At least he was out of the Boston prison! He had been flashed terribly far away, he knew; but that same machine that had flashed him here could flash him back.
He stood erect, almost weightless in the tiny centrifugal force of this object he was in, and his immense barrel chest expanded with the appetite for freedom. It would come! In spite of anything. He did not fear the vile creatures who ordered him about any more than those spastic, hollow- eyed humans who were his labor mates. They did not matter. Tupaia, Te'ehala, paramount king-warrior of the forces of Free Polynesia, awaited the moment of opportunity that would make him free.
But it did not seem very quick to come . . .
It did not come while they were loading the lander. The hideous aliens were ever vigilant, and the lashing steel tentacles of the robot, the scorching electric sting of the huge floating eye proved themselves on other Purchased People. Tupaia learned quickly to avoid them.
It did not come on the long voyage down to the surface of the thing they called Cuckoo. What did come, though, was at least a little leisure, a little time to find which of his fellow prisoners were capable of speech. Most were not, but the young blond girl sometimes, the scar-faced boy more frequently, were willing to talk, almost as human prisoners did in human jails. From them he learned a good deal. They were approaching Cuckoo! Even Tupaia had heard of Cuckoo—no citizen of Earth could have avoided that much. But the flame that burned inside Tupaia had bleached out most other things, and he had had no idea of its size, its distance, or its impenetrable strangeness. No matter. He had discovered that, among the machines and instruments he had helped to muscle on board the lander, some were weapons and one was a miniature portable copy of the tachyon-transfer machine that could flash him back to the orbiter, perhaps even back to Earth. He marked it well. The weapons, even better.
When the aliens discovered that he alone among the dozen Purchased People they had commandeered was not "owned" by some distant creature, there was another cacophony of screeches and yelps and confusion as they discussed the finding among themselves. For hours. Finally Tupaia, bored, fell asleep. When he woke the blond girl was staring at him—out of her own eyes, he thought. "What are you?" she demanded.
He said, "I am Te'ehala Tupaia, paramount king-warrior of the forces of Free Polynesia, and I am hungry. What is there to eat?"
She dismissed the question angrily. "Are you with these monsters? Do you know what they plan?"
"I am with them because I have no choice," he said.
"And as to the rest, I have no doubt you are going to tell me.
"How can you joke? They are playing a dangerous game! They think they can learn all of Cuckoo's secrets to send back to their home worlds and then destroy it!"
"Perhaps they can."
"Only if they die with Cuckoo—and we with them!"
"I do not die so easily, woman," he growled.
"And you are free," she added thoughtfully. She looked at him almost with envy. "They're going to have to reimburse my owner for this," she explained, "and at least you come free. Nobody cares about you."
"I come free," said Tupaia softly, "because I am free."
"Not really," she said jealously. "None of us are that!" But he would not argue with her and when, a moment later, that familiar look of sudden abstraction came into her eyes and she moved off on some errand of her distant owner, he was not displeased. The more solitude, the more opportunity to plan. Barring the terrible food, the crowding, and above all the stink—the creature they called a "Watcher" was the filthiest of all the creatures aboard, but each one had its own sickening fetor—he was not displeased with where he was.
Especially since every moment brought him closer to the surface of that great, mysterious world called Cuckoo— huge enough to escape into, he was sure!
They came down at last on what seemed like a white porcelain boulevard in front of a tall, stern temple. The thrusters of the landing craft fouled the boulevard with streaks of scorched blackness and stretches of crazed, heat- cracked porcelain. The aliens herded the Purchased People out at once, and when Tupaia touched the cracked surface it singed his jail-softened feet. He cried out. The blond girl caught him roughly by the shoulder. In a voice not her own she declaimed, "If this unit cannot perform it should be eliminated." Tupaia muttered something, not caring to look back at what looked out of those mad eyes, and took the hint. He did not complain again.
And had no need to, really. The immense bits of metal and instrumentation they made him carry out of the ship were feather-light in this gentle gravity. They did, however—he discovered—have mass and momentum. He made the mistake of getting between two of them, one a case of synthetic rations, the other a huge, massy, translucent block with a kind of organ keyboard attached to it. There was something about the block that flared Tupaia's broad nostrils and erected the hairs at the back of his neck. Was it a weapon? Had he seen it before? He hesitated, wondering, as the objects floated crunchingly together, and it nearly cost him a leg. He did not do that again. But the work was no challenge for his great muscles.
A great lake. An even greater forest, almost a jungle. Tupaia was desperate to explore either or both, but at first there was no chance. The beings that seemed to be the real leaders of the expedition—the floating eye and the great, puffing cubical robot—disappeared almost at once into the temple. Tupaia could only get quick glimpses of them as they scoured its confines for . . . what? For something he could not guess at, and did not think they found, to judge from the discontented, rancorous squawks and crackles that came from them. The leathery-winged, foul-smelling Watcher cruised overhead, watching all of them at close range; the lesser aliens toiled with the Purchased humans at slave labor. With three other Purchased People and a horse-headed creature they were set to putting together a raft and loading it with material from the ship. It was hot work in the dank air. All of the humans sweated profusely, and even the horse-headed Canopan exuded great oily drops of a scarlet liquid like blood.
But what a paradise this was! In the moments he could snatch from toil, Tupaia mapped every feature he could see.
All around lay distant, gentle slopes rising up to a ring of far-off cliffs. The slopes were wooded with pink-leaved trees that smelled graciously of cinnamon and pitch. And down in front of them was the great lake. Cool. Clean. It reminded him of the crystal waters of the lagoon beyond the hotel where he had worked as a boy, no more than a meter deep until you reached the distant breakwater reef, with patches of dark coral and the bright underwater lanes where he and the other beachboys raked pebbles and shell fragments away to save the whiteskins' tender feet. But this was even more clear. He could see no fish or crustaceans, just a gentle sandy bottom with a few clusters of marine growth—and the white porcelain roadway. He could trace its outlines as it went straight into the water, descending steeply as the lake deepened until it was lost from sight.
That was puzzling; but the forest was a promise! It would not be hard to hide in such a place.
Tupaia's courage did not exclude the awareness of danger. There were dangers in plenty in the place where he was and the company he kept. He knew that those gentle woods might conceal dangers more appalling still. The only native life form he had seen was the Watcher; if that was typical of what inhabited Cuckoo, the sharks and orcas of the outer reefs were playthings by comparison!