And while I was still following that one through, I got the proof I’d been wanting: The man called Lujac stepped out from black shadows and for the second time I felt the bone-crushing agony of the nerve-gun sweep over me.
I came to lying on the floor in front of the control panel of a shuttle with my arms clamped behind me. It wasn’t Bayard’s machine, but there was no mistaking the sweep of unfamiliar dials and the big pink-glowing screen, or the hum that went between my bones until it rose out of the audible range. On the screen, things were happening. The old walls rising on the left of the screen flickered and sank down into heaps of rubble, with weeds poking out from between the stone slabs. The weeds withered and the rubble blackened into cokelike ash, then glowed blue and slumped into puddled lava. The river was rising, it welled out over its banks and became an oily black sea that stretched away to a row of volcanic cones that shed red light on the far horizon. Green slime crawled up on the rocks that showed above the surface. It changed into moss that grew into toadstools fifty feet high that jostled and thrust for footing. The water receded, and new plants swarmed up out of the sea; a vine-thing like writhing snakes threw itself over the jungle and tiny black plants sprang up along its tendrils, eating at it like acid. Broad leaves poked out from under the rotted vegetation and wrapped themselves around the black vine-eaters. I saw all this through a sort of purple haze of pain that did nothing to brighten the nightmare.
Animal life appeared: Strange creatures with deformed limbs and misshapen bodies like melting wax statues posed among the cancerous plants. The leaves grew huge and curled and fell away, and scaly, deformed trees rose up, and all the while the creatures didn’t move. They swelled, twisted, flowed into new shapes. A forty-foot lizard was locked in the clutch of a plant with rubbery, spike-studded branches that wound around the bossed hide until the hide grew its own spikes that impaled the thorn tree, and it shriveled and fell away and the lizard dwindled into a crouching frog-thing that bloated into a stranded tadpole the size of a cow and sank into the ooze.
For a while, night glowed like day under a radioactive moon; and then the ground dissolved and the shuttle was hanging in black space, with the glare of the sun coming from behind to illuminate the undersides of the dust and rock fragments that arched up and over in a pale halo that must have dwarfed Saturn’s rings. Then land appeared again: a dusty plain where small plants sprouted and grew thicker and turned into tangled underbrush dotted with small, cancerous trees. They grew taller and developed normal bark and green leaves, and slowly the atmosphere cleared and the moon was riding high and white in a dark sky full of luminous clouds.
Lujac switched off and the sound of the drive dwindled down to a low growl and died. He pointed the nerve-gun at me, gestured toward the exit. I made it to my feet, stepped out onto a trimmed green lawn beside a high stone wall that was the same one we’d started from. But now there was ivy growing there, and lighted windows, up high. There were flowerbeds along the base, and a tended path led off down the slope toward the moonlit water of the river below. The trees were gone, but other trees grew in places where there had been no trees. Across the river, the lights of a town glowed, not quite where the town had been before.
We went along the path to a broad, paved walk, rounded the front of the building. Light blazed from a wide entry with glass doors set in the old stone. Two sharp-looking troopers in white jodhpurs snapped to and passed us into a high marble hall. Nobody seemed to think there was anything exceptional about a prisoner in cuffs being gun-walked here. We went along a corridor to an office where neat secretaries sat at typewriters with only three rows of keys. A lean, worried-looking man exchanged a few words with Lujac, and passed us into an inner office where Major Renata sat at a desk, talking into a recorder microphone. He twitched his sharp mouth into a foxy smile when he saw me and motioned Lujac out of the room.
This wasn’t the same man I’d known back at Key West, I saw that now. It was his twin brother, better fed, better bred, but with the same kind of mind behind the same sly face. Not a man I’d ever really take a liking to.
“You led me quite a chase, Mr. Curlon,” he said. “It’s unfortunate that events fell out as they did; I had hoped to handle matters more subtly. You understand that I require certain information from you as the first order of business. Let’s begin with the matter of Colonel Bayard’s involvement. When did he first contact you, and what was his proposition?”
“Where is he now?”
“Never mind that!” Renata rapped. “Don’t be confused by any false sense of misguided loyalty, Mr. Curlon. You owe him nothing! Now—answer my questions fully and promptly, and I give you my assurance that you will be in no way held accountable for his crimes.”
“Why did you sink my boat?”
“It was necessary. You will be reimbursed, Mr. Curlon. As a matter of fact, you are an extremely lucky man. When this matter is finished up to the satisfaction of, ah, Imperial authorities, you’ll find yourself in a most comfortable situation for the rest of your life.”
“Why me?”
“I’m acting on instructions, Mr. Curlon. As to precisely why you were selected for this opportunity, I can’t say. Merely accept your good fortune and give me your cooperation. Now, kindly begin by telling me precisely how Bayard contacted you and what he told you of his plans.”
“Why not ask him?”
“Mr. Curlon, please limit your comments to answering questions for the present. Later, all your questions will be answered—within the limits of Imperial security requirements, of course.”
I nodded. I was in no hurry. What came next probably wouldn’t be as much fun.
“I know about your good intentions,” I said. “I’ve met your lieutenant, the fellow with the nerve-gun.”
“It was necessary to insure there’d be no unfortunate accident, Mr. Curlon. You’re a powerful man, possibly excessively combative. There was no time for explanations. And you’ve suffered no permanent injury. Oh, by the way: where did Bayard secrete the shuttle?”
“You mean the amphibious car he picked me up in?”
“Yes. It’s Imperial property, of course. By helping me to recover it, you’ll be reducing the charges against Bayard.”
“He must have parked it out of sight.”
“Mr. Curlon…” Renata’s face tightened. “Perhaps you don’t understand the seriousness of your situation. Cooperate, and your rewards will be great. Fail to cooperate, and you’ll live to regret it.”
“It seems you’re always offering me a proposition, and I’m always turning it down,” I said. “Maybe you and I just weren’t meant to get together, Renata.”
He took a breath as though he were about to yell, but Instead he thumbed a button on his desk, savagely. The door opened and a couple of the armed troops were there.
“Place this subject in a Class Three quarters, MS block,” he snapped. He favored me with a look like a poison dart. “Perhaps a few days of solitary contemplation will assist you in seeing the proper course,” he snapped, and went back to his paper work.
They marched me along halls, down steps into less ornately decorated halls, down more steps, along a passage with no pretensions of elegance at all, stopped before a heavy iron-bound door. A boy with blond fuzz on his chin opened up. I stepped through into the dim light of a shielded bulb and the door closed behind me with a solid sound. I looked around and put my head back and laughed.