Brain World

Chapter Eighteen

“What the hell’s that got to do with us?” Ronny said. “We’re not even Dawnmen, not to mention belonging to the Kshatriya caste.”

Gil said, “It seems that in ancient times, on the world where they first evolved, and before they spread out over other planets as well, they had a society somewhat similar to that of ancient Earth. That is, they were split up into different tribes and nations. When they captured enemies in battle they were sent to the arena. If they survived, they were turned free.”

Roy added, “Though they no longer have wars, in the old sense, the tradition is still with them. It’s part of their rituals, even though megayears have gone by since then. Last time, they warned you and Wyler off, but this time they are taking few chances of our returning and informing other strangers of the location of the Dawnworlds. This time, we fight for our lives.”

Dorn said, “With what weapons?”

Gil said, “If I understand it, with the ancient weapons of their… people. If you can call the Dawnmen people.”

Ronny said, “What are their ancient weapons?”

Charles said, “We don’t know that. The only weapon we’ve seen is a three-headed spear. Unless the swagger stick of the captain of the squad that arrested us is really some sort of a weapon.”

“If it is,” Dorn said, “it’s hardly an ancient one.” He looked at Ronny. “Have you been checked out on swords?”

“Swords? No,” Ronny said. “Why do you think that they’d have swords?”

Dorn said, “It occurs to me that any humanoid type life form would evolve very similar weapons. The war club, at first, then the knife and spear. When metals were developed the sword would appear, as it did on Earth from Japan to England. Even the Aztecs had a type of sword which used razor-sharp obsidian chips set into a wooden blade.”

“Well,” Ronny said, “even if that’s what they use for their gladiator fights, it won’t effect me much. I’ve never had any kind of sword in my hand in my life.”

“Neither have I,” Dorn said. He looked at the four men from Einstein.

They all shook their heads. Roy said, “I’ve never had any kind of weapon in my hands.”

And Gil said, “Nor have I.”

David said, “Charles and I had pistols when we arrived. I brought them from Avalon, after a scientific conference I attended there. But they didn’t work when we tried to defend ourselves from the Dawn men.”

“Oh, wizard,” Ronny said in disgust. “Out of the lot of us, no one knows anything about the use of primitive weapons. And you can trust the Holy Ultimate that our Kshatriya friends are trained with them from earliest youth. They’ll all be experts.”

“Well,” Dorn said, “I did some boxing when I was in school. I made the university championship.”

“That’s better than nothing,” Ronny said. “I used to practice judo as a hobby back before I joined Section G. I’m more than a little rusty by now, I suppose.” He looked at the other four.

They all shook their heads and Gil said, “On Einstein, we don’t indulge in sports involving violence.”

Lee Chang Chu said, “I know kenpo.”

Rosemary said, “What’s kenpo?”

“An early Chinese form of karate.”

“What’s karate?”

“A method of fighting with your hands and feet,” the Chinese girl said.

Rosemary looked at her wanly. “It doesn’t make any difference. The ritual of the annual ceremonies doesn’t provide for women fighting. For all I know, perhaps the Dawnwomen are liberated now, but they weren’t in the primitive times of the race. So the rituals have no place for women.”

“What’s to happen to us, then?” Lee Chang said.

Rosemary shrugged and said, “We’re to be sacrificed on the altar on top of the pyramid in their sacred complex, following the games. We won’t be alone. All the Kshatriyas who survive the games but have failed to triumph are also sacrificed.”

Roy said bitterly, “Evidently it was the system, in the old days of weeding out incompetent warriors. Each year the boys who had reached the age to become full warriors fought it out in the arena. Those that triumphed became members of the army, the half that didn’t either died in the arena, or were sacrificed later.”

“As you can see,” Gil added, “after a few million years you’d wind up with a pretty tough warrior caste.”

Dorn said apologetically to Lee Chang and Rosemary, “I doubt if our fates will be much different than your own. As Ronny said, the Kshatriyas will be experts in the use of their weapons and none of us have even seen one, not to speak of knowing how to handle them.”

They mulled it over some more, but there was little else to be said.

Ronny and Dorn questioned them on the possibilities of escape but the other four men claimed it was utterly impossible. They had explored every aspect of getting out of the house and had come up with a blank. Besides, what if they did escape? Where could they go that the Dawnmen wouldn’t find them? Even their spaceship was inoperative.

