“The soup?”
“Sure. Those filthy Lidsgallians—you heard them? They’re leaving tonight and taking us with them. Once they’ve got us on their home planet, they’ll be able to work us over at their leisure. They won’t get anything out of me, and I hope, for the honor of the Academy, they won’t get anything out of you, no matter what they do to us, but we won’t be good for very much by the time they’re through. Oh, those Lidsgallians know their way around a torture chamber, yessiree, Bob!”
“Torture chamber?” Alfred felt sick and knew he looked it.
The older man reached out and squeezed his shoulder. “Steady on, lad,” he said. “Don’t show the white feather before the natives. Keep a stiff upper lip. Bite the bullet. Fight on for old Notre Dame. Never say die. You have nothing to lose but your chains. Let’s keep the old flag flying.”
As Alfred said nothing, John Smith took his silence for agreement with these high principles and went on; “You can’t get out of this cell—it’s a spun web of pure chrok, practically unbreakable. But the worst of it, of course, is its insulating quality: you can’t phmpff through chrok if you stand on your head. I’ve tried to phmpff for help until I almost fractured an antenna—couldn’t raise a whisper. That’s why they don’t have to split up their force to guard us. And that’s why I haven’t bothered to come out of my uniform to talk to you: if we can’t phmpff we’ll make more sense to each other with the jaw attachments of our uniforms.”
Grateful for this small mercy, Alfred began to look around at the enclosing walls of chrok. “How about using these—these jaw attachments to get help?” he suggested. “Sound seems to go through. We could try yelling together.”
“And who would hear you? Humans. What could they do?”
Alfred spread his hands. “Oh, I don’t know. Sometimes—even humans can be—”
“No, forget about it. Things are bad, but they’re not that bad. Besides, these walls are especially thick and there are no cracks in them. If those Lidsgallians hadn’t come down a couple of times a day to change the air, I’d have suffocated by now. As it was, I was in a bad way a couple of times and had to fall back on the reserve air supply in the chest—you know, the compartment right over the control cubicle? But I’ll tell you this, if I ever get back to Vaklitt in one piece, there’s a modification of our uniform I’ll really try to talk Command Central into making. I thought of it while I was watching them search you. Do away with the air reserve in the chest. I’ll tell Robinson—how often, when you come right down to it, does one of our Special Emissaries ever find himself drowning or in the middle of a poison-gas war?—and find some way an agent can take a weapon—a real, honest, claw-operated weapon, into his uniform-disguise with him. Although come to think of it, you’d need some sort of turret arrangement coming out of the human flesh to fire it, and those Lidsgallians, once they found out about it, would—”
He rambled on. Alfred, watching him, realized how hungry he’d been for companionship. And this talkative mood might be put to use. They both might be in a Lidsgallian torture chamber somewhere out in the galaxy in a couple of hours, but there was a very slender chance that they might not. And, besides, facts were always useful; he could cope with whatever lay ahead a bit more easily if he only had some coherent facts on which to base his plans. This was the time, if ever, to find out who was the greater menace to Earth, the Vaklittians or the Lidsgallians—and who was more likely to accept the proffer of friendship from a badly frightened, torture-leery human.
Only—he had to be careful how he phrased the questions. He had to be prepared to cover up any blunders quickly.
“Why do you think,” he asked carelessly, “the Lidsgallians hate us so much? Oh, I know the usual answers, but I’m interested in hearing your opinion. You seem to have a very refreshing slant.”
John Smith grunted appreciatively, thought for a moment, then shrugged. “The usual answers are the only answers in this case. It’s the war. Naturally.”
“Just the war? That’s all, you think?”
“Just the war? What do you mean, just the war? How can an interstellar war, going on across two-thirds of the galaxy for almost three centuries, be just the war? Trillions upon trillions of individuals killed, dozens upon dozens of fertile planets smashed into space dust—you call that just the war? You youngsters must really be growing up pretty cynical these days!”
“I—I didn’t mean it quite like that,” Alfred said rapidly, placatingly. “Of course, the war—it’s a terrible business, and all that. Awful. Positively horrible. Sickening, sickening. And our enemy, those vicious Lidsgallians—”
John Smith looked sandbagged. “What? The Lidsgallians aren’t our enemies—they’re our allies!”
It was Alfred’s turn under the sandbag. “Our allies?” he repeated weakly, wondering how he was ever going to get out of this one. “Our allies?” he said again, trying a different intonation on for size and the bare possibility of sense.
“I don’t know what the Academy’s coming to any more,” John Smith muttered to himself. “In my day, you got a good general education there, with just enough lab work in espionage to warrant giving you a commission in the Service if you filled all the other requirements. You came out of the Academy as a wide-awake, cultured interstellar citizen, with a good background in history, economics, art, science, and total terroristic warfare. On top of that, you had, whenever you wanted to use it, a decent and honorable trade—spying—under your belt. Of course, if you wanted to specialize, you could always go back, after graduation, for intensive study in elementary and advanced ciphers, creative disguise design, plain and fancy lying, physical and mental torture, narrow fields of scholarship like that. But that used to be strictly postgraduate work. Now—now, everything is specialization. They turn out dewy youngsters who can crack any code in space, but can’t tell a simple espionage lie to save their heads; they graduate kids who can knock out a masterpiece of a uniform-disguise, but don’t even know the difference between a Lidsgallian and a Pharseddic! Mark my words, this overspecialization will be the death of the Academy yet!”
“I agree with you,” Alfred told him with ringing sincerity. He thought for a moment and decided to underline his bona fides. “Shoemaker, stick to your last. A place for everything and everything in its place. Spare the rod and spoil the child. Look to the ant, thou sluggard!” He found he was going off the track and stopped himself. “But you see, the way the Academy feels today, its graduates will go into active service and meet older, more experienced men like yourself who can give them this general political orientation right on the spot. Now, of course, in a way, I really knew all the time that the actual enemy, in the deeper sense of the word, so to speak, were the Pharseddics, but—”
“The Pharseddics? Our enemy? But the Pharseddics are the neutrals—the only neutrals! Look here, youngster, and try to get it straight in your mind for once. You absolutely can’t do a first-class job of espionage on Earth unless you know the general principles and the background data from which they’re derived. To begin with, the Lidsgallians were attacked by the Garoonish, right?”
Alfred assented with a positive shake of his head. “Right! Any school child knows that.”
“All right, then. We had to go to war with the Garoonish, not because we had anything particular against them, or liked the Lidsgallians, but because if the Garoonish won they would then be in a position to conquer the Mairunians who were our only possible allies against the growing power of the Ishpolians.”