Wall Around a Star

TEN

Te'ehala Tupaia, paramount king-warrior in the forces of Free Polynesia, shuffled along the line of prisoners. Muscles flaccid, he commanded himself. Eyes down! Fol­low the little old man ahead! Two steps, stop. Wait. Two steps more, stop again. It was not easy to remain impassive, since he was almost surely the only one in the line of Pur­chased People who both knew where they were going and had the freedom to protest or resist ... if he dared.

But he did not dare.

The man ahead lurched and moved, and Tupaia sham­bled another two steps. Tachyon transfer! Even to a king- warrior, it was frightening. Because he was neither igno­rant nor actively possessed, he had plenty of time to consider what it meant. Tupaia was no ignorant beachboy. He had completed every grade in the mission school, and gone on to the university on Bora Bora—though all that taught you was how to be a tour guide or, at the upper stretch of ambition, a headwaiter. Even nineteen-year-old Tupaia had something better in mind than that.

But—this was not it! Even in Bora Bora they had heard of the tachyon transmissions, and the young men and wah- ines had debated wonderingly why anyone would venture such a senseless trip. Now Tupaia faced the questions as imminent realities. The first question in his mind was, did he have reason to fear this adventure? The second, was there anything he could do about it, anyway?

The answer to the first question turned out not to mat­ter, because the answer to the second was obviously no. When he took the next two steps forward, he was suddenly alone. The little man ahead of him had been manhandled through a sliding metal door, and disappeared.

And then it was Te'ehala Tupaia's turn. The two bored guards kicked the door open and grabbed an arm each to hurl him in.

For a moment he stiffened in involuntary resistance. The guards felt it. One of them glanced at him with the beginnings of surprise; but he had the wit to keep his eyes cast down. He willed his muscles to relax, though he was twice the size of these effeminate whiteskins, and they hus­tled him in in his turn.

The door slid latched behind him. There was a bright blue flash, a sting of electrical spark, and a sudden sense of disorientation. And the door on the other side of the tiny chamber opened and, willing himself not to make that deadly blunder again, Tupaia allowed himself to slump for­ward to take his place once more in the line . . .

But there was no line.

There was no great, busy tachyon-transmission hall, with its high ceiling and tessellated floor.

There was not even a floor! Or, at least, no floor that came up solidly to meet his feet as a floor should do. He spun weightlessly across an eerily lighted chamber, until a queer doughy creature caught him roughly and thrust him spinning against a wall.

He had been transmitted.

He was somewhere else. On another planet. Or in a spacecraft, or on an orbiting satellite—wherever he was, it was not on Earth, or on any planet with enough mass to give a man solid weight.

How far away from home, he did not know.

And how much time had elapsed—how long his coded pattern had been held on file before a need arose that it could fill—and how many Te'ehala Tupaias had lurched out into the shattering realization that they had been thrust millions of millions of kilometers away, he did not even think to ask.

Although Te'ehala Tupaia had known of the existence of the great galactic races all his life, and had even seen a few specimens at a distance, he had never before been in such intimate proximity to one. Had never touched them—hot metal; soggy flesh the texture of clay; damp scales—and above all had never smelled them. They reeked! Tupaia was not particularly sensitive in such matters. He had grown up with stinks of rotting palms and washed-ashore dead fish, not to mention the middens and spoil heaps around his village. But the strong Pacific breezes carried the worst away, and even the worst was nothing like this stinging metal odor of the Scorpian robot or the sour decay of the Sheliaks.

At first his new captors seemed, peculiarly, almost as confused by him as he was by them. They hustled him through long corridors to a hot, huge metal space the size of a ballroom, filled with what seemed to be half-destroyed old machines. The Sheliak, the clay-fleshed creature with the astonishing ability to shape its body to suit its needs, extended one pseudopod to hang a Pmal translator around Tupaia's neck. It spoke sharply, something that the transla­tor rendered as a cackle of gibberish.

"I do not understand you," said Tupaia, shaking his head. The Sheliak recoiled in astonishment. There was a quick exchange between the aliens, drumroll from the Scorpian, tweeterings and whistles and growls from the oth­ers. The Pmal again produced only an unintelligible barn­yard cackle.

Then the Sheliak realized what was wrong. It reached out and made an adjustment to the device, gesturing to Tu­paia to speak. "My name," Tupaia said, comprehending, "is Te'ehala Tupaia, paramount king-warrior of the forces of Free Polynesia, and I have been abducted and held cap­tive here against my will."

That was enough. The Pmal identified Tupaia's lan­guage from its store and corrected its programing. When the aliens responded, it at once produced their meaning in Tupaia's own vocabulary. The responses were an agitated hissing and a high, tenor snare-drum rattle; and the Pmal translated them as laughter.

* * »

At least here there was no more need to pretend to be possessed by his alien purchaser. That was the most ob­vious improvement in Tupaia's situation . . . maybe, he thought grimly, the only one.

Te'ehala Tupaia was resourceful and quick—he'd had to be, to avoid the colonial jails as long as he had. Within an hour of emerging from the tachyon chamber he had fig­ured out where he was—more or less—and even what he was doing there. It wasn't hard to deduce that.- Obviously these creatures had summoned him up in order to do some­thing they couldn't, or didn't want to, do for themselves. That was what Purchased People were for. It had been a surprise to them to learn that he did not understand the language of his whilom owner, and to deduce from that that he was inexplicably free—or not free physically, of course, because they made clear he was not that, but free at least of the unwelcome alien presence that once had filled his mind. They asked questions about that, but not with much real interest, and when he could give them no clear explanation they did not press the matter. It didn't interest them, really. What they wanted was the use of his physical body. Who was in control of it mattered very little.