Ronny said, “We could call down the Alexander Hamilton and have them pick us up.”

“If they could nullify our spacecraft, I assume they could do the same to yours,” one of the others told him.

“When do the annual ceremonies begin?” Dorn asked.

Rosemary said, “We don’t know.”

She was far from the smiling, bright Rosemary that the Section G agents had first met on Einstein. On the face of it, she had been under pressure long enough for her defenses to have collapsed. She was obviously in a state of despair.

Ronny frowned and said to her, “What are you doing here, anyway? I thought from what Marvin said back on Einstein that you were sending a delegation of your highest intelligences for this romp. You told us you were comparatively stupid.”

“That was a fake,” she sighed. “We wanted to put one of our number in a position to set you up. I was chosen.”

Following their conference, the three Section G agents were given a conducted tour of the premises. The rest of the building bore out what they had found in the living room. It was simple, to the point of being stark, but the furniture was comfortable. The bathrooms were surprisingly similar to those of Earth settled worlds, but, once again, Ronny decided, a humanoid life form would eventually come up with approximately the same toilet equipment; the bathtub, the shower, the flush toilet.

The dining room was something of a mystery, however. The Einstein five had never figured out how it worked. Periodically, the legless, anti-gravity dining room table would disappear. In moments, it would become visible again, bearing sufficient food for the number of persons present. None of them were particularly happy with the strange food, but it obviously supported their life form. Rosemary hated it and would eat only enough to keep her going.

The bedrooms were, once more, stark, and with no facilities for storing clothes. It occurred to Ronny that the Dawnmen had no need to store clothes. With a matter conversion unit, and he assumed that each dwelling had one, you could make new clothing, or anything else you might wish, at any time.

The beds were about half as high as the Earthlings were used to, but quite comfortable. There were no covers whatsoever, not even a bedsheet. One slept on the equivalent of a mattress which seemed similar to a water-mattress, though filled with something other than water. They never did find out what.

Each room had one or more large windows, according to its size, and they could look out without difficulty over the fabulous countryside. It was difficult to realize that from the exterior the house was invisible and all in it. Only by opening the front door could it be seen that a dwelling was here.

The building was fairly large, with five bedrooms in all, each with two beds. To accommodate the newcomers, those from Einstein did some switching about. Lee Chang and Ronny took over one room, Dorn another. Rosemary had made a wry mouth when it became obvious that Ronny was to sleep with the Chinese girl. However, Ronny suspected that she was probably not sleeping alone, but with one, or possibly more, of the Einstein men. He rather doubted that Rosemary slept alone very often, not with the sexual mores under which she had been raised.

The inspection of the premises over, they retired again to the living room. Ronny pulled up a chair before the floating table top and brought forth his communicator. He had his fingers mentally crossed. In view of what Rosemary had said about their time instruments being disrupted, all he needed was for his Section G communicator not to function. He was relieved to get an answer when he called the Alexander Hamilton.

Ronny reported briefly to John Fodor, who looked worried, but obviously knew that there was nothing that he could do. Thus far, he hadn’t spotted any signs of Dawnworld spacecraft, which could only be a relief to him.

Ronny told him that there was no night and day here and that evidently you slept when you became tired. He was beginning to feel that way already, so if he didn’t report in within the next six hours, the captain was not to become alarmed. He would as soon as sleep was over.

The captain gone, Ronny called the Octagon on Earth again and was put through to Sid Jakes. He gave him the whole story.

“A gladiator fight?” the assistant to Ross Metaxa protested. “The more I hear about these Dawnmen, the more I disbelieve. How can they be that far advanced and still put up with gladiator fights?”

Ronny shook his head. “They live by traditions and rituals, most of them going back to the dawn of their race. They’re bred into them. Evidently, it’s impossible to change them, any more than it’s possible to change a drone into a worker bee.”

“So the story is that if you win, you go free. All but Lee Chang, that is, and the girl from Einstein.”

“That’s right, Sid,” Ronny said lowly.

“Well, you and Dorn take the cloddies, Ronny, and figure out some way of getting the girls off the hook, especially Lee Chang.”

“Ha, you dreamer,” Ronny growled at him.

“Stiff upper lip, old chappie,” Sid Jakes grinned at him. “You’ll find some way. You always do.”

