Chapter V

The panels to two adjacent chambers were open.

"Guess they don't trust us together," Cragin said. The dark blue plastiglass of his Patrol tunic dully reflected the subdued half-light that emanated into the tube-like corridor from beyond the panels. Like a nightmare, he kept telling himself, like a nightmare. Impossible impossible impossible....

Her face was the color of white sand, and it was the only indication that she understood.

"Please try, Cragin."

"Sure."

"You want to try...."

"It's a cinch I can't arrest 'em, princess. And I know you want out. You want to sink 'em all and so do I. If there's any way, believe me--"

Cragin knew he would not forget the look etched in the thin white lines of her face as she was led into the testing place; there was something in it that he had never seen before in the face of an Earthman. Not an expression caused purely by reflex in time of danger or pain; not one carefully controlled after finding an unpleasant solution to an inescapable problem. Neither of those. But what others....

Cragin looked then to what he might be more successful in understanding. The testing place which had been readied for him was a small, independent laboratory, much like the control room of the machine-planet, save for the complete absence of telescreens. And awaiting him were two cloaked figures in red mail--technicians, second grade. The Owners were taking no chances.

He lay at full length on a sheet of metal that was as comfortably resilient and warm as an old-fashioned bed of feathers, and waited expectantly.

"Are you prepared, Earthman?"

"Fire away, braintrust." He wondered at the absence of equipment. Nothing was attached to him--no electrodes, none of the usual electroencephalographic devices. There was only a low hum, and the pale glow from the indistinct walls about him.

"The test begins, Earthman. Display your mind as you see fit."

The hum deepened. The walls became more indistinct, and the glow somehow became a part of the sound that filled the tiny chamber.

Cragin flashed his mind to his first years of schooling. He had been 10 years old, had learned the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the two opposite sides ... "i" represents the square root of the quantity minus one, and is termed an imaginary number ... for every action, there is an opposite and equal reaction....

He lost all sense of time, and guarded against thinking of it, lest he betray even a basic knowledge of continuum dynamics. Had to keep it simple, child-like, simple.... The intensity of light diminishes inversely as the distance from its source is squared.

The voice inside his head was at length the signal that the test was completed.

"From this examination, Earthman, it is evident that you stumbled where you did purely by accident, and that the craft in which you traveled was out of control, operating entirely beyond your understanding."

Cragin kept his thoughts diffuse and made no effort to reply.

"Do I serve or die?" he asked at length.

"On a probationary basis, you serve. Grade, twelfth."

The test was done, and Cragin had won the first cast of the dice.

The ruse had worked, Cragin knew, not because the Owners and their test had been outwitted but because the test itself had been logically constructed to measure the level of a mind which was functioning at its maximum. The trick was based on folly--folly in which higher level intelligences would not indulge, and which lower ones would not recognize as a gamble for higher stakes than slavery. Cragin knew he would not have indulged in it had the chance been up to him alone.

What surprised him of course was that so far it had worked. And it made Lin Griffin all the more mystifying, almost inscrutable. Theoretically, she should have dismissed such a plan as ridiculous. But logic and the theory upon which it was based, and what Lin Griffin did, were two different things. Cragin tried to put the puzzle from his mind. And the girl. The probabilities were against his seeing her again. And that, for reasons as puzzling as the girl herself, made him peculiarly miserable.

* * * * *

Other slaves from a hundred other civilizations, ranging from the shape of a man to shapes that Cragin could not identify with his three dimensional senses had been packed into the hull of the spacecraft with him; they were all of his assigned grade, and therefore would constitute little problem. He could tell by their reactions to outside stimuli that he was their mental superior.

The pilot might be a different matter. He carried arms much resembling his own Krell guns, judging from their outward appearance of construction and functional design. But there was one thing--they had a fixed grip, like the ancient pistols of Earth. It meant they could be used from only one hold, and indicated that they were copied from the product of a civilization perhaps a hundred years behind his own. But perhaps his slim margin of advantage would be enough.

A cloaked and red-mailed servant of the second grade had briefly addressed the group prior to take-off, and for moments Cragin had feared that he would accompany the consignment. But he had not.

