Certainly the prospect was frightening. I could feel sweat on my face. My hands were cold. But I’d follow him. Before God, I’d follow him!
Still—“Three of us?” I jeered. “Three of us against a couple of hundred warriors?”
“There’ll be more on our side,” he said impassively. After a moment’s silence he went on: “Naturally, we’ll have to watch ourselves. Only two or three of them know Anglic. I’ll point them out to you. And of course our work is under surveillance. But the watchers are ignorant. I think you have the brains to fool them.”
“I—” Kathryn stood, reaching for words. “I can’t believe it,” she said at last. “A naval vessel in this condition—”
“Things were better under the old Baldic conquerors,” admitted Manuel. “The kings who forged the. League out of a hundred planets still in barbaric night, savages who’d learned to build spaceships and man atomblasts and little else. But even they succeeded only because there was no real opposition. The Commonwealth society was rotten, corrupt, torn apart by civil wars, its leadership a petrified bureaucracy, its military forces scattered over a thousand restless planets, its people ready to buy peace rather than fight. No wonder the League drove everything before it!
“But after the first sack of Terra fifteen years ago, the barbarians split up. The forceful early rulers were dead, and their sons were warring over an inheritance they didn’t know how to rule. The League is divided into two hostile regions now, and I don’t know how many splinter groups. Their old organization is shot to hell.
“Sol didn’t rally in time. It was still under the decadent Commonwealth government. So one branch of the Baldics has now managed to conquer our big planets. But the fact that they’ve been content to raid and loot the inner worlds instead of occupying them and administering them decently shows the decay of their own society. Given the leadership, we could still throw them out of the Solar System and go on to overrun their home territories. Only the leadership hasn’t been forthcoming.”
It was a harsh, angry lecture, and I winced and felt resentment within myself. “Damn it, we’ve fought,” I said.
“And been driven back and scattered.” His heavy mouth lifted in a sneer. “Because there .hasn’t been a chief who understood strategy and organization, and who could put heart into his men.”
“I suppose,” I said sarcastically, “that you’re that chief.”
His answer was flat and calm and utterly assured. “Yes.”
In the days the followed I got to know more about Manuel Argos. He was never loath to talk about himself.
His race, I suppose, was primarily Mediterranean-Anatolian, with more than a hint of Negro and Oriental, but I think there must have been some forgotten Nordic ancestor who looked out of those ice-blue eyes. A blend of all humanity, such as was not uncommon these days.
His mother had been a day laborer on Venus. His father, though he was never sure, had been a space prospector who died young and never saw his child. When he was thirteen he shipped out for Sirius and had not been in the Solar System since. Now, at forty, he had been spaceman, miner, dock walloper, soldier in the civil wars and against the Baldics, small-time politician on the colony planets, hunter; machinist, and a number of darker things.
Somewhere along the line, he had found time to do an astonishing amount of varied reading, but his reliance was always more on his own senses and reason and intuition than on books. He had been captured four years ago in a Gorzuni raid on Alpha Centauri, and had set himself to study his captors as cold-bloodedly as he had studied his own race.
Yes, I learned a good deal about him but nothing of him. I don’t think any living creature ever did. He was not one to open his heart. He went wrapped in loneliness and dreams all his days. Whether the chill of his manner went into his soul, and the rare warmth was only a mask, or whether he was indeed a yearning tenderness sheathed in armor of indifference, no one will ever be sure. And he made a weapon out of that uncertainty. A man never knew what to await from him and was thus forever strained in his presence, open to his will.
“He’s a strange sort,” said Kathryn once, when we were alone. “I haven’t decided whether he’s crazy or a genius.”
“Maybe both, darling,” I suggested, a little irritably. I didn’t like to be dominated.
“Maybe. But what is sanity, then?” She shivered and crept close to me. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
The ship wallowed on her way, through a bleak glory of stars, alone in light-years of emptiness with her cargo of hate and fear and misery and dreams. We worked, and waited, and the slow days passed.
—The laboring old engines had to be fixed. Some show had to be made for the gray-furred giants who watched us in the flickering gloom of the power chambers. We wired and, welded and bolted, tested and tore down and rebuilt, sweltering in the heat of bursting atoms that rolled from the radiation shields, deafened by the whine of generators and thud of misadjusted turbines and, the deep uneven drone of the great converters. We fixed Manuel’s sabotage until the ship ran almost smoothly. Later we would on some pretext throw the whole thing out of kilter again. “Penelope’s tapestry,” said Manuel, and I wondered that a space tramp could make the classical allusion.
“What are we waiting for?” I asked him once. The din of the generator we were overhauling smothered our words. “When do we start our mutiny?”
He glanced up at me. The light of our trouble lamp gleamed off the sweat on his ugly pockmarked face. “At the proper time,” he said coldly. “For one thing, it’ll be while the captain is on his next dope jag.”
Meanwhile two of the slaves had tried a revolt of their own. When an incautious guard came too near the door of the mens’ cell one of them reached out and snatched his gun from the holster and shot him down. Then he tried to blast the lock off the bars. When the Gorzuni came down to gas him his fellow battled them with fists and teeth till the rebels were knocked out. Both were flayed living in the presence of the other captives.
Kathryn couldn’t help crying after we were back in our cabin. She buried her face against my breast and wept till I thought she would never stop weeping. I held her close and mumbled whatever foolish words came to me.
“They had it coming,” said Manuel. There was contempt in his voice. “The fools. The blind stupid fools! They could at least have held the guard as a hostage and tried to bargain. No, they had to be heroes. They had to shoot him down. Now the example has frightened all of the others. Those men deserved being skinned.”
After a moment, he added thoughtfully, “Still, if the fear-emotion aroused in these slaves can be turned to hate it may prove useful. The shock has at least jarred them from their apathy.”
“You’re a heartless bastard,” I said tonelessly.
“I have to be, seeing that everyone else chooses to be brainless. These aren’t times for the tender-minded, you. This is an age of dissolution and chaos, such as has often happened in history, and only a person who first accepts the realities of the situation can hope to do much about them. We don’t live in a cosmos where perfection is possible or even desirable, We have to make our compromises and settle for the goals we have some chance of attaining.” To Kathryn, sharply: “Now stop that snuffling. I have to think.”
She gave him a wide-eyed tear-blurred look.
“It gives you a hell of an appearance.” He grinned nastily. “Nose red, face swollen, a bad case of hiccoughs. Nothing pretty about crying, you.”
She drew a shuddering breath and there was anger flushing her cheeks. Gulping back the sobs, she drew away from me and turned her back on him.
“But I stopped her,” whispered Manuel to me with a brief impishness.
The endless, meaningless days had worn into a timelessness where I wondered if this ship were not the Flying Dutchman, outward bound forever with a crew of devils and the damned. It was no use trying to hurry Manuel, I gave that up and slipped into the round of work and waiting. Now I think that part of his delay was on purpose, that he wanted to grind the last hope out of the slaves and leave only a hollow yearning for vengeance. They’d fight better that way.
I hadn’t much chance to be alone with Kathryn. A brief stolen kiss, a whispered word in the dimness of the engine room, eyes and hands touching lightly across a rusty, greasy machine. That was all. When we returned to