“Having a wonderful time,” Ronny snarled at him. “Wish you were here… instead.”

He flicked the communicator off and turned back to Dorn and Lee Chang who had been following the reports he had been making.

He snarled, “That grinning funker.”

But Lee Chang shook her head. “Poor Sid’s worried sick. How would you like to be in his position, sitting helpless there in Greater Washington?”

Gil entered and said, “Meal time again. At least the table is freshly loaded with their Dawnworld gook.”

They followed him into the dining room where the others had already gathered and found that Rosemary had exaggerated the quality of the food. It wasn’t as bad as all that. They were accustomed to none of the basics but they were obviously nourishing. There were even some fruits for dessert that were quite exotic in taste, though less sweet than the Earthlings were used to.

Following the meal, the three Section G agents felt like sleep. They were still used to the routine of the Alexander Hamilton in spite of the daylight that prevailed on the Dawnworld. The others had fallen into the habit of sleeping when tired, no matter how many hours they had been up.

Lee Chang and Ronny retired to their room. There were two windows and they could discover no way of darkening them. There were no drapes or blinds and evidently no mechanical means of opaquing them. It would seem that theDawnworlders slept in bright daylight. Ronny vaguely wondered if this perpetual light had always been so, or if it was a result of planetary engineering, perhaps some megayears ago. In either case, the need for dark to sleep comfortably would have evolved out of the Dawnmen, if they ever had it.

He wasn’t up to sex, even if Lee Chang had been. The fact that she was doomed, even if he had a very remote chance of surviving, hung heavily over the two of them. They undressed, kissed, and took to separate beds.

She said, before they dropped off into sleep, “Ronny, during your years as a Section G operative, have you ever before been in a spot where it seemed impossible that you could survive?”

“Yes,” he said.

After a moment, she said, “So have I, but never one where it seemed so very impossible.”

There was no answer to that. When they awakened, they made their toilets, dressed and returned to the living room to find nobody but Gil there. Gil and the dogs. Boy and Plotz had elected to spend their time here, rather than in the smaller bedrooms.

Boy looked up and said, “Boss, when do we eat? There’s a big spread on the dining room table.”

“I suppose now,” Ronny told him. “Eat, drink and be merry for… ” He broke it off. It wasn’t funny, with Lee Chang there beside him. And, seated across the room, Gil, who had never been in physical combat in his life and was slated to go up against expert gladiators.

Lee Chang looked at him from the side of her almond eyes but she had the guts to be amused. She said softly, in her Lee Chang voice, “You’ve got a real touch there, darling.”

“Sorry,” he said gruffly. They headed for the dining room.

Dorn was already there and making himself up a plate of the unappetizing looking Dawnworld dishes.

He said, pushing his glasses higher on the bridge of his nose, “I am of the opinion that we should act on the basis that our best bet is to keep up our strengths—we’ll need them.”

The Dawnmen didn’t have the institution of different dishes for different times of the day. The food presented at this meal was identical to that Ronny had eaten at the last one. The bee-hive culture, Ronny thought inwardly. But he heaped his plate, following Dorn’s advice.

That worthy looked at Lee Chang thoughtfully. He said, “My dear, I am a physician, among other things. I could kill you quickly and almost painlessly, in seconds.”

Lee Chang looked at him and made an Oriental moue. She said, “Thanks, Dorn. But, no thanks. I follow the old saying, as long as there’s life, there’s hope. Besides, as I told you, I know kenpo. If at all possible, I’m going to get in at least one deadly blow at these funkers.”

“Well said,” Dorn rumbled. He turned back to his food, his face somewhat embarrassed.

Ronny had put down two plates for the dogs.

Boy chomped and said, “This stuff is grim. Don’t they have meat on this planet?”

Ronny said, “It would seem not. They don’t even seem to have animal life at all. That captain, or whatever he was, of the Kshatriyas, not only didn’t know what a pet was, but obviously had trouble in his telepathy in using the thought animal.”

“Some world,” Boy growled, but he went back to his food.

Roy wandered in, yawning, and began to fill a plate. He said, “I wish that they at least supplied us with reading material, or some games, or something. I’m beginning to go around the bend from sheer boredom.”

But it was then that a thought came into all of their minds.

Prepare to receive us.