Doomsday Warrior 18 - American Dream Machine Page 9

  “There seems to be a certain dissatisfaction among you,” Dovine said, and Rock would have sworn that he was dryly amused. “I’ll accept questions.”

  The prisoner at Rock’s left, a mournful-looking, fiftyish man with very few teeth, asked, “What work have we got to do?”

  “I’m afraid it will take a day or two once we land before we can sort that out,” Dovine said. “For reasons beyond my control entirely. In the meantime, you are the guests of our spacecraft. Eat well, sleep well. I regret that there is no work for you on this short journey, but that condition will soon pass, believe me.”

  Somebody snickered. It was the horse-faced prisoner who’d made a remark about such a good dinner having to be paid for.

  “I’ve done ’nough work in my time. A little relaxation is what I need,” Horse-face said.

  An emotion flickered behind Dovine’s eyes, and Rock could guess what it was. Sadism. The eager anticipation of seeing that man in agony. But nobody could deny that Dovine was a master of self-control. His response was mild and measured. “A few days of total leisure will make Esmerelda much more . . . interesting,” Dovine said mildly. “Are there any other questions?”

  “Yes.” Rock stood up and turned to face the man directly for the first time since coming into this ritzy banquet room. “Is there a Mr. Zrano involved in this? And when are we supposed to meet him?”

  Dovine’s lips pursed tightly a long time before he spoke. “I must give a truthful answer to each part of that question. No, there isn’t a Mr. Zrano involved. However, you will meet Zrano in the course of your—involvement in the entertainments. If the warden-president of Esmerelda decides that.”

  Rockson didn’t like the sound of that. This Zrano seemed to be a thing, not a man! Rock absentmindedly touched the moon-shaped medallion hung around his neck. Protection against Zrano . . .

  “All right, then,” Rock complained, “animal, vegetable, or mineral—is Zrano something that’s not human, and that we’re all going to be involved with?”

  “The answer to both questions is in the affirmative,” Dovine said, and Sanders let out a deep despairing breath. “I think that will be all for the questions,” Dovine snapped. “Everything you want to know is going to be answered shortly, perhaps sooner than you might wish. Are there requests that haven’t been anticipated? Is there anything you want that you can realistically be given now and in the terms of your short stay here?”

  The question had been framed to rule out bad jokes of the sort that inspired requests for freedom or for passage back to Venus. Dovine may not have had any humor himself, but he’d probably heard that others did.

  Rock said promptly, “I want the company of a woman.”

  Everyone at the prisoners table except Sanders chuckled and nodded.

  “Me, too.”

  “Same here.”

  “Yeah, a blond with curves.”

  Surprisingly, Dovine replied, “Women will be provided, but only for brief spans of time. I regret that, but any consort has to earn her credits. You have only a small number of credits each—the pay you have coming for good behavior. So be good. And—we’ll see.”

  Rock was a bit amazed. Women were to be provided?

  “If all of you will return to your rooms, women will soon be with those of you who ask for them. These two women here are available for thirty credits per hour. You don’t get to choose which one.” Dovine pushed back his chair, took another drink, then said, “Thank you for having listened to me so courteously.”

  Rock thought that the man’s eyes lighted briefly on Sanders, and then Dovine walked off the dais and out a suddenly opening door. The two women who’d sat with him so passively now got to their feet and followed, after a momentary pause. The room was quiet once more. All eyes had followed the women.

  Rock and the others were advised over the P.A. to hurry back toward the rooms they’d been given. No dessert.

  “Hey, you!” It was Sanders. The burly man touched Rock’s shoulder with a hard hand as they filed out of the room.

  “What do you want?”

  Sanders, not saying another word, only pointed at the flap in Rock’s one-piece that had received the gray square of audi-writing a while ago.

