Gordon Dickson - 8 Short Stories and Novellas Part 7

"Kill me?" he choked. "You think that's going to make me help you? The hope of getting killed?"

They looked at him almost compa.s.sionately. "You may find," said the doctor, "that death may be some-thing you will want very much, only for the purpose' of putting a close to a life you've become weary of. Look,"--he gestured around him--"you are locked up beyond any chance of ever escaping.

This cage will be illuminated night and day; and you will be locked in it. When we leave, the bridge will be with-drawn, and the only thing crossing that moat--which is filled with acid--will be a mechanical arm which will extend across and through a small opening to bring you food twice a day. Beyond the moat, there will be two armed guards on duty at all times, but even they cannot open the door to this build-ing.

That is opened by remote control from outside, only after the operator has checked on his vision screen to make sure all is as it should be inside here."

He gestured through the bars, across the moat and through a window in the outer wall.

"Look out there," he said.

Eldridge looked. Out beyond, and surrounding the building, the shallow trench no longer lay still and empty under the sun. It now spouted a vertical wall of flickering, weaving dis-tortion, like a barrier of heat waves.

"That is our final defense, the ultimate in destructiveness that our science provides us--it would literally burn you to nothingness, if you touched it. It will be turned off only forseconds, and with elaborate precautions, to let guards in, or out."

Eldridge looked back in, to see them all watching him.

"We do this," said the doctor, "not only because we may discover you to be more dangerous than you seem, but to impress you with your helplessness so that you may be more ready to help us. Here you are, and here you will stay."

"And you think," demanded Eldridge hoa.r.s.ely, "that this's all going to make me want to help you?"

"Yes," said the doctor, "because there's one thing more that enters into the situation. You were literally taken apart physi-cally, after your capture; and as literally put back togetheragain. We are advanced in the organic field, and certain things are true of all life forms. I supervised the work on you, myself. You will find that you are, for all practical purposes immortal and irretrievably sane. This will be your home forever, and you will find that neither death nor insanity will provide you away of escape."

They turned and filed out. From some remote control, the cage door was swung shut. He heard it click and lock. The bridge was withdrawn from the moat. A screen lit up and awoolly face surveyed the building's interior.

The building's door opened. They went out; and the guardstook up their patrol, around the rim in opposite directions, keep- ing their eyes on Eldridge and their weapons ready in their hands. The building's door closed again. Outside, the flickering wall blinked out for a second and then returned again.

The silence of a warm, summer, mountain afternoon descended upon the building. The footsteps of the guards madeshuffling noises on their path around the rim. The bars enclosedhim.

Eldridge stood still, holding the bars in both hands and looking out.

He could not believe it.

He could not believe it as the days piled up into weeks and the weeks into months. But as the seasons s.h.i.+fted and theyear came around to a new year, the realities of his situa-tion began to soak into him like water into a length of dock piling. For outside, Time could be seen at its visible and regular motion; but in his prison, there was no Time.

Always, the lights burned overhead, always the guards paced about him. Always the barrier burned beyond the building, the meals came swinging in on the end of a long metal arm ex-tended over the moat and through a small hatchway which opened automatically as the arm approached; regularly, twice weekly, the doctor came and checked him over, briefly, im-personally-and went out again with the changing of the guard.

He felt the unbearableness of his situation, like a hand winding tighter and tighter day by day the spring of tension within him. He took to pacing feverishly up and down the cage. He went back and forth, back and forth, until the room swam. He lay awake nights, staring at the endless glow of illumination from the ceiling. He rose to pace again.

The doctor came and examined him. He talked to Eldridge, but Eldridge would not answer. Finally there came a day when everything split wide open and he began to howl and bang on the bars. The guards were frightened and called the doctor. The doctor came, and with two others, entered the cage and strapped him down. They did something odd that hurt at the back of his neck and he pa.s.sed out.

When he opened his eyes again, the first thing he saw was the doctor's woolly face, looking down at him-he had learned to recognize that countenance in the same way a sheep-herder eventually comes to recognize individual sheep in his flock. Eldridge felt very weak, but calm.

"You tried hard--" said the doctor. "But you see, you didn't make it. There's no way outthat way for you."

Eldridge smiled.

"Stop that!" said the doctor sharply. "You aren't fooling us. We know you're perfectly rational."

Eldridge continued to smile.

"What do you think you're doing?" demanded the doctor. Eldridge looked happily up at him.

"I'm going home," he said.

"I'm sorry," said the doctor. "You don't convince me." He turned and left. Eldridge turned over on his side and dropped off into the first good sleep he'd had in months.

In spite of himself, however, the doctor was worried. He had the guards doubled, but nothing happened. The days slipped into weeks again and nothing happened. Eldridge was ap-parently fully recovered. He still spent a great deal of time walking up and down his cage and grasping the bars as if to pull them out of the way before him-but the frenzy of his earlier pacing was gone. He had also moved his cot over next to the small, two-foot square hatch that opened to admit the mechanical arm bearing his meals, and would lie there, withhis face pressed against it, waiting for the food to be delivered. The doctor felt uneasy, and spoke to the commander privately about it.

