Eric had told Rachel about Roy. Now he introduced the Runner to his mate. Roy was enormously impressed. A woman of the Aaron People, willingly, without coercion … His voice, when he began telling the history of the other cage since Eric had left, was low and almost greasily respectful.
“After they took you out, we didn’t have a leader for a while—the men had lost the habit of following Arthur the Organizer. He’d lost something also: he wasn’t very eager to give orders anymore. So I tried removing my head straps and letting my hair hang free again. You know, to look like you. I figured if I looked like you, maybe the men would take orders from me as if you were giving them. Only it didn’t work. Walter the Weapon-Seeker took over for a while, until the—”
“That’s it, Eric,” Rachel broke in. “The loose hair. That’s why they brought him here.” She tumbled the hair at her neck with the back of a hand. “The loose hair. You, me, the Wild Men. The Monsters don’t know I’m pregnant. They’re still trying to get me mated.”
Eric nodded, but Roy the Runner looked very puzzled and stared first at one and then at the other of them. “Go on, Roy. I’ll explain it all later. How many of the expedition are left?”
“Practically none. About six, besides me. And not all in those Monster experiments, either. A lot of them died in the fighting.”
“Fighting? You started fighting among yourselves?”
The tall thin Runner shook his head impatiently. “No—what was there to fight over? Lots of food and no women. What happened was the Monsters put a whole flock of strange men in our cage, men like you’ve never seen or heard about. I mean not Wild Men even. Little brown men, about half our size, but strong, strong as hell. They didn’t use spears. They had clubs and something they called slingshots. It was hard to understand them. They talked—I don’t know, they talked funny, not like other human beings at all. None of the Strangers had ever seen men like them before, not Arthur the Organizer, not anybody. They had names like Nicky Five and Harry Twelve and Beelzebub Two. All of them had names like that—it was crazy.”
A small noise from Rachel. Eric looked at her. “I know about them,” she said. “They’re not from this house at all. They’re from another house, the one next to ours. Naturally, another house—they’re almost a totally different breed of humanity. Men from my people have visited them and brought back some strange, strange tales.”
“What does she mean ‘another house’?”
“A Monster house,” Eric told Roy. “All of us Mankind, the Strangers, the Aaron People—we all live in the walls of one particular Monster house. Actually, we all live in just one wing of that one house. In the other wings, there are lots of other peoples, some like us, some different. But people who live in another house entirely have to be very different from us. They’ve been breeding away from us for centuries, and their language and culture have been changing.” At the Runner’s bewildered expression, he said: “All right, Roy, I’ll explain that later, too. Don’t worry about it now. These men came into the cage and started fighting?”
“They did, from the moment they arrived,” Roy answered, relieved to get back to a matter that was familiar and somewhat understandable. “They were screaming, just as we were, when the Monsters dropped them into the cage. Then they calmed down: they stopped screaming and they started fighting with us. They didn’t like anything we did. They said we didn’t even know how to eat: the only right way to eat, according to them, was stretched out at full length on the floor of the cage, face down. And you weren’t supposed to touch the food with your hands—you had to eat it off the floor. There were lots of other things: the way we slept, the way we talked, the way we moved our bowels. Everything had to be done their way—they were like lunatics! Day after day we lived in opposite corners of the cage with sentries posted while we slept, and every time we were fed—or watered—or anything—there’d be a full-scale battle in the middle, spears against clubs and slingshots, and three, four corpses for the Monsters to dispose of.”
“Finally, though, you beat them?”
“Nobody beat anybody. What happened was the Monsters brought up a big sort of buzzing machine and put it over the cage. From that time on, whenever you felt mad enough to kill someone, you got a terrible pain in the head, and it got worse and worse until you thought you’d go clear out of your mind. The moment you stopped thinking about killing, the pain disappeared. Let me tell you, Eric, we got to be friends, us and those strange little brown men! We got to be friends, no more arguments, no more battles, no more killing—just the Monsters taking a man out every once in a while and tearing him to pieces. You know, good times again?”
Eric and Rachel smiled grimly.
“That’s what I expected was going to happen to me when they pulled me out today. Eric, was I glad to see you! I thought you’d been sewered a long, long time ago. They took Arthur the Organizer out only two days ago. He was lucky: they dropped some black powder on him and he was dead fast just like that. But Manny the Manufacturer—”
Eric held up a hand to stop him. ” Pm not interested in that,” he said. “Tell me: you said that sometimes there were three or four corpses to dispose of while the fighting was going on. Were they all taken out of the cage together?”
The Runner screwed up his eyes and thought back. “I think so. Yes. Yes, they were all taken out of the cage at the same time. Once a day, whoever was dead, down would come the green ropes and out they’d all go together.”
“And whatever they were wearing, whatever spears or clubs might be lying across their bodies—that would go out too?”
“Sure. You saw it. Remember the guy that Walter said was from the Aaron People, the one who died the day after we arrived? They took him out with his skirt wrapped around his face just the way we had placed it. That’s the way they dumped him into the black hole—that’s the way they do it with everyone who dies in the cage.”
“The Monsters do seem to have a thing about death,” Rachel mused aloud. “Or at least death as it has to do with human bergs. Their interest in us is strictly in viva, as the ancestors would say. But what difference does that make to you, Eric? Once we’re dead—”
“Once we’re dead, we have a good chance to stay alive,” he told her. “And I’m not being funny. Roy, do you want to escape with us?”
After one startled stare, the Runner bobbed his head emphatically. “Do I! Any plan you have, no matter how dangerous it is, count me in. The way I see it, there’s no real future here for an ambitious young man.”
“The plan I have is very dangerous. An awful lot of things can go wrong, but it’s absolutely the only way out of the cage that I can see. All right, let’s get started.”
Under his instructions, they went into action. He drove them both the way he’d been driving himself, doggedly, unremittingly. And the work went fast.
But once Rachel looked up and asked anxiously: “Aren’t you taking a lot for granted, Eric? You have inference piled on inference. We don’t know that much for certain about the construction of Monster houses.”
“If I’m wrong, we’ll be killed. And if we stay here?”
Rachel put her head down, sighed, and went back to her task.
Another time, it was Roy who exploded. He was learning and growing, too—and becoming less deferent. “Look, Erik, you have no reason to believe these things work. Even Rachel—who’s from the Aaron People—even she says she’s never heard of these things before.”
“Yes, she has. She knows them under another name= the Archimedes principle. And I told you, I’ve experimented with them. I’ve experimented with them over and over again. They’ll work.”