Ben Bova - Voyagers

Backing away, knees bent, hands out defensively, Stoner heard his instructor’s voice again: The martial arts are not a game! You are not trying to score points, you are trying to save your life!

Schmidt advanced toward him, brandishing the bottle. A low growl came from his throat. Stoner watched the young man’s feet as he came closer, forcing himself to concentrate on what he must do, calming his breathing rate, putting his body in balance.

Nobody’s going to lift a finger to help, he saw with a strangely detached part of his mind. They either figure this is a private grudge or they’re scared of getting hurt.

Schmidt swung the bottle in a wild overhand sweep. Stoner ducked under it and leaned all his weight into a punch to Schmidt’s diaphragm. Then he grabbed him and spun him into the wall.

Schmidt turned and swung again wildly but Stoner blocked it with a forearm and kicked him through the partition between booths. The wood splintered and screeched as the young astronomer’s body shattered it.

Stoner stood over Schmidt’s prostrate body and let the breath sigh out of him. He saw Jo still standing at the doorway and now Reynaud was beside her, insanely dressed in gray Navy pajamas, with his arm in a light sling. The others in the club were edging toward him now, timidly approaching.

But Schmidt started climbing slowly to his feet, the bottle still firmly in his hand, a grisly smile on his bleeding face. Everyone froze into stillness.

Jesus Christ! Stoner gaped. He’s like Frankenstein’s monster. Nothing stops him.

Schmidt giggled like a schoolboy pulling the wings off a fly and came at Stoner again.

Stoner buried the fear and pain he felt and did what had to be done. Block, kick, punch to the side of the head. Schmidt sagged to his knees. Stoner grasped the wrist of his right hand, yanked the arm out full length and kicked Schmidt’s ribs. The bottle fell from his hand. Ribs cracked audibly. Stoner chopped a vicious knife-edge blow to Schmidt’s neck and he went down on his face.

The crowd surged in closer.

“Don’t get near him!” Stoner panted. “He’s crazy.”

And Schmidt slowly climbed back to his feet. The crowd gasped and backed away. His ribs must be broken from that kick, Stoner knew. What in hell is going to stop him?

His face set in a hideous death’s-head rictus, Schmidt charged again at Stoner, who met him with a front kick to the abdomen and a hammer blow to the shoulder. Schmidt’s collarbone cracked.

Break him down, Stoner told himself. Go for the bones. Chop him down like a fucking tree.

It seemed like an eternity. Stoner worked automatically blank-minded, remorselessly, until Schmidt lay inert on the wooden floor, as still as death.

Reynaud pushed his way through the onlookers with his one good arm, Jo trailing behind him.

“You’ve killed him!” Reynaud cried, sinking to his knees beside Schmidt’s prostrate form.

“I don’t…think so,” Stoner panted. “Hope not. I couldn’t…he went…berserk…”

Jo was staring at him. “You’re hurt.”

“I’m okay,” he said. “Get an ambulance…for the kid. I had to hit him…pretty hard.”

“But you…”

The adrenaline was wearing away and every muscle in Stoner’s body was starting to scream.

“Just get me back to my room,” he mumbled, heading for the door. “I just want to lie down.”

But there were four uniformed shore patrolmen at the door. Stoner collapsed into their arms.

Cavendish woke up slowly, blinking and struggling to clear the fog of sleep from his brain. He shivered with cold. For long moments he had no recollection of why he was sitting slumped against the bole of a big palm tree, legs folded painfully under him, across the tennis courts from the island’s hospital.

Gradually he remembered. He remembered Schmidt and the wild untrue words he had poured into the young man’s ear. Shame burned through him. They’re controlling me, he told himself. They’ve stolen my soul.

He looked out across the tennis courts. It was dark and no one was in sight. Leaning against the tree, he pulled himself up to his feet.

His legs were afire with pins and needles, but his head felt clear. The pain is gone! His hands flew to his face, his scalp, as if they had a will of their own, probing, searching, trying to find from touch if he were deluding himself and the pain was really lurking in there somewhere, hiding, waiting to come back in even more terrifying force.

“It’s gone,” Cavendish whispered shakily to the night shadows. “Truly gone…as completely as if someone had turned off a switch.”

A switch. “Quite,” he said to himself. “A switch that they can turn on again just as easily, whenever they decide they want more from me.”

He pulled his trembling hands away from his head. Despite their tremor, inwardly he felt quite calm. His mind was his own again—at least for a little while.

And with a clarity that comes only when all distracting thoughts have been burned away, Cavendish at last realized what he had to do.

The only person who makes slavery possible, he had once read somewhere, is the slave himself.

And with that brilliant, blazing clarity of vision that had suddenly been granted him, Cavendish saw how he could end his own slavery.

“I know what you want,” he muttered through clenched teeth, “but you can’t make me do it. I’m a man, not one of your bloody trained dogs.”

Very deliberately, he turned his back to the hospital and threaded his way past the trees, through the buildings, across the main street and through the clustered buildings on the other side. The ocean side. It took only a few minutes to span the width of the island and stand on the ocean beach.

The surf boomed closer here. The sea stretched out under gleaming skies. Beyond the scudding clouds the aurorae flickered and laughed at him.

I know what you are, and what’s causing you, Cavendish said silently to the dancing lights. That’s enough. I won’t get to meet you in person, but that’s all right. I’ve had enough for one lifetime.

The ocean surged at his feet, alive, breathing.

Cavendish smiled sadly into the dark waters. “Sophocles long ago heard it,” he quoted. “And it brought into his mind the turbid ebb and flow of human misery.”

There were strong currents in that remorseless ocean, currents that would sweep a man away from land, currents that harbored the planet’s most efficient carnivores.

Cavendish stood at the water’s edge for only a moment. No thought of his past life paraded through his mind. He thought only of the future, a bleak, grim future of pain and slavery to unknown, unknowable masters.

With a crooked smile he muttered, “But while I have the strength, I can end all that.”

He waded into the sea, into the warm engulfing amniotic fluid that would erase his pain forever. Straight into the waves he walked, up to his knees, up to his hips, his shoulders, oblivious to what waited out there hungrily, oblivious to the lights in the sky that made the night brilliant with eerie glowing fire. Sure enough, the current seized him and soon he disappeared from the land.

Even through his acoustically insulated helmet, the pilot was getting a headache from the helicopter’s rattling, roaring engine. Below him was nothing but empty gray ocean. At his side, the crewman scanned the choppy sea with binoculars.

“How th’ fuck they expect us to find a guy in th’ fuckin’ water without a fuckin’ dye marker?” the pilot hollered over the chopper’s cacophony.

The crewman put the binoculars in his lap and rubbed his bloodshot eyes. “Orders,” he yelled back.

“Fuck! The dumb sonofabitch went out swimmin’ at night and got pulled under. He’s fuckin’ shark food by now.”