So, there was no magical, negentropic chimpanzee after all. But the first part of the dream was true. He was in jail on a strange world. A bunch of cavemen who hadn’t the slightest idea they were cavemen had him prisoner. He was at least fifty miles from the shattered zievatron, on a world where the most basic physical laws he had been brought up to believe were queerly twisted.
It was night. Snores echoed through the prisoners’ shed. Dennis lay unmoving in the dimness until he realized that someone sat on the next cot, watching him. He turned his head arid met the look of a large, well-muscled man with dark, curly hair.
“You had a bad dream,” the prisoner said quietly.
“I was delirious,” Dennis corrected. He peered. “You look familiar. Were you one of the men I shouted at while I was raving? One of the… the clothes practicers?”
The tall man nodded. “Yes. My name is Stivyung Sigel. I heard you say that you had met my son.”
Dennis nodded. “Tomosh. A very good boy. You should be proud.”
Sigel helped Dennis sit up. “Is Tomosh all right?” He asked. His voice was anxious.
“You needn’t worry. He was just fine last I saw.”
Sigel bowed his head in gratitude. “Did you meet my wife, Surah?”
Dennis frowned. He found it hard to remember what he had been told. It all seemed so long ago and had been mentioned only in passing. He didn’t want to distress Sigel.
On the other hand, the man deserved to be told whatever he knew. “Umm, Tomosh is staying with his Aunt Biss. She told me something about your wife going off to ask help... from somebody or something called Latoof? Likoff?”
The other man’s face paled. “The L’Toff” he whispered. “She should not have done so. The wilderness is dangerous, and things are not yet so desperate!”
Sigel stood up and started pacing at the foot of Dennis’s bed. “I must get out of here. I must!”
Dennis had already begun thinking along the same lines. Now that he knew there were no native scientists to help him, he had to be getting back to the zievatron to try putting a new return mechanism together by himself, with or without replacement power buses. Otherwise he would never get off of this crazy world.
Maybe he could turn the Practice Effect to his advantage, though he suspected it would work quite differently for a sophisticated instrument than for an ax or a sled. The very idea was too fresh and disconcerting for the scientist in him to dwell on yet.
All he really knew was that he was getting homesick. And he owed Bernald Brady a punch in the nose.
When he tried to get up, Sigel hurried to his side and helped him. They went to one of the support pillars, where Dennis leaned and looked out at the stockade wall. Two small, bright moons illuminated the grounds.
“I think,” he told the farmer in a low voice, “I might be able to help you get out of here, Stivyung.”
Sigel regarded him. “One of the guards claims you are a wizard. Your actions earlier made us think it might be true. Can you truly arrange an escape from this place?”
Dennis smiled. The score so far was Tatir many, Dennis Nuel nothing. It was his turn now. What, he wondered, might not be wrought from the Practice Effect by a Ph.D. in physics, when these people hadn’t even heard of the wheel?
“It’ll be a piece of cake, Stivyung.”
The farmer looked puzzled by the idiom but he smiled hopefully.
A touch of motion caught Dennis’s eye. He turned and looked up at the layered castle to his right, its walls gleaming in the moonlight.
Three levels up, behind a parapet lined with bars, a slender figure stood alone. The breeze blew a diaphanous garment and a cascade of long blond hair.
She was too far away to discern clearly in the night, but Dennis was struck by the young woman’s loveliness. He also felt sure that somehow he had seen her somewhere before.
At that moment she seemed to look toward them. She stood that way, with her face in shadows, perhaps watching them watch her, for a long time.
“Princess Linnora,” Sigel identified her. “She is a prisoner as are we. In fact, she’s the reason I’m here. The Baron wanted to impress her with his property. I’m to help practice his personal things to perfection.” Sigel sounded bitter.
“Is she as beautiful in the daytime as she is by moonlight?” Dennis couldn’t look away.
Sigel shrugged. “She’s comely, I’ll warrant. But I can’t understand what th’ Baron’s thinking. She’s a daughter of the L’Toff. I know them better than most, and it’s hard even for me to imagine one of them ever marraiging to a normal human being.”
5. Transom Dental
1
“They patrol outside the wall to keep people away,” the small thief said. “After all, a lot of prisoners have family and friends on the outside, and a fair part of Zusiik’s population would help in a jailbreak. Even after thirty years, Kremer’s northmen ain’t too popular hereabouts.”
Dennis nodded. “But do the guards inspect the wall on the outside as carefully as they do inside?”
The escape committee numbered five. They were gathered around a rickety table eating the noon meal. The prisoners sat in flimsy, uncomfortable chairs. It would have been better just to stand, but practicing the chairs was another of their jobs.
Gath Glinn, the youngest member of their group, squatted in the shadows beside the nearby castle wall, huddled over Dennis’s prototype escape device. The sandy-haired youth had been the first to catch on to the Earthman’s idea and had been assigned to try it out. He stopped working and covered the device whenever the others indicated the guards were near.
Right now his hands moved rapidly back and forth, and the little tool he practiced made soft “zizzing” sounds.
The short, dark man whom Dennis vaguely remembered yelling at on his first day in jail shook his head and answered Dennis’s question. “Naw, Denniz. Sometimes they take gangs of us out to throw rocks at the wall. But mostly they make us practice it from th’ inside.”
Dennis was still routinely puzzled by things his fellow prisoners told him. His look must have showed it.
Stivyung Sigel looked left and right to make sure no one had approached too close. “What Arth means, Dennis, is that another of our jobs is to practice the wall itself into being a better wall.”
The farmer seemed to have caught on that Dennis came from someplace far away, where things were very different from here. It seemed to puzzle him that civilization could exist in a land where things didn’t get better with use, but he appeared willing to give Dennis the benefit of the doubt.
“I see.” Dennis nodded. “That’s why those men are allowed to chop away at the wall like that, without being stopped by the guards.” He had seen groups of prisoners lackadaisically attacking the palisade, and the wall of the castle itself, with crude mallets. He had wondered why it was permitted.
“Right, Dennis. The Baron wants the wall stronger, so he has prisoners scratch at it.” Stivyung shrugged at explaining something so basic. “Of course, the guards make sure they don’t use good tools while doing it. This way, in the course of time, the outermost wall will grow more and more like the one behind us, they’ll roof it over then, and the castle will grow that much larger.”
Dennis looked up at the palace. He understood the wedding cake geometry now. When the Coylians built a structure it started out little better than a rude lean-to. When it was finally coverted, after years of practice, into a solid one-story building, another crude structure was built on top. While the second story improved, the first became better at supporting weight on its roof and grew outward as lateral additions were made.