Poul Anderson: The Long Night

Windows existed between the two great cells. We made a rush for them, crying out, pushing and crowding and snarling at each other for first chance to see if our women still lived.

I was large and strong. I shouldered my way through the mob up to the nearest window. A man was there already, flattened against the wall by the sweating bodies behind, reaching through the bars to the three hundred women who swarmed on the other side.

“Agnes!” he shrieked. “Agnes, are you there? Are you alive?”

I grabbed his shoulder and pulled him away. He turned with a curse, and I fed him a mouthful of knuckles and sent him lurching back into the uneasy press of men. “Kathryn!” I howled.

The echoes, rolled and boomed in the hollow metal caves, crying voices, prayers and curses and sobs of despair thrown back by the sardonic echoes till our heads shivered with it. “Kathryn! Kathryn!”

Somehow she found me. She came to me and the kiss through those bars dissolved ship and slavery and all the world for that moment. “Oh, John, John, John, you’re alive, you’re here. Oh, my darling—”

And then she looked around the metal-gleaming dimness and said quickly, urgently: “We’ll have a riot on our hands, John, if these people don’t calm down. See what you can do with the men. I’ll tackle the women.”

It was like her. She was the most gallant soul that ever. walked under Terran skies, and she had a mind which flashed in an instant to that which must be done. I wondered myself what point there was in stopping a murderous panic. Those who were killed would be better off, wouldn’t they? But Kathryn never surrendered, so I couldn’t either.

We turned back into our crowds, and shouted and pummeled and bullied, and slowly others came to our aid until there was a sobbing quiet in the belly of the slave ship. Then we organized turns at the windows. Kathryn and I both looked away from those reunions, or from the people who found no one. It isn’t decent to look at a naked soul.

The engines began to thrum. Under way, outward bound to the ice mountains of Gorzun, no more to see blue skies and green grass, no clean salt smell of ocean and roar of wind in tall trees. Now we were slaves and had nothing to do but wait.

There was no time aboard the ship. The few dim fluoros kept our hold forever in its uneasy twilight. The Gorzuni swilled us at such irregular intervals as they thought of it, and we heard only the throb of the engines and the asthmatic sigh of the ventilators. The twice-normal gravity kept most of us too weary even to talk much. But I think it was about forty-eight hours after leaving Terra, when the ship had gone into secondary drive and was leaving the Solar System altogether, that the man with the iron collar came down to us.

He entered with an escort of armed and wary Gorzuni who kept their rifles lifted. We looked up dull-eyed at the short stocky figure. His voice was almost lost in the booming vastness of the hold.

“I’m here to classify you. Come one at a time and tell me your name and training, if any. I warn you that the penalty for claiming training you haven’t got is torture, and you’ll be tested if you do make such claims.”

We shuffled past. A Gorzuni, the drunken doctor, had a tattoo needle set up and scribbled a number on the palm of each man. This went into the human’s notebook, together with name, age, and profession. Those without technical skills, by far the majority, were shoved roughly back. The fifty or so who claimed valuable education went over into a corner.

The needle burned my palm and I sucked the breath between my teeth. The impersonal voice was dim in my ears: “Name?”

“John Henry Reeves, age twenty-five, lieutenant in the Commonwealth navy and nuclear engineer before the wars.” I snapped the answers out, my throat harsh and a bitter taste in my mouth. The taste of defeat.

“Hmmm.” I grew aware that the pale chill eyes were resting on me with an odd regard. Suddenly the man’s thick lips twisted in a smile. It was a strangely charming smile, it lit his whole dark face with a brief radiance of merriment. “Oh, yes, I remember you, Lieutenant Reeves. You called.me, I believe, a filthy bastard.”

“I did,” I almost snarled. My hand throbbed and stung. I was unwashed and naked and sick with my own helplessness.

“You may be right at that,” he nodded. “But I’m in bad need of a couple of assistants. This ship is a wreck, She may never make Gorzun without someone to nurse the engines. Care to help me?”

“No,” I said.

“Be reasonable. By refusing you only get yourself locked in the special cell we’re keeping for trained slaves. It’ll be a long voyage, the monotony will do more to break your spirit than any number of lashings. As my assistant you’ll have proper quarters and a chance to move around and use your hands.”

I stood thinking. “Did you say you needed two assistants?” I asked.

“Yes. Two who can do something with this ruin of a ship.”

“I’ll be one,” I said, “if I can name the other.”

He scowled. “Getting pretty big for the britches you don’t have, aren’t you?”

“Take it or leave it,” I shrugged. “But this person is a hell of a good technician.”

“Well, nominate him, then, and I’ll see.”

“It’s a her. My fiancee, Kathryn O’Donnell.”

“No.” He shook his dark curly head. “No woman.”

“No man, then.” I grinned at him without mirth. Anger flamed coldly in his eyes. “I can’t have a woman around my neck like another millstone.”

“She’ll carry her own weight and more. She was a j.g. in my own ship, and she fought right there beside me till the end.”

The temper was gone without leaving a ripple. Not a stir of expression’in the strong, ugly, olive-skinned face that looked up at me. His voice was as flat. “Why didn’t you say so before? All right, then, Lieutenant. But the gods help you if you aren’t both as advertised!”

It was hard to believe it about clothes—the difference they made after being just another penned and naked animal. And a meal of stew and coffee, however ill prepared, scrounged at the galley after the warriors had messed, surged in veins and bellies which had grown used to swilling from a pig trough.

I realized bleakly that the man in the iron collar was right. Not many humans could have remained free of soul on the long, heart-cracking voyage to Gorzun. Add the eternal weariness of double weight, the chill dark grimness of our destination planet, utter remoteness from home, blank hopelessness, perhaps a touch of the whip and branding iron, and men became tame animals trudging meekly at the heels of their masters.

“How long have you been a slave?” I asked our new boss.

He strode beside us as arrogantly as if the ship were his. He was not a tall man, for even Kathryn topped him by perhaps five centimeters, and his round-skulled head barely reached my shoulder. But he had thick muscular arms, a gorilla breadth of chest, and the gravity didn’t seem to bother him at all.

“Going on four years,” he replied shortly. “My name, by the way, is Manuel Argos, and we might as well be on first name terms from the start.”

A couple of Gorzuni came stalking down the corridor, clanking with metal. We stood aside for the giants, of course, but there was no cringing in Manuel’s attitude. His strange eyes followed them speculatively.

We had a cabin near the stern, a tiny cubbyhole with four bunks, bleak and bare but its scrubbed cleanliness was like a breath of home after the filth of the cell. Wordlessly, Manuel took one of the sleazy blankets and hung it across a bed as a sort of curtain. “It’s the best privacy I can offer you, Kathryn,” he said.