"Well," said the commander, "just what is it you suspect?"

"I don't know," confessed the doctor. "It's just that I seehim more frequently than any of us. Perhaps I've become sensitized-but he bothers me."

"Bothers you?"

"Frightens me, perhaps. I wonder if we've taken the right way with him."

"We took the only way." The commander made the little gesture and sound that was his race's equivalent of a sigh. "We must have data. What do you do when you run across a possibly dangerous virus, doctor? You isolate it-for study, until you know. It is not possible, and too risky to try to study his race at close hand, so we study him. That's all we're doing. You lose Objectivity, doctor. Would you like to take a short vacation?"

"No," said the doctor, slowly. "No. But he frightens me."

Still, time went on and nothing happened. Eldridge pacedhis cage and lay on his cot, face pressed to the bars of thehatch , and staring at the outside world. Another year pa.s.sed; and another. The double guards were withdrawn. The doctor came reluctantly to the conclusion that the human had at last accepted the fact of his confinement and felt growing withinhim that normal sort of sympathy that feeds on familiarity.

He tried to talk to Eldridge on his regularly scheduled visits, but Eldridge showed little interest in conversation. He lay on the cot watching the doctor as the doctor examined him, with something in his eyes as if he looked on from some distant place in which all decisions were already made and finished.

"You're as healthy as ever," said the doctor, concluding his.e.xamination. He regarded Eldridge. "I wish you would, though. . . ." He broke off. "We aren't a cruel people, you know. We don't like the necessity that makes us do this." He paused. Eldridge considered him without stirring.

"If you'd accept that fact," said the doctor, "I'm sure you'd make it easier on yourself. Possibly our figures of speech have given you a false impression. We said you are immortal. Well, of course, that's not true. Only practically speaking are youimmortal. You are now capable of living a very, very, very long time. That's all."

He paused again. After a moment of waiting, he went on.

"Just the same way, this business isn't really intended to go on for eternity. By its very nature, of course, it can't. Even races have a finite lifetime. But even that would be too long. No, it's just a matter of a long time as you might live it. Eventually, everything must come to a conclusion-that's in-evitable."

Eldridge still did not speak. The doctor sighed.

"Is there anything you'd like?" he said. "We'd like to make this as little unpleasant as possible. Anything we can giveyou?"

Eldridge opened his mouth.

"Give me a boat," he said. "I want a fis.h.i.+ng rod. I want a bottle of applejack."

The doctor shook his head sadly. He turned and signaled theguards. The cage door opened. He went out.

"Get me some pumpkin pie," cried Eldridge after him, sittingup on the cot and grasping the bars as the door closed. "Give me sonic green gra.s.s in here."

The doctor crossed the bridge. The bridge was lifted up and the monitor screen lit up. A woolly face looked out and saw that all was well. Slowly the outer door swung open.

"Get me some pine trees!" yelled Eldridge at the doctor's re-treating back. "Get me some plowed fields!

Get me some earth,some dirt, some plain, earth dirt!Get me that! "

The door shut behind the doctor; and Eldridge burst into laughter, clinging to the bars, hanging there with glowing eyes.

"I would like to be relieved of this job," said the doctor to thecommander, appearing formally in the latter's office.

"I'm sorry," said the commander. "I'm very sorry. But it wasour tactical team that initiated this action; and no one has the experience with the prisoner you have.I'm sorry."

The doctor bowed his head; and went out.

Certain mild but emotion-deadening drugs were also known to the woolly, bearlike race. The doctor went out and began toindulge in them. Meanwhile, Eldridge lay on his cot, occasionallysmiling to himself.

His position was such that he could seeout the window and over the weaving curtain of the barrier that ringed his building, to the landing field. After a while one of the large s.h.i.+ps landed and when he saw the three members of its crew disembark from it and move, antlike off across the field toward the buildings at its far end, he smiled again.

Hesettled back and closed his eyes. He seemed to doze for a couple of hours and then the sound of the door opening to admit the extra single guard bearing the food for his threeo'clock mid-afternoon feeding.

He sat up, pushed the cot down a ways, and sat on the end of it, waiting for the meal.

The bridge was not extended-that happened only when some-one physically was to enter his cage. The monitor screen lit up and a woolly face watched as the tray of food was loaded on the mechanical arm. It swung out across the acid-filled moat, stretcheditself toward the cage, and under the vigilance of theface in the monitor, the two-foot square hatch opened just before it to let it extend into the cage.

Smiling, Eldridge took the tray. The arm withdrew, as it cleared the cage, the hatch swung shut and locked. Outside thecage, guards, food carrier and face in the monitor relaxed. The food carrier turned toward the door, the face in the monitor looked down at some invisible control board before it and the outer door swung open.

In that moment, Eldridge moved.

In one swift second he was on his feet and his hands had closed around the bars of the hatch. There was a single screechof metal, as-incredibly--he tore it loose and threw it aside. Then he was diving through the hatch opening.

