Flandry looked back. The flashbeam jiggled in a gloom where streamers of mist seemed to glow white. He lurched onward. A few times he stumbled, teetered on the uneasy slope, and heard a roar as the scree slid downward. No use heading that way, unless he wanted to die in chunks. He sobbed for air, his lungs were twin deserts and his gullet afire.
A sheer wall rose before him. He ran into it and stared stupidly for seconds before he comprehended. The magma dyke. Yes. Yes, that was it. Must be some way up… here, a ladder, iron rungs set into the concrete…
He stood on a railed platform and looked down into the channel. The molten rock threw gusts of heat and poison gas at him. It growled and glowed, ember colored, but he thought he could see tiny flames sheet back and forth across its current. If he wasn’t crazy. If he wasn’t dreaming.
There was no way to go from here. No bridge, no catwalk to the other side. Not even a flat top on the levee itself. Only the platform, where the engineers could stand to check the stone river. Why should there be more? Flandry leaned on the rail and fought to breathe.
A voice from below, hardly discernible through racing blood and the snarl of Gunung Utara-but cool, almost amused: “If you wish to immolate yourself in the lava, Captain, you still have time. Or you can stay there, holding us off, till the fumes have overcome you. Or, of course, you can surrender now. In that case, the persons who assisted you will not be put in the cage.”
Flandry croaked, “Will you let them go?”
“Come, come,” chided Warouw. “Let us be sensible. I promise nothing except to spare them the ultimate punishment.”
Somewhere in the pounding weariness of his brain, Flandry thought that he should at least make an epigram. But it was too much like work.
He threw his gun into the lava. “I’ll be down in a minute,” he sighed.
X
Awakening was slow, almost luxurious until he realized the aches and dullnesses in him. He sat up with a groan which turned into an obscenity.
But the chamber was large and cooclass="underline" Its view of gardens, pools, and small arched bridges was very little spoiled by a wrought-iron grille set in the window frame. A clean outfit of kilt and sandals lay waiting next to the low bedstead. An alcove behind a screen held a bathroom, complete with shower.
“Well,” murmured Flandry to himself, as he let hot needles of water wash some of the stiffness out, “it’s the minimum decent thing they can do for me… after last night.” That memory brought a shiver, and he hurriedly continued his graveyard whistling: “So let’s hope they do the most. Breakfast, dancing girls, and a first-class one-way ticket to Terra.”
Not that they had tortured him. Warouw wasn’t that crude. Flandry hoped. Most of the physical suffering had been due his own exhaustion. They didn’t let him sleep, but hustled him straight to a highspeed aircar and questioned him all the way to wherever-this-was. Thereafter they continued the grilling, established that he was indeed immune to any drug in their inquisitorial pharmacopeia, but did their best to break his will with his own sheer grogginess. Flandry was on to that method, having applied it himself from time to time; he’d been able to cushion the worst effects by relaxation techniques.
Still, it had been no fun. He didn’t even remember being conducted to this room when the party broke up.
He examined himself in the mirror. His dyed hair was showing its natural hue at the roots, his mustache was noticeable again, and the high cheekbones stood forth under a skin stretched tight. Without their lenses, his eyes revealed their own color, but more washed out than normal. I was interrogated a long time, he thought. And then, of course, I may easily have slept for twenty hours.
He was scarcely dressed when the door opened. A pair of Guards glowered at him. There were truncheons in their hands. “Come,” snapped one. Flandry came. He felt inwardly lepidopteral. And why not? For a captain’s lousy pay, did the Imperium expect courage too?
He seemed to be in a residential section-rather luxurious, its hallways graciously decorated, servants scurrying obsequiously about-within a much larger building. Or… not exactly residential. The apartments he glimpsed didn’t look very lived in. Transient, yes, that must be it. A hostel for Biocontrol personnel whose business brought them here. He began to realize precisely where he must be, and his scalp prickled.
At the end of the walk, he was shown into a suite bigger than most. It was fitted in austere taste: black pillars against silvery walls, black tables, one lotus beneath a scroll which was a calligraphic masterpiece. An archway opened on a balcony overlooking gardens, a metal stockade, jungled hills rolling into blue distances. Sunlight and birdsong came through.
Nias Warouw sat on a cushion before a table set for breakfast. He gestured at the Guards, who bowed very low and departed. Flandry took a place opposite their master. Warouw’s short supple body was draped in a loose robe which showed the blaster at his hip. He smiled and poured Flandry’s tea with his own hands.
“Good day, Captain,” he said, “I trust you are feeling better?”
“Slightly better than a toad with glanders,” Flandry admitted.
A servant pattered in, knelt, and put a covered dish on the table. “May I recommend this?” said Warouw. “Filet of badjung fish, lightly fried in spiced oil. It is eaten with slices of chilled coconut-so.”
Flandry didn’t feel hungry till he began. Then he became suddenly sharkish. Warouw crinkled his face in a still wide smile and heaped the Terran’s plate with rice, in which meat and baked fruits were shredded. By the time a platter of tiny omelets arrived, Flandry’s animal needs were satisfied enough that he could stop and ask for the recipe.
Warouw gave it to him. “Possibly the aspect of your wideranging career most to be envied by a planet-bound individual such as myself, Captain,” he added, “is the gastronomical. To be sure, certain crops of Terran origin must be common to a great many human-colonized planets. But soil, climate, and mutation doubtless vary the flavors enormously. And then there are the native foods. Not to mention the sociological aspect: the local philosophy and practice of cuisine. I am happy that our own developments apparently find favor with you.”
“Ummm, grmff, chmp,” said Flandry, reaching for seconds.
“I myself could wish for more intercourse between Unan Besar and the rest of the galaxy,” said Warouw. “Unfortunately, that is impracticable.” He poured himself a cup of tea and sipped it, watching the other man with eyes as alert as a squirrel’s. He had not eaten heavily.
The Terran finished in half an hour or so. Not being accustomed from boyhood to sit cross-legged, he sprawled on the floor in his relaxation. Warouw offered him Spican cigarillos, which he accepted like his soul’s salvation.
Inwardly, he thought: This is an old gimmick. Make things tough for your victim, then quickly ease off the pressure and speak kindly to him. It’s broken down a lot of men. As for me… I’d better enjoy it while it lasts.
Because it wasn’t going to.
He drew blessedly mild smoke into his throat and let it tickle his nose on the way out. “Tell me, Captain, if you will,” said Warouw, “what is your opinion of the Terran poet L. de le Roi? I have gotten a few of his tapes from the Betelgeuseans, and while of course a great many nuances must escape me—”
Flandry sighed. “Fun is fun,” he said, “but business is business.”
“I don’t quite understand, Captain,”