Black uniformed Inspectors dropped out of the black flitterboats and closed in on the two men. A couple of the Inspectors dogtrotted over to the flitter Carl and Alyssaunde were in and came up the ramp. “Another one!” one of them said, grabbing Carl.
“Are you all right, Miz Alyssaunde?” the other asked.
“Fine,” Alyssaunde said. “How did you people get here?”
“Your father got worried when you didn’t come home to dinner last night,” he told her. “Finally he tried calling your flitter, but your communicator was out. So he told us, and we put a trace on your command frequency. We’ve been following you on screens all across the country. When you got close to the Outlands, we put these flitters in the air a couple of minutes behind you. We had reason to believe those two men were in the area you left from, so it seemed a reasonable precaution. Who’s this third one?” he indicated Carl.
“He’s a soldier from that sector,” Alyssaunde said. “His name is Corporal Allan. He’s been wounded.”
“We’ll take care of him, miz,” the Inspector said. And the two of them helped Carl down the ramp. The last glimpse he had of Alyssaunde was her face staring after him as the Inspectors took him across to one of their ships.
Carl spent the next three weeks in a hospital. It wasn’t until the third week that he figured out that he was a prisoner. “I want to go back to my bivouac,” he told the doctor treating him.
“That’s up to the Inspectors,” the doctor told him. “You’re in the detainment wing.”
“But what have I done?” he demanded.
“I’m your doctor, not your judge,” the doctor said. “But you must have done something. The Inspectors are anxious to take you away.”
It was during the third week that he got mail: a letter from His Majesty Hiram VI himself. When he saw the envelope he was as elated as the third hour of a happy drunk. The letter itself sobered him up quickly:
hiram vi
king of the celts & picts & jutes
emperor of rome-in-exile
Hereditary Foe of the Supremacy of Allah
prime area, sector 7
14 May 697
TO: Former Lance Corporal Carl Frederic Allan Greetings.
We were sorry to hear of the wounds suffered in our defense.
We cannot, of course, condone your subsequent action.
In view of your record up to that time, and your heroism in your last action, your father’s pension will not be cut.
We hope this reassures you.
Your Imperial Majesty,
Hiram VI
There was a pen-scratched H in the signature block. His king had disowned him. But at least his father’s pension wouldn’t suffer. Carl didn’t find this reassuring, since it had never occurred to him that his father’s pension might suffer. Now he had to worry about all the other things they might do to him that he hadn’t considered before. Once he put his mind to it he could think of a lot. He was afraid to ask about any of them, because he might just put the idea into their heads.
The Inspectors were waiting for him to be well enough to take away. One of them, a tall, dour-looking man who didn’t speak, came in to check him over every couple of days. It was only Carl’s physical condition that interested him. He had no questions to ask Carl, and wasn’t interested in any answers.
“If he won’t talk to me,” Carl complained to the doctor one evening after the Inspector’s visit, “what does he keep coming for? Can’t he just get your reports?”
“He doesn’t want to have to tell anyone that he relied on the doctor’s word for the patient’s condition,” the doctor explained. “They’re conditioned not to believe anyone, or at least not to accept anyone’s word without checking.”
When the doctor and the Inspector agreed that Carl was well enough, he was taken before a board of three judges. “Of what am I accused?” he asked them.
“Silence!” the one on Carl’s right ordered.
“You have already been tried and found guilty,” the middle one told him. “This is the sentencing hearing.”
“I was tried and found guilty without even being present?” Carl asked, amazed. They didn’t do things that way in his sector.
“You are convicted of the crime of being found out of your sector,” the middle judge explained, looking bored. “Two Inspectors swore to it. Can you refute their testimony?”
“No,” Carl said, “but the circumstances—”
“The circumstances are none of our concern!” the left judge said sharply. “What is now of our concern is what to do with this man.”
“He may be contaminated,” the right judge said.
“He may,” the middle judge agreed. “Then we must put him with the others.”
“The island?” the left judge asked.
“The island!” the right judge stated.
“The island!” the middle judge agreed. He rapped his gavel. “Carl Frederic Allan, you are sentenced to an indefinite term of service on Devil’s Island; term to commence immediately.”
And the Inspectors took Carl away and they put him in a little cell. During the course of the day several more men were put into the cell or the one adjoining it. At the end of the day they were each given a tin bowl of soup and a hunk of bread to sop it up with. Then they were lined up, and chained together with leg irons, and led out single-file to a covered van. The van took them to a large flying craft that looked like an oversized, bulbous flitter, and they were herded aboard.
The flier took them all to Devil’s Island.
Chapter Eight
They flew over water for a long time before reaching Devil’s Island. Carl asked a guard what sea it was, and got a silent glare as his answer. The island was fairly large, as such things go, maybe twelve or fourteen miles in diameter on the average.
Carl spent the first two days in a holding area, and then was assigned to his barracks and his task. The barracks were primitive, long, one-story wooden buildings housing about forty men each, lined up in neat rows in a muddy field. Carl was put in the building crew, constructing more barracks.
