What they were doing was at that moment of no interest to the boy. He was preoccupied inside himself. He had never been so treated. He had never been so helpless, not even when the girl he was interested in had whispered to him that she had pledged to marry his brother, not even when he was tiny and his mother died. Not ever.
In pain and anger, Org Rider was conscious of one certainty. Whatever happened, he would see the Watchers paid for this.
* * *
At length Redlaw's voice boomed: "You can stand up, boy. I've made a deal for you."
He whistled sharply, and the yellow rope fell away from the boy's neck.
"You're to wear the watchman's eye," Redlaw ordered. "It will show them everything you see. If you have any further contact with these funny-looking fellows, they want to know about it."
"What if I refuse?" the boy blazed.
Redlaw scowled. "I don't care what you do!" he shouted. "It's your life." He tapped the square-bladed knife at his waist. "Maybe I didn't tell you that they have a taste for human flesh."
The boy said staunchly, more staunchly than he felt, I'll throw it away the minute you leave me."
"Tie it to a bubble-seed if you want," Redlaw grumbled. "If they know you do it they'll kill you. If they don't—it's your gamble, not mine."
He paused, looking toward the ship. From the gaping hatch a sixth, and larger, Watcher flapped down. It was darker than the others as well as bigger, its stubby wings almost black. It flew directly to Org Rider and caught him in a reeking hug, clasping something around his neck. "Careful now!" Redlaw shouted, but the boy had already taught himself not to resist. It lasted only a moment, then the large Watcher fell away.
The object was a heavy black globe, twice the size of the ball of Org Rider's thumb. A slick black cord of some sort of leather held it around his neck.
"Our captain asked me to tell you," Redlaw said, "that if you take it off he will do you the honor to eat you himself." He glanced over his shoulder. The captain of the Watchers had already returned to the ship; the others were flapping slowly after him, no longer appearing interested in the boy or in the body.
"Good-bye, Org Rider," the man said, almost reluctantly, as if he had more he wanted to say.
If he had, he did not say it. He turned away and entered the ship. The hatch closed. At once, a small curved shell tipped down outside the longer shell of the ship. Something whined. A gust of warm wind sent the boy rocking away across the gravel, sliding onto the moss.
The ship rose and slid whining away through the sky. Org Rider watched it until he was sure it was not coming back.
Then he set about gathering his lost gear. None of it was gone, or badly damaged, though it was scattered all over the rock and all of it stank of the death-weed reek of the Watchers.
As soon as he had it, he strapped his harness on, loaded himself with what he had to carry. His torn body was sending messages of pain from the crusted wounds in scalp and arms, and his stomach fought against the clinging reek of the Watchers. He put them out of his mind. He did not even look again at the dead creature who had appeared out of the bubble, or the glittering, broken toy that had brought him.
He turned his back on the campsite that had become so hateful to him, launched himself into the air, turned, and with great, painful strokes continued toward the distant peak of Knife-in-the-Sky. He did not look back.
FIVE
More than a hundred million miles away, far beyond the great broad curve of the horizon, the spinning wheel of the orbiter marched through its endless sweep.
On it Ben Pertin turned away from the monitor screen. The image it showed was as cracked and shattered as the small cube of the monitor itself. All it showed was a ghastly view of Ben's own dead, staring eye, peering emptily forever up into the gaudily clouded sky of Cuckoo.
Ben looked guiltily at the silvery girl he called Venus. He did not think even an alien like her would fail to see the emotions on his face, and he was not proud of those emotions. It was an unsettling thing to see oneself die. The Ben Pertin who had just had his skull smashed and his body blasted on the distant surface of Cuckoo was as much himself as this other body he was inhabiting here, in the orbiting wheel of the survey satellite.
"I'm sorry, Venus," he said.
"Sorry?" she fluted.
He said, "I guess that was a bust. Well, we've learned something from it. First and most important, next time we send somebody down we'd better arm him for bear. No more waiting till he asks for weapons, and trying to get them to him in a hurry."
"Concurred," said Venus. "Also editing appears necessary due to the gravity differential."
"Right. That one-percent gravity is tricky. I—he was sprawling all over the place." Ben Line Pertin managed a smile. "I've never been transmitted in an edited form before," he said. "I don't know how well I like the idea."
"It does not hurt, Ben Line."
"Of course not."
The silvery girl curled one wing and moved closer to him, studying him carefully. "It is established," she said in her chiming voice, "that my people and Scorpian robots, for example, experience less ego displacement in transmission than do you or, for example, the TWorlie. Suggestion. One of us can go on the next transmission to the surface of Cuckoo."
"That's an idea. We'll keep it in mind," Ben Line said. In his heart he knew he didn't want to do it that way. When the next transmission went, he would make it. There were two reasons, one practical, the other not. The practical reason was that, confusing and inexplicable though it was, Earthmen looked like the people who roamed this portion of the surface of Cuckoo. With editing, to stretch them out and reduce their musculature, they would look even more so; and the first job of communication with them, building up the store of language that the Pmal translators needed to work, was difficult enough even so. Asking one of these primitives to talk to a robot, or to a T'Worlie, or to a creature like the silvery girl was out of the question.
The other reason was the important one. Ben Line Pertin had thought it over carefully and, all in all, he had no particular reason to want to go on living.
Ben Pertin was not the first human being in the history of the race to reach that conclusion. It happened often enough, for reasons far more trivial than his own. The thing that graveled Ben Pertin, almost more than the real pains and troubles that infested his head, was that his options were curiously circumscribed. With tachyon transmission, you could die and die and die . . . and still be alive. However many times Ben Pertin let the tachyon scanners memorize his body structure and translate an exact duplicate to the surface of Cuckoo, and however many times that duplicate met a gory death, he would still be alive in orbit. And he would still be hurting.
Other men in his position could fling their lives away in a reckless gamble against death, and find oblivion. He could not. The only gamble he could take was in a fixed game that he could not lose. It made a mockery of courage . . .
"I said," the silvery girl repeated tonelessly, "the T'Worlie Nammie is speaking to you.'
"Oh, sorry." Ben Line shook himself into attention and attempted a smile to the butterfly-winged being that hung in the air beside him. "Hi, Nammie. What's new?"