He rolled head over heels like a gymnast and came up with his feet standing on the inner edge of the moat. The acrid scent of the acid faintly burnt at his nostrils. He sprang forward in a standing jump, arms outstretched--and his clutching fin-gers closed on the end of the food arm, now halfway in the process of its leisurely mechanical retraction across the moat.

The metal creaked and bent, dipping downward toward theacid, but Eldridge was already swinging onward under the power-ful impetus of his arms from which the sleeves had fallen back to reveal bulging ropes of smooth, powerful muscle. He flewforward through the air, feet first, and his boots took the nearest guard in the face, so that they crashed to the ground together.

For a second they rolled entangled, then the guard flopped andEldridge came up on one knee, holding the black tube of the guard's weapon. It spat a single tongue of flame and the other guard dropped.

Eldridge thrust to his feet, turning to the still-open door.

The door was closing. But the panicked food-carrier, unarmed,had turned to run. A bolt from Eldridge's weapon took him in the back. He fell forward and the door jammed on his body. Leaping after him, Eldridge squeezed through the remainingopening.

Then he was out under the free sky. The sounds of alarm screechers were splitting the air. He began to run-- The doctor was already drugged--but not so badly that he could not make it to the field when the news came. Driven by a strange perversity of spirit, he went first to the prison to inspect the broken hatch and the bent food arm. He traced Eldridge's outward path and it led him to the landing fieldwhere he found the commander and the academician by a bare, darkened area of concrete. They acknowledged his presence by little bows.

"He took a s.h.i.+p here?" said the doctor.

"He took a s.h.i.+p here," said the commander.

There was a little silence between them.

"Well," said the academician, "we have been answered."

"Have we?" the commander looked at them almost appealingly. "There's no chance--that it was just chance? No chance that the hatch just happened to fail--and he acted without thinking, and was lucky?"

The doctor shook his head. He felt a little dizzy and unnaturalfrom the drug, but the ordinary processes of his thinking wereunimpaired.

"The hinges of the hatch," he said, "were rotten-eaten away by acid."

"Acid?" the commander stared at him. "Where would he getacid?"

"From his own digestive processes-regurgitated and spat di-rectly into the hinges. He secreted hydrochloric acid among other things. Not too powerful-but over a period of time. . . ."

"Still--" said the commander, desperately, "I think it must have been more luck than otherwise."

"Can you believe that?" asked the academician. "Consider the timing of it all, the choosing of a moment when the food arm was in the proper position, the door open at the proper angle, the guard in a vulnerable situation. Consider his unhesitat-ing and sure use of a weapon-which could only be the fruits of hours of observation, his choice of a moment when a fully supplied s.h.i.+p, its drive unit not yet cooled down, was waiting for him on the field. No," he shook his woolly head, "we have been answered. We put him in an escape-proof prison and heescaped."

"But none of this was possible!" cried the commander.The doctor laughed, a fuzzy, drug-blurred laugh.

He opened his mouth but the academician was before him.

"It's not what he did," said the academician, "but the fact that he did it. No member of another culture that we know would have even entertained the possibility in their minds. Don't you see--he disregarded, hedenied the fact that escape was impossible.That is what makes his kind so fearful, so dangerous. The fact that something is impossible presents no barrier to their seeking minds. That, alone, places them above us on a plane we can never reach."

"But it's a false premise!" protected the commander. "They cannot contravene natural laws. They are still bound by thephysical order of the universe."

The doctor laughed again. His laugh had a wild quality. The commander looked at him.

"You're drugged," he said.

"Yes," choked the doctor. "And I'll be more drugged. I toastthe end of our race, our culture, and our order."

"Hysteria!" said the commander.

"Hysteria?" echoed the doctor." No--guilt!Didn't we do it, we three? The legend told us not to touch them, not to set a spark to the explosive mixture of their kind. And we went ahead and did it, you, and you, and I. And now we've sentforth an enemy-safely into the safe hiding place of s.p.a.ce, in as.h.i.+p that can take him across the galaxy, supplied with food to keep him for years, rebuilt into a body that will not die, with star charts and all the keys to understand our culture and locate his home again, using the ability to learn we have en-couraged in him."

"I say," said the commander, doggedly, "he is not that dan-gerous-yet. So far he has done nothing one of us could not do, had we entertained the notion. He's shown nothing, nothingsupernormal."

"Hasn't he?" said the doctor thickly. "What about the defensive screen-our most dangerous most terrible weapon-thatcould burn him to nothingness if he touched it?"

The commander stared at him.

"But-" said the commander. "The screen was shut off, of course, to let the food carrier out, at the same time the doorwas opened. I a.s.sumed--"

"I checked," said the doctor, his eyes burning on the com-mander. "They turned it on again before he could get out."

"But hedid get out! You don't mean . . ." the commander's voice faltered and dropped. The three stood caught in a suddensilence like stone. Slowly, as if drawn by strings controlled by a n invisible hand, they turned as one to stare up into the emptysky and s.p.a.ce beyond.

"You mean--" the commander's voice tried again, and died.