Worlds Apart

by J. T. McIntosh

  5

  "I think," said Commodore Corey, we've wasted quite enough time."

  They had visited several locations suggested by Pertwee. He had pretended to be sure and said he wasn't at all sure. He had insisted that he was telling the truth and he had admitted he was lying. But the ship was limited only by the acceleration the people inside it could stand, and by the destructive effect of friction against the atmosphere at high speeds. Even allowing for these, it was only a matter of an hour or two from one side of the planet to the other.

  Pertwee had taken the ship very close to Lemon on one of the trips. From an unguarded remark one of the lieutenants had dropped he found that the ship had already been this way. There was a possibility that the people in Lemon had seen it; only a possibility, however.

  As they passed within twenty miles of Lemon, the, impatience of the people about him communicated itself to Pertwee and he was satisfied. If on the second visit to this region they were impatient because they had already examined it and found nothing, they would be most unlikely to work out for themselves, from his itinerary, where Lemon must be. That was why he had taken them so close. The place where one is least likely to look for anything is where one has looked already.

  But now they were a thousand miles from Lemon again, and the commodore was losing patience.

  "Back on Earth," he observed, "we had truth drugs and lie detectors and other useful methods of getting information quickly from people who were reluctant to give it. We have none of these methods here, unfortunatdy. Do you know, Pertwee, I think we will just have to resort to crude old-fashioned torture."

  Pertwee had expected they would. It wasn't really possible, he decided, for Toni and him to keep the secret of Lemon's location from Corey. Not if Corey was really determined. If he had been alone, perhaps, though he doubted even that. One man can decide to die before giving information. But two of them, and one of them Toni . . .

  It was too much to expect that she could withstand torture, not really knowing why she should. Her experience didn't contain enough for her to know even the shape of what would probably happen if the Clades discovered the Mundan colony.

  Besides, technically they were both under sentence of death in Lemon. Should they give so much for a settlement which had rejected them?

  The commodore caught Lieutenant Fenham's eye. "Will you work on her yourself," he asked, "or do you want someone else?"

  The woman thought. "This is really a job for Lieutenant Barton, sir," she said. Corey nodded, and she left the room.

  Pertwee saw Toni was puzzled, cautious, but not in the least afraid. In her experience, people who hurt each other were angry. They didn't speak coldly and calmly as the commodore was doing.

  Lieutenant Fenham returned, and at sight of the girl who accompanied her Pertwee started. She wore the usual neat, impersonal uniform, but she was lovely. One felt drawn to her, determined to like her, to think the best of her. Her hair under her cap was silvery-blond. Though she wore no make-up her lips stood out vividly against her creamy skin and her brilliant teeth.

  Very likely in her and Toni, Pertwee thought, the most attractive girls of each party met.

  "Hallo," said Toni, with a friendly grin. "What's your name?"

  "Phyllis Barton," said the girl coldly. Still Toni grinned. Toni's way of dealing with competition had always been to try and get on with it. There seemed no reason why this shouldn't apply to Phyllis Barton.

  What might have been a reason soon appeared. Barton and Fenham fastened Toni in a chair. Lieutenant Barton took off her tunic. She was surveying Toni thoughtfully, running through the various possibilities.

  "I don't want them mutilated or hurt too much," said the commodore. "I only want information."

  "'Them,' sir?" queried the girl.

  "We may have to work on the man too, if you have difficulty with the woman."

  Phyllis nodded. She put her hands lightly on Toni's shoulders, probing carefully with her thumbs. Then, having found her spot, she leaned on her arms and pressed her thumbs into Toni's flesh with all her strength.

  Toni screamed. It was a revelation to her that one could be hurt so much, so easily, with so little warning. No one had ever hurt her scientifically before. Any blows which had ever fallen on Toni had been struck in anger, carelessly. There was nothing careless about Phyllis Barton.

