Then it steadied, and he sat up slowly. He swung his legs over the sharp edge of what appeared to be a shallow, sloping metal trough. It was a mattressless bunk, curved in its bottom, from hundreds of men who had lain there before him.
He was in a cell.
“Hey! I said you got a match there?”
Qarlo turned from the empty rear wall of the cell and looked through the bars. A bulb-nosed face was thrust up close to the metal barrier. The man was short, in filthy rags whose ‘odor reached Qarlo with tremendous offensiveness. The man’s eyes were bloodshot, and his nose was crisscrossed with blue and red veins. Acute alcoholism, reeking from every pore; acne rosacea that had turned his nose into a hideous cracked and pocked blob.
Qarlo knew he was in detention, and from the very look, the very smell of this other, he knew he was not in a military prison. The man was staring in at him, oddly.
“Match, Charlie? You got a match?” He puffed his fat, wet lips at Qarlo, forcing the bit of cigarette stub forward with his mouth. Qarlo stared back; he could not understand the man’s words. They were so slowly spoken, so sharp and yet unintelligible. But he knew what to answer.
“Marnames Qarlo Clobregnny, pryt, sizflfwunohtootoonyn,” the soldier muttered by rote, surly tones running together.
“Whaddaya mad at me for, buddy? I didn’t putcha in here,” argued the match-seeker. “All I wanted was a light for this here butt.” He held up two inches of smoked stub. “How come they gotcha inna cell, and not runnin’ around loose inna bull pen like us?” He cocked a thumb over his shoulder, and for the first time Qarlo realized others were in this jail.
“Ah, to hell wit ya,” the drunk muttered. He cursed again, softly under his breath, turning away. He walked across the bull pen and sat down with the four other men-all vaguely similar in facial content-who lounged around a rough-hewn table-bench combination. The table and benches, all one piece, like a picnic table, were bolted to the floor.
“A screwloose,” the drunk said to the others, nodding his balding head at the soldier in his long cape and metallic skintight suit. He picked up the crumpled remnants of an ancient magazine and leafed through it as though he knew every line of type, every girlie illustration, by heart.
Qarlo looked over the cell. It was about ten feet high by eight across, a sink with one thumb-push spigot running cold water, a commode without seat or paper, and metal trough, roughly the dimensions of an average-sized man, fastened to one wall. One enclosed bulb burned feebly in the ceiling. Three walls of solid steel. Ceiling and floor of the same, riveted together at the seams. The fourth wall was the barred door.
The firmer might be able to wilt that steel, he realized, and instinctively reached for his pouch. It was the first moment he had had a chance to think of it, and even as he reached, knew the satisfying weight of it was gone. His bandoliers also. His Brandelmeier, of course. His boots, too, and there seemed to have been some attempt to get his cape off, but it was all part of the skintight suit of metallic-mesh cloth.
The loss of the pouch was too much. Everything that had happened, had happened so quickly, so blurry, meshed, and the soldier was abruptly overcome by confusion and a deep feeling of hopelessness. He sat down on the bunk, the ledge of metal biting into his thighs. His head still ached from a combination of the blow dealt him by the cop, and the metal bunk where he had lain. He ran a shaking hand over his head, feeling the fractional inch of his brown hair, cut battle-style. Then he noticed that his left hand had been bandaged quite expertly. There was hardly any throbbing from his wound.
That brought back to sharp awareness all that had transpired, and the War leaped into his thoughts. The telepathic command, the rising from the firmhole, the rifle at the ready...
...then a sizzling shussssss, and the universe had exploded around him in a billion tiny flickering novas of color and color and color. Then suddenly, just as suddenly as he had been standing on the battlefield of Great War VII, advancing on the enemy forces of Ruskie-Chink, he was not there.
He was here.
He was in some dark, hard tunnel, with a great beast roaring out of the blackness onto him, and a man in a blue coat had shot him, and clubbed him. Actually touched him! Without radiation gloves! How had the man known Qarlo was not booby-trapped with radiates? He could have died in an instant.
Where was he? What war was this he was engaged in? Were these Ruskie-Chink or his own Tri-Continenters? He did not know, and there was no sign of an explanation.
Then he thought of something more important. If he had been captured, then they must want to question him. There was a way to combat that, too. He felt around in the hollow tooth toward the back of his mouth. His tongue touched each tooth till it hit the right lower bicuspid. It was empty. The poison glob was gone, he realized in dismay. It must have dropped out when the blue-coat clubbed me, he thought.
He realized he was at their mercy; who they might be was another thing to worry about. And with the glob gone, he had no way to stop their extracting information. It was bad. Very bad, according to the warning conditioning he had received. They could use Probers, or dyoxl-scopalite, or hypno-scourge, or anyone of a hundred different methods, anyone of which would reveal to them the strength of numbers in his company, the battery placements, the gun ranges, the identity and thought wave band of every officer...in fact, a good deal. More than he had thought he knew.
He had become a very important prisoner of War. He had to hold out, he realized!
Why?
The thought popped up, and was gone. All it left in its wake was the intense feeling: I despise War, all war and the War! Then, even that was gone, and he was alone with the situation once more, to try and decide what had happened to him...what secret weapon had been used to capture him...and if these unintelligible barbarians with the projectile weapons could, indeed, extract his knowledge from him.
I swear they won’t get anything out of me but my name, rank, and serial number, he thought desperately.
He mumbled those particulars aloud, as reassurance: “Marnames Qarlo Clobregnny, pryt, sizflfwunohtootoonyn.”
The drunks looked up from their table and their shakes, at the sound of his voice. The man with the rosedrop nose rubbed a dirty hand across fleshy chin folds, repeated his philosophy of the strange man in the locked cell.
“Screwloose!”
He might have remained in jail indefinitely, considered a madman or a mad rifleman. But the desk sergeant who had booked him, after the soldier had received medical attention, grew curious about the strangely shaped weapon.
As he put the things into security, he tested the Brandelmeier-hardly realizing what knob or stud controlled its power, never realizing what it could do-and melted away one wall of the safe room. Three inch plate steel, and it melted bluely, fused solidly.
He called the Captain, and the Captain called the F.B.I., and the F.B.I. called Internal Security, and Internal Security said, “Preposterous!” and checked back. When the Brandelmeier had been thoroughly tested-as much as could be tested, since the rifle had no seams, no apparent power source, and fantastic range-they were willing to believe. They had the soldier removed from his cell, transported along with the pouch, and a philologist named Soames, to the I.S. general headquarters in Washington, D.C. The Brandelmeier came by jet courier, and the soldier was flown in by helicopter, under sedation. The philologist named Soames, whose hair was long and rusty, whose face was that of a starving artist, whose temperament was that of a saint, came in by specially chartered lane from Columbia University. The pouch was sent by sealed Brinks truck to the airport, where it was delivered under heaviest guard to a mail plane. They all arrived in Washington within ten minutes of one another and, without seeing anything of the surrounding countryside, were whisked away to the subsurface levels of the I.S. Buildings.