VII

 

 

Captain Ogric halted abruptly in his tracks. From somewhere in the belly of the ship was coming such a clashing and banging one would have thought a herd of wild animals was coming aboard instead of a collection of raggedy, underfed migrant workers. He had been on his way to dine with the port commandant, a traditional act of courtesy the last night before a ship lifted for space.

But at the racket which he heard, he turned aside and began to stride down a corridor in the direction from which the cries and crashes came.

Rounding a corner, he went full tilt into his master-at-arms, who jumped back with a cry of dismay and threw up a smart salute. Captain Ogric, who was known as White Dwarf to his crew because of his small size and illimitable energy, fixed him with a glare.

“For the love of life, what’s going on?” he demanded.

“Beginning of a riot in the workers’ quarters, sir,” the master-at-arms said. “We’re penning it up as much as we can, but there seems to be some superstitious reason at the bottom of it which they’re more scared of than they are of my men. A small group of them turned out of the cabin allotted because they said they wouldn’t share it with another man who was just sent aboard. Claim he’s a zombie, or something—say he’s a dead man walking. Some local cult, I guess.

“We took out the man who started the trouble, a big bully called Hego—white as a sheet, practically wetting himself with raw terror. You never saw anything like it, sir! I thought I’d avoid further trouble by transferring the so-called ‘dead man’ to another cabin, but the word got around, and half of them are saying they won’t fly in the same ship as him. Want to break out of the ship and go back to the city.”

“Ugly?” the captain rapped.

“Quiet at the moment. But rumbling. Like a volcano.” The master-at-arms wiped sweat off his forehead. “I was just going to send down to the examination huts for Lieutenant Balden.”

Ogric kept his face from showing his feelings, but he made a mental note to remind Lieutenant Balden privately that when he was put in charge of getting a batch of workers aboard, that didn’t mean lounging at the barrier gate and eyeing the women among them. But he wasted only a moment on that. In the forefront of his mind was what the port commandant had told him when he first landed and went to present his compliments.

“I wish you joy of them,” the port commandant had said. “But I’ll tell you what your advertising is going to bring in—the dirtiest bunch of thieves and cutthroats who ever disgraced this continent. They’ll come out of the Dyasthala, the thieves’ slum in the city which they cleared the other day about half a century after the job fell due. I guess your only advantage is that none of them will trust any of the others out of sight, so you won’t have the danger of them organizing mutiny. But you’d best make the trip a fast one to Vashti—or I wouldn’t put it past them to conceive the idea of taking over your ship and setting up as pirates.”

Was it starting before they’d lifted for space?

Ogric wished profoundly that he could simply turn the lot of them back on the ground and go somewhere else for his workers. But he was in government service, and under orders to supply willing labor for the Vashti mines, so he’d have to make the best of it.

“All right!” he said, making up his mind. “Hold the rest of the intake in the hold where they’re being fed. Close off all the corridors leading out of the workers’ quarters. Get Lieutenant Balden to sort out the zombie, the man who started it, and anyone else he thinks, or you think, might put us in the picture, and have them up in my cabin in half an hour. And get the workers calmed down. And send a man to the port commandant with my compliments and tell him I’ll be late for dinner. Got that?”

“Aye, sir,” the master-at-arms said, and doubled away.

 

“He’s a what?” the intellectual lieutenant said, sounding rather bored, when the master-at-arms came panting with the message.

“Sold to a devil, they say. And they’re so scared of him they’d rather go back to starvation than ship to Vashti with him even with their contracts worth twenty thousand.”

A horrifying memory clicked in the lieutenant’s mind. He straightened up as though he had been kicked at the base of the spine and stared wildly around for Zethel. But there was no sign of the big man.

Sold to a devil? And supposed to be dead? It couldn’t really be the original of the story. But if even the government authorities of Berak had taken the notion seriously enough to clear out the thieves’ quarter and thus risk spreading some thousands of the criminal class all over their city, then who could say what the illiterate superstitious might not make of it? He had to swallow hard before he could trust his voice; then he barked at the master-at-arms to come with him back to the ship and show him where the trouble was.

The corridors in the workers’ quarters were lined with anxious faces peering out of the doors. Some of the bolder ones had emerged despite the threat of men armed with gas-guns at every intersection, and were warily eying each other as though none of them was sure who the “dead man” really was.

Lieutenant Balden halted nervously, looking down the corridor where the trouble had begun. In a low voice he spoke to the master-at-arms.

“Tell them I’m coming to put this thing right,” he said. “Promise them there’ll be no trouble.”

The master-at-arms shouted the message ringingly down the corridor. It had no visible effect, except that some of the men and women in the passage drew back into nearby rooms. A dry feeling in his throat, the lieutenant allowed the master-at-arms to lead him forward.

Before the last door in the corridor they pasued. “I think he’s still in here,” the master-at-arms said, leaning on the panel and sliding it aside. “Yes. That’s him.”

“Him?” the lieutenant echoed in surprise. He stepped forward involuntarily. Yes, it was definitely the pale-haired, old-young man he had seen at the examination hut. And come to think of it, there had been a dead look in his eyes.