  Rock nodded. He walked on, into his room, noticing that his wall mirror had been taken away in the half-hour’s absence. With the gray square firmly in hand, he flipped the toggle at the bottom and heard Sanders’s first words spoken so quietly that the speak-end had to be raised to his ear to hear: “There ain’t no more room for workers on Esmerelda, I hear. Once we land, pal, we have to get away before the Zrano gets us.” Sanders’s desperate urgency was entirely convincing, but it was unfortunate that he took it for granted that Rock knew what a Zrano might be. “Anything’s better than that,” Sanders whispered from the device, “I’ve heard stories from men who wouldn’t lie to me. There are—deserted places—badlands on that asteroid where a man can hide. Now in order to get away, we’ve—”

  A knock at the door. Rock clicked off the device.

  Not for a moment was Rock seriously tempted to hear Sanders’s words out to the end, not just then. He didn’t seriously believe that it would be possible to get away once they’d landed, so it seemed that Sanders’s sputtering could wait for awhile. He tucked the audi-writing away in the flap from which he had drawn it. Rock said, “Come in.” He smiled at the girl who walked in, even though she wasn’t Kimetta.

  “My name is Qettm,” she said briskly. “Let us begin.”

  She was the one who had sat at Dovine’s right side. A good-looking girl by any standards, she wore an attractive, green, low-cut mini-outfit. Barefooted, she probably was a little taller than his five-eleven, which Rock didn’t mind at all. She could have been any age from twenty to thirty-five—the shiny skin made it hard to tell with any certainty. She flopped on the cot, as if she wanted to be finished with the “work” ahead as fast as possible, and started to unbutton her outfit.

  He was still trying to pronounce her name when she peeled off her scanties, looking at him expectantly, suddenly utterly naked. She was ripe. Probably a lot of synth-buildup, but a good job. He got into bed. The girl said, “Do what is normal and necessary.”

  Rock wasn’t like that. He insisted on being slow, making diversions, touching her in this place and that, prolonging the ritual so as to please her as well as himself. He knew he was slowly bringing her close to the heights of ecstasy. She responded, and they began doing what they both now desperately wanted to do!

  When it was over, Qettm said warmly, “There is no charge, and I want to stay, so that you can do that another hundred times! But I have to go. I’ll come back soon!”

  “I’d like that,” Rock said. “When?”

  “I will return, if possible, in an hour.”

  Now, they were friends. Her cold gray eyes had changed, and become a warm pair of baby blues. “Never was a man so kind to a girl,” she spoke, as she slipped on her scanties. “I never had any pleasure from the sex act.”

  “I can’t believe that,” Rock said, finding a cigarette.

  “On Esmerelda, sex is performed because children have to be made or because some people find the pressure of not doing it for a while to be intolerable.” Qettm raised herself up reluctantly. “Only so much time allotted for sex during a month, and after that you have to get out and do your work. It is the system, for citizens as well as prisoners. It is, they say, for our own good.”

  Rockson nodded. All tyranny, he knew, sought to control joy, to deny the “feeling” part of life. For your own good, the rulers of Esmerelda said, for your own effectiveness, you have to be deprived of joy.

  “With you,” Qettm added lowly, “I wish sex to last for many months! There’s no one like you on all of Esmerelda. Something about being with you is different from other men I’ve known.”

  He couldn’t bring himself to say that the difference was simply that he enjoyed making her happy, and as a result she had set herself to make him
very happy in turn. There was probably an Esmereldan dictionary with a definition of the word “pleasure,” but any citizen stumbling across it probably raised his eyebrows and hurried away to find another more comfortable word. He felt a pang of empathy for her.

  After Qettm put on her clothes, she turned on impulse to kiss Rock full and warmly on the lips.

  “There! I never did that before unless I knew I was going to make extra credits with the man! I must thank you for having caused me to feel so good, for giving me—hope? Is that the word? Yes, hope that there is more than work.”

  Not until she was gone, having used her voice-activation code to get out of the room, did Rock lazily remind himself that he ought to have asked about the Zrano. The audi-writing was still available to him, of course.

  Sanders’s clear and urgent tones came through at his touch, as he lay puffing on a Camel: “I’ve heard stories from men who wouldn’t lie to me. Now in order to get away we have to meet in the main square, called The Concourse, as soon as possible. The first one out on the asteroid will try to get all the others to join the escape. Six have a better chance of making it. There won’t be any trouble putting the guards out of commission. All it needs is a few sharp-edged metallic objects and a little guts. From the minute we get back to our rooms where they take us, we’ve got to get busy. Hide something sharp in your one-piece! Remember, our lives depend on it. Remember, it’s escape, or the Zrano!”

