“I don’t suppose so,” said Jim, watching the smaller man calmly. The black eyes flickered upon him like dark flashes of lightning.
“Because of the conflict of personalities,” said Melness, “I have no physical authority over you. But if necessary, I can suspend you from duty with your Starkien unit and enter a formal complaint to the Emperor about you. Don’t let yourself be misled by any foolish notion that the Emperor will not act upon any complaint I make to him.”
“I won’t,” said Jim softly. Melness looked at him for a moment more, then disappeared.
“Now, Jim,” Adok said at his elbow, “if you like, we can return to your quarters; and I will show you the use of your weapons and accouterments.”
“Fine,” said Jim.
They transported themselves back to Jim’s quarters. There Adok fitted Jim out with the straps and belts he had brought from the armory.
“There are two classes of weaponry,” said Adok, once Jim was outfitted. “This”—he tapped the small black rod he had inserted in the loops of the belt attached to Jim’s loin strap—“is independently powered and is all that is normally used for duty upon the Throne World.”
He paused and then reached out softly to touch a silver band encircling the biceps of Jim’s upper left arm.
“These, however,” said Adok, “are part of the weaponry of the second class. They are completely useless at the moment, because they must be energized by a broadcast power source. Each of them is both a weapon and an enabler at the same time.”
“Enabler?” Jim asked.
“Yes,” said Adok. “They increase your reflex time, by causing you to react physically at a certain set speed—which in the case of anyone not High-born is considerably above his natural speed of reflex. Later on, we’ll be working out with the enabler function of the second-class weaponry. And eventually, perhaps you can get permission to go to the testing area, which is at a good distance below the surface of the Throne World, and gain some actual experience with the weapons themselves.”
“I see,” said Jim, examining the silver bands. “I take it, then, that they’re fairly powerful?”
“A trained Starkien,” said Adok, “under full control of effective second-class weaponry, should be the equivalent of two to six units of fully armed men from the Colony Worlds.”
“The Colony Worlds don’t have Starkiens of their own, then?” asked Jim.
For a second time Adok managed to register a mildly visible emotion. This time the emotion seemed to be shock.
“The Starkiens serve the Emperor—and only the Emperor!” he said.
“Oh?” said Jim. “On the ship that brought me to the Throne World, I had a talk with a High-born named Galyan. And Galyan had a Starkien—or somebody who looked exactly like a Starkien—bodyguarding him.”
“There’s nothing strange in that, Jim,” said Adok. “The Emperor lends his Starkiens to the other High-born when the other High-born need them. But they are only lent. They still remain servants of the Emperor, and in the final essential their commands come only from the Emperor.”
Jim nodded. Adok’s words rang an echo off the remembered words of Melness a short time before. Jim’s thoughts ran on ahead with the connection.
“The underground area on the Throne World is occupied only by the servants, is that right, Adok?” he asked.
“That’s right, Jim,” said Adok.
“As long as I’m going to be going down there as a matter of duty from now on,” said Jim, “I think I’d like to see some more of it. How large an area is it?”
“There are as many rooms below grounds,” said Adok, “as there are above. In fact, there may be more, because I don’t know them all.”
“Who does?” asked Jim.
Adok looked for a second as though he would have shrugged. But the gesture was evidently too marked a one for him to make.
“I don’t know, Jim,” he said. “Perhaps… Melness.”
“Yes,” said Jim thoughtfully. “Of course, if anyone would know, it would be Melness.”
During the next few weeks Jim found himself involved in several parades down on the parade grounds. He discovered that his duties on these occasions were nothing more than to get dressed and to stand before his unit, which consisted of seventy-eight Starkiens, a noncommissioned Starkien officer, Adok, and himself.
But the first parade he witnessed, it came as a shock to him to see that vast space underground completely filled with rank upon rank of the impassive, bald-headed, short, and massive-boned men who were the Starkiens. Jim had assumed that the Throne World was a full-sized planetary body, that there would be a large number of servants and all types, and that the Starkiens should be a fair proportion of these. But he had not realized, until he saw it with his own eyes, how many Starkiens there were. A little calculation afterward based upon what Adok could tell him of the floor space of the parade ground area led him to estimate that he must have seen at least twenty thousand men under arms in that space.
If it was indeed true, what Adok said, that each Starkien was the equivalent of four to five times a unit of eighty soldiers from the Colony Worlds, then what he had seen gathered there had been the equivalent of between half and three-quarters of a million men. And Adok had told him that this parade ground was only one of fifty spaced about the Throne World, underground.
Perhaps it was not so surprising that the High-born of the Throne World considered themselves above any threat that could be posed by any Colony World or combination of Colony Worlds.
Outside the parades, Jim found that his only duties during the first few weeks consisted of a session in the gymnasium every other day with Adok, wearing the second-class weaponry.
The silver bands that represented the second-class weaponry were still not energized as weapons, but within the confines of the gymnasium they became active in their capacity as enablers. The exercises that Jim was put through by Adok, therefore, consisted merely of running, jumping, and climbing over various obstacles, with the enablers assisting. After the first session of this exercise, which Adok permitted to go on only for some twelve minutes, the Starkien took Jim almost tenderly back to his own quarters and had Jim lie down on the oversized hassock that served as a bed there, while Adok gently removed the class-two weaponry bands.
“Now,” said Adok, “you must rest for at least three hours.”
“Why?” Jim asked, curiously gazing up at the stocky figure standing over him.
“Because the first effects of wearing the enablers is not appreciated by the body immediately,” said Adok. “Remember, your muscles have been forced to move faster than your nature intended them to. You may think that you feel stiff and sore now. But what you feel now is nothing to what you will feel in about three hours’ time. The best way of minimizing the stiffness and soreness when you first begin to use the enablers is to remain as still as possible for the three hours immediately following exercise. As you become hardened to their use, your body will actually adapt to being pushed at faster than its normal speed of reflex. Eventually you won’t become stiff unless you really overextend yourself, and you won’t need to rest after each exercise.”
Jim kept his face impassive, and Adok vanished, considerately dimming the lights of the room before he went. In the dimness Jim looked thoughtfully at the white ceiling overhead.