He choked the idea off firmly. Glancing around the cabin, he saw gear belonging to about four or five other people scattered on the bunks. And one other person besides the pale-haired young man—a girl, about the same age, with plain untidy brown hair cut irregularly short, her freshly scrubbed face rather attractive and heavily freckled across the nose and cheekbones, her mouth full and almost pouting. She was taking garments out of the bag in which they had been issued to her and stowing them in a locker, as calm as could be.

The pale-haired young man, on the other hand, was doing nothing at all but staring into space.

“You!” Balden said. “Are you the cause of all this trouble? Are you the man that everyone’s saying is possessed of a devil?”

The lackluster eyes turned to look at him. The head gave a forward dip that might have been a stillborn nod.

“The name’s Kazan,” the master-at-arms supplied. “Anonymous orphan; that’s his whole name.”

“Kazan!” Balden said. “What’s it all about? What started this nonsense about you being back from the dead?”

“I am,” Kazan said in a rustling voice, and went on staring into space.

Helpless, Balden hesitated a moment and then switched his attention to the girl. “You there!” he said. “What’s your name?”

“Clary,” she answered. “That’s my whole name, too.”

“Were you here when this began?”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you run with the rest of them, then?”

She raised burning eyes to him. They were a little sunken in her face, as though she had been undernourished for a long time. She said with a touch of scorn, “The man who started it was a lumbering fool called Hego, with much more muscle than brain and less guts. I’m from the Dyasthala. I don’t believe in devils. And anyone with an eye in his head could see that he isn’t any more dead than I am. Feel him—he’s warm. He’s got a pulse. Hego must be insane.”

The master-at-arms said puzzledly, “If he is crazy, sir, how come he got through the examinations?”

It crossed Balden’s mind wildly that a parallel question might be, “If Kazan is dead, how did he get past?” But he pulled himself together before he voiced the words. He said, “All right, both of you. Come with me. We’ll take you up to the captain and get it straightened out.”

 

His impatience mounting visibly, like a needle on a dial ascending towards the red danger mark, Ogric listened to Hego, then to Balden’s gloss on the story, quoted from Zethel, then to the master-at-arms, Clary, and four other workers who said they also knew the story, chosen from at least a hundred.

Halfway through the fourth confirmatory recitation, Ogric slammed his open palm on the arm of his chair with a sound like a firecracker and bounced to his feet.

“Enough!” he barked. “I never heard anything like it! A walking corpse! Devils! Miracles! Lunacy, all of it—half comet-dust and half nightmares! You there sitting like a booby in the corner—what’s your name, Kazan! You’ve listened to this garbage about your coming back from the dead. What have you got to say about it?”

Kazan shrugged. He didn’t seem very interested. He said, “You heard what Hego said. It’s quite true. They threw me in the lake with my hands manacled.”

“Then how by the blaze of Sirius did you get out alive?” Ogric demanded.

A curious look crossed Kazan’s face. He said, “I—I think something bit through the manacles. And something took hold of me, and another creature attacked it, and I found myself in the mud on the beach.”

From Hego, standing by the door with his face sheet-white, a groan like a dying man’s. He could not tear his fascinated gaze from Kazan, not even to blink.

“Quiet, you!” Ogric ordered. He drove fist into palm. “Well, the answer’s simple enough. We’ll put him back on the ground, since most of these idiots won’t ship with him, and we can better afford to lose one man than hundreds.”

“Did he sign the same contract I signed?” Clary said. Her small face seemed to have set like stone, and her eyes burned more fiercely than ever.

“What?” Ogric snapped.

“I can read,” Clary said. “The contract I signed was solid as rock. Bound you, as well as me. I have my eye on cash at the time when I think about marrying. Did you ask him whether he wants to dissolve the contract? Or do I go back down with the rest of the workers and tell them the contracts they’ve signed are so much wrapping paper?”

Ogric lowered himself into his chair again, staring at her. He said, “What’s your interest in this, young woman?”

“None, specially.” She shrugged. “Except I don’t like fools”—she shot a contemptuous glance at Hego—“and I don’t like seeing people made fools of.”

Balden cleared his throat. He said, “If I could make a suggestion, Captain—”

Ogric spun his chair to face the lieutenant. In a frosty voice suggesting he didn’t think the suggestion would be worth hearing, he said, “Yes?”

“I saw this man’s test results. He’d be worth keeping anyway as valuable material to train for a responsible job. We’ve got one worker here—this girl Clary—who scoffs at the superstitious nature of the others. We can probably find enough to fill, or partly fill, one of the cabins. Then we can persuade the rest by playing on their greed or by shaming them that they’re being foolish. The Vashti pull isn’t too long from here.”

“Any pull with this situation stewing aboard the ship would be too long,” Ogric growled. “But the proposal seems sensible enough. Come to think of it, if anyone might well be put on the ground again, it’s this shivering idiot Hego. But no doubt you, young woman”—he gave an ironical half-bow to Clary—“would have something to say about that as well.”

Clary returned his gaze evenly. “You wouldn’t be making a fool of him,” she said. “He’s been one since birth, looks like.”

Ogric couldn’t help it. He chuckled. “You’ve a head on your shoulders,” he said approvingly. “Let’s see if there’s something in it. You’re going to see if you can find ten more like yourself among these silly workers, who’ll have the sense you’ve shown—and if you do it, there’s a bonus for you on top of your contract pay.”