Chapter 20
TIME PASSED.
How much time Grimes did not know, although he did try to keep some track of it. He assumed that he was being fed at regular intervals, assumed, too, that he was being given three meals a day. The trays, bowls and spoons were made of a material that could be torn up and flushed away. He saved the spoons, laying out a row of them in the toilet alcove.
He tried to keep fit by exercising, by doing push-ups, situps and toe-touchings. He was far from sure that this was wise—the better the condition in which he maintained himself the longer it would take him to die under torture. But he could not abandon hope. Not for the first time in his life he thought that the immortal Mr. Micawber must be among his ancestors. Something might—just might—turn up.
The worst feature of this period of incarceration was that he was beginning to look forward to the sadistic trivi shows. He tried to excuse himself by telling the censor in his mind that he watched so as to be assured that neither Fenella Pruin, Darleen or Shirl was one of the screaming victims. This was partly so—but he knew that he had, now and again in the past, enjoyed films in which were picturesque scenes of the maltreatment of naked women. These had only been make-believe sadism—or had they?—but this was the real thing.
It was when he became sexually stimulated that he really hated himself.
Then one night—if it was night—he was awakened by the notes of a bugle call, reveille, from the wall screen. (It made a change from the usual piercing screams.) He looked at the wall but there was no picture, only an ominous, ruddy glow.
A quite pleasant male voice said, “We have been observing you, Grimes.”
“Surprise! Surprise!” he muttered sardonically.
“We have been observing you, Grimes,” repeated the voice. “We have decided that you are promising raw material.” (Grimes remembered a torture session that he had been unable to watch to a finish, that of a man being skinned alive.) “It may not surprise you to learn that many of our executioners are recruited from among the prisoners. You will be given the opportunity to join their number.”
“Like hell I would!” almost shouted Grimes.
“The standard reaction,” remarked the voice. “But you would be surprised to learn how many of our torturers have been recruited as you will be. After all, it boils down to a simple choice, that between being the killer or the killed. During your career in the Survey Service—and subsequently—that is a choice that you must have made, quite unconsciously, many and many a time. But when you made that choice in the past the death that you escaped would have been a relatively painless one. This time the death that you escape would have been extremely painful.”
“The answer is NO!” shouted Grimes.
“Are you sure? As I have already said, we have watched you. We have observed that you were physically stimulated by many of the more picturesque punishments meted out to members of the opposite sex. You really hate women, Grimes, don’t you? Soon, very soon, you will be given the opportunity to do something about it. And I warn you that if you fail to give satisfaction, if you refuse to take up the torturer’s tools or if you accord the subjects the privilege of a too quick release, you will be given instruction in the techniques required for the infliction of a long-protracted passing—instruction from which you will not benefit as you will not survive it.”
The red glow in the screen contracted to a single bright point, an evil star, then winked out.
And what would he do, Grimes asked himself, when it came to the crunch? What could he do? If failure to comply would mean only a quick death the choice would be a simple one—but he remembered vividly, too vividly, that wretch who had been skinned alive and that other one slowly roasting over the sizzling coals.
Then they came for him.
***
The four guards hustled him through what seemed like miles of corridors, cuffing him when he hesitated, prodding his naked back with the hard muzzles of their stunguns. They brought him into a large room, a sort of theatre in the round with the tiered seats already occupied by the audience. Over these the lighting was dim but Grimes could see men and women—and the inevitable Shaara. The stage was brightly lit by a single light sphere hanging above it. It was a set, and the other members of the cast were ready and waiting, there was a rack. There were two St. Andrew’s crosses. There was a box, a sort of oven, glowing redly, from which protruded the wooden-handled ends of the hot irons. There was a table with an array of knives, large and small, straight and curved, gleaming evilly.
On the rack was Fenella Pruin. She looked at him. He looked at her. She was trying hard not to show her fear but it would have been impossible for one in her situation not to be hopelessly afraid. Strapped to one cross was Darleen, to the other was Shirl. Grimes remembered the show that he had watched with Fenella, the make-believe torturings of the women on the rack and the crucifixes. He remembered the fat man who had wanted to take her to see the real thing. He wondered if that swine were among these ghoulish spectators. An amplified voice was speaking.
