“Exactly,” said Moro. “But amusing as it would be to see you eaten alive, or boiled inchwise in oil, perhaps, I assure you that I much prefer to have the Omnidrene. It increases my ordinary pleasures so greatly… What is your point with all this foolishness?”
“My point is that I never realized that the stuff would go so fast. At this rate it won’t last my lifetime—and I believe in living a long, full life. I also believe in planning ahead.”
Moro frowned. “If it won’t last your lifetime, it won’t last mine!” he muttered unhappily. “I could reserve it to myself… but that would cause trouble. It might be dangerous.”
So far, so good, Fraden thought. He’s worried. He’s ripe for leading down the primrose path.
“Would you consider that I was fulfilling my side of the bargain if I told you how to manufacture the stuff?” Fraden asked archly.
“It can be made here?” Moro blurted. Then, more slowly, “To be sure, to be sure. That would do nicely.” His pig eyes narrowed and he smiled slyly. An imbecile could read his so-called mind, Fraden thought Once he had an independent supply of Omnidrene—good-by, Brother Bart! But once this little piece of bait was taken and things got started, it would be time for Brother Bart to disappear into the outback and become President Bart Fraden of the Free Republic of Sangre. It was just a matter of some neat timing.
“It can be made here as well as anywhere else,” Fraden said. “That is, if there are enough schizophrenics on Sangre.”
“Schizophrenics?”
Oh, brother! Fraden thought How do I explain what a schizophrenic is to Old Lardbucket? But then, if you’re going to tell a He, tell a simple one.
“Madmen,” Fraden said. “Surely you have madmen on Sangre?”
“Madmen…? You mean those Animals who act so strangely after unusually imaginative torture? The ones that sit around like vegetables or babble nonsense languages?”
That wasn’t exactly a scientific description of schizophrenia, Fraden thought, but since Omnidrene is really purely synthetic, what does it matter?
“That’s it,” he said. “Schizophrenics.”
“It happens every once in a while,” Moro said. “Of course such Animals are useless as slaves or as interesting subjects for torture, for that matter. They’re given over to the Public Larder as a matter of course. What possible use are madmen?”
“None whatever,” Fraden said. “However, their blood is another matter. Omnidrene is an extract of the blood of schizophrenics. But it takes quarts and quarts of schizophrenics’ blood to make even one dose. If you had enough of ’em, I mean tens of thousands, we could make the stuff. But there’s no point in it, since you only have a few here and there…”
“Let me understand this…” Moro said slowly. “Omnidrene is extracted from the blood of madmen? Drive a man mad, and his blood will yield small quantities of Omnidrene?”
Ye gods, how long will it take the fat slob to get the point? Fraden wondered. Of course, anyone stupid enough to swallow a lie like that whole might have to be led by the hand every step of the way. Still, I can’t be too obvious.
“Minute quantities,” Fraden said. “You’d have to have some way of driving men mad en masse, and I don’t see—”
Moro roared with laughter. “But that’s because you’re a fool, Brother Bart!” he said. “You have no aesthetic sense. This is perfect, it proves the basic belief of the Brotherhood of Pain: give Pain and receive Pleasure!”
“What’re you getting at?” Fraden said in great mock confusion, as if it weren’t his idea in the first place. “You have a way of driving thousands mad?”
“By Hitler and De Sade!” Moro roared. “You really don’t see it? It’s so beautiful, so obvious! We shall institute a campaign of torture such as Sangre has never seen! What a challenge to the art! To invent tortures subtle enough to drive Animals mad without wasting a drop of their blood!”
Moro rocked back and forth madly on his throne like a kid with a lollipop. “We’ll drive the whole planet mad!” he crowed. “The whole planet!”
Hook, line, and sinker! Fraden thought. Torture the whole planet to insanity and then bleed ’em to death to get Omnidrene for your jollies! Not even Sangrans will sit still for this. Comes the Revolution, Fat Boy, comes the Revolution!
Fraden smiled in sardonic admiration. “Moro,” he said evenly, “I must admit that I’ve never run across a mind quite like yours.”