  She left Toni a moment to recover, to tell herself it had never happened, and couldn't possibly happen ever again. Then she felt for the nerve again and gripped hard. Pertwee watched her hands go white.

  Toni didn't scream this time. She gasped, but made no other sound. Again Phyllis stood back and waited. When she stepped forward again and placed her hands on Toni's shoulders, Pertwee saw that already Toni was conditioned to fear and pain at her touch. She shrank in terror before she was hurt.

  "She knows nothing," he said. "She couldn't take you to the settlement if she wanted to."

  "Carry on, Lieutenant," said the commodore. "May I work on one of her teeth?" asked the beautiful inquisitor.

  "No," said the commodore regretfully. "The idea is good, but it would be better if you confine yourself to things which will heal quickly and entirely. We may have to claim later that their report of what was done to them here is a lie."

  Pertwee had forgotten that that kind of planning existed.

  Phyllis released one of Toni's arms and went behind her. Carefully, unimpressed by anything Toni could do, she bent it until Toni went white and sagged with agony, afraid to struggle in case the pain became worse. Toni's shoulder was held just short of dislocation. Moved one way it would be back in place. Moved the other it would be out.

  No, there was nothing that could be done against this, Pertwee thought hopelessly. Like millions of human beings in not dissimilar circumstances in the past, they were really only taking as much as they could for their own pride. They didn't want to carry with them afterwards the knowledge that they had caved in easily. As a matter of fact they didn't want to carry with them the knowledge that they had caved in at all, but Pertwee couldn't see how they could help it.

  Carefully Phyllis replaced the shoulder and massaged it gently with long, slender fingers. She tied that arm up again, though it must still be hurting enough to make Toni reluctant to move it if she could. Phyllis unfastened the other arm.

  Toni fainted for the first time in her life at the top point in that demonstration.

  "Water," said the commodore. "But not on this carpet. Move her into the bathroom."

  A door was opened. The two women lieutenants lifted Toni's chair and bore it into a bare white bathroom. The men made no effort to assist them. They had Pertwee by the arms, but Pertwee was uneasily conscious of the fact that one of these powerful strangers could handle him with one arm.

  Toni was still out. Phyllis filled a pail with water and threw it over her. She spluttered into consciousness.

  Since they were there, Phyllis filled the bath. She untied Toni and bore her like a baby to the bath, put her in it and held her face down by the back of the neck and one shoulder. Regularly she began to dip Toni's face under the water, waiting what seemed an interminable time, letting her up for no more than a couple of breaths and then submerging her head again.

  Pertwee noticed how she got the intervals. She was doing the exercise along with Toni, holding her breath and letting Toni up when she had to breathe herself . . .

  They worked hard at their job, these people. Thoroughness might have been their watchword, as it had been of other autocracies in the past.

  It went on and on and on. Phyllis grimly continued, until her green shirt was wet with sweat and sticking to her back, and she staggered as she bent over the bath. Then she let Toni up for a moment, leaving her hanging half out of the bath. Toni had taken about as much as she could take. She was gulping air and retching and she had a dead-white pallor that frightened Pertwee.

  He really wouldn't have believed this could happen. This was cold, not even cruel. There wa
s no grandeur in this. Pushing a girl's head under water in a tiny bathroom wasn't like burning her at the stake or stretching her on the rack. The bathos of it prevented her from feeling a heroine. It was merely an undramatic way of doing a job. Like suffocating an empress, not romantically with a silken pillow amid the trappings of satin and subdued lighting and fragrant perfume, but by sitting on her face.

  Toni wasn't permitted to be brave and beautiful and unruffled and stoic. She was left sprawled in a bath, her hair bedraggled, her ket plastered against her unattractively, retching nauseatingly.

  Phyllis wasn't heavily muscled as Pertwee had suspected from the strength she had showed -- though her height was the same as Toni's, every other measurement appeared to be less. Toni, if not plump, was certainly sleek and well-fed; Phyllis Barton was lean and firm.

