Buchanan tensed, and an almost undetectable robotic quivering told him that the contraction of muscle been noted. Maran was massively unimpressed.
“The robots will watch, Buchanan,” he said. His eyes were wells of tiredness. “You were appointed to this station, presumably, Buchanan, because you have an expert knowledge of these tools.” He indicated the low-grade servitors. “Respect them!”
“He’s right,” said Liz slowly. “He’s always right.” Buchanan could not resist saying: “You won’t get away, Maran.” Childish as it was, the threat did something to restore his confidence.
“Very possibly,” agreed Maran. “To the bridge,” he ordered a servitor. It aided his halting progress to fhe small grav-chute. Buchanan was sure he was asleep before the chute took him to the bridge of the Jansky Station.
When he was gone, Buchanan looked down at his bony hands. He felt the crab of helplessness stirring in his body, gripping, clawing at him. Despair and doom echoed through his skull.
“Al?” whispered Liz, and he saw that she was exhausted.
Confused and bitter as he was, he responded to the appeal. Liz’s eyes held no condemnation, only an urgent need. She lifted her arms and he bent to hold her. Minutes passed. Only the slow whine of remote systems could be heard. The ship might have held no more than the two of them. Buchanan felt a suffusion of delight such as he had never, not in the best days of their relationship, believed possible. It was a bursting of happiness that drowned the crablike clawings deep in his body. Liz gently pushed Buchanan away. They had both drawn strength from the tenderness of reconciliation.
“I was a fool,” whispered Buchanan, still amazed at the freak of coincidence that had kept her from joining the long-dead in the time-lost tunnel. “Why did I leave you?”
“You had to! I know how it was, Al!” Buchanan saw that she had changed. There was a new edge of resolution about Liz Deffant. He remembered the cruiser commander’s message.
“Maran?” he said. “He held you hostage?”
“No. I don’t think so.”
“When I think of him—”
“Don’t—not now!”
“We have to!”
“There’s been too much, Al! Too much for anyone to take!”
He held her, lightly this time. But even during this second long embrace, Maran’s brooding presence made itself felt. A robotic voice said peremptorily: “Routine report, Commander Buchanan!”
“Well?”
He hardly had time to ask himself if the machines had revertedly to his authority before it demolished the unborn hope.
“Commander Maran wishes you to listen to all routine reports, sir. The latest on core emission is that condition starquake is now in abeyance. There are simple dipole configurations and data corresponding with previous readings. No aberrant energy fields. That is all, sir.” Buchanan heard, filled with a sharp self-disgust. Maran had instructed the machines to keep him informed. He was, possibly, useful to the cyberneticist who had so easily taken his ship from him. Maran slept, confident of the robots’ loyalty.
He heard a racking sob and saw that Liz Deffant was at the end of her powers of endurance. Cursing himself for his selfishness, he led her to the grav-chute. A tentacle restrained him gently.
“Let me pass,” he ordered.
“Commander Buchanan will remain in the hold until summoned by Commander Maran,” it informed him. Buchanan shrugged. “Get a couch for Miss Deffant.”
“Yes, sir.”
Liz was talking now. Some of the story came out, garbled and incoherent: “…he was so young! And those hands… but he had to do it! It was the animal that took over…. Al, he wasn’t responsible—but the eyes! The eyes in the cell-deck—all staring! It was green, Al—they were thrashing about and dying! But he had to do it that way! It’s the small-minded bigots who had him sent out! If he’s given a chance, he can change the nature of our minds! And poor Tup’s neck—it broke, broke!”
Al stopped the flow of words as her voice rose to an hysterical pitch. He could only guess at the horrors of the doomed ship’s last hours. Murder. The successive shocks of the cruisers’ combined fields. The escape of the wounded prison-ship commander. She should not go through the trauma of telling it, not yet.
He soothed her, comforting her by his physical presence.
“Rosario?” she asked abruptly.
“He was picked up. I had a message from the commander of the cruiser. He’s safe and well.” And then she was back in the nightmare. “I tried, Al—I found a gun—a musket, and I’ve never killed anything in my life—but I tried to kill him!”
“All right! Now rest! Tell me later!”
“But I tried to kill him!” She was trying to make him understand with an agony of desperation.
“Liz, I would have done the same!”
“But him!”
And Buchanan knew she was in a frenzied torment.
“Forget him! Rest now—sleep!”
“The musket fired—he knew!”
Buchanan began to worry. This was more than fatigue—more than understandable nervous reaction to even mayhem. Liz was in a state of acute anxiety over Maran.
“Not now, Liz,” he said. “Leave it!”
“I tried—to—kill—Maran.”
Buchanan thought of what he knew of Maran. A powerful and hypnotic personality, a man with a unique charisma, a man who could exert such a power over the minds of men and women that they volunteered willingly for the brutal surgery his machines inflicted on the deepest centers of the cortex. They died believing they were Maran’s disciples.
Liz?
She was staring at him with a shocked despair.
She had tried to kill Maran. And, because of that attempt, she was suffering from an unholy feeling of guilt that would not give her the slightest remission.
Buchanan sensed the right thing to say. Hating himself, but able to say the words to the woman he loved, he whispered: “He forgave you. Liz, Maran forgave you.”
Liz’s anguish diminished. Gradually the panic left her eyes. “Yes,” she whispered back. “He did.” She slept.
Buchanan kicked out savagely at the watchful servitor. Even as his legs braced to take the impact of its metallic bulk, a tentacle swept out to hold him. Another prevented him from falling. He sat down to watch Liz sleep. He had found her again, only to lose her to the mesmeric genius who had taken his ship.
The three of them were trapped, he and Liz doubly trapped. And where was the way out for any of them?
CHAPTER 17
Watching Liz Deffant slowly emerge from a deep sleep, Buchanan had the curious impression that none of the events leading up to Maran’s presence aboard the station had happened. Time telescoped. They were together, and they seemed not to have separated. Liz looked tired, of course; they were in the cramped hold of the station; a servitor followed their every slightest movement; but they were the same people, he and Liz. They had a planned future.
Buchanan frowned. Except that Liz seemed to be under Maran’s spell. It was a matter he would have to approach with care. Maran himself was a different thing entirely; if only there was some weapon he could use against him! But it was out of the question. The responses of the automatons were measured in ten-thousandths of a second; Maran was right to rely on their lightning reactions. Then Liz opened her eyes and Buchanan could relax for a moment.
The panic and despair were gone.
Buchanan had always appreciated her levelheaded, gentle, persistent way of thinking. He respected her intellect. He had known her achieve better results than cleverer colleagues because she did not try too hard. She allowed her mind to range over a problem, letting an answer emerge by a slow process of growth. Buchanan could see that she had recovered her balance. However, he would not broach the question of her feelings about Maran.