Tupaia had not bothered to lie on that subject. He knew no more than they. There had been an hour of dreadful pain, the raw torture of senses he didn't have, in limbs and organs he did not possess. It was obvious that something frightful had happened to his distant, alien owner. No doubt it had died. At least the pain had stopped, and where that inner tyrant had occupied his mind there was suddenly a blessed emptiness; Te'ehala Tupaia was himself again.

And would be free, too, as soon as he had disposed of this new crew of tormentors! Of achieving that he was quite confident. Physically the creatures looked formidable, particularly the hissing metal robot and the thing that looked like a gross, hovering blue eye, crackling with electrical forces, that they called a Sirian. But physical odds he could overcome.

What then?

Even Te'ehala Tupaia was forced to admit to himself that the way was unclear before him. He would have to wait and be ready for whatever opportunity presented it­self . . .

And then he understood what the creatures were doing, and the opportunity became almost at hand; for the queer metal devices in the chamber were weapons!

He even understood what they needed a human being for. The weapons were ill-suited to their owners. "Owners" seemed the wrong word, in fact; the creatures were almost as awkward with them as Tupaia himself, as if they had never seen them until just recently. Certainly the handles and grips and levers were designed for beings with fingers and hands—although not, perhaps, the fingers and hands of human beings. Tupaia's fingers were too short, and the grips seemed made for creatures with more than a single thumb. Yet he could manage, and they could not. They ordered him to pick up one of the pieces, a silver-gray onion-shaped device, a globular mass coming to a sharp point at one end; it had a double butt, making it even more awkward. When he raised it to his shoulders it was too narrow to fit properly on his huge torso, and his clumsiness with the finger grips made the alien creatures scatter in consternation.

That was when he realized it was a weapon. They snatched it away from him and jerked the Pmal off his neck, gabbling among themselves in hiss and drum-roll and screech. Without the Pmal he could not understand a word—as they had intended—but he didn't care. His mind was bursting with the realization that here was a chance he had never dreamed of. Weapons of an alien science! If he could steal them— If he could get them to the tachyon transmitter and smuggle them back to Earth— If he could evade the guards at the Tachyon Center and deliver them to the other warriors in New Guinea or Rabaul—

There would be a way. There had to be!

But it was slow to appear.

They kept him there for endless hours, without rest or respite. They threw the Pmal at him from time to time, long enough to convey quick, curt orders commanding him to manipulate strange controls on even stranger devices, then retired once more for their interminable secret gab­bles. After the first time they were wary of letting him have free access to a hand weapon, and even warier of some of the huger, stranger devices. But they had to learn how to operate them, and he was their only learning tool. There was a device like an organ keyboard attached to a great, solid, translucent block; under their instructions he pressed keys and twisted curious, helical levers, and for a long time nothing happened.

Then something did.

The glassy block began to light up with an eye-searing pinkish glow, while a thin, high sound grew louder and deeper, running down the scale. The aliens reacted with quick fear. The Sheliak's tentacles snatched Tupaia's fin­gers off the keys while the robot lunged at what seemed to be the starting switch. For a moment Tupaia thought they had been too late, as the glow built higher for a second. Then it wavered, faded, and disappeared.

They never let him touch that one again.

While they were debating, Tupaia became conscious of bodily needs. He approached the Sheliak, took the Pmal, and through it asked for food, water, rest. The answer, once again, was the Pinal's equivalent of contemptuous laughter. Tupaia stolidly let them take the translator away. His time would come. He would make it come.

He could find nothing to eat, but there was a globe of a thin, sour liquid enough like drinking water to serve, and a corner in which he relieved himself. The aliens paid no attention. He squatted by the door, watching everything, seeking the vagrant thoughts that would turn into a plan. He was certainly in a far better position than when he had been owned. The purchasers of Purchased People generally treated them as expendable. If they wanted to eat or sleep or relieve their bladders, they could. As long as there were no prior orders from the owner. Which was seldom. Here the only force imposed on him was physical. And by com­parison, physical constraints were nothing.

After Tupaia's arrest and conviction, it had been only a few days until the prison authorities had struck their bar­gain for another batch of convicts sold to the aliens. Which aliens, or for what purpose, no one seemed to care. There had been a brief surgical operation—strapped immobile to the table Tupaia could not see what was happening behind his ear, or feel more than an itching tingle through the local anesthesia—and then the owner was inside his head. Terrible! It was not like one-to-one communication. The owner was immeasurably distant, and even tachyons took finite time to traverse interstellar spaces. But it laid its geases on him, and sampled his senses, and it was always there . . .

He was allowing himself to daydream!

He roused himself just as the screeching and rattling of the aliens rose to a high pitch and stopped, and they turned back to their project. Tupaia watched carefully as the Scorpian and the Sheliak examined the hand weapons. The robot picked up the onion-shaped weapon apprehensively, while the Sheliak nervously hissed advice. If they were foolish enough to put it in his hands again, even for a mo­ment . . .

That foolish they were not.

As the robot awkwardly fitted his clawlike metal feelers onto the grip and braced the twin butts against his metal body, the Purchased Person, Te'ehala Tupaia, realized tar­dily that he was meant to serve more purposes than one. Not just to help them learn how to operate the weapons. To do something more important still. Because how could you know if a weapon was effective until you tried it on a liv­ing target?

The onion-shaped globe came up with the point aimed straight at Tupaia. A greenish glow sprang out around the globe, collected itself toward the tip, launched itself toward him.

As the green blob of light spun toward his head he real­ized that he had waited too long to make a move; and that was the last thought that ever flickered through the mind of that particular Te'ehala Tupaia.