Cluster (10 page)

S
mg came at him like a wrestler. Flint stepped aside and caught the Yæjr with a backhand chop to the skull. It was a hard blow, and his hand went numb; he had intended to go for the neck. But that was his human experience, suffering in the translation. For Øro's arm was jointed differently, and the fingers did not form a true fist.
S
mg's head was not solid bone in back; it rose into a cartilage crest. Somehow these differences were more apparent to the sense of touch than to the sense of sight. As a result, Flint had actually hurt himself worse that he had hurt
S
mg.

But there was a hum of amazement through the audience, for Øro was not behaving the way Slaves usually did in combat. In fact this strike at the hard head with the soft hand resembled a gesture of supreme contempt.

Flint saw
Q
iw watching him closely. Well, let the foreman be surprised; Flint had
tried
to tell him the truth.

Stung by the fancied taunt,
S
mg came at him like a boxer. Flint dodged his first swing, spun about, trapped his moving hand and twisted the arm into an armlock. This should be a submission hold, good for some satisfying pain.

S
mg tried to jerk away. Flint bore down, throwing himself to the ground and carrying the trapped arm with him. Suddenly there was a crack, and
S
mg screamed. Flint had broken his arm.

He hadn't intended to. A human arm would not have broken. But again, he had misjudged the alien structure. The elbows bent the opposite way from those of human beings.

Q
iw stepped forward, eying the damage. He spoke into his Slave band. “Property damage report, sir.”

The Master responded at once in his musical tones. “Details.”

“Routine meet, sir. For favor of female. Upper appendage broken.”

“Salvageable?”

“Joint. Uneconomic convalescence.”

“Intentional?”

Q
iw peered at Flint, obviously unable to figure out how someone as stupid as this had fought like that. “Accident.”

“Dispatch damaged property. Five days discipline for instigator.”

Five days discipline! Flint needed no survey of his memory to comprehend what that meant. For Øro it would be extremely unpleasant, but for Flint it could mean disaster. Every day he stayed here in this alien body meant a further diminution of his Kirlian aura. Eventually he would lose his identity, and become Øro in fact as well as form. The Earth authorities thought his was good for several months, but they weren't
sure.
Not until he completed his mission and returned, could they measure the actual depletion of aura. Meanwhile, all they could be sure of was that he had better not waste any time when out of his natural body. Five days of starvation and punishment pain, on top of the three his body had just undergone—that could be very bad trouble, and was not worth the risk.

Q
iw was setting the punishment-box on Smg's frequency. Every Slave had a code imprinted on his torso, and any box could be tuned to that code, so that it sent its current through that specific body and no other.
Q
iw set the dial to twelve.

“No!” Smg screamed, scrambling toward him, the broken arm dangling. “I'll recover! I'll recover fast!”

But
Q
iw activated the box.
S
mg of Yæjr stiffened in utter agony, crashing helplessly into the dust. For five seconds the torture continued, ten fifteen, without letup—until the Slave relaxed.

S
mg of Yæjr was dead. The unrelenting maximum intensity pain, continued beyond the toleration point of life, had wiped out his mind, and with it his body. It was a terrible way to die.

The way Øro had died, vacating his body for Flint.

Q
iw turned. “Now Øro of N*kr,” he said, beginning to retune the box.

Flint kicked the box right out of his hands. There was a moan of shock from the surrounding Slaves. Flint dived for the box, knowing that he could never escape as long as it was in working order and within range of him. He picked it up and smashed it down against a rock.

“The band!” someone cried. It was
C
le. “Don't let him call!”

But
Q
iw was already calling. “Emergency!” he said. “Slave out of control.”

Flint whirled about and charged him.

“Identity,” the pleasant Master voice replied, unruffled.

Flint caught the band with one hand and shoved
Q
iw back with the other. The communicator ripped off the foreman's wrist. “Øro of N*kr!” Flint yelled into the speaker. “Oro!” This time he omitted the Slave-intonation, no mere breach of etiquette, but a crime. “Shove it up your blowpipe!”

