For a long time Dallith was not strong enough to talk much, and he did not press her. He was content to sit by her side and let her hold his hand... almost, he thought, as if in some way he could give her some of his own strength and vitality. But she was growing in strength daily, and one day she smiled at him and asked about him.
"And you're from a world none of us have ever heard of. Strange, that they should risk so much to come there. Or perhaps not, if all your people are as strong as yourself."
He shrugged. "I've spent most of my life hunting new adventures. This is just a little more bizarre than most, that's all. I got hooked early on the idea that nobody would willingly pass up any kind of experience that was—what do they say—neither illegal, immoral, nor fattening."
She laughed a little. Her laugh was enchanting, as if all the gaiety in the world dwelt within her voice. "Are all your people like that?"
"No, I guess not. A lot of them settle down early and never do anything. But the adventurer strain keeps coming back. I guess it's a pretty durable part of our makeup." He remembered then that Rianna had told him that Dallith's people invariably died, away from their home world, and bit his lip to keep from asking questions about that. But as if she followed his thoughts, a shadow passed over her face. Her sadness seemed as all-pervasive as her gaiety, as if her small slight body held room for only one emotion at a time and it wholly possessed her. She said, "I only hope your strength and bravery don't mean that the Mekhars have some especially fearful fate planned for you."
"All I can do is wait and see what happens," he said, "but like I told you, while there's life, there's hope."
The shadow lay deep on her. She said, "I could not imagine, could not even dream, of hope or anything good ahead, away from my world and my people." Her voice was desolate. "Oh, others have left our world, but with some purpose, and never—never alone."
Dane said, "It's like a miracle that you came back. But it's a miracle I still can't completely understand."
She said simply, "You reached me. I felt your strength, and your will to live, so that I could believe in life again. It was that which fed me... your own hope and your belief in life ahead as well as behind. And with so much will to live, there was no room in me for death, and so death took his hand away from me and I began to live again. The rest was" —a small disinterested shrug— "only mechanics. The important thing was that you still believed in life, and you could share your belief with me."
He clasped her small hand in his. The fingers were as soft as if they were boneless, completely pliant, molded to his. "Come, Dallith, are you trying to tell me that you read my mind, or my emotions, or something?"
"Of course," she said, surprised. "What else?"
Well, how can I say it isn't true? It seems to have happened, and anyway she believes it, Dane thought, but he still felt a little disquieted, uncanny. Still, he was content, for as her strength grew, Dallith clung to him more and more. Sometimes it almost frightened him, that she should be so completely dependent on his will—what would she do if they were separated? he thought—but mostly it did not trouble him, for she was not obtrusive or demanding. Most of the time she was content to sit quietly at his side, without speaking, almost like a shadow, while, during the next days and weeks, he took the measure of his fellow prisoners.
He seemed to be the only one—at least in their separate cell—from an isolated world. All of the others were, more or less, from the same interstellar civilization as Rianna. They were a mixed crew. The spider-thing was from a hot, wet world where his race was in a minority, and his name was an incomprehensible mangle of sibilants. And even the enormous lizard-man, Aratak, found his mental processes inaccessible, although he tried. He told Dane kindly, "He is very bewildered. I do not think he is sure what has happened; his mental processes have been shocked." Dane was less charitable; privately he didn't believe the spidery alien had any mental processes worth noticing. All he seemed able to do was huddle in a corner, hissing at anyone who came near, and when food was brought sidle out in a rush, take it, and retreat with it. Dane wrote him off as probably being of no use in their present trouble.
Rianna and Roxon, the two sturdy red-headed anthropologists, were far more congenial. Dane kept forgetting that they were not Earthmen like himself, unless one of them happened to allude to some commonplace of their lives which to him, was straight out of a science fiction movie... Rianna offhandedly saying that she had served a four-year apprenticeship in alien technology surveying an asteroid belt for fragments of the civilization on the exploded world; Roxon complaining that the main axis of the civilization was interested only in proto-feline technologies and tended to ignore the proto-simians (or humans) as being superficial. "Just because the damned proto-felines invented the extra-light drives, they think they own the Universe," he grumbled more than once.
As for Aratak, the lizard-man quickly became a companion, then, surprisingly, a friend. The immense alien seemed quickly more human than any of the others. His gray, rugose skin, his huge claws and teeth, were quickly forgotten; his mind worked, Dane swiftly found out, very much like Dane's own. His philosophy reminded Dane very much of the Hawaiians and Filipinos he had met on his first voyage to the Pacific; a calm acceptance of life, a willingness to take whatever came, not exactly submitting to it, but going along with it until something better came along, and incidentally getting what was good out of it. He never left a crumb of his food, he slept long and well, and he tended to fill every lull in the conversation with some excerpt from the Wisdom of the Divine Egg—who had been, Dane gradually gathered, the Confucius, Lao-Tzu, Hillel, and Hiawatha of his race. On the surface he seemed content and even complacent in their captivity, enough so as to be infuriating.
But Dane was sure it was not quite what it seemed. At first this was only a suspicion; on the eighth or ninth "day" of their captivity, the suspicion ripened into certainty.