“Gentlebeings, the stars of the entertainment that we are about to witness are already known to each other. The man making his debut as an apprentice torturer is an offplanet spy who was apprehended by our security forces. He is being given the opportunity to redeem himself. The lady on the rack is his fellow agent. She will be punished for her crimes against society. The two ladies draped so attractively on their crosses abetted the man in his defiance of authority. Perhaps some of you were present on that occasion in the Colosseum. They will learn that it is unwise to transfer allegiances. Unfortunately for them it will be the last lesson of their lives . . .”
“Cut the cackle!” screamed Fenella Pruin defiantly.
“I would order you gagged,” the unseen announcer went on, “but that would disappoint our customers, to whom shrieks and pitiful pleas for mercy are the universe’s finest music.
“And now, Grimes, may I remind you that the show must go on? And soon, very soon. If there is too much hesitation on your part one of our experienced tormentors will usurp your star role and yours, although in an almost as important part, will be for one performance only.
“You see your working tools. The rack, the hot irons, the knives. You can use them in any order you please. Your original accomplice has stretched the truth so often that it would, perhaps, be an act of poetic justice if you stretched her. Or you might prefer to make a start on your more recent acquaintances, working on the principle of last in, first out. May I make a suggestion. Perhaps, during your early training in the use of various weapons, you became an expert knife thrower? And the young ladies come from a world whose inhabitants are experts in the use of thrown weapons . . . They would appreciate being dispatched that way. But do not make it too fast, Grimes. You know what the consequences to you will be if you do. Just try to lop off an ear here, a nipple there. Aiming between their legs you could slice their labia quite painfully . . .”
Or I could use a knife on myself, thought Grimes. But that wouldn’t be any help to the women. Or I could kill one of them before the stunguns got me. But which one?
Shirl was staring hard at him. She seemed to be trying to tell him something. She looked from him to the knives on the table, then up to the bright overhead light, screwing up her eyes exaggeratedly, then back to him. Grimes was no telepath but perhaps she was. Perhaps she was an unusually strong transmitter. There were glimmerings, only glimmerings, in his mind. Throwing weapons . . . Nocturnal vision, so often possessed by those of Terran but non-human ancestry, such as the Morrowvians . . . (He did not know what was the racial origin of the people of New Alice but he had his suspicions.)
There was a chance, he decided.
There was a chance for a quick death for the four of them—and a chance that they would not go to the grave unaccompanied.
But what of his own nocturnal vision? A sudden plunge into almost darkness would leave him as blind as the proverbial bat, and without the bat’s sonar. But he had been trained to work in the dark, by feel, when necessary. As long as he had directions and distances fixed firmly in his mind . . .
“We are waiting, Grimes,” said the voice. “Make up your mind. The choice is simple—torturer or torturee. And by being noble you won’t help your lady friends. Perhaps a countdown will help you. Ten . . . Nine . . .”
Grimes walked slowly to the table, picked up a short knife in his left hand. Then he went to the electric brazier, pulled a hot iron out of the box. Its tip was incandescent.
“A knife and an iron . . .” remarked the announcer. “This should be interesting. Which will he use first, I wonder? The knife, I imagine . . .”
Grimes moved to the centre of the stage. He was not quite directly beneath the overhead light, now (except for the ruddily glowing brazier) the only source of illumination in the theatre. And he was, he prayed to all the Odd Gods of the Galaxy, correctly sited for his next move.
Suddenly he threw the heavy iron upwards as hard as he could, transferring the knife to his right hand as soon as he had done so and running towards Shirl. The whirling, white-hot bar hit the glaring lamp, fortuitously the incandescent end first. Perhaps the plastic globe would not have broken had this not been so—but break it did.
