"Master." He turned as Lim entered the cabin, not bowing, but appearing to cringe. "As yet no success."
"Leave us." As the door closed behind him Lim said, "I would prefer to dispense with this barbarism but if necessary it can continue."
"Until I die?"
"Is that your objective?"
"Pain," said Dumarest. "Apply enough of it and you can make a saint plead to become a sinner. You are hardly subtle, cyber."
"And you are being willfully stupid. What can continued refusal gain? You are here, alive, and will continue to be kept that way. In pain and torment, but alive. Where is your body?"
Dumarest shook his head. "I don't know what you're talking about."
"You insist on continuing the pretense but it is a waste of time. I know you used the affinity twin to take over the body of the woman. I know your body is somewhere in Zabul." Lim saw the sudden tension of the broken hands. "The dummy you brought here is now far distant in space. A bomb, of course. One which would be detonated when you stopped relaying a biological signal. Did you swallow a capsule to monitor the beating of your heart?" Again he saw the betraying movement of the hands. "You have been clever in a primitive fashion but now you see that cleverness was not enough. You are here. Your body is in Zabul. I shall demand it be handed over and will destroy the entire installation if it is not. Piece by piece, naturally, with due warning given as to which part is next. How many warnings will I have to give? How much destruction will they accept?"
Dumarest said, "Try it and they will blast you from space."
"So you admit your body is there?"
"I admit nothing. God! My hands!"
Twin furnaces of searing agony rose to fog his mind with a dull haze shot with brittle lightning. The pain diminished that in his chest by contrast. The man with the angelic face had known his trade.
"The sequence?"
"Go to hell!"
"No, Dumarest, it is you who will dwell in hell. The pain in your hands is nothing to what that body you are wearing can be made to suffer. A prelude to what will happen once your own body is in my hands. But, for now, the eyes, I think. Acid placed in each corner so as to burn out the orbs. Later we shall try the application of mental probes. Stimulation of the pain center of the brain will cause no physical damage but will yield unimaginable torment. The sequence?"
"My hands! I can't-"
"Write? Of course not. But you can gesture." Lim freed the broken appendages from their clamps. "Here." He placed a sheet on the table before Dumarest. It was marked with the fifteen molecular units. "Just point to each as they are to be united to form the chain."
Dumarest lifted a hand, blood dripping from the wounded fingers, touched the sheet and left only smears.
"Try again." Lim replaced the sheet with another, watching as, again, Dumarest failed.
"I can't. Give me something to point with. A stylo." Dumarest took it, fighting the pain as he forced torn flesh to obey, stabbed the point at the symbols one after the other. "There!"
"Do it again." Lim followed the pattern. It was the same but he had no way of telling if it was correct. "The acid, I think. It is important to be sure."
"No!" Dumarest sagged, a man trapped in an alien body, broken, pleading. "I want to help. You can check I'm telling the truth. On Zabul. I marked the sequence on my skin. In case I forgot. For God's sake don't hurt me again!"
"Your body?"
"In a casket. I'll show you!"
The obvious hiding place. Lim turned and touched the button of a communicator. "Captain? Take us at once to Zabul. Direct contact."
Moments yet before the ship could move. Time in which the cyber could check the situation-to realize the error he could have made. As Lim turned again to the communicator Dumarest lunged from the table.
He was slow, awkward, lacking strength and judgment but his objective was simple; to gain time. To prevent the cyber from canceling his order. Lim staggered as Dumarest slammed against him, falling back, hands lifting as Dumarest thrust the stylo at an eye. The blow missed, the point catching the skin at the side of the face, ripping it to mix blood with the ink. A struggle ended as the cyber struck back in turn to send Dumarest to the floor, there to lie in a raw tide of pain.
A red fury which dissolved in a gush of searing white flame.
Death was an ending, a release and, for him, a transition. Lying in the sac, Dumarest looked at the naked splendor of the galaxy beyond the taut membrane and wondered if it was always like that. But it had been Carina who had died-his turn was yet to come.
He reached for the controls and looked at the bulk of Zabul, at the dying haze beyond it where the Saito had been. A nimbus grew as the jets moved him toward the artificial world, fading in expanding vapor soon to be nothing but a host of spreading atoms. A pyre in which Lim had died, his acolytes, the crew and Carina Davaranch. Her genius deserved a better monument.
Suited figures moved toward the sac as it neared the port and within it Althea was waiting.
"Earl!" Her arms closed around him with unsuspected strength. "I thought you were dead. Earl!"
"Easy." The memory of lacerated lungs was too recent as was that of broken hands. "You must have known I was safe. You saw the sac taken from the ship."
"Yes, but we didn't know you were in it. How-" She shook her head, baffled. "After all that trouble to get you why did they let you go?"
A gamble taken and won and he thought about it when, later, he sipped wine in the warm comfort of her room. At the last Lim must have known and it gave a special pleasure to remember his eyes, the shock of understanding. The recognition of his error must have given the cyber a foretaste of hell.
"A bomb," he explained as Althea sat at his side. "I made it and planted it against the hull. Kusche helped me to carry it and tampered with the fuses but I'd lied to him and he wasted his time. Even so it was proof of what I'd suspected."
"So you killed him?"
"No. Carina did that."
"The bitch! She almost laughed at me, Earl. When you were being carried to the port. I could have killed her!"
Instead she had done as he'd asked and never realized the conversation had been to remind her of what needed to be done.
Now, frowning, she said, "I still don't understand. Why the arranged accident? All we did was to sound the alarm and fill the air with dust and bump into those men carrying the sac."
A bluff and it had worked. Dumarest looked at his wine, thinking of the chance he had taken. The gamble which he'd been unable to avoid. His use of the affinity twin had been certain to be discovered but he had to make sure it was done in such a way as not to be obvious. And then, at the right moment, sow the doubt which had sent Lim on the one path which would rob the cyber of victory.
At the last, surely, he must have known.
Known there had been no time to make a dummy and switch it for the real man. Known that his own cautious logic had trapped him into falling a victim to the deception. Known too, at the last, that all Dumarest had done and said had been aimed at making him move the vessel once the sac was safely away.
The Erhaft field itself had detonated the bomb. "Earl?" Althea touched his hand and smiled when he looked toward her. "I've been talking to some of the young ones. They aren't happy. They think as you do: the Council is too old and reluctant to change. Volodya tends to side with them."
"So?"
"To them you're a hero, Earl. More than that." Pausing she added, "They want you to guide them to Earth."