“The first thing we require of you,” said the man with blond hair, “is that you should answer many more questions that we have. We are confronting a situation that is new to us. Nothing in our previous experience prepared us for what we have found in this city, and what we now know to exist beyond the dome. We know that we have much to learn, and there is much that you can teach us. But I warn you that our patience is now worn thin. We do not care very much whether you live or die, and if we find that you are not helping us to the very best of your ability, we will shoot you. We have many other people to help us, and the more we learn from them, the less useful you will become. Do you understand that?”
“I understand,” I said, flatly. “But I answer questions better when I’m not so hungry.”
He wasn’t entirely pleased by the tone of my voice, but his displeasure was tempered by understanding, and I thought I had just about won my case.
“You are hungry, and would like to eat?”
“Yes I am,” I told him. It was perhaps the first entirely honest thing I had said.
“Then I will take you to a place where we can eat. There you will meet some of the other people who are helping us. Afterwards, you will begin the work of repaying us for our generosity.”
The man with sky-blue eyes stood up, and spoke for a couple of minutes to the white-haired man, who remained seated. Then, having apparently obtained approval for his proposals, he gestured to indicate that I should precede him to the door.
When I opened it, I found myself looking down the guns of a couple of guards, and I stood back to let my inquisitor pass. He spoke to them, and they relaxed, but they didn’t put the guns away. They fell into step behind us as we went along the corridor.
The electric lighting system the invaders had rigged up here was makeshift, and the light was much yellower than the brilliant white favoured by the Tetrax. I looked up at the bulbs strung on a cable pinned to the ceiling, and the man with sky-blue eyes took it as a criticism.
“It is very poor,” he admitted. “But these are the disconnected levels, where we cannot use the power-systems left to us by our ancestors. Very regrettable. You will find things very different closer to the Centre, where the ancestors’ power is the motor of our civilization.”
I would have liked to continue that conversation, because there were at least as many questions that I wanted to ask him as he wanted to ask me, but we were already arriving at a larger room kitted out as a refectory, with a dozen long tables and hundreds of folding chairs. It was very noisy— the room was full of invader troopers. I guessed that they must be eating in shifts. Hot food was being dished out from big tureens—flavoured manna with a few trimmings that presumably made it seem a little more like the stuff their mothers used to cook for them.
The odour of the food made my mouth water furiously. Tetron cuisine never had that effect on me, even when I was pretty hungry, and it seemed grounds for concluding that the invaders really did have a great deal in common, both physically and biochemically, with my own kind. I hadn’t had a decent meal since leaving Leopard Shark, and although a cold-suit will feed you, it can’t satisfy your aesthetic sensibilities. I could feel my stomach muscles churning in anticipation, though I knew I’d have to take it easy until I got back into the habit of eating.
The crowd was so big, and my mind was so preoccupied, that although I saw the group of Kythnans sitting at one of the tables I didn’t really pay them much attention until one of them suddenly stood up. She stared at me, and I looked at her dazedly, not really knowing what was happening until the accusing finger was pointed. She took the man with the sky-blue eyes by the elbow, and guided him away from me, talking furiously into his ear in a low voice.
I just stood still, knowing that there was nothing else I could do. The muzzles of the guards’ guns swung once again to point at my chest, and I knew that yet again my luck had turned completely arse over tit.
The Kythnan woman was Jacinthe Siani—a ready-made collaborator if ever there was one—and she knew only too well who I really was. She might also know that I’d left Asgard before the invasion, and that my presence here now was a real twenty-four carat surprise.
The sky-blue eyes no longer seemed weak as they fixed me with an astonished gaze when the hurried whispering was over. They seemed very, very hard.
“Well, Mr. Rousseau,” said Jacinthe Siani, vindictively. “This time, it seems, my evidence hasn’t acquitted you.”
“No need to be so smug about it,” I told her, with as much bravado as I could muster. “I don’t think I can give you much of a character reference, either.”
But I couldn’t conceal the fact that I was very frightened indeed. All that trust which I had carefully built up was smashed to smithereens, and it now looked odds-on that I was scheduled to be shot—or worse.
15
This time, there was more urgency about the way I was manhandled. Surprisingly enough, though, they didn’t march me back outside again. They took me to a corner of the room, sat me down, and gave me the food they’d promised. But Sky-blue didn’t sit down to eat with me—he went buzzing off like a startled hornet, with Jacinthe Siani in tow. The guards watched me eat; the fact that they didn’t relax suggested that they’d had stern orders to look after me very carefully.
Long before I’d finished, Sea-blue was back again, and so was an even older, smaller man with brow-ridges that looked big even on an invader. This one looked to be a real top man. I carried on eating while they discussed the situation, because I figured that if I were going to die, I might as well do it on a full stomach. My appetite had dwindled, though, and I hadn’t finished when they indicated that it was time to go.
I was rushed through the corridors and into the open, where there was a passenger car waiting on the nearest section of track. I was shoved in, unkindly. Sky-blue, the old man, and Jacinthe Siani followed, plus a couple of troopers.
As we got under way, I said to the man with pale blue eyes: “Wouldn’t it be easier to shoot me right here?”
“We’re not going to shoot you, Mr. Rousseau,” he said. “You have far too much information that would be valuable to us. But we can only assume that you are a spy, and hostile to our people.”
That sounded ominously like a threat of torture.
“I came back because the Tetrax asked me to come,” I told him, quickly, “but I’m an ambassador as much as a spy. The Tetrax are very keen to open up a dialogue. They want to make friends, and they don’t understand why you won’t respond to their signals. When we get up to the surface, I’ll be more than happy to act as an intermediary, if you wish.”
“We’re not going to the surface, Mr. Rousseau,” he told me. “We’re going in the opposite direction. And we have no desire to hurry in making contact with anyone outside Asgard. There will be all the time in the world to deal with the Tetrax, when we are ready. At the moment, much more pressing matters concern us. What you can tell us will be most interesting—and you will tell us everything that you know.”
By this time I was getting used to being interesting. It seemed that everyone in the universe was keen to talk to Michael Rousseau, and were exceedingly reluctant to take no for an answer. I realised that Jacinthe Siani hadn’t just fingered me as a Tetron spy. She’d fingered me as the guy who’d penetrated the lower levels—the man who’d talked to the super-scientists.