Babylon accepted it and turned it over in his hands. It was lighter than he had expected—less massy, he corrected himself, since everything was "light" in the orbiter. It was even more flexible than it had appeared while Redlaw still held it; he could twist it, turn it, fold it; he could even imagine himself doing as Redlaw had, and drawing it on over his head.
But there was ancient power in the device; he could feel it. He temporized. "What is it?"
Zara answered for him. "Do you know what Purchased People are, Jen?"
"Sure. Everybody does. They're criminals who have been sold to aliens to use," he said impatiently.
"Yes, exactly. But do you know how the aliens use them?"
"Why, yes, I suppose so—I mean," he said, floundering, "of course the technical details are a little out of my field—"
Zara laughed, nodding in friendly sympathy. "Mine too, Jen. Almost everybody's. All we know, really, is that the Purchased People are given some sort of implant, which then puts them in direct communication with their owners. The owners can feel with their senses, see with their eyes, control their actions. Of course, some sort of tachyon communication must be involved, but that's about all any of us knew. But this helmet—" She looked at it almost with awe. "It lets us listen in, Jen! It lets us experience whatever any Purchased Person in range is experiencing—and that means anyone on or near Cuckoo! And that means—"
Her husband interrupted harshly. "It means that for the first time we can find out what's really going on here! Why some of the races are determined to destroy the research project, if not Cuckoo itself. Put it on, Babylon!"
He flexed it in his hands, still hesitating, and glanced at the doorway. He was startled to see that it was vacant.
"He's gone, Jen," Zara said, nodding. "This part of what we found doesn't interest the Watchers; I think our truce with them is over." She came closer and touched his arm reassuringly. "But our part is just beginning, Jen. Put it on!"
TEN
Te'ehala Tupaia, paramount king-warrior in the forces of Free Polynesia, shuffled along the line of prisoners. Muscles flaccid, he commanded himself. Eyes down! Follow the little old man ahead! Two steps, stop. Wait. Two steps more, stop again. It was not easy to remain impassive, since he was almost surely the only one in the line of Purchased People who both knew where they were going and had the freedom to protest or resist ... if he dared.
But he did not dare.
The man ahead lurched and moved, and Tupaia shambled another two steps. Tachyon transfer! Even to a king- warrior, it was frightening. Because he was neither ignorant nor actively possessed, he had plenty of time to consider what it meant. Tupaia was no ignorant beachboy. He had completed every grade in the mission school, and gone on to the university on Bora Bora—though all that taught you was how to be a tour guide or, at the upper stretch of ambition, a headwaiter. Even nineteen-year-old Tupaia had something better in mind than that.
But—this was not it! Even in Bora Bora they had heard of the tachyon transmissions, and the young men and wah- ines had debated wonderingly why anyone would venture such a senseless trip. Now Tupaia faced the questions as imminent realities. The first question in his mind was, did he have reason to fear this adventure? The second, was there anything he could do about it, anyway?
The answer to the first question turned out not to matter, because the answer to the second was obviously no. When he took the next two steps forward, he was suddenly alone. The little man ahead of him had been manhandled through a sliding metal door, and disappeared.
And then it was Te'ehala Tupaia's turn. The two bored guards kicked the door open and grabbed an arm each to hurl him in.
For a moment he stiffened in involuntary resistance. The guards felt it. One of them glanced at him with the beginnings of surprise; but he had the wit to keep his eyes cast down. He willed his muscles to relax, though he was twice the size of these effeminate whiteskins, and they hustled him in in his turn.
The door slid latched behind him. There was a bright blue flash, a sting of electrical spark, and a sudden sense of disorientation. And the door on the other side of the tiny chamber opened and, willing himself not to make that deadly blunder again, Tupaia allowed himself to slump forward to take his place once more in the line . . .
But there was no line.
There was no great, busy tachyon-transmission hall, with its high ceiling and tessellated floor.
There was not even a floor! Or, at least, no floor that came up solidly to meet his feet as a floor should do. He spun weightlessly across an eerily lighted chamber, until a queer doughy creature caught him roughly and thrust him spinning against a wall.
He had been transmitted.
He was somewhere else. On another planet. Or in a spacecraft, or on an orbiting satellite—wherever he was, it was not on Earth, or on any planet with enough mass to give a man solid weight.
How far away from home, he did not know.
And how much time had elapsed—how long his coded pattern had been held on file before a need arose that it could fill—and how many Te'ehala Tupaias had lurched out into the shattering realization that they had been thrust millions of millions of kilometers away, he did not even think to ask.
Although Te'ehala Tupaia had known of the existence of the great galactic races all his life, and had even seen a few specimens at a distance, he had never before been in such intimate proximity to one. Had never touched them—hot metal; soggy flesh the texture of clay; damp scales—and above all had never smelled them. They reeked! Tupaia was not particularly sensitive in such matters. He had grown up with stinks of rotting palms and washed-ashore dead fish, not to mention the middens and spoil heaps around his village. But the strong Pacific breezes carried the worst away, and even the worst was nothing like this stinging metal odor of the Scorpian robot or the sour decay of the Sheliaks.
At first his new captors seemed, peculiarly, almost as confused by him as he was by them. They hustled him through long corridors to a hot, huge metal space the size of a ballroom, filled with what seemed to be half-destroyed old machines. The Sheliak, the clay-fleshed creature with the astonishing ability to shape its body to suit its needs, extended one pseudopod to hang a Pmal translator around Tupaia's neck. It spoke sharply, something that the translator rendered as a cackle of gibberish.
"I do not understand you," said Tupaia, shaking his head. The Sheliak recoiled in astonishment. There was a quick exchange between the aliens, drumroll from the Scorpian, tweeterings and whistles and growls from the others. The Pmal again produced only an unintelligible barnyard cackle.
Then the Sheliak realized what was wrong. It reached out and made an adjustment to the device, gesturing to Tupaia to speak. "My name," Tupaia said, comprehending, "is Te'ehala Tupaia, paramount king-warrior of the forces of Free Polynesia, and I have been abducted and held captive here against my will."
That was enough. The Pmal identified Tupaia's language from its store and corrected its programing. When the aliens responded, it at once produced their meaning in Tupaia's own vocabulary. The responses were an agitated hissing and a high, tenor snare-drum rattle; and the Pmal translated them as laughter.
* * »
At least here there was no more need to pretend to be possessed by his alien purchaser. That was the most obvious improvement in Tupaia's situation . . . maybe, he thought grimly, the only one.
Te'ehala Tupaia was resourceful and quick—he'd had to be, to avoid the colonial jails as long as he had. Within an hour of emerging from the tachyon chamber he had figured out where he was—more or less—and even what he was doing there. It wasn't hard to deduce that.- Obviously these creatures had summoned him up in order to do something they couldn't, or didn't want to, do for themselves. That was what Purchased People were for. It had been a surprise to them to learn that he did not understand the language of his whilom owner, and to deduce from that that he was inexplicably free—or not free physically, of course, because they made clear he was not that, but free at least of the unwelcome alien presence that once had filled his mind. They asked questions about that, but not with much real interest, and when he could give them no clear explanation they did not press the matter. It didn't interest them, really. What they wanted was the use of his physical body. Who was in control of it mattered very little.