sat up straight on the bunk where Birek had laid him. “The tidal wave,” he said, over a quick stab of fear. “What....”
“We ride it out,” said Loris bitterly. “We always have.”
MacVickers knew the Jovian Moons pretty well. Remembering the tremendous tides and winds caused by the gravitational pull of Jupiter, he shuddered. There was no solid earth on Io, nothing but mud. And the extraction plant, from the feel of it, was a hollow bell sunk under it, perfectly free.
It had to be free. No mooring cable made could stand the pull of a Jupiter-tide.
“One thing about it,” said Pendleton with quiet viciousness. “It makes the bloody Jovies seasick.”
Janu the Martian made a cracked, harsh laugh. “So they keep a weak current on us all the time.” His hatchet-face was drawn, his yellow cat-eyes lambent in the dim light.
The men sprawled on their bunks, not talking much. Birek sat on the end of his, watching MacVickers with his pale still eyes. There was a tightness in the room.
It was coming. They were going to break him now, before he hurt them. Break him, or kill him.
MacVickers wiped the sweat from his face and said, “I’m thirsty.”
Pendleton pointed to a thing like a horse-trough against the bulkhead. His eyes were tired and very sad. Loris was scowling at his stained and faintly filmed feet.
There wasn’t much water in the trough. What there was was brackish and greasy. MacVickers drank and splashed some on his face and body. He saw that he was already stained with the mud. It wouldn’t wash off.
The dying Earthman whispered, “There is food also.”
MacVickers looked at the basket of spongy synthetic food, and shook his head.
The floor dipped and swung. There was a frightening, playful violence about it, like the first soft taps of a tiger’s paw. Loris looked up at the glass roof with the black shapes beyond.
“They get the pure air,” he said. “Our ventilator pipes are only a few inches wide, lest we crawl up through them.”
Pendleton said, rather loudly, “The swine breathe through the skin, you know. All their sense organs, sight and hearing....”
“Shut up,” snarled Janu. “Stop talking for time.”
The sprawled men on the bunks drew themselves slowly tight, breathing hard and deep in anticipation. And Birek rose.
MacVickers faced them, Birek and the rest. There was no lift in his heart. He was cold and sodden, like a chuted ox watching the pole-axe fall. He said, with a bitter, savage quiet,
“You’re a lot of bloody cowards. You, Birek. You’re scared of the death creeping over you, and the only way you can forget the fear is to make someone else suffer.
“It’s the same with all of you. You have to trample me down to your own level, break me for the sake of your souls as much as your bodies.”
He looked at the numbers of them, at Birek’s huge impervious bulk and his great fists. He touched his silver collar, remembering the agony of the shock through it.
“And I will break. You know that, damn you.”
He gave back three paces and set his feet. “All right. Come on, Birek. Let’s get it over with.”
*
The Venusian came toward him across the heaving floor. Loris still looked at his feet and Pendleton’s eyes were agonized. MacVickers wiped his hands across his buttocks. The palms were filmed and slick with oil from the can he had handled.
There was no use to fight. Birek was twice his size, and he couldn’t be hurt anyway. The diamond-sheathe even screened off the worst of the electric current, being a non-conductor.
That gave the dying men an advantage. But even if they had spirit enough left by that time to try anything, the hatches were still locked tight by air-pressure and the sheer numbers of their suffering mates would pull them down. Also, the Jovies were as strong as four men.
Non-conductor. Sheathed skin. Birek’s shoulders tensing for the first blow. Sweat trying to break through the film of oil on his palms, the slippery feel of his hands as he clenched them.
Birek’s fist lashed out. MacVickers dodged under it, looking for an opening, dreading the useless agony of impact. The bell lurched wildly.
A guard moved abruptly overhead. The motion caught MacVickers’ eye. Something screamed sharply in his head: Pendleton’s voice saying, “They breathe through the skin. All their sense organs....”
He sensed rather than saw Birek’s fist coming. He twisted, enough to take the worst of it on his shoulder. It knocked him halfway across the deck. And then the current came on.
It was weak, but it made him jerk and twitch. He scrambled up on the pitching deck and started to speak. Birek was coming again, leisurely, smiling. Then, quite suddenly, the hatch cover clanged open, signalling the change of the shifts. MacVickers stood still for a second. Then he laughed, a queer little chuckle, and made a rush for the hatch.
III
He went down it with Birek’s hand brushing past his head. Men yelled and cursed. He trampled on them ruthlessly. The ones lower down fell off the ladder to avoid his feet.
There was a clamor up above. Hands grabbed at him. He lashed out, kicking and butting. His rush carried him through and out across the pit, toward the space between the end points of the horseshoe circuit.
He slowed down, then. The guards had noticed the scuffle. But it seemed to be only the shift changing, and MacVickers looked like a man going peacefully for oil.
Peacefully. The blood thundered in his head, he was cold, and the skin of his back crawled. Men shoved and swore back by the ladder. He went on, not too fast, fighting the electric shiver in his brain.
Fuel and lubricating oils were brought up, presumably from tanks in a still lower level, by big pressure pumps. All three sets of pumps, intake, outlet, and oil, worked off the same compressed-air unit.
He set the lubricating-oil pump going and rattled cans into place. The men of his shift were straggling out from the ladder, twitching from the light current, scared, angry, but uncertain.
There was a subtle change in the attitude of the Europan guards. Their movements were sluggish, faintly uncertain. MacVickers grinned viciously. Seasick. They’d be sicker—if they didn’t get him too soon.
The surging pitch of the bell was getting worse. The tide was rising, and the mud was playing with the bell like a child throwing a ball. Nausea began to clutch at MacVickers’ stomach.
The pressure-gage on the pump was rising. He let it rise, praying, his grey-green eyes hot and bright. Going with the motion of the deck, he sprawled over against the intake pumps.
He spun the wheel on the pressure-control as far as it would go. A light wrench, chained so that it could not be thrown, lay at his feet. He picked it up, his hand jerking and tingling, and began to work