That was the day when a man in the next cage, or cell, went mad. Dane saw him crouch, when the clanging sound came which meant that the Mekhars were on the way with food, tense and huddled within himself and all one purpose which could almost be seen. And the instant that the food-cart came into sight around the curve of the corridor he rushed the door, flung it open, and threw himself against the edge of the cart, sending it careening back and knocking the Mekhar who pushed it off his feet.
For an instant Dane tensed, thinking, Now! Now, if they all rush him at once, at once, he couldn't kill more than one or two of them—
He actually began to spring; and then the man at the cart began to yell, incoherently, a hoarse half scream.
"Come on, you bastards! Kill me all at once, not by inches! Come on, everybody get them, better to die fighting than sit here waiting—" He grabbed the end of the food-cart and ran it over the prostrate body of the Mekhar, by now howling gibberish and screaming. Dallith shrieked and hid her face in her hands. Aratak gripped his claws on the bars, and as Dane tautened his muscles for a rush the lizard-man reached out one hand and grabbed him. His claws dug into Dane's shoulder, tearing his shirt.
"Not now," he said. "Don't throw your life away like this. Not now!"
The loose prisoner was still howling and raging, charging up and down with the runaway food-cart. The other Mekhar raised his weapon and gestured; the madman did not seem to see him. He ran right up against him and in the instant before the food-cart ran him down the Mekhar with the weapon raised it—almost, it seemed to Dane, reluctantly—and shot him.
The man screamed, a terrible tearing sound. He dropped to the floor, writhing, convulsing, froth coming from his mouth as his muscles went into spasm after spasm of shuddering. He screamed and screamed, fainter and fainter, and at last he lay still, twitching and still convulsing. The Mekhar bent and dragged him into his cell, gesturing at his cell-mates with the drawn weapon. They all edged back before it, with horrified gasps and murmurs.
The feeding went on without further incident; but Dane could not eat, until
Dallith, white as her own loose robe, refused food and faltered into the women's area to vomit; then, with hard self-discipline, Dane forced himself to pick up his food and chew it, doggedly. He should have known. Dallith was so much a reflection of his own moods....
With the new knowledge of this, he ate, refusing to think about the would-be escapee; when Dallith, gray and shaking, came back, he pulled her down beside him and gently fed her little pieces from his own tray until the color began to come back into her cheeks, then sat by her until she slept. The wounded man in the next cell moaned and twitched and foamed and screamed more and more faintly, although his cell-mates tended him, until some time that night he died. The next morning at feeding-time the Mekhars hauled his body away.
The rows of cells were very quiet as the man's body was taken away. But when the Mekhars disappeared again and the clanging sound of the cell-block lock assured them all that the Mekhars were gone, the quiet tension of horror broke and everyone began talking at once.
Dane found Aratak by his side; the lizard-man's great scaled paws, claws flicking in and out, rested lightly on his shoulder. He said to Dane, "For a moment, yesterday, I thought you were going to throw your life after his."
"For a moment I thought of it. But it isn't in me to commit suicide, and I realized in time that was what he was doing. If everyone had joined him, of course, we probably could have done it."
"Yes," Aratak said. "This has been on my mind. But it must be carefully planned and decided. A mad rush, even with the wild hope that the others will join us, is not the way to begin such an effort. The Divine Egg has said that a man is a fool who holds his life too dear—but twice a fool is he who holds it cheap enough to throw away."
Dane glanced guardedly around. Dallith was sleeping, and he was glad; already the fear of frightening her was a daylong preoccupation with him. (He asked himself then: was it love? Certainly not in a sexual sense, at least not yet. But a constant, living preoccupation, so that her welfare was more to him than his own, so that she lived somewhere in the innermost core of his being... yes; call it love.) Then he said, "I take it you go along with me—that it ought to be possible to escape, with care and cooperation. I think these Mekhars underrate us. They probably think no one but themselves is clever enough to think it out. But have you noticed that the doors are unlocked, and virtually unguarded, for the best part of half an hour, twice a day?"
"I've noticed," Aratak said. "For a time I thought it seemed almost too easy. As if they were trying to tempt us to escape, for some unknown reason of their own. But why would they do that? Sheer blood-lust? They could have one of us up to kill every day, if that were their pleasure. So I have come around to the conclusion you seem to have reached; that it is their arrogance. They simply do not believe that anyone except themselves could take advantage of such an opportunity; they believe we simply fear them and their weapons too much."
He stopped; his normally placid voice was fierce.
"Would you like to teach those damned cat-things their mistake?"
Dane thrust out his hand in a spontaneous gesture of camaraderie. "I'm with you!" Only when the scaly paw, claws carefully retracted, closed gingerly over his hand, did he recall that his new comrade was not what most people would call a man.
Agreed, they sat down in a corner of the cell to make their plans. "We can't do it alone, just the two of us. And it's going to need time—and planning."
"True. The Divinely Wise Egg has told us that an act of folly can be successful only if it is planned twice as wisely as an act of wisdom."