At the end of the first week Carl spotted Chester A. Arthur in the mess hall and went over to sit with him. The restrictions were very loose on the island; the guards weren’t worried about escapes. There was no place to go. Sometimes a fed-up resident—they weren’t called prisoners for some reason lost in the bureaucracy of the system—ran off into the surrounding jungle. Within a few days he crept back to camp. Or else he never came back. As long as he didn’t leave the island, it was all the same to the guards.
“I’m sorry to see you here,” Chester said. “I knew they’d kept you, but I thought you’d get some easier factory. You’ve never tried to escape or otherwise caused them trouble.”
“They’re afraid I’m contaminated,” Carl said.
Chester laughed. “With what?” he asked.
“With you, I think,” Carl said.
That sobered Chester up. He thought about it for a few long minutes, chewing on the vegetable stew that was their evening meal. “You must be right,” he finally decided. “Maybe your friend Alyssaunde will be able to do something for you.”
“She never even came to see me,” Carl said. “She’s not my friend.”
“Clearly,” Chester agreed. He sighed. “Well, since we got you into this . . . Do you want to leave?”
“Leave?”
“Escape.”
“Yes,” Carl said. “Only—how, and where to?”
Chester shrugged. “What difference does it make?” he asked. “The worst they can do to you is send you back here.”
“They can kill you,” Carl said.
“True,” Chester agreed. “But I still say the worst they can do to you is send you back here.”
“It’s not so bad,” Carl said.
“It grows on you,” Chester told him. “Wait till you’ve been here a while. It’s the awful monotony more than anything else. It’s not that the food is bad so much, al
though it is, it’s that it’s always the same.”
Carl pushed at his stew. “Well, I don’t want to spend the rest of my life here, which is what they seem to have in mind. And they taught us in the army that the best time to effect an escape is as soon as possible, before you get used to being a prisoner. What do we do?”
“We build a giant dugout canoe,” Chester said.
Carl stared at him. “Where?” he asked. “In front of the barracks?”
“About a half mile up the coast,” Chester said. “We take turns, whenever we can get away. The most important thing is stealing food.”
“This food?” Carl said. “For what?”
“For O’Malley. He ran away the day after we got here, and he’s been there ever since.”
“You’re serious about this, then.”
“Of course,” Chester said. “What did you think?”
“Well, what do we do with this canoe? Which way do we paddle?”
“I think we can manage a sail,” Chester said.
“All right then, sail. Which way?”
“That, I admit, is a problem,” Chester said. “We have no idea where we are. They change directions several times, with no consistent pattern, when they fly us in here. And there are no windows in the prisoners’ compartment.”
“So?” Carl said.
“We’re working on it.”
“Listen,” Carl said. “Much as I’d like to leave here and get myself killed by the Inspectors, I’m not going anywhere until you pick a direction.”
“I told you we’re working on it,” Chester said, sounding annoyed. “I have several methods in mind, but they are all useless until we have the means of escape at hand. My feeling is that the island isn’t too far from land, and the length of the trip is just to confuse the prisoners. Most islands are on the continental shelves, close to their continent.”
“I thought there were islands in the middle of the oceans.”
“Sometimes,” Chester said. “But they’re almost always volcanic. There’s no volcano anywhere on this island.”
Convinced by this logic, Carl went to sleep with happy thoughts of escape that night, but woke up in the middle of the night dreaming that a volcano had just thrust itself up under his straw cot. He didn’t sleep well for the rest of the night.
The next day it rained. While the rest of the residents went up to the great windowless stone slab up on the hill that was the local factory, Carl and the others in the building crew were off work. Ancient established custom has it that you can’t build houses in the rain, it’s bad luck. Carl took a spare two-by-four and a bowl of cold vegetable stew and slogged through the rain the quarter-mile to O’Malley and the felled tree that was going to become a canoe.
“It’s good to see ye, lad,” O’Malley told him “Although I’m sure ye don’t feel the same. But take heart, we’ll all be away from here in no time.”
“How long do you think it’s going to take to turn that log into a canoe?” Carl asked.
“I don’t know,” O’Malley said. “It took a week just to cut it down. But it should go faster from now on.”
“Wonderful,” Carl said. “Well, just tell me what tools you need, and I’ll try to obtain them for you from the work crew.” They crouched together under the newly hewn log to keep out of the rain. It wasn’t really wide enough to keep them dry, but it provided some psychological comfort. “How do you like being out here all alone most of the time?” Carl asked.
O’Malley raised his head and spat out into the rain. “Not so bad,” he said. “Most of the time it’s not so bad. I’m beginning to think I’m going slightly crazy, hearing things late at night, but I’ve decided not to worry about it. Once we leave this island paradise, I’m sure it will stop.”
“What sort of things?” Carl asked.
“Rumblings deep in the earth,” Different O’Malley told him. “Strange and curious noises that get louder and louder and then fade away again and disappear. They seem to come at a regular time each night.”
“Rumblings?” Carl said, trying to remember what he knew about volcanoes.
“That’s what I said,” O’Malley said, glaring at him. “Ye’re not going to laugh at me now, are ye? Make me sorry I told ye?”