Sitting naked on the edge of his bed in the comparatively cool Sangran night, Bart Fraden found himself sweating, a dank, heatless sweat. He remembered an old, old saying, so old that its origin had been long forgotten: “Never look behind; something may be gaining on you.” He felt the breath of that something on the back of his neck.
Got a planet to knock over, Bart? Need something to break a social stasis, stir up the Animals real good? Well, why not get the opposition to go ape, try to torture the whole population into insanity? After all, that should be enough to bug anyone enough to fight. Clever, Bart, a real clever gambit.
And damn it, it was clever. It had to work. He should feel pleased with himself. So why the cold sweat, why the knot in his stomach? Why the feeling of something breathing down his neck, and what was that something? It couldn’t be conscience, that was just a word, a phony excuse men used for not acting. Wasn’t it…?
Sophia emerged from the bathroom. She was naked, and her long red hair fell down over her shoulders, and her breasts were firm and lovely, her legs taut and smooth, and she was the best damned chick in the Galaxy, first-class all the way, and she was his. She smiled, open-mouthed, and her eyes shone. He knew that look.
“Peerless Leader…” she said, draping herself across his lap, and the words were strangely devoid of sarcasm. He knew that tone. This was the other Sophia who broke through now and then, the little girl before the football hero, the cavegirl before the Great Hunter. This Sophia stirred him viscerally, but he did not understand her at all.
She kissed him, a long, lingering, open kiss. “Wheeling and dealing,” she muttered against him. “Peerless wheeler-dealer. My man. Numero uno. Bigger than life and twice as nasty…”
She kissed him again, and Fraden felt his blood beginning to pound, felt the cold breath of that something retreat, wither, die. It was more than mere animal heat, it was something deeper, something other than the feel of her inviting body moving against him. It was what that invitation said: I want you. I want you. I want you because you’re a winner, because you’re the best. It was the pride in her calling to the pride in him.
Touch me, feel me, have me, her body said to him. I’m the best, and you’ve earned me. I’m the best and I’m yours, as long as you’re the best, as long as you’re on top, as long as you’re my Peerless Leader.
And no longer, he thought as he pulled her to him. This was where it was at. This was worth fighting for, scheming for, killing for, if need be. This was worth ten thousand lives. To be the best, Number One, the center of the universe, and to hold the best woman there was in your arms and to know she was yours because you were the best, because you won her day by day, moment by moment against the universe, in the arena, against all comers.
He stretched his body over hers and it made him feel ten feet tall. She enveloped him, drew him to her like a special, special prize, and he took her as she gave herself.
And her little cries and her slow movements against him were a paean to his manhood, his vaulting, hungry ego.
And his fulfillment washed away the doubts and the foolish twinges of guilt and the dank, cold breath of conscience.
To the victor, the spoils! To the loser, nothingness!
CHAPTER SIX
“What’s going on around this perverts’ pigpen now?” Sophia O’Hara asked, turning from the window as Fraden re-entered the bedroom. The window looked out across the open space in back of the Palace toward the glowering black Stadium, and for the past horn: or so, truck after truck had been arriving at the Stadium, each one packed wi
th chained men and women, guarded by squads of laconic Killers. “And what did that Killer want?”
“Looks like they’re preparing for some unpleasantness,” Fraden said, “The Killer issued an invitation—an order, really—that my presence would be required in Moro’s box at the Pavilion for today’s pageant.”
“Pageant?” Sophia said with a dubious frown. “What does Old Greaseball mean by ‘pageant’?”
“Somehow I get the feeling it isn’t a Maypole dance,” Fraden said. “I’ve been trying to keep a rough head count of how many people they’ve herded into the Stadium. Got to two hundred or so before the Killer interrupted, and I see they’re still coming. Wonder what it’s all about?”
Actually, Fraden was all too sure just what it was about. For the past five days, all of the Brothers in the Palace had been tanking up on Ommdrene, working themselves up into a fine state of slavering, red-eyed anticipation and babbling incessantly about the great show Moro was preparing. Moro himself wasn’t talking and his silence had the ominous quality of a schoolboy preparing a ghastly prank. On the other hand, the Prophet of Pain was all too eager to discuss the great pogrom of torture he was planning, the pogrom that would drive thousands mad and insure, so he thought, a bottomless supply of Omnidrene. For the past two days, there had been the sounds of construction going on within the Stadium, and now they were trucking in hundreds of Sangrans… And then, this invitation.
