feet, you scum of the universe,' he bawled hoarsely with rough glee. 'We have arrived at your new home. You'll love it here. The DnDrf mines of Haggis!' A sound, something between a moan and a groan, emanated from the filthy ranks, for this was known as the end of the road for slaves, from which none ever returned. With reluctance they rattled their chains as they were unlocked and driven toward the door.
'This is the end!' Pipa groaned. 'I shall never see my home pond again.'
Jerry wanted to give him some measure of cheer, but he dared not, not yet. The mind shield in his sinus prevented his brain being read like an open book, but he knew that all the others could have their thoughts tapped at any time. He must keep his secret safe! The time would come. . . .
Whips cracking like lightning, the slavers drove the hapless slaves down the gangway and into the frigid Artic wastes of Haggis. Of course, they were frigid by Haggisian standards, which meant the temperature was around 100 degrees by Fahrenheit standards, which is bearable, though not very comfortable. As each slave emerged, the slavers stripped him and – or her of all their clothing so they could survive in the dry heat. Jerry's Hush Puppies were cut from his feet with the slash of a blade, and his sundered tie-died Levi's followed them. All that remained was his jockstrap, and he was ready to fight to the death to keep this – and not only for the mini-mind shields – but because it was bright purple, the slavers thought it was part of his body (which shows you how slavers think) and they pushed him on with the others. Ahead were the mines.
It was a scene of utter desolation. All about lay a sulfur desert, cooking and shimmering in the heated air. Above hung the great blue sun of Sirius, frying brains in their brain-pans and shooting out hard radiation to batter genes and start the mutations mutating. Ahead lay a mountain range, and set into the nearest mountain was a solid collapsium* door just six feet high. Above this door was engraved in letters carved out of the solid rock 'Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here' or something like that.
[* Collapsium is an artificial material made of atoms with their binding energy reduced so they sort of collapse in upon themselves and are dense and heavy and that kind of thing.]
Jerry could not be sure because he could not read Haggisian, but it seemed a reasonable guess. The whips cracked even more fiercely as they drove the reluctant slaves toward this grim portal.
'Now hear this,' the master slaver bellowed through a loudhailer from a position on a rock where he could survey the gathered, trembling, fear-infested slaves, who were quickly whip-cracked into silence.
'I'm only gonna tell this to you just once, so cock your ears and bend your antenna or whatever. This here is the mine I been telling you about. That door there is the first of seventeen just like it. The drill is that it opens, one of you slobs goes in, then it closes before the next door opens. You go through that etc. etc. until you are in the mine. It is my poisonal suggestion that you step lively because three seconds after a door opens a fifty- sixthousand-volt current is sent through the compartment you will be standing in. So in you go, crying and weeping, but in you go. Once inside, you will find more slaves working away at mining the DnDrf. The Hagg-Loos don't bother about how the stuff is mined, and they don't care neither. Grinding machines inside grind it to a fine powder, and it is pumped out through a one-inch pipe. One ton of it a day. As long as that ton comes out every day, food and water are pumped in through other pipes. No workee, no eatee, as the expression goes. So do your best, work for your chow, resign yourself to a last look at the sun for eternity, and off you go into endless darkness.'
The whips cracked again as the outer door opened, and the first slave was booted into position. One by one the others followed until it was Jerry's turn, and he took a last despairing look at the burning plain, the slaver ship, the insulated buildings where the Hagg-Loos were; then in he went. With an unoiled screeching the portal closed behind him, and darkness descended.
'I'm doing it for you, Chuck,' he said staunchly, then sniffed and wiped his nose with the back of his hand. When the next door opened, he skittered through quickly as he heard the onrushing 56,000 volts zinging through the cables toward him.
It was a nightmare voyage with an even more nightmarish ending. As Jerry stepped through the last door, a great, hairy, ugly, brutal monster of a slave caught him in the back of the neck with a club (that looked suspiciously like a human femur), sending him sprawling. But surprised as he had been by the sudden and unprovoked attack, Jerry's reflexes were still superb, and he rolled with the blow so it did not stun him, fell and twisted and caught the brute's shin with a solid kick that knocked him to the ground.
Then, before the foul creature could recover, he dived on it and clutched hard with a Japanese headlock that renders the victim unconscious in five seconds and dead in ten. He applied full pressure. The thing tried to speak through its filthy beard. At the end of four seconds it gasped, 'Urgh . . . Jerry. . . don't. . .' and instantly became limply unconscious on the fifth second. Jerry thought about this for a few seconds more, wondering how the creature knew his name. After eight seconds had passed, he looked at it more closely, and at the end of nine seconds he released the pressure so that blood reentered the thing's brain, and it did not die. Its grimy, bloodshot eyes opened tremblingly, and it glared up with bestial hatred.
'Chuck, that is you, isn't it?' Jerry asked. The thing blinked fuzzily and muttered, 'Me name Chuck. . . how you know name?'
'Poor lad,' Jerry said, helping him to his feet and dusting him off. 'They have been walking through his brain with spiked boots, and they shall pay for it, and someday, I promise, he will be restored to full mental and physical health. Do you understand, Chuck?'
'Let's go eat. Chuckee hungry.'
Jerry patted the Chuck-thing on the shoulder and led him toward the chow trough, where the others were guzzling, concealing his deepest feelings at this terrible fate that had struck his best friend. He felt no desire to compete with the others for the thin gruel that they lapped up by the handfuls. It looked and smelt like mashed mangelwurzels. In fact, it probably was mashed mangel-wurzels; these fiends would stop at nothing. So, while Chuck dived into the swill, Jerry looked around at the demoniac scene – and that was a good word for it, for the cave was dimly lit by flickering flames that leaped from niches scraped in the stone walls. These fires were fueled with some sort of dark lumps; he noticed this when one of the slaves dragged over a bucket and dumped some of them on a fire. A loud creaking and groaning filled the air as other slaves worked hard at the great handles of a grinding machine. This was fed with chunks of some black substance wheeled up on carts. The mill reduced it to a fine powder which was dumped into a funnel and vanished down a pipe.
'DnDrf!' he gasped aloud, the terrible drug that drove aliens mad, then ate away their chitin. Reluctantly he sidled up for a closer look and kicked at a glistening chunk that had dropped from the mill.
'You know,' he mused to himself. 'If I did not know that this was the hideous drug called DnDrf, I would say it is nothing but a lump of coal.'