“Not a bit,” Carl said. “I don’t think it’s at all funny. You haven’t noticed it getting hot, have you?”
“Every day,” O’Malley said, giving him a strange look.
“No, I mean the ground. You haven’t noticed the ground getting warm, have you, when you hear the rumbling?”
“No,” O’Malley said. “It just rumbles for a while, then stops. About an hour after sunset most nights. Regular as dripping water.”
“Have you told Arthur?” Carl asked.
“Told me what?” Chester A. Arthur demanded, stepping out from behind a tree. “And please call me ‘Chester,’ and not ‘Arthur,’ if you don’t mind. Mr. Arthur is all right, I suppose. You have no idea how confusing it can be to have two first names.”
“About the rumbling,” Carl said.
“Rumbling?” Chester crouched down and tried to fit himself under the downed log with his two companions. He was only moderately successful.
“I been hearing noises, Chester,” O’Malley said, looking sheepish. “I been alone so much, I suppose.”
“Rumbling?” Chester asked.
“Aye, rumblings. About an hour after sundown. Deep in the earth, I would say.”
“Rumbling!” Chester said, staring at the raindrops hitting the water.
“I’m sure it will stop when we get away from here,” O’Malley said.
“Rumbling!” Chester said again, staring now at the ground beneath his feet. “An hour after sundown, you say. At no other time?”
“Aye, at other times, too. The noise has awakened me during the night occasionally, and sometimes I think I’ve heard it during the day.”
“Earthquake, do you think?” Carl asked. “Perhaps that volcano coming up out of the ground.”
“I don’t remember too much about earthquakes,” Chester said, “but I don’t believe they’re so selective. If Different could hear it here, then we could surely hear it half a mile away at camp. Same with an up-rushing volcano. It seems to have stopped raining,” he added, sticking his hand out. He stepped out from under the log, stood up to his full six foot eight, and stretched. “But it hasn’t stopped dripping,” he added, as the tree he was under gave up a part of its acquired water, cascading it onto his bare head.
“Then ye think it’s in my mind?” O’Malley asked.
“I didn’t say so, and I don’t think so,” Chester said. “Let me consider it for a while. As a matter of fact, let me stay here this evening and see if I can hear it.”
Carl and O’Malley joined Chester, who had walked to a nearby rock and was standing glaring out over the sea. The water was choppy and the waves coming in fast, beaten up by a stiff wind. But the same wind was blowing the storm clouds rapidly down the coast, clearing the sky behind them, and a full rainbow arced across the eastern sky.
A gaily colored flitterboat appeared high in the sky, coming straight in toward them. Carl pointed it out to his two companions. “Look,” he said, “you don’t see many of those around here.”
“I’ve not seen one before since coming to this island,” O’Malley said. “I suppose there’s nothing worth staring at here.”
“I imagine this island isn’t on any of their maps or lists of happenings,” Chester said.
As they watched, three black Inspectors’ flitterboats came out of the clouds to the west and intercepted the Guest flitter. They closed in on it, surrounding it, and must have communicated with the Guest inside, for presently all four flitterboats flew off together to the west.
“We’re in quarantine,” Chester said. “Unapproachable. Which explains why we haven’t seen any Guests about. The sight of our fetters might depress them.”
“What fetters?” Carl asked.
“I spe
ak metaphorically,” Chester told him.
“Some of us,” O’Malley commented, “have been known to attempt to make off with yon Guests’ flitterboats in an unlawful and unfriendly manner. I name no names, ye understand. But I’ve heard it’s so.”
“No!” Chester said. “Why anybody who would do a thing like that would be a criminal. I can’t believe it.”
O’Malley nodded his head sagely. “’Tis true,” he said, “’Tis a pity, but ’tis true.”
“Well, we’ve learned one thing,” Carl said, staring after the retreating craft.
“What’s that?” Chester asked curiously.
“Why, the direction of the closest land,” Carl told him. He pointed. “That’s where the Inspectors came from, and it’s where they’re going back to.”
Chester slapped him on the back. “Boy,” he said, “glad to have you along. I should have picked up on that myself. Very good.”
“Then it helps?” Carl asked.
“Any truth,” Chester said, “no matter how obscure, or seemingly unimportant, is a piece of the mosaic and a step toward completion. That’s what it says over the door of the Earth Artifacts Library.”
“But what about the direction?”
“You’re right, the flitterboats point the way to the closest shore. But the rumbling points the way of our escape.”
Carl sat down on the rock. “The rumble,” he said.
“Did you ever wonder where the guards go when they’re off?” Chester asked.
“Let’s stick with the rumble for a while,” Carl said. “Explain that to me first.”
“I am,” Chester said. “There are three shifts of guards, right?”
“Right,” Carl agreed. “So?”
“So they all spend their off-duty time in the guard building, right? I mean, you never see one outside anywhere except when they’re on duty.”
“I guess so,” Carl said. “I haven’t thought about it.”
“And, come to think of it, no flitterboat ever comes to take the off-duty guards for leaves or passes.”
“That’s true,” Carl said. “I’ve never seen a guard either come to or leave the island.”
Tomorrow Knight Page 7