The madness-pogrom gambit had seemed like such a brilliant idea when he had sold it to Moro. Painless, distant, removed from his ken. Once it was under way, he and Sophia would leave for Vanderling’s camp, he would proclaim the Free Republic of Sangre, start a rumor, a rumor that would be backed up by fact, that the Brotherhood was going to torture the entire population to madness, then bleed them slowly to death to produce Omnidrene. The Revolution would sweep through the countryside like a firestorm…
But when the “gambit” incarnated itself in the duckings of the Brothers, like teen-age girls anticipating a pajama party, in hundreds of flesh and blood victims being trucked into the Stadium for god-knows-what, it was no longer just a clever trick. It was inescapably human lives, human pain, human madness, and it was on his head. The pogrom would ignite the Revolution, he knew it would, it had to… But the tinder that would be consumed was human tinder, that thought and suffered and bled and died.
And only when the Killer had brought him the grotesque “invitation” did it hit him that he was going to have to see what he had wrought, smell it, hear it, taste it.
But there was no turning back now, and there was no point in telling Soph of his part in the whole sordid business. So it was an evil, a very real evil, but, so he told himself, an essential one and the guilt, if what he felt was guilt, was something private, something he could share with no one.
“Does your invitation include family?” Sophia said. “I must admit to a certain morbid curiosity about the more exotic folkways of our intended fief.”
Fraden was torn by the desire to spare her the horror that surely was to come and the terrible loneliness of facing it alone. After a long moment, he opted for the less selfish choice.
“ ’Fraid not,” he lied. “Brothers in good standing only.”
“Goody, goody, a stag party! Replete with beer and dirty movies, no doubt.”
“Haven’t seen a glass of beer since we landed, only that sour grape juice they call wine,” Fraden quipped hollowly. “And somehow, I have the feeling that today’s entertainment will be live.”
At least for openers, he thought vertiginously.
Most of the Stadium—the rude, backless wooden benches that formed the bulk of the great open bowl’s circumference—was empty. A comparatively small section of the stands at the far end from where Fraden had entered was roofed over against the hot, red Sangran sun which cast deep red shadows on the empty seats and the sandy arena floor. That roofed Pavilion seemed stuffed with tiny figures as if a whole stadiumful of spectators huddled there awaiting the end of a thunder-shower. It made Fraden feel uncomfortably alone and exposed as he walked along the lateral aisle toward the Pavilion.
He looked down at the arena floor and saw that a strange oblong wooden structure had been set up at the far end of the arena, immediately below and parallel to the Pavilion. It was a long raised platform, uncomfortably like a mass gallows, about sixteen feet wide and a full hundred yards long. A row of steel leg irons ran along either edge of the platform, and from where Fraden stood, the open back of the thing revealed a maze of wiring beneath. A heavy cable ran from beneath the platform, snaked across the arena and disappeared into the bowels of the Stadium through a large gate.
Now what in hell could that thing be? Fraden thought. Then, still waiting, he looked up at the-by-now-nearby Pavilion and forgot all about the enigma on the arena floor.
At least nine hundred robed Brothers reclined on tiers of upholstered couches, and for every filled couch, five were vacant. In front of each occupied couch, a low table was set up, and on the tables sat jugs of wine, bowls of fruit, and… and whole roast babies. Naked women, three, four, five to each Brother, held up jugs of wine, limbs from the ghastly roasts, fruit, packets of Omnidrene, whatever their masters required. Many of the Brothers were toying with women who sat on their laps. Others were being toyed with. Armed Killers stood all around the periphery of the Pavilion. They were smiling—death’s-head smiles. Fraden had never seen a Killer smile before. There was a fetid, carnival air about the Pavilion; laughing, shouting, drinking, the wolfing down of too much food. Rome in the reign of Caligula, Fraden thought, might’ve been a pale imitation of this.
Moro sat on a raised throne in the front and center of the Pavilion. He spotted Fraden, waved for him to join him.