That would have been a vaguely obscene insult to a human being. It was not vague at all when addressed to a Master of Canopus, for this species really did have pipes through which digestive refuse was expelled under pressure, or “blown,” in crude vernacular.

Then Flint smashed the band and whirled to face the stunned Slaves. “Who joins me in freedom?” he challenged them.

“I do!”
C
le cried.

But she was the only one.

“Let's get out of here!” Flint said to her, disgusted. “They can't all be vegetables on this planet.”

“The hills,” she said. “There are FreeSlaves there, wildmen. If we can make it before the Masters come–”

The Slaves all seemed stupefied, afraid to either hinder or help the rebels.

Except for Foreman
Q
iw. Stripped of his punishment-box and his Master communicator, he charged Flint barehanded.

Flint sidestepped the clumsy lunge and tripped him.
Q
iw fell to the ground, bashed his head, and lay still.

And Flint realized:
It was too easy.
Q
iw had not gotten to be foreman by being clumsy or stupid. Why hadn't he simply ordered the loyal Slaves to tackle Øro in a group and overpower him?

Because he wanted Øro and
C
le to escape? Naturally he could not permit this openly; his own position and perhaps his life would be forfeit. So he had made a show of obstruction, blundering into the fray exactly as
S
mg had, and taken his dive. Everyone present had seem him try. So he had fouled it up; what else could be expected of a mere slave?

Would the Masters see through the act? If so,
Q
iw's punishment would not be token. “You play a dangerous game, Foreman,” Flint muttered.

They fled across the fields of burl. “You know the odds are against us,” Flint said as they ran.

“Maybe not,” she said, breathing hard. “The Masters don't realize Slaves can think. They'll underestimate us, and maybe
Q
iw will stall them long enough.”

So she had noted the foreman's act too.
Q
iw—why would he allow a dangerous Slave to escape, if he had not understood what Flint had tried to tell him? And if he
had
understood, why hadn't he taken Øro directly to the Masters for more careful interrogation?

The question elicited its own answer.
Because Qiw didn't want Flint to make contact with the Masters.
The foreman was ultimately loyal to his own kind; he wanted Flint either silenced or with the FreeSlaves. So he had waited on events, cautiously, not risking his own position, and had acted when he had to.

Waited on events? Surely the foreman had selected
C
le of A[
^th
] to feed Øro, knowing she was a rebel at heart, untamed, and that she was looking for a new man, a strong one. Very cunning.

C
le made a half-choked little scream. Flint looked back.

A Master's saucer was skimming over the field toward them.

There was no way to outrun it, and there was no concealment here in the field. Their trail through the burl was obvious, and the saucer could crack the speed of sound under full power in the open.

Øro's memory was no help; it merely informed him that the saucers were equipped with pain beams that could strike right through foliage, rocks, or any other cover to incapacitate the fugitives instantly, without damaging them. These beams were all-purpose; they did not need to be tuned like the boxes. The Masters had had centuries of experience at this sort of thing.

The Masters were the very authorities Flint was sent to talk to, but at this point they would dismiss anything he said as the ravings of a rebellious Slave. Probably
Q
iw had made a report that suggested Øro was mad, because of the overdose of punishment pain. A neat maneuver by the foreman.

And Flint was increasingly uncertain he wanted to contact the Masters officially. Maybe it would be better to give the Slaves a break. Sphere Sol had abolished slavery as uncivilized centuries ago, and if it aligned with these slaves–

“Are we going to fight, Øro?”
C
le inquired breathlessly.

“Yes!” he snapped, though at the moment he couldn't see how.

She smiled, though she was obviously terrified. “On A[
^th
] they threw rocks.”

“
Rocks
? Against a supersonic saucer?”

“The Masters thought maybe they were bombs, so they put the shield up, and then they couldn't use the beams.”