  She stepped to the bath again, grasped Toni, and the performance was repeated. Toni was so much dead weight, and soon Phyllis was in difficulties again. But she carried on grimly, and no one moved to help her. When she stopped again it wasn't because she couldn't go on, but as she told the commodore:

  "She's got to the stage, sir, when she doesn't really know what's going on. I suggest you work on the man, or give the woman a few hours to recover."

  She lifted Toni back into the chair. Toni slumped in the seat, conscious but only just. She hadn't the strength to vomit now; her stomach did little audible somersaults every few seconds, but she only jerked slightly.

  "There's plenty of time, really," said the commodore reflectively. "It doesn't matter much whether they tell us today, next week or next year."

  That drew a convulsive shudder from Toni -- the prospect of a year of this.

  "Put them in a room together," the commodore ordered. "We won't work on the man -- only the girl."

  That was the cleverset thing he had said, Pertwee thought. What must the effect be on Toni if they never harmed him and always, after each respite, went back to work on her? Wasn't anyone in such circumstances bound to feel hatred, sooner or later, for the companion who was never hurt, the partner who was never called on to bear anything -- and blurt out the truth to put an end to the pain, the injustice, the terror that one's fortunate companion never had to face?

  2

  Rog was aware of June's unhappiness, but, he paid no attention just yet. He would attend to that in a minute. Meantime, he had a thought which might be solved now but lost for ever if he left it.

  He didn't believe in coincidence. The older people, used to a complex world, were more prepared to take coincidence for granted. Once, long ago, they had gone to a city of a million inhabitants and met on the street an old friend. Or got back in change a nicked, lucky penny spent by mistake.

  When still a child Rog had found that in a small community there was no such thing as coincidence. He had picked up the word, liked the sound of it, and investigated. It didn't really mean anything. Something happened that seemed queer, something the old people called coincidence. But when you traced it back, and found out what happened before this, before that, you found there was nothing strange about it at all.

  Bertha Doran had been much impressed when, back in New Paris after ten years, she happened to put her hand down the side of an old chair and when she drew it out, there on her finger was a long-lost ring. But when you considered a few things you wondered why she was so surprised. One, Bertha had gone back to her old home, where she was likely to find a lot of things that had been lost for years. Two, it was a habit of Bertha's to put her hands in odd crannies like that -- all her friends could testify to it. Three, there was only one place a hand could go down the side of the chair, and it wasn't incredible that a ring which stuck strongly enough there to be pulled off a finger should be dislodged by a finger being pushed back into it.

  If there was anyone who wasn't satisfied by that, he could try digging around for a few more facts.

  What was on Rog's mind at the moment was this. A ship left Earth and traveled quite a few light-years, was broken up and passed out of people's thoughts. Twenty years passed, and people talked less and less of Earth and more and more of Mundis. Then one day the people on Mundis could see with the naked eye that Earth was no more. Within five minutes, so to speak, there was a second ship flying overhead, a ship no one had known or guessed about.

  Rog wasn't prepared to buy the coincidence. That two unconnected events of such magnitude should happen to come together was, of course, possible; but he preferred not to believe it. He searched patiently, doggedly, for some connection.

  But he found he wasn't getting anywhere. And June still wasn't happy. He could feel her unhappiness.

  "Come here, honey," he said.

  They were back at their house in Lemon; It was late -- after midnight. June was curled in the darkest corner, watching him. She often did that, and he hardly noticed her.

  She uncurled herself. He took her in his arms, but there was something wrong. Patiently he started on the business of finding out what it was.

  "What's the trouble, June?" he asked. "Did I do something? Or was it something I didn't do?"

  She gulped down a lump in her throat which had probably been there a long time. "It's nothing -- nothing at all," she said unsteadily.

  He kissed her lips very lightly and grinned wryly down at her. "Nothing?" he said gently.