There was darkness—complete insofar as Grimes and the members of the audience and the guards were concerned. Grimes had misjudged slightly, made heavy contact with Shirl’s naked body a fraction of a second before he anticipated it. He heard the ough as the air was driven from her lungs. Both his hands went up to her left wrist, found the strap securing it to the arm of the cross. He slashed, felt the soft leather or plastic or whatever it was fall away. (That knife was sharp.) Then her right wrist . . . (At least one stungun was in operation now, to judge from the vicious buzzing, but the shooting was wild.) Then her right ankle. (She emitted a little scream as he inadvertently nicked her skin.) Then her left . . .
Freed from the cross she fell against him, then pushed away, saying, “Look after Darleen . . .”
He stumbled towards the other crucifix. He almost missed it, found it only by tripping over Darleen’s right foot. Even though he fell he did not lose his hold on the knife. He scrambled to his feet, went to work on the girl’s bonds. Meanwhile Shirl, to whom the glow from the brazier afforded adequate illumination, must have made her way to the table with the knives. There was no more buzzing of misaimed stunguns. There were shouts, screams. Somebody was yelling, “Lights! Lights!”
Darleen was released. Without a word she ran to join Shirl. Perhaps there were now no knives left to throw but there were still the hot irons and, in the arena she had preferred a club to throwing weapons . . .
But where was the rack? Where was Fenella Pruin? It was still too dark for anybody with normal eyesight to find his way around in the theatre and he had now lost all sense of direction.
“Fenella!” he shouted.
“Here!” Then, “Get a bloody move on!” she cried.
He stumbled in the direction from which her voice had come. He found the rack the hard way, crashing into it, falling full length on to her nude body. She snapped irritably, “I want you to cut me loose, not make love to me!”
This time he had dropped the knife. He slid off her, down to the floor. He scrabbled around under the rack, to both sides of it. Then there was a brief flare of actinic light as one of Shirl’s missiles hit some piece of electrical equipment, shorting it out. He saw the gleam of metal close by his groping hand. Just in time he was able to stop himself from picking it up by the blade.
As he cut through Fenella’s bonds he realised that the theatre was now very quiet. All of the audience must either have escaped or been killed. (He did not think that they could have put up much of a fight.) Fenella pulled herself to her feet by holding on to his shoulders.
She asked, “What now?”
It was a good question, too good.
He said, after hesitation, “I kill you. Then the other two girls. Then myself.”
“What!”
“Do you think that they will give us an easy death after all this?”
“So you want to die? I don’t.”
And neither did he, thought Grimes. But what chance of survival was there?
Yet the theatre should have been swarming with armed guards by now. It was not. Surely the show in which he, Fenella, Shirl and Darleen were the stars must have been monitored . . . Perhaps the monitoring was only a recording, with nobody watching it live . . . Perhaps the survivors of the massacre were still trying to find their way through the maze of tunnels and had not yet met anybody to whom to report that the actor and actresses had strayed from the script.
“Shirl! Darleen!” he called.
They came to him, their bodies palely luminous in the near-darkness.
“Some escaped,” said Shirl. “We didn’t get them all . . .”
“We have to escape ourselves. Find women about your build among the corpses. Strip them. Completely. Get dressed. And you, Fenella.”
He found the body of a man. A thrown knife had penetrated his brain through his left eye, so there was not much blood. Grimes, hating the feel of the dead flesh, removed the shirt, the kilt, the underwear. At this latter he wrinkled his nose in disgust. He dressed in the shirt and kilt, found that the dead man’s shoes fitted his feet.
Not far from him Fenella Pruin had taken the long dress off a tall, slim woman who no longer needed it, had put it on. She looked at him and said, “Let’s go.”
“Underwear,” Grimes told her.
“But I can’t wear that. She . . .”
“People usually do when they die. Take those panties off her and hide them under a seat. When the guards get here they’ll find, among the other bodies, four completely naked ones. They’ll think—for a short while—that they’re us. I hope. Ready, all of you?”
“Ready!” said Shirl and Darleen.
“All right. Let’s get out of here.”
He led the way along an aisle. All the EXIT lights were out, of course, but surely an egress would not be hard to find. They passed through an opaquely panelled revolving door into a corridor that was, by comparison with the darkness of the theatre, brightly lit.
At the far end of this was a large group of men, running towards them.