Eric Russell: Now Inhale

His leg irons clanked and his wrist chains jingled as they led him into the room. The bonds on his ankles compelled him to move at an awkward shuffle and the guards delighted in urging him onward faster than he could go. Somebody pointed to a chair facing the long table. Somebody else shoved him into it with such force that he lost balance and sat down hard.

The black brush of his hair jerked as his scalp twitched and that was his only visible reaction. Then he gazed across the desk with light gray eyes so pale that the pupils seemed set in ice. The look in them was neither friendly nor hostile, submissive nor angry; it was just impassively and impartially cold, cold.

On the other side of the desk seven Gombarians surveyed him with various expressions: triumph, disdain, satisfaction, boredom, curiosity, glee and arrogance. They were a humanoid bunch in the same sense that gorillas are humanoid. At that point the resemblance ended.

“Now,” began the one in the middle, making every third syllable a grunt, “your name is Wayne Taylor?”

No answer.

“You have come from a planet called Terra?” No response.

“Let us not waste any more time, Palamin,” suggested the one on the left. “If he will not talk by invitation, let him talk by compulsion.”

“You are right, Eckster.” Putting a hand under the desk Palamin came up with a hammer. It had a pear-shaped head with flattened base. “How would you like every bone in your hands cracked finger by finger, joint by joint?”

“I wouldn’t,” admitted Wayne Taylor.

“A very sensible reply,” approved Palamin. He placed the hammer in the middle of the desk, positioning it significantly. “Already many days have been spent teaching you our language. By this time a child could have learned it sufficiently well to understand and answer questions.”

He favored the prisoner with a hard stare. “You have pretended to be abnormally slow to learn. But you can deceive us no longer. You will now provide all the information for which we ask.”

“Willingly or unwillingly,” put in Eckster, licking thin lips, “but you’ll provide it anyway.”

“Correct,” agreed Palamin. “Let us start all over again and see if we can avoid painful scenes. Your name is Wayne Taylor and you come from a planet called Terra?”

“I admitted that much when I was captured.”

“I know. But you were not fluent at that time and we want no misunderstandings. Why did you land on Gombar?”

“I’ve told my tutor at least twenty times that I did it involuntarily. It was an emergency landing. My ship was disabled.”

“Then why did you blow it up? Why did you not make open contact with us and invite us to repair it for you?”

“No Terran vessel must be allowed to fall intact into hostile hands,” said Taylor flatly.

“Hostile?” Palamin tried to assume a look of pained surprise but his face wasn’t made for it. “Since you Terrans know nothing whatever about us what right have you to consider us hostile?”

“I wasn’t kissed on arrival,” Taylor retorted. “I was shot at coming down. I was shot at getting away. I was hunted across twenty miles of land, grabbed and beaten up.”

“Our soldiers do their duty,” observed Palamin virtuously.

“I’d be dead by now if they were not the lousiest marksmen this side of Cygni.”

“And what is Cygni?”

“A star.”

“Who are you to criticize our soldiers?” interjected Eckster, glowering.

“A Terran,” informed Taylor as if that were more than enough.

“That means nothing to me,” Eckster gave back with open contempt.

“It will.”

Palamin took over again. “If friendly contact were wanted the Terran authorities would send a large ship with an official deputation on board, wouldn’t they?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“We don’t risk big boats and important people without knowing what sort of a reception they’re likely to get.”

“And who digs up that information?”

“Space scouts.”

“Ah!” Palamin gazed around with the pride of a pygmy who has trapped an elephant. “So at last you admit that you are a spy?”

“I am a spy only in the estimation of the hostile.”

“On the contrary,” broke in a heavily jowled specimen seated on the right, “you are whatever we say you are—because we say it.”

“Have it your own way,” conceded Taylor.

“We intend to.”

“You can be sure of that, my dear Borkor,” soothed Palamin. He returned attention to the prisoner. “How many Terrans are there in existence?”

“About twelve thousand millions.”

“He is lying,” exclaimed Borkor, hungrily eying the hammer.

“One planet could not support such a number,” Eckster contributed.

“They are scattered over a hundred planets,” said Taylor.

“He is still lying,” Borkor maintained.

Waving them down, Palamin asked, “And how many ships have they got?”

“I regret that mere space scouts are not entrusted with fleet statistics,” replied Taylor coolly. “I can tell you only that I haven’t the slightest idea.”

“You must have some idea.”

“If you want guesses, you can have them for what they are worth.”

“Then make a guess.”

“One million.”

“Nonsense!” declared Palamin. “Utterly absurd!”

“All right. One thousand. Or any other number you consider reasonable.”

“This is getting us nowhere,” Borkor complained.

Palamin said to the others, “What do you expect? If we were to send a spy to Terra would we fill him up with top-secret information to give the enemy when caught? Or would we tell him just enough and only enough to enable him to carry out his task? The ideal spy is a shrewd ignoramus, able to take all, unable to give anything.”

“The ideal spy wouldn’t be trapped in the first place,” commented Eckster maliciously.

“Thank you for those kind words,” Taylor chipped in. “If I had come here as a spy, you’d have seen nothing of my ship much less me.”

“Well, exactly where were you heading for when forced to land on Gombar?” invited Palamin.

“For the next system beyond.”

“Ignoring this one?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I go where I’m told.”

“Your story is weak and implausible.” Palamin lay back and eyed him judicially. “It is not credible that a space explorer should bypass one system in favor of another that is farther away.”

“I was aiming for a binary said to have at least forty planets,” said Taylor. “This system has only three. Doubtless it was considered relatively unimportant.”

“What, with us inhabiting all three worlds?”

“How were we to know that? Nobody has been this way before.”

“They know it now,” put in Eckster, managing to make it sound sinister.

This one knows it,” Palamin corrected. “The others do not. And the longer they don’t, the better for us. When another life form starts poking its snout into our system we need time to muster our strength.”

This brought a murmur of general agreement.

“It’s your state of mind/’ offered Taylor.

“What d’you mean?”

“You’re taking it for granted that a meeting must lead to a clash and in turn to a war.”

“We’d be prize fools to assume anything else and let ourselves be caught unprepared,” Palamin pointed out.

Taylor sighed. “To date we have established ourselves on a hundred planets without a single fight. The reason: we don’t go where we’re not wanted.”

“I can imagine that,” Palamin gave back sarcastically. “Someone tells you to beat it and you obligingly beat it. It’s contrary to instinct.”