3
Awakening in Hell
Collard was standing over me when I woke up, his eyes filled with that familiar mixture of anxiety and mistrust. His crown was not on his head, but a blaster was jammed negligently in his belt and his right hand was never far from the butt of it.
He said, "You're not hurt. You can thank the Others for that. Five of the girls were killed, but it takes a lot to bother a man of the Four and the Four. Just take a minute and rest up. I want to talk to you."
I felt like I'd been beaten with clubs, but I pushed myself up and looked around. What I saw was fantastic—absurd—frightful! All about there lay corpses, the bodies of the Others. They were dead, but without a mark on them, as though they had perished in some weird pandemic. I could not understand.
I looked at Collard. "You've killed them," I said, but it was not an accusation, for I simply could not believe that it had happened. I had never seen a dead master before; I had not known that they could die.
He shook his head, "No," he said cryptically. "The Others are still alive."
"Alive?" I gasped. "But—"
"Their bodies are dead," he said carefully. "At least, they're dead as any machine is dead, when the power is turned off. The Others themselves—their minds and egos—are . . . Well, look." He held out one hand to me, showed me a capsule of coppery metal. "This," he said solemnly, "is what you are so devoted to. This is one of the masters."
I reached up automatically, touched it. It was curiously chill, as though it had been in outer space for weeks. I fondled it, looked at it. . . . Then what Collard had said penetrated. "You fool," I said. "What are you—" He held up a hand, took back the coppery capsule. "I'm not lying," he sighed, "but I didn't expect you to believe me. Well, let me tell you anyhow. The Others were robots. Where they came from, how they came into being, perhaps they could tell you, though I doubt it. Certainly, I can't. But all they were was clever machines—oh, made of organic materials, for the most part, yes. But a machine can be organic in composition. The robots were activated from without, supplied with energy from the central sending station that we crashed into and annihilated. When the power stopped—they stopped.
"They are unharmed. That is why we are removing these capsules—which contain the mind of the robot—from their bodies. You see, the power might be turned on by some of those who, like you, are still under the domination of the Others. We can't chance that."
I looked around, bewildered. For the first time I saw that the sending tower was still blazing furiously, sending up a tower of unbelievably thick white smoke. Other, lesser pyres all around marked where the robot ships had crashed. I looked back at Collard.
He was smiling at me. I wondered at his smile, open and sincere, warm. I wondered—until I understood.
I stood up, "You had me going," I admitted. "I understand now. All right. You killed these Others, and you dare not admit it to me. You are a rebel—a heretic—a renegade. You must be punished, and it seems that I am the only one who can do it. Collard," I said, "draw your gun. I'm going to kill you."
His smile faded, but he made no move for his gun. He looked at me for a long second. Then, just as I was about to spring for him, he said quietly, "Take him."
I had been a fool! Two pairs of arms grabbed me from behind, and pinioned me. I struggled, but I was weak and there were twice as many of them. I fought them all the way, but they brought me here, to this room. And there they left me.
Collard came back in a while ago to tell me that I had five minutes. He has been reading what I have written—I let him, because it does not matter. I have given up hope of getting this to those it should reach, even as I have given up hope of dying. Collard was too smart for me; he left his blaster outside when he came in with another like him. Otherwise I would have died at the muzzle of his blaster—and I might have taken him with me.
Collard has been talking to me as he reads. He says I am deliberately deceiving myself, omitting important things. He says that I should not refer to the machine he is going to use on me as a torture machine. He says that the Others used the same machine on me during the hundred days of training, repeatedly; that they indoctrinated me with it, very thoroughly, and that all he is going to do is to cancel out what they impressed on my mind.
That may be true. But I do not want it canceled out; I do not want to become a traitor to the Others. What Collard has said may be true, in part; it may be that the Others were robots, the mechanical descendants of some organic race that once lived on this green planet and disappeared without a trace. I don't know; it doesn't matter. The Others were—the Others. I swore to obey them and to serve them.
I do not want to be forced to change that.
They must be nearly ready for me. Almost all of those of the Four and the Four who were still loyal to the masters have been through the mind-molding machine already. They have been warped as Collard is warped, have degenerated to mere humans again, though with all the physical powers and mental keenness that the Others gave them still. But their emotions and their outlook have become human.
That was how it began. I think the Others could have prevented it, if they had thought ahead far enough, and cared enough. The mind is an elastic thing, and tends to return to its original shape. After a time on the green planet, even the most devoted of the Four and the Four began to question, to change back to humanity.
Yes, even I might have done so, in time. For it is true that the Others did not plan well what to do with us after we arrived; all that concerned them was getting us here, with the girls.
Collard claimed an absurd thing. He said that this planet of the Others is dying out, that it will soon be uninhabitable even for them. He said that that is why the Others have seventy-seven representatives on Earth. That, he said, is why the maidens of the Four and the Four were sent—to provide all information necessary. It may be, as I told him, true. And if so it does not matter, for the Others are beyond our questioning.
It might have been well if the three Others there in that great tomb-like structure where the maidens waited, somnolent, had been unable to send warning. All that Collard and his cohorts wanted was the girls themselves. Some insane idea they had of finding a hidden spot on this green planet, where they could live and have children and, after the Others had left for Earth, take over the green planet. The Others could have spared the maidens—they were important, but not vital—and the aerial duel over the city, with its frightful consequences, need never have been.
But it is too late to think of that.
Collard is getting impatient. If the mind operation is successful on me—if I become a traitor—he will want me to go back to Earth with him, to seek out the radio-power station that feeds the Others there and destroy it.
If the mind machine fails he will go alone.
I hope it fails.
Collard is opening the door, beckoning to me. The shadow of the machine is visible, flickering only slightly in the light of the flames that are finally beginning to die down. It is waiting for me, and I must go.
I pray that it will kill me—
But I have become sure that it won't.
I have just added up the prices I was paid for all the stories (and the one sf poem) included up to this point in this book. It comes in the aggregate to $283.50. Money was worth more a generation ago, but not that much more. The principal reason I wrote so much and earned so little from sf was that I was writing mostly for myself, at the rates I could afford to pay.
Partly that was because of lack of confidence. Partly it was lack of money. A terrible disadvantage in working cheap is that it condemns you to go on working cheap. You can't afford to take chances, even if they might pay off better. While I was my own editor I didn't pay much. But I paid fast, and I paid sure.
When Al Norton took over my magazines it was no longer quite as fast, because he had the quaint notion that he should read my stories before he bought them and that usually took a week or two. And, at least in my mind, it wasn't as sure. I don't remember Al ever rejecting a science-fiction story of mine. But it could have happened. And I reasoned that as long as I had to go back to being a civilian I might as well try a few other markets.
So I cast around for a new outlet. I found one in Planet Stories, which published Conspiracy on Callisto in its Winter 1943 issue.