  Rock turned it off and crushed out his cig. Escape? There was no sense trying to get away from an asteroid if there was no ship waiting to fly you away. Rock wondered if Sanders was sane. He tilted the audi-writing square so that the long, thin sliver of toggle would fall out. He watched it dissolve. Once the evidence was self-destroyed, Rockson put his considerable skill in mimicking voices to use. He imitated the sex-girl’s voice and after three tries, the door slid open, activated by his close copy of her throaty tones. He had decided to talk Sanders and the others out of doing themselves harm by making any escape try. The penalty for attempted escaping, everyone knew, was brain-sapping—a ray that basically erases your mind. That wouldn’t do! The others might disagree, but he’d talk about making the best of this situation. Maybe Rock had found his true vocation at last: “Realist!” Or “Model prisoner!”

  Nobody was in this narrow white corridor. Were there guards in this area? Cameras? Stun-traps?

  Sanders’s door was wide open. Had he figured out how to open it also?

  Rock guessed what he would find inside Sanders’s room. And sure enough, the room was empty, all right. It was as if Sanders hadn’t ever been there. Maybe the man was roaming around looking for booze? Or was already trying an escape—in space! If so, it seemed like a stupid gesture to have left the door open. Rock wondered why he suddenly felt as if he had sustained a bad chill.

  “Going somewhere?” It was Dovine’s voice, which startled him.

  Rock spun around. “I—”

  “It’s all right,” Dovine smiled, “you were very clever to get out of your room. Now you wonder what happened to Sanders? Well, he was a bad boy. He was plotting you know. We had to let him take a stroll . . .”

  “Stroll?”

  “Yes,” Dovine smirked, coming closer, slapping a swagger stick in his hands. “Sanders has taken a walk outside the spacecraft. Without a spacesuit. He won’t be back.”

  Twelve

  Fourteen hours later, after a sleep period:

  “Step inside, please,” Dovine said. “I hope that the last one will close the door.” There were only five of them now: Rock, Skinny Jones, Reelk, Jansen and Horse-face.

  Reelk, the mournful-looking prisoner with only a few teeth, was the last in, and did what he had been asked. Rockson noticed with relief that all four other prisoners had come in response to the order to report to Dovine. So Sanders was the only one jettisoned. The dining table had been taken away, and five chairs faced the dais now. Two dull gray boxes had been set down on the table in front of Dovine, one at each end.

  “You all will be seated. There will be no need to discuss Sanders at this meeting—is that clear?”

  No one said anything.

  Rock was the only prisoner to sit down so that the bright ceiling light wouldn’t batter down on his head.

  “You’ve killed him,” Reelk blurted. And then he held a fist against his blabbermouth.

  “No,” Dovine replied. “He had a fair chance to survive,” Dovine spoke smoothly. “Not as fair as some of you will get, but as much chance as he deserved. He tried to escape in a shuttle capsule and he hadn’t properly sealed its air lock. So, I didn’t do anything, not really. Just let him—escape.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Rock said. “You killed him.”

  Dovine just shrugged. “I’m innocent.”

  “You’ve got no right to kill Sanders,” the toothless one continued to mutter.

  “Please be quiet and watch.” Dovine moved a switch on the box to his right and another on the one to his left. The boxes were visi-screens, it seemed, for they soon presented identical pictures. The video pictures were of a gladiator-type arena. It was empty. Rock felt his muscles knot up at the sight; he had the feeling he didn’t want to see this tape.

  “What in the name of hell is going on?” Reelk muttered as they waited for the action. “What is this stuff?”

  “We’re probably going to watch visi-flicks, like a bunch of damn kids,” Jansen, the fat one, complained.

  “At least it’s something to do,” the lantern-jawed Horse-face said, fidgeting. “I didn’t get a prosti-visit. I had no good behavior credits and—I’ve been biting my nails down to the armpits without anything in the way of work.”

