Poul Anderson: The Long Night

Meanwhile two of the slaves had tried a revolt of their own. When an incautious guard came too near the door of the mens’ cell one of them reached out and snatched his gun from the holster and shot him down. Then he tried to blast the lock off the bars. When the Gorzuni came down to gas him his fellow battled them with fists and teeth till the rebels were knocked out. Both were flayed living in the presence of the other captives.

Kathryn couldn’t help crying after we were back in our cabin. She buried her face against my breast and wept till I thought she would never stop weeping. I held her close and mumbled whatever foolish words came to me.

“They had it coming,” said Manuel. There was contempt in his voice. “The fools. The blind stupid fools! They could at least have held the guard as a hostage and tried to bargain. No, they had to be heroes. They had to shoot him down. Now the example has frightened all of the others. Those men deserved being skinned.”

After a moment, he added thoughtfully, “Still, if the fear-emotion aroused in these slaves can be turned to hate it may prove useful. The shock has at least jarred them from their apathy.”

“You’re a heartless bastard,” I said tonelessly.

“I have to be, seeing that everyone else chooses to be brainless. These aren’t times for the tender-minded, you. This is an age of dissolution and chaos, such as has often happened in history, and only a person who first accepts the realities of the situation can hope to do much about them. We don’t live in a cosmos where perfection is possible or even desirable, We have to make our compromises and settle for the goals we have some chance of attaining.” To Kathryn, sharply: “Now stop that snuffling. I have to think.”

She gave him a wide-eyed tear-blurred look.

“It gives you a hell of an appearance.” He grinned nastily. “Nose red, face swollen, a bad case of hiccoughs. Nothing pretty about crying, you.”

She drew a shuddering breath and there was anger flushing her cheeks. Gulping back the sobs, she drew away from me and turned her back on him.

“But I stopped her,” whispered Manuel to me with a brief impishness.

The endless, meaningless days had worn into a timelessness where I wondered if this ship were not the Flying Dutchman, outward bound forever with a crew of devils and the damned. It was no use trying to hurry Manuel, I gave that up and slipped into the round of work and waiting. Now I think that part of his delay was on purpose, that he wanted to grind the last hope out of the slaves and leave only a hollow yearning for vengeance. They’d fight better that way.

I hadn’t much chance to be alone with Kathryn. A brief stolen kiss, a whispered word in the dimness of the engine room, eyes and hands touching lightly across a rusty, greasy machine. That was all. When we returned to our cabin we were too tired, generally, to do much except sleep.

I did once notice Manuel exchange a few words in the slave pen with Ensign Hokusai, who had been captured with Kathryn and myself. Someone had to lead the humans, and Hokusai was the best man for that job. But how had Manuel known? It was part of his genius for understanding.

The end came suddenly. Manuel shook me awake. I blinked wearily at the hated walls around me, feeling the irregular throb of the gravity field that was misbehaving again. More work for us. “All right, all right,” I grumbled. “I’m coming.”

When he flicked the curtain from Kathryn’s bunk and aroused her, I protested. “We can handle it. Let her rest.”

“Not now!” he answered. Teeth gleamed white in the darkness of his face. “The captain’s off in never-never land. I heard two of the Gorzuni talking about it.”

That brought me bolt awake, sitting up with an eerie chill along my spine. “Now—?”

“Take it easy,” said Manuel. “Lots of time.”

We threw on our clothes and went down the long corridors. The ship was still. Under the heavy shuddering drone of the engines, there was only the whisper of our shoes and the harsh rasp of the breath in my lungs. Kathryn was white-faced, her eyes enormous in the gloom. But she didn’t huddle against me. She walked between the two of us and a remoteness was over her that I couldn’t quite understand. Now and then we passed a Gorzuni warrior on some errand of his own, and shrank aside as became slaves. But I saw the bitter triumph in Manuel’s gaze as he looked after the titans.

In the power chamber where the machines loomed in a flickering red twilight like heathen gods. We found three Gorzuni standing there, armed engineers who snarled at us. One of them tried to cuff Manuel. He dodged without seeming to notice and bent over the gravity generator and signaled me to help him lift the cover.

I could see that there was a short circuit in one of the field coils, inducing a harmonic that imposed a flutter on the spacewarping current. It wouldn’t have taken long to fix. But Manuel scratched his head, and glanced back at the ignorant giants who loomed over our shoulders. He began tracing wires with elaborate puzzlement.

He said to me: “We’ll work up to the auxiliary atom-converter. I’ve fixed that to do what I want.”

I knew the Gorzuni couldn’t understand us, and that human expressions were meaningless to them, but an uncontrollable shiver ran along my nerves.

Slowly we fumbled to the squat engine which was the power source for the ship’s internal machinery. Manuel hooked in an oscilloscope and studied the trace as if it meant something. “Ah-hah!” he said.

We unbolted the antiradiation shield, exposing the outlet valve. I knew that the angry, blood-red light streaming from it was harmless, that baffles cut off most of the radioactivity, but I couldn’t help shrinking from it. When a converter is flushed through the valve, you wear armor.

Manuel went over to a workbench and took a gadget from it which he’d made. I knew it was of no use for repair but he’d pretended to make a tool of it in previous jobs. It was a lead-plated flexible hose springing from a magnetronic pump, with a lot of meters and switches haywired on for pure effect. “Give me a hand, John,” he said quietly.

We fixed the pump over the outlet valve and, hooked up the two or three controls that really meant something. I heard Kathryn gasp behind me, and the dreadful realization burst into my own brain and numbed my hands. There wasn’t even a gasket.

The Gorzuni engineer strode up to us, rumbling a question in his harsh language, his fellows behind him. Manuel answered readily, not taking his gaze off the wildly swinging fake meters.

He turned to me, and I saw the dark laughter in his eyes. “I told them the converter is overdue for a flushing out of waste products,” he said in Anglic. “As a matter of fact, the whole ship is.”

He took the hose in one hand and the other rested on a switch of the engine. “Don’t look, Kathryn,” he said tonelessly. Then he threw the switch.

I heard the baffle plates clank down. Manuel had shorted out the automatic, safety controls which kept them up when the atoms were burning. I threw a hand over my own eyes and crouched.

The flame that sprang forth was like a bit of the sun. It sheeted from the hose and across the room. I felt my skin shriveling from incandescence and heard the roar of cloven air. In less than a second, Manuel had thrown the baffles back into place but his improvised blaster had torn away the heads of the three Gorzuni and melted the farther wall. Metal glowed white as I looked again, and the angry thunders boomed and echoed and shivered deep in my bones till my skull rang with it.

Dropping the hose, Manuel stepped over to the dead giants and yanked the guns from their holsters. “One for each of us,” he said.