spine.
He stumbled backward, and his foot went off into emptiness. He twisted blindly, catching the opposite side of the shaft, and hung there, groping with his foot for the ladder rungs, cursing in a harsh, toneless voice.
The tentacle struck out again, with swift, exquisite skill. Three times like a red-hot lash across his face, and twice, harder, across his hands. Then it touched the collar again.
MacVickers retched and let go. He fell jarringly down the ladder, managed to break his fall onto the metal floor below, and crouched there, sick and furious and afraid.
The hatch cover clanged down over him like the falling hammer of doom.
*
MacVickers dropped into a circular room thirty feet across, floored and walled with metal and badly lighted. The roof was of thick glassite plates. Through them, very clearly, MacVickers could see four Europan guards, watching.
“They’re always there,” said the Venusian softly. “You’ll come to love them, stranger.”
There were men standing around the ladder foot, thirteen of them, with the Venusian. Earthmen, Martians, Venusians, pale, stark naked, smeared with a blue-green stain. Their muscles stood out sharp on their gaunt bodies, their silver collars a mocking note of richness.
Deep, deep, inside himself, MacVickers shivered. His nostrils wrinkled. There was fear in the room. The smell of it, the shudder of it in the air. Fear that was familiar and accustomed, lying in uneasy sleep, but ready to awake.
There were other men, four or five of them, back in the shadows by the wall bunks. They didn’t speak, nor come out.
He took a deep breath and said steadily, “I’m Chris MacVickers. Deep-space trader out of Terra. They caught me trying to get through the Asteroid lines.”
Their eyes glistened at him, looking from him to something behind them that he couldn’t see. They were waiting, and there was something ghoulish in it.
The Venusian said sharply, “Tough luck, MacVickers. I’m Loris, late of the Venusian Guard. Introduce yourselves, boys.”
They did, in jerky detached voices, their eyes sliding from him to the hidden something. Loris drew a little closer, and one of the Earthmen in the group came toward him.
“I’m Pendleton,” he said. “The Starfish . Remember?”
MacVickers stared at him. The furrows deepened in his craggy face. He said, “My God!” very softly, and not as a curse. “Pendleton!”
The man grinned wryly. He was English, the ravaged ghost of the big, ruddy, jovial spaceman MacVickers remembered.
“Quite a change, eh? Well, perhaps we’re lucky, MacVickers. We shan’t have to see the smash.”
MacVickers’ head dropped forward. “Then you saw it coming, too?”
Loris made a little bitter laugh that was almost a sob. All the desperate boyish humor was gone from his face, leaving it old and grim.
“Who hasn’t? I’ve been here—God knows. An eternity. But even before my ship was taken, we knew it. We can’t build spaceships as fast as their Jovium destroys them. When they break through the Asteroid line....”
Pendleton’s quiet voice was grave. “Mars is old and tired and torn with famine. Venus is young, but her courage is undisciplined. Her barbarians aren’t suited to mechanized warfare. And Earth....” He sighed. “Perhaps if we hadn’t fought so much among ourselves....”
MacVickers said harshly, “It wouldn’t make much difference. When a man has a weapon that causes metal to explode its own atoms, it doesn’t make any difference what you stack up against him.”
He shook his craggy head impatiently. “What is this place? What are you doing here? The Jovies just brought me here and dumped me in without a word of explanation.”
Pendleton shrugged. “We, too. There’s a pit below, full of machinery. We work it, but we’re not told why. Of course, we do a lot of guessing.”
“Guessing!” The word rose sharp on the thick hot air. A man burst out of the group and stood swaying with the restless motion of the floor. He was a swart Low-Canal Martian. His yellow cat-eyes glittered in his hatch-face, and his thin ropy muscles twitched.
“I’ll tell you what this place is, Earthman. It’s a hell! And we’re caught in it. Trapped, for the rest of our lives.” He turned on Pendleton. “It’s your fault. We were in a neutral port. We might have been safe. But you had to get back....”
“Janu!” Pendleton’s voice cracked like a whip. The Martian went silent, watching him. There was more than hate in his yellow eyes. Dando , the beginning of the trap-madness. MacVickers had seen it in men who couldn’t stand the confinement of a deep-space voyage.
The Englishman said quietly, “Janu was my glory-hole foreman. He rather holds this against me.”
The Martian snarled, and then coughed. The cough became a paroxysm. He stumbled away, grey-faced and twitching, bent almost double.
“It’s the heat,” said Loris, “and the damp. Poor devil.”
*
MacVickers thought of the air of Mars, cold and dry and pure. The floor rocked under him. Eyes, with the queer waiting shine to them, slid furtively to the hidden thing behind the standing men.
The hot wet air lay on his lungs. He sweated. There was a stir of nausea in him and the lights swirled. He shut his jaw hard.
He said, “What did Janu mean, the rest of our natural lives? They’ll let us go when the war’s over—if there’s anything left to go to.”
There was a tight little silence. And then, from the shadows against the wall, there came a brittle, whispering laugh.
“The war? They let us go before that!”
The group parted. MacVickers had a brief glimpse of a huge man crouched in a strange position on the floor. Then he couldn’t see anything but the shape that came slowly out into the light.
It moved with a stiff, tottering gait, and its naked feet made a dry clicking sound on the metal floor. MacVickers’ hand closed hard on the ladder behind him.
It had been a man, an Earthman. His body was still tall, his features still fine. But there was a film over him, a pale blue-green sheathe that glistened dully.
He thrust out an arm, with a hand on it like a hand carved in aquamarine. “Touch it,” he whispered.
MacVickers touched it. It was quite hard, and warm only with the heat of the air. MacVickers’ grey-green eyes met the sunken, sheathed eyes of the Earthman. His body hurt with the effort to control it.
“When we can no longer move,” the whispering voice said, “they take us up the shaft and throw us over, into the mud. That’s why you’re here—because we were one man short.”
MacVickers put his hand back on the ladder rung. “How long?”
“About
