lifetime of conditioning brought some order to its agony-dazed mind, and it answered.
“I was ordered to the inner plots — to harvest.” The word-symbols came haltingly, but with sufficient clarity to be unmistakable, shocking as their implication was.
So the student had trusted slaves near a food supply! Perhaps that accounted for the two stripped planets.
“You went to harvest when a young fool like this orders it?”
“He was a master, and he gave the order. Many of us went; many of us have been going for years — and seldom returning. We did not wish it, Master, but he ordered it. What could we do?”
“You could have asked the first superintendent who came here whether it was better to disobey a Prime Order or a young master.”
“You are the first to come, Master, as far as I know. And the young master said we were not to speak of this order to anyone. It is only because you command me to speak that I do so now — that and the fact that there is little more that he could do to me, anyway.”
The overseer ignored the pointed closing sentence. “You say many of you have been ordered to do this, but few have returned from the errand? What happened to them? What happened to you?”
“They die. I did not know how; now I suppose it must be — this way.”
There was a pause, and the supervisor was moved to sarcasm. “I suppose they are struck by meteoric particles, as you seem to have been. Do slaves absorb personal characteristics such as stupidity from their masters? Could you not dodge the meteors?”
“No, not all of them. The region near the central furnace has more of such matter than any other place I have ever seen. Some pieces are iron, some are of other matter; but they cannot be avoided. They strike too hard. They cannot be absorbed in normal fashion, but simply boil off one's body material into space. The shock is so tremendous that I, at least, could do nothing toward recovering the material until it had dissipated beyond hope of salvage. That is the reason so much of my mass is gone; it was not merely starvation.
“Some of the other slaves did better than I — as I said, some of them have survived — but others did much worse. They would dive in toward the furnace, and their bodies would come falling back out in just about the shape I am.”
“And still he sends his slaves in to harvest?”
“Yes. We did not do too badly, actually, on the largest plots; but then he got interested in the others farther in. After all, they're hotter. He ventured in himself almost to the orbit of the plot that was destroyed — did you know that? — but came out very quickly and sent us on all such journeys thereafter.
“We — or, rather, those who preceded me — cleaned off the next inner plot, the fourth from the central furnace, fairly well, though the loss of slaves was high. Then he wanted to start on the third. I was one of the first to work on this project.
“I did not expect to live, of course, after what I had heard from the others; but the order came, and I let myself fall toward the sun. My orbit passed close to the greatest of the plots, which the master has been harvesting himself, and I hoped to strengthen myself with a little food from it as I passed.”
That confession showed how certain the slave felt of his own imminent death, as well as the state of demoralization into which the student's activities had permitted his servitors to fall.
“But I did not dare take any food when the time came,” the slave went on feebly. “As I passed through the region where the destroyed plot had been, drifting particles began to grow more numerous. At first there would be an occasional bit of stone or iron, which I could dodge easily. Then they came in twos and threes, and sometimes I would have to change an escape curve in mid-maneuver. Then they came in dozens and clusters, and at last I could avoid them no longer. I was struck several times in rapid succession.
“For a moment I almost turned back — I had never dreamed that anything could feel like that — and then I remembered the order and went on. And I was struck again, and again, and each time the order faded in my mind. I reached the orbit of the fourth planet, crossed it — and turned out again. It didn't seem to help; I was still being pelted. For a time I must have almost lost orientation; but at last I won out to a place near the orbit of the giant planet. That was where I remembered the order again.
“I had never disobeyed a master before, and I didn't know what to do, or say, or think. I'd start back toward the sun, and remember what had happened, and come back out. Then I'd remember the master, and head in again. I didn't dare go out in the cold where he would be waiting. I didn't dare dive back into that storm of rock and metal from the old fifth planet. But I had to do something. I couldn't float by the orbit of the giant planet forever. He would find me there sooner or later, and that would be worse than if I had come out to him. I had to think.”
That word struck the superintendent like a shock. The very idea of a slave's thinking-making a decision for himself concerning an action he was to perform — was repugnant to a member of the dominant race. They preferred to think of their slaves as mindless creatures relying on their masters for the necessities of existence — a comforting fiction that had been maintained for so many rotations of the Galaxy that its originators had come to believe it themselves. He had suspected that this particular slave must be an unusual specimen in many ways; now he was sure of it.
It was this that kept him silent while the creature paused, visibly collected its waning energies, and resumed the tale.
“I found what I thought was the answer at last. Since the tremendous number of particles must have come from the farm that had been blown up, it seemed likely that their orbits would be more or less controlled by that and would have at least a slight family resemblance. If I were to take up a powered, nearly elliptical path through that region, matching velocities with most of them instead of falling in a practically parabolic orbit across their path, I should be able to avoid the worst of the blows.”
Weakly, the shattered creature shuddered and paused, mustering strength to continue.
“I had about made up my mind to try this when I detected another slave inbound,” it went on, “and it occurred to me that two would be better than one. If one died, at least the other could learn from what had happened. I caught him easily since he was in free fall and explained the idea. He seemed willing to follow any suggestion, not thinking for himself at all, so he went with me.
“For a while it worked. We got inside the orbit of the fourth planet without being hit more than a few times each — that was harder on me than on him, because I'd already been hurt quite a lot on the first trip. Into that level, a great deal of the wreckage is formed of quite large particles, anyway; it's easy to see and avoid. Farther in, though, where most of the heavy stuff either never went or was cleared out by collision with the inner planets in a few million of their revolutions, there was much more extremely fine stuff. It actually seems to increase in concentration near the sun. Maybe radiation pressure has something to do with it.
“Anyway, we began to take a bad beating again. It was a little better than before. My idea must have had something to it, but it still wasn't good. The other slave wasn't used to it, either, and lost control of himself just as I had. We were almost to the third farm plot then, but he must have gone completely blind from pain. He apparently never sensed the food so near by — that plot is incredibly rich.
“He went blundering squarely into another, useless plot that accompanies the third one in its orbit; an object too small to hold culture material in that temperature range, though still several hundred times the diameter of my body or his. He rammed it hard, and the energy involved in matching velocities was more than enough to volatilize his mass completely. The object was pretty well scarred with impact craters, but he made one of the neatest.
“I was close enough then to the third planet to start harvesting — at least, I would have been under normal circumstances. I tried, but couldn't concentrate on one course of action long enough. The bombardment was endless. There are simply no words to describe what it was like. I was not twenty of its own diameters from the most amazingly rich farm plot I have ever seen, and was not able to touch a bit of it!
“It had been so long since it was harvested that substances completely strange to me had developed in its surface layers. There were carbohydrates, of course, and light-element oxides and carbonates which anyone would expect; but there were proteins more fantastically complex than anyone could well imagine. Their emanations nearly drove me wild. They must have been building up and breaking down at incredible speed at that temperature — It had quite an atmosphere out, as a result of boiling off surface matter to use up incoming radiant energy — and they had evolved to an unheard-of degree. And I couldn't get a taste!
“I could sense them, though, and in spite of the pain of the meteor bombardment, I stayed near the planet, vacillating as I had done before, for a couple of hundred of its trips around the Sun. That may seem like a short