  The dam burst. "You shut me out," said June, and burst into tears. She couldn't control the sobs -- he could hear her try and fail. He didn't tell her to stop crying. He pulled her head on his breast and caressed her shoulders, knowing that would make her cry more. "Toni," she said between sobs. "You wouldn't let me stay. And now -- you won't tell me. Always."

  He sorted out the incoherence. "I should have told you," he said. "I should always tell you. It's just habit, June. I never told anyone anything I didn't have to. But it isn't lack of trust."

  "Oh, I'm a fool, Rog," said June unsteadily. "I'm always misunderstanding you, and thinking you don't care about me when I really know you do. You see, you were Dick's friend, and you know what Dick thinks of you. Dick talking about you is one of the first things I remember. And even when you don't notice what you're doing you're kind. You were always nice to me, even when you weren't really noticing me. So I fell in love with you a long time ago. But for years I kept telling myself that I must keep that to myself, because you'd never notice me. And then when you asked me to marry you I wanted to say no, for I was sure it would only mean misery sooner or later."

  She laughed uncomfortably. "I'm still expecting the misery, you see," she whispered.

  "That's not very sensible, is it?" asked Rog gently.

  "No," she murmured, like a repentant child.

  "Became if you wait for misery, it always comes. Something comes along, and if you didn't expect to be unhappy you wouldn't let it get you down. But if you're all set to say 'this is it' and let it break you, it will be it and it'll surely break you."

  He stroked her hair soothingly. "Know what, June?" he went on. "You never really did grow up. You still care what people think of you the way adolescents do. You're still afraid to say what you think in case people will laugh at you or say it's silly. Well, take it easy, baby. Don't hurry about growing up. I won't be sorry when you do, but you're very sweet as you are now."

  Suddenly June laughed. "What a mistake it is to say all men are equal. If they could start people off from scratch over and over again you'd always come out on top, Rog."

  But when people began to talk about himself Rog lost interest. He knew about himself -- all he needed to know, anyway.

  He wanted to say that as far as he was concerned it wasn't an interim marriage any more. But that was committing himself for the future, and Rog never committed himself when it wasn't really necessary. June was happy enough now and she was still young -- all the reasons there had been for making it an interim marriage still existed.

  He became alert and businesslike again. "Listen, June," he said. "I won't shut you out any more. This is what I was
trying to work out. Maybe you have some ideas."

  "You mean," she said when he had explained what was bothering him, "you wonder why the second ship should come here the instant we saw that the solar system was destroyed?"

  "Well, if not quite the instant we saw it, in a day or two."

  "As if the flare-up was a signal," June mused.

  "It must be a signal. At any rate it clearly acted as one. Then the ship was waiting -- off Mundis, in space perhaps?"

  "Not for years, surely."

  "Then on Secundis -- yes, /that's it/. They were waiting on Secundis, or they have a base there. Perhaps they weren't thinking about us at all, But whenever they saw that there was no Earth any more, they came looking for us."

  "But the flare-up wasn't a signal," objected June. "People back on Earth weren't going to blow up the sun just to show that it was time to do something."

  "No, it wouldn't be that sort of signal," Rog agreed. "But it could be a sign that it was safe to come here now. That would mean that it wasn't what they were meant to do. I don't quite know . . . "

  He jumped up. "Let's go and see Bentley," he said.

  "What -- now?" asked June.

  Rog remembered abruptly it was the middle of the night. He laughed. He could turn off his impatience instantly when it was clear it wasn't going to do any good being impatient.

  No," he said. "'Come on, June, let's get some sleep."

  3

  Pertwee shook his head as Toni was about to speak.

  "They may be listening to us," he warned her. He could have put it a lot stronger than that; there was no doubt at all that the Clades were listening. But making it clear that he appreciated that would only show the Clades that there was no purpose in leaving them together.

  Toni was gradually, and with rather unexpected courage, returning to her normal self. They had been put in a cell which contained nothing but a two-tiered bunk and a chair. There was a lavatory two feet square off one wall. The light was bare, bright and hard.