Close to his cheek, Antonella whispered, “Are they dead?”
He reached out. His hand penetrated the mist without meeting any resistance, but he felt his skin tingle. Maybe the gas had preservative properties. He touched a warm soft shoulder. It felt no colder than twenty degrees C. In one sense, then, it might be said she was still alive. Gently he took hold of her wrist. The pulse was nearly imperceptible. The heart seemed to be beating, but only at a very slow tempo.
Very slow.
“No,” he said. “Not quite dead.”
At the feet of each of the sleeping women a faint luminance could be seen, a seven-banded rainbow. Noticing that the colors underwent slow periodic changes, he puzzled for a while and concluded that he knew what they implied. They reminded him of EEG pulsations, though he had never seen anything quite like them. What would you call a device that performed the function of detecting life—a metaboloscope?
The two uppermost of the colored bands showed no changes at all. He shivered.
“If I’ve worked this out right,” he muttered, “they’re not just in coma, either. It looks as though the bodies are alive, but there’s no activity in the brain.”
He had seen cities destroyed, whole planets laid waste, fleets smashed to fragments; he had seen men die by the thousands and sometimes by the millions, but he had never run across anything as quietly saddening as this mausoleum. Had an entire population chosen this end for themselves? Was the prairie outside the lawn of a cemetery? Could it make any sense to keep bodies idling if they would never again have any more personality than a plant? How long could they be preserved? Looking again, more closely, he spotted wires, finer than hairs and nearly invisible, which penetrated the girls’ skin: no doubt the terminals of automatic maintenance devices.
Suddenly he began to dash about like a madman, peering into one bay after another. He must have covered more than a kilometer before he stopped, soaking with perspiration. He had not seen a single male body. Clearly he could not climb up and inspect the cells on the upper levels, which were stacked clear to the roof of the great hall, but it was a safe bet that they too contained only women.
None over twenty-five. All very beautiful. Including representatives of every race he had run across. The family likeness he had noticed at once turned out to be due to a classification system. The hair of the first one he had felt the pulse of was black; the last he had examined before stopping was fair. On the other side of the aisle the cells contained dark-skinned women, shading from tan to so deep a black it was almost blue.
What the setup called to mind was a collection. Someone—or something—had laid these girls out like the prizes of an entomologist. Once, during a battle, he had been fighting his way through a museum of butterflies, not only those from Earth but their counterparts from hundreds of other planets. Shots and explosions raised a mist of dead butterfly wings. The air was full of dry bright dust that seared his lungs despite his respirator. In the end the museum had caught fire, and in the swirling updraft he had seen swarms of butterflies take the sky for the last time.
Naturally skin color and hair color would not be the only criteria. Maybe the color of their eyes was classified along the vertical axis… But without means to climb up and see, there was no point in wondering about that.
Were men kept in a separate building? Or was the collector interested exclusively in women? That might imply that the person responsible was human: unbelievably perverted, but human nonetheless. An alien—he thought of the beak-faced Urians—would have no reason to specialize in female bodies.
Slowly he returned to the entrance. And suddenly an idea struck him. At once he decided it was the sole logical explanation for this place. They must have discovered a prison camp.
Suppose that somewhere in time or space remote overlords engaged in frightful combat were to assemble hordes of slaves. They would wipe out the peoples they conquered, retaining only, in accordance with immemorial custom, the most physically perfect of their captives. “A fate worse than death”—it looked as though here the cliche had acquired a literal meaning. For the overlords involved in such a war would regard it as a waste of their resources to take any trouble over the care of their livestock. The cost of sheltering, feeding, and guarding them must be kept to a minimum. Besides, history was littered with warlords killed by one of their own prisoners.
So these overlords would have drawn a lesson from the past. They would have obliterated the consciousness of their victims, and when the whim overtook them they would graft on an artificial, robot-like personality. Something of the kind had already been possible by Corson’s time. If these girls had been treated like that they would no longer be capable of initiative, reasoning, or creativity. Their intelligence might approximate that of an advanced ape. But that wouldn’t worry their overlords. One would not seek in a slave girl wit or affection or understanding.
How could anybody be that twisted? People like those would be necrophiles, in the strictest possible sense.
The idea was so revolting that Corson sought grounds to convince himself the Terrestrials had been at least a little better than that in the days of the Earth-Uria war. He searched his memory. He recalled a general who had ordered the execution of thousands of Urian hostages in the first few hours of the conflict. He remembered another commander whom he had seen dancing among the ruins of a bombed city. It had been a human city, but the inhabitants had made the mistake of trying to conclude a treaty with the Urians. He thought of Veran, and the way he had asked for a million men. Someone of his type would scarcely have hesitated to organize something as loathsome as this if he thought he could profit by it.
Murderous rage possessed Corson for a moment. His Murderous rage possessed Corson for a moment. His jaw lumped, his fists doubled, his vision went dark. He drew in on himself as adrenalin poured through his veins. Then the fit passed, and he simply stood there trembling. Was this the way of the universe, that violence should evermore breed violence? Was the true visage of humanity a mask of blood? Did a grinning demon ride the back of these upstart monkeys, the specter of desolation and death? Was there any means of getting rid of it and becoming something else, something better?
Well… Dyoto. He thought of that utopia founded on the wreckage of war, of that world which knew nothing of compulsion and enjoyed a government so stable over six centuries that it did not require an army. That evil aspect of mankind had to be done away with, but not at the cost of violence. How, though, to ban violence without using it? How to escape the fetters of “just wars”?
Antonella had hunkered down in the middle of the aisle, and she was weeping. All the suppressed anger he had felt since she played that trick on him aboard the floater broke away from his mind like a chunk of ice falling from a roof. She was, after all, a human being like himself. He helped her to her feet and took her in his arms, hiding from her the sight of those sinister cells. He heard her sob, and wordlessly thanked her for it.
Chapter 16
Corson was hungry. He headed mechanically toward the door, as though merely going outside amounted to approaching a solution. Of course, there was a solution, and he was only too well aware of the fact If he had been alone he might even have considered it. Soldiers in battle were taught to feed on anything rather than die of hunger. If they didn’t learn the lesson well, they didn’t last very long. And training, rather than instinct, reminded him that they were surrounded by a vast stock of protein. But he could imagine the unspeakable horror he would see in Antonella’s eyes if he explained the price they might have to pay for their ultimate survival.