The voice had simply said, "New servants of the Owners, you are about to be transported to your place of work. As servants of the twelfth, and lowest, rank, your duty will be the mining of unconsumed zronon, employed by the Owners to maintain their home and their glorious gateway on an equal level of brilliance to that of the stars themselves. Death awaits that servant who lags in his output. Your destination will be the eighth mining planet, nearest the edge of the Trespass Limit. It was once, like all other mining planets, a live star, extinguished and cooled by the Owners that its highly precious and combustible substance be turned to their own desired ends.

"Are there any for whom this directive has not been reduced to sufficiently simple terms?"

There was silence.

"Very well. Be it remembered among each of you that the Owners, those who near the goal of the creation of life, and who are long since the masters of death, command you."

Then it was over, and Cragin waited in the hot, dank hull, sweating inside his helmet, in which there was an endless supply of his own unique atmosphere. His own helmet, because it was far from being so perfect, had been taken from him upon completion of the test. Such was the case with each of the others, and the textures and colorations of the stuff they breathed or absorbed was as varied as the planets on which they were spawned. And there was hardly any helmet of the same shape or design as another.

The waiting did not last long, but Cragin's plan was in his head as completely as he could fashion it when he felt the landing jar. If it were to work, it would be executed with split-second speed and precision, or again, the alternative would be destruction. It was evident that to use his advantage to the utmost, it must be coupled with the dual advantages of immediacy and surprise.

The airlock opened; with the rest, Cragin filed through it. He took glancing note of the positions of the few guards; kept their pattern of surveillance stenciled in his memory.

The file was split--a quick maneuver placed him at the end of his own section as it was led to the opening of a shaft even darker than the leaden twilight which hung low like a weighted shroud over the entire sphere.

It would be in a moment, or a month, or a year....

The slave ship had not prepared yet for take-off; its tubes smoked lazily, cooling.

A month, even a day, would be too long. If it was to be attempted at all, it was to be NOW.

* * * * *

And Cragin had the squat guard on a grip which broke his spine before his heart had time to beat again. The gloom helped; the din that issued dully from the mine's lower levels covered the near silence of the death which Cragin had meted out. The weapon was the guard's only insigne of identity, and Cragin had it cradled in his own arms before the thick, broken body hit the ground.

Then he ran, laboring against a slightly stiffer gravity than his Earth-muscles had been born to, waving the weapon above him with all the strength he had!

Toward the ship and its smoking tubes--gesturing, pointing toward the cave-mouth, and yelling his head off, wondering how closely the time-lapse would match between the time he reached the ship and the other guards, even now running their first steps toward the cave mouth toward which he pointed, would realize that although he was giving alarm, he was running away from, not toward, the indicated trouble point.

He was within the airlock by the time the first guard to answer his cry of distress had taken twenty running steps, and had, upon taking the twenty-first, realized that Cragin was going in the wrong direction. But the margin had been enough--

The lock slammed shut.

The pilot, returning to his control panels from the brief recess he had taken elsewhere in the ship, only saw Cragin for as long as it took the Earthman to unleash the weapon he had captured. There was a flat explosion, the weapon bucked uncomfortably, and the pilot died with a large, blue hole through what Cragin took to be his head.

There was only one more thing left to logic, and the rest--

For the second time in his life since he had met Lin Griffin, he wondered what, if something there was, might lie beyond logic.

The simplified control panel resembled something that might have been manufactured in Earth factories half a century before. It had been obviously designed for the capabilities of the servant-pilot to whom it was assigned. If only she had the guts--

Cragin blasted off, and twisted the speed-control full on.

The Trespass Limit would shatter him, of course. Or within moments at least, the death which the Owners themselves controlled would seek him out. Unless....

He could not understand the symbols, but he knew the acceleration and velocity needles were going crazy--they were deep in a red-hued band and nearing its limit.

Even through the inverse inertia field, Cragin could feel the thrust of the terrible acceleration and then--

There was a click.

A hum which rose within seconds to a high shrill followed it and then another click came, another hum, then going up the scale.

Such sounds could be only from--COMPTOMETERS!

Cragin spun a telescreen control, a mad laughter welling from within him, bursting through his blood-flecked lips, shaking him uncontrollably. There was blackness! The gateway, gone--the great, star-like home of the Owners, vanished! Somehow, he was out!

A critical speed, and the comps going like crazy!

Cragin laughed and laughed until he fell unconscious.