Flint saw it. “Beautiful,
C
le!” he cried.

“I know it,” she said, patting her fur in place. Slave females were vain about their fur, even as the human girls, no, humans, were about their hair. “Only one problem.”

Now the saucer was upon them: a bowl-shaped flier large enough to hold two or three Masters. Flint dropped to the ground, scrambling for stones. “What problem?” he demanded, searching desperately underneath the burl vines.

“No rocks here,” she explained.

This was a cultivated field. Naturally there were no rocks.

Still, Flint had had occasion before to consider combating Space age technology with Stone Age technology. He had come to the conclusion that a smart Paleolith could prevail against a stupid spaceman.
Could
, not
would.
It depended a lot on the individual circumstance. This particular situation was not what he would have chosen for the test.

Yet
C
le had given him the hint. The Masters could be deceived. They tended to underestimate Slaves, then to overreact when surprised. This could be exploited. Maybe.

A beam stabbed out form the saucer.
C
le screamed: pain this time, not fear. The beam had crossed her foot. She fell among the vines, rolling, and the beam lost her.

Flint grabbed a burl berry and ripped it from its plant. It was a green fruit, unripe and hard and solid, and his savage jerk uprooted the parent plant. He hurled it at the saucer, his arm moving in a kind of backhand swing that would have been impossible for a human.

The berry struck the underside of the craft and bounced off harmlessly.

Now the beam found him. It touched his arm as he tried to throw again. It was twelve-pain, paralyzing, intolerable! It was as if the bone were splitting open, the flesh turning to ash, the blood boiling and vaporizing right within its conduits. The berry fell from his hand and his arm knotted in utter agony, every one of his six fingers twisting spasmodically. He, too, fell among the vines.

But these were random beam-tags. It was difficult to keep the bean on target when both sauces and target were moving. When it left, his arm recovered quickly, undamaged. Now he was glad of the Master's design: pain without injury.

By this time he had more berries, and so did
C
le. He aimed higher.

The saucer was not an armored flier. It was more like a concave dish, open on top, so that the Master could look out over the fields conveniently in any direction. But this also meant it was vulnerable from any direction, as long as is protective shield was down. If that shield were raised, it would not be able to attack.

Flint could see the occupant now. It was a lone Master; evidently that was deemed sufficient for the occasion.

The berries struck the saucer on both underside and upper side. But they did not do any real damage, and only annoyed the occupant. The Master did not raise the shield. Instead the saucer circled low, the pain-beam sweeping about, orienting on Øro. No hysterical reaction here. The Master had full confidence that the fugitives had no bombs; the only concern was to maneuver the craft so as to allow maximum effect of the beam.

Flint dodged, but the beam caught him again: a swipe across the chest. Instant agony collapsed his lungs, and he began to lose consciousness. As he started to fall, the pain receded. With an effort he recovered his balance. He couldn't take many more of these!

The saucer was now down almost to his eye level, hovering. The Master was looking over the rim at him: a slender dark shape, hooded against the sun, seemingly featureless. Flint discovered he didn't know what a Master looked like; Øro had never seen one close up, and had averted his eyes whenever a Master was visible.

The muzzle of the beam projector swung around to lock on Flint. This time the pain would not be transitory; the Master had taken time to be sure of his quarry.

Flint threw Øro's body to the ground. He scrambled toward the saucer, getting under its edge, using it as a shield against the beam.

But the Master was no slouch at maneuvering. The saucer dodged aside, dropping even lower. Once more the dread beam searched for him.

C
le rose up on the opposite side and threw a handful of dirt over the saucer. The Master whirled to cover her with the beam. The aim was excellent; she stiffened and fell, her mouth frozen in a soundless scream.

Flint leaped for the saucer. His fingers caught the rim. The weight of his body jerked it down.

The Master compensated beautifully. The saucer shot straight up, righting itself—with Flint still hanging.