“Come on, Alex. I just want to know the score. What kind of a place is this?”
“Well,” he said. “I think there are about two thousand people here. The great majority are members of non- galactic humanoid races—I estimate that there are at least a dozen different species. Perhaps a tenth of the prisoners are galactics. Most are Tetrax, but the invaders seem to have brought down at least one specimen of each of the races represented in Skychain City. This is as much a centre of learning as a place of imprisonment—it seems probable that anyone the invaders wish to interrogate for an extended period of time is brought here. There seems to be no routine mistreatment of prisoners, but I am not in a position to determine the whole range of the activities which go on. Until I have more data, it would be premature to draw too many conclusions.”
“Oh merde,” I muttered. I should have known what to expect. I lay down, with my head on the pillow, and looked up at him.
“You’re tired,” he observed. It was nice to see that he wasn’t entirely incompetent in the business of drawing conclusions.
“You never did tell me what time we eat around here,” I reminded him.
“We operate a day cycle slightly shorter than the Tetron norm,” he told me. “The invaders appear to use a forty-unit division. I have no idea why. The lights go on at the zero point and off at twenty-five. We eat during the first, the eleventh, and the twenty-first periods. We exercise during the fifth and sixth, and during the fifteenth and sixteenth.”
“I’ll try to remember,” I promised.
After a pause, during which time it might have sunk in to his thick skull that he was not being very helpful, he said, in a softer voice: “What’s going to happen to us, Rousseau? Will the Tetrax succeed in securing our release?”
“Now why should the Tetrax worry unduly about you?” I asked him, returning a little of the malicious sarcasm. “In spite of all your sterling work with the Co-ordinated Research Establishment, they probably don’t give a damn about you, and now that I’ve failed in my mission, they probably care almost as little about me. If I were you, Alex, I’d start wondering how I could help myself. That’s what I’m doing.”
“Oh,” he said flatly. “In that case, I wish you the best of luck.”
I can tell when a man isn’t sincere. Unfortunately, I thought I might need the very best of luck—and a bit more. I shut my eyes, and tried to figure out how I should play it when the questions began again—as they undoubtedly would. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get my thoughts straight. I was tired and I was sniffing continually in a hopeless attempt to clear my sinuses.
Of all the stupid places to catch a cold, I thought, furiously, I have to do it in the one place in the universe where I can’t get proper treatment. Fate still seemed to be dealing me the worst cards it could find, and I realised that what I’d said to Alex was probably true. In all likelihood we were out of the game for good, and nobody would bother to make the slightest effort to bring us back into it. If I didn’t play my cards exactly right, I might be here for a very long time.
18
The second phase of my interrogation started in a more polite fashion than the first. My new interlocutor spoke far better parole than my old acquaintance with the sky-blue eyes, and he obviously wasn’t “only a soldier.” He even began by telling me his name, which was Sigor Dyan. He was dressed in black, like all the uniformed men, but he wore no insignia of rank at all—which implied, in subtle fashion, that he was important enough to stand outside the hierarchy. He had the customary white skin, and his white hair was commonplace, too, but he had curious eyes, which were a purplish colour somewhere between light-blue and albinic pink. His brow-ridges weren’t very prominent and he had a comparatively steep forehead, which made him look very human indeed.
He received me in a pleasant room, and invited me to sit on a sofa, although he sat on a more angular chair whose seat was elevated—with the consequence that he could look at me from a higher vantage, even though I was a good three centimetres taller than he. There was a low-level glass-topped table between us, with two cups and a pot of some kind of hot drink. Without asking, he poured us each a cup, and pushed mine over. I tasted it carefully. It was green and sweet, like sugared mint tea. It soothed my throat, which had become very sore. It was obviously velvet glove time—but I knew I’d have to look out for the iron fist.
“Your name is Michael Rousseau?” he began.
“That’s right,” I croaked.
“And you are a native of a planet which you call Earth?”
“It’s the homeworld of my species. I was born on a microworld in the asteroid belt. That’s a thin scattering of big rocks somewhat further away from our star than the homeworld. You know about stars and solar systems?”
“We are learning. I believe that Asgard is a very great distance away from your homeworld—a distance so great that I can hardly imagine it. We have grown used to figuring distances in rather small units. We have discovered that our conceptual horizons were narrower than we could possibly have supposed.”
“I hope your soldiers aren’t agoraphobic,” I commented.
He smiled. “I fear that they are,” he told me. “Many have experienced difficulties in working on the surface. Even the dome of Skychain City seems to us to contain an unusually large open space. Beyond the dome . . . perhaps you can imagine what a vertiginous experience it is for our people to look up into that sky for the first time.”
“Perhaps I can,” I admitted. I couldn’t—when you’re born in the asteroid belt you grow up with a sky that makes all others seem comfortable.
“What brought you to Asgard, Mr. Rousseau?” He spoke gently, and I certainly didn’t want to discourage him. I felt too poorly to get into an argument, though I was trying to put on a brave face and keep my symptoms under control.
“A spirit of adventure,” I told him. “You get to a point in life where you can afford to buy a starship, and suddenly the whole galactic arm is open to you. The microworld began to seem intolerably parochial, and the asteroid belt seemed to have very little to offer—just millions of orbiting boulders. I had a friend who was keen to head for somewhere Romantic. Asgard is Romantic, with a capital R: the biggest, strangest world in the known universe. News of its existence had only just reached the system, and it was the great mystery—the ultimate puzzle. The space-born tend to look outwards . . . they rarely go back to Earth. To them, Earth is the dead past . . . the galactic community is the future. What brought you to a place like this?”
“A certain talent for learning languages. Perhaps, though, you do not mean the question personally—perhaps you are asking what brought my people to this environment?”
“It would be interesting to know,” I answered.
“Initially,” he said, “the need to discover more space than was provided for us in our original habitat came from simple population pressure. Our habitat was some thirty million square kilometres in extent, but there were no significant checks on our population growth. We do not know how many of us there were originally—not very many, perhaps—but by the time we discovered a way to penetrate other environments there were six billion of us, and we faced the prospect of doubling our population again in the space of a man’s lifetime. For most of our history—I should say prehistory, as we had no written records for what must have been the greater part of our time here—we took our environment for granted. Only in recent lifetimes have we begun the business of learning to exploit the technologies that lie behind it.
“We thought that we were making very rapid progress as we moved up and down from our native level. We found no other inhabited level as advanced as our own, and we found many levels effectively uninhabited. Levels like this one posed severe problems in downward expansion. There are others like it beneath us. It seemed easier and more rewarding to go upwards, until we met the cold levels. It looked as if they would be an insurmountable barrier, until we found the lower levels of your city. It seemed to us a very welcome loophole—we could not know until we had already committed our forces what unwelcome revelations awaited us there.”