The basis of the plan was simplicity itself and hardly more complex than that of the man who had died; to take advantage of the early unlocking and late closing of the cell to slip out, rally other prisoners to join them, knock the weapon from the hands of the Mekhar guard and force their way out of the slave quarters. The Mekhar might kill one or two of them before they were disarmed—Dane faced the possibility that he might be one of the first ones killed, probably, in fact, would be—but certainly the Mekhar couldn't kill them all, and the rest would escape.
Once they were out of the slave quarters, what then? They would have to face the rest of the crew; in the hospital area there were tangler fields, and perhaps in other areas of the ship too.
"We can't do it alone," he said to Aratak.
"I never thought we could."
"But we can't even plan it alone. I don't know enough about the Mekhars; I don't know enough about your spaceships; I don't know enough about your civilization or weapons or even your Unity. We need help, and quickly, even to make sensible plans."
"I think you are right," the great lizard-man said. "We must decide which of our colleagues we can approach for help, and which of us would go mad like that poor creature and give us away with rashness or panic, or even betray us to the Mekhars in return for some small advantage—oh, yes, some of us in here, even, might do that." The edges of his leathery gray jaws began to glow slightly, luminous. "I will consult the wisdom of the Egg. And I suppose you will break it first to Dallith."
Dane felt his throat close with a spasm of sudden fear; not for himself, but for the girl. He had tried so hard to keep all upsetting thoughts away from her; and the man who had gone berserk had upset her so greatly that he had been afraid, for a moment, that she would drop back into that deathly, death-seeking lassitude. "I think not," he said hoarsely. "First I will speak to Rianna." Perhaps Dallith could be kept free of this, protected until all the danger was over....
He was beginning, now, to be able to distinguish subtle changes of expression on Aratak's leathery countenance; but he did not, yet, know what emotion ridged the rugose forehead and made the small wattles around the amphibian's gill-slits glow luminous. Aratak was moved; but whether by sympathy, disagreement, or annoyance Dane Marsh could not yet tell. His voice was as flat as ever when he said, "Well, you proto-simians know one another as I never could, so perhaps you are right. I will inquire carefully and seek wisdom; speak to Rianna if you will."
Dane waited until the next meal period, and when all the inmates of their particular cell had seized their coded food trays and were seeking places to eat, he laid a hand on Rianna's arm.
"I want to talk to you," he said in an undertone. "Sit here beside me, in this corner, and eat." As they tore open the strips of their trays, he outlined what he had noticed about the locking and unlocking of the cell doors, and saw her dark eyes light up fiercely.
"I've wondered if anyone else saw that! It seems that everyone else here is either a coward, or insanely rash! You're right, something could be done, but what could I, a woman, do alone? I'm with you, Dane, even if I'm the first one shot down!"
He grinned a little sourly. "I thought you were the one preaching the virtues of resignation. You were feeling hopeless enough to let Dallith die."
I was doing what seemed best on the basis of what I knew of her people," Rianna said stiffly. "Anyone can act in ignorance. I'm enough of a scientist, I hope, to change my theories as I acquire more facts. After observing the Mekhars for a few periods—and the quality of our fellow prisoners—I feel a little more optimistic."
"You do know," Dane said slowly, "that if we take the lead, you and I may very well be the first ones to be shot down? It's not a pleasant death."
"But at least when it's over, I won't have to worry about what happens next, will I? But just in case we should survive long enough to have that particular worry, what happens after that? I take it you don't mean to stop at letting us out of the cages. What next?"
"I don't know," Dane said frankly. "That's why I came to you. I'm no good as the leader of this enterprise. I might be able to help us bust out of the cages. But once we're out, I'm about as much use as sails on a spaceship. I'm the one from the backward world, remember. What I know about spaceships could be painlessly engraved on my thumbnail in large block letters. I'd kind of thought that we might hold the Mekhar guards hostages for our own freedom; arrogant races usually hold the live
s of their own kind very precious, even if they treat other races as expendable. But I don't know the Mekhars. And even if we could manage to kill off or subdue every damned lion-face on the ship, we'd still be out of my element. I wouldn't know how to get us to a safe port, or even how to hit the distress button and yell for help if we started to crash-land or fall into a sun."
"Oh, as far as that goes, Roxon has a pilot's certificate," Rianna said. "I don't think he's ever handled anything this size—he certainly isn't licensed to—but the ultra-light drives are standard all through the known Galaxy. Once the Mekhars are out of the way, he could land us somewhere inside the Unity."
Dane reflected that this wouldn't help him much, but after all, that was a small point. He couldn't help being better off inside a civilized government—no matter how strange or alien—than outside it. The Unity at least didn't deal in slaves.
"I suppose the next step is to enlist Roxon as part of our plan, then," he said, "if you're sure we can trust him. You know him. I don't."
Rianna said, in disgust, "What do you take him for? He's a civilized citizen."
"Presumably, so is that poor chap who rushed the nerve-guns," Dane said. "I wasn't impugning his standards of decency. I simply don't know him at all. How can I be in a position to judge how brave he is? How likely he is to panic? How well he holds up in a crisis? Or even how well he can hold his tongue and keep from talking to the wrong people? Why in hell do you think I asked you first?"
Hunters of the Red Moon Page 3