Fraden pushed his way through the laughing, back-slapping, reeling mass of Brothers and servants, their hands greased with human fat, their lips and faces reddened with splashes of wine, their eyes the eyes of maddened boars. He felt his gorge rising as they greeted him, waved to him, touched at his Brother’s robe with filthy fingers. He was pale and shaking with disgust and rage as he finally made it to the foot of Moro’s throne, where a huge table groaned with huge wine jugs, a great platter heaped high with tiny, crisply browned human arms.
Moro motioned him to a couch beside his throne with a half-eaten arm that he waved like a scepter. Woodenly, Fraden seated himself on the edge of the couch as a woman held up a wine jug to Moro’s fat lips.
Moro wiped his mouth with the back of a gross arm. “Ah, Brother Bart…” he cooed, “the source of this great challenge. Welcome, welcome to our modest pageant!” He took a pinch of Omnidrene, held it to his nostril, snorted it up, sneezed, laughed and said, “Think of it—to torture unto madness without spilling a drop of blood! I hope my first poor attempt at this noble goal will succeed. However, if not, no matter. Try, try again, eh?”
Fraden found himself unable to utter a sound. He felt certain that to open his mouth would be to vomit.
But Moro seemed to be talking mostly to hear the sound of his own voice. He took another arm from the platter, nibbled it and the first alternately as he spoke.
“Observe, observe,” he said, pointing to the platform below with a half-eaten limb. “See how the shackles are wired? The charge has been carefully calculated to maximize pain without resulting in permanent damage.”
As he spoke, two lines of people, one of men, one of women were led out of the arena gate by squads of Killers, across the sand, and up onto the platform.
“See there,” Moro cried shrilly. “Those buttons?” Fraden saw two parallel lines of buttons running down the center of the platform. As the Killers began shackling the victims to the platform, men facing women, he realized that the buttons were so placed as to be just within reach of the men and women in the shackles.
“There is genius!” Moro crowed. “The buttons control the current The subjects may turn the current on or off at will.”
“I don’t get it,” Fraden
grunted thickly. “Why—?”
“Ah, but the buttons are cross-connected, you see! See how they are paired. Each subject can control the current to the shackles of the one opposite, not his own. When his partner’s current is on, his is off. But, and this is the master’s touch, if both buttons are depressed, the current goes to both shackles—and if neither button is pressed, both receive shocks as well. And to increase the interest, all have been briefed in the operation of the device. And, as the pièce de resistance, the paired Animals are in fact all mates! To create madness, it is best to torture the mind as well as the body, eh?”
By now, the victims were all in place, over a hundred frightened men lying prone on the bare wood facing an equal number of naked, terrified women, Moro raised his fat right arm, a Killer threw a master-switch beneath the platform, and…
A shrill, animal wail split the air as the current surged into the shackles, a monstrous tortured sound as of a huge beast in mortal agony. The bodies on the platform stiffened, began to twitch convulsively. Hands reached for buttons, and there was no masculine gallantry here. In some pairs the man was the faster, in some the woman. Half the victims continued to twitch and scream, half lay there panting and watched their mates’ agony.
Behind him, Fraden heard a liquid, horrid, rippling sound, the sound of laughter, little gleeful cries, wine gurgling down throats. He dared not turn, he could only watch the obscenity in the arena below, unable to face the reveling Brothers behind him.
“Look! Look!” Moro cried, thumping him on the back with a hand that still held a tiny human arm. Fraden felt vomit rising in the back of his throat.
Now all the victims were screaming in agony, every button depressed, agonized faces set in devils’ masks of determination, each victim determined to outlast his partner, make him grant a moment’s release in return for the unspoken promise of reciprocal self-sacrifice.
Here and there a man or woman finally gave in to the unvoiced promise, released his button, continued to twist in torment while the body opposite went limp in blessed relief from the wracking pain. But once released from agony, who would willingly return to pain? Those not in torment kept their fingers relentlessly on their buttons, for to release them was to bring on the agony that writhed opposite them on the platform. In a universe of pain, there was no honor, no love, no mercy, only the grim determination to buy a moment’s rest.
The Men in the Jungle Page 9