  “Shut up!” Dovine snapped. “Just look!” On the screen, the camera panned up, showing an expectant audience of about five hundred people in the arena, maybe more. Rock wondered who the guy with a whole box to himself was. He was old, looked mean, and was dressed sort of like Nero would have been, laurel wreath and all.

  “That’s the warden on the goddamn prison-asteroid,” Reelk said. “He used to be warden on Venus. His name is Langdon.”

  “Hey, look now! There’s the bottom of the arena! That’s where it’s all gonna happen, whatever it is,” Jansen shouted.

  “It’s gonna be like one of those shows you see on Venus-Blue where two guys beat each other’s brains out,” Reelk offered.

  Rockson wished they would shut the hell up. But Skinny Jones said, “No, it’s not! Look at those gates, one very big, and one about human size. Reminds me more of an arena for those Spanish bullfights! But that gate is way too big for any bull I ever heard of.”

  Something dark was coming out of that large gate.

  “That’s no bull. It’s only got two legs,” Reelk said, in a low tone. “God, what is it?”

  The thing, a massive black shape, stayed in shadows. Out of the small gate came a man—a naked, well-muscled man. He was being prodded out with long pointed tridents by two uniformed guards. The guards were laughing; the naked man was crying.

  Reelk said, “Jeez! He’s turning back to the little gate, like he’d give anything to be back on the other side.”

  “Poor bastard!” Rock muttered. Having guessed what was going to happen, Rockson watched Dovine’s expressionless face, the face of somebody very, very evil. Horse-face said, “Look at that other gate! The big one! Something’s coming now. Whatever it is, it’s huge!”

  “It’s coming, now,” Reelk agreed.

  Rock saw a dark, immense shape moving in the shadows, and then nothing! The camera panned down, and avoided giving a clear shot of the thing! Frustrating!

  For a split second, Rock thought they had seen something like an elephant-sized lizard-creature, something out of every man’s nightmares, a four-o’clock-in-the-morning creature, a hangover creature. But he wasn’t sure.

  The camera had moved so quickly that Rock couldn’t be sure it wasn’t just his mind filling in a shape. The camera did show the naked victim, wi
th his back against the sharp, guard-held pikes that had propelled him into the arena. He was letting go of his bowels, and screaming. To show a human being who looked the way that man did at that moment was in itself a wicked act. Not seeing the thing made it worse.

  In a low, awed voice one of the prisoners asked, “What is it? I didn’t see.”

  “Well,” Dovine said, “I guess it’s a Zrano.”

  Rockson didn’t have to look up at Dovine to know that the man would be smiling.

  Horse-face said quietly, “The guy has got no place to run, it ain’t fair.”

  “Hell, if it was me out there, I’d run like nobody’s business!” Reelk said with conviction.

  “You?” Horse-face looked cynically at the speaker. “You’d probably shit that damn thing to death!”

  Rock wondered if it wasn’t the ability to make bad jokes in times of stress that set human beings apart from other species. His eyes were riveted on the screen and, like the other prisoners in the room, he couldn’t help talking; but his words were aimed at Dovine.

  “Why is this being done?”

  “You should understand that, of all people. It is a punishment. A simple pleasure for the audience, a punishment for the victim.”

  “Is the sight of a man’s dying horribly your idea of—”

  “The people of Esmerelda, you realize, work very hard indeed. It shouldn’t surprise you if they want to watch others suffer a bit too? This is a live broadcast, by the way. Many prisoners on Esmerelda have volunteered to face the Zrano. They think it’s better than living there.”

  “Has anybody ever survived?” Reelk asked—a good question.

  “Oh yes, indeed. There’s a gentleman who died very recently of old age who had met the mother of this Zrano. Zranos are living fossils. Monsters very rare indeed, worth quite a lot of credits. I might tell you, if it’s of interest, that there will be no descendants of this monster, alas. The rules of biology are immutable, and the birth of this Zrano resulted in—ah, difficulties. At any rate, the games will never resume unless it is with a Zrano-robot, once this one dies. I’m sure a robot-monster won’t be as good.”