Entities: The Selected Novels of Eric Frank Russell (95 page)

Just for the ducks of it he bided his time and, when the spyhole opened, let it catch him in the middle of giving grateful thanks to Eustace for some weird service not specified. As intended, this got the jumpy Marsin to wondering who had arrived at the crossroads and copped some of Eustace’s dirty work. Doubtless the sergeant of the guard would speculate about the same matter before long. And in due course so would the officers.

Near midnight, with sleep still evading him, it occurred to him that there was no point in doing things by halves. If a thing is worth doing it is worth doing well—and that applies to lying or to any form of villainy as much as to anything else. Why rest content merely to register a knowing smile whenever the enemy suffered a petty misfortune?

His tactics could be extended much farther than that. No form of life was secure from the vagaries of chance. Good fortune came along as well as bad, in any part of the cosmos. There was no reason why Eustace should not snatch the credit for both. No reason why he, Leeming, should not take unto himself the implied power to reward as well as to punish.

That wasn’t the limit, either. Good luck and bad luck are positive phases of existence. He could cross the neutral zone and confiscate the negative phases. Through Eustace he could assign to himself not only the credit for things done, good or bad, but also for things wot done. In the pauses between staking claims to things that happened he could exploit those that did not happen.

The itch to make a start right now was irresistible. Rolling off the bench, he belted the door from top to bottom. The guard had just been changed, for the eye that peered in was that of Kolum, a character who had bestowed a kick in the rump not so long ago. Kolum was a cut above Marsin, being able to count upon all twelve fingers if given sufficient time to cogitate.

“So it is you!” said Leeming, showing vast relief. “I am very glad of that. I befriended you in the hope that he would lay off you, that he would leave you alone for at least a little while. He is far too impetuous and much too drastic. I can see that you are more intelligent than the other guards and therefore able to change for the better. Indeed, I have pointed out to him that you are obviously too civilized to be a sergeant. He is difficult to convince but I am doing my best for you.”

“Huh?” said Kolum, half flattered, half scared.

“So he’s left you alone at least for the time being,” Leeming said, knowing that the other was in no position to deny it. “He’s done nothing to you—yet.” He increased the gratification. “I’ll do my very best to keep control of him. Only the stupidly brutal deserve slow death.”

“That is true,” agreed Kolum eagerly. “But what—”

“Now,” interrupted Leeming with firmness, “it is up to you to prove that my confidence is justified and thus protect yourself against the fate that is going to visit the slower-witted. Brains were made to be used, weren’t they?”

“Yes, but—”

“Those who don’t possess brains cannot use what they haven’t got, can they?”

“No, they cannot, but—”

“All that is necessary to demonstrate your intelligence is to take a message to the Commandant.”

Kolum popped his eyes in horror. “It is impossible. I dare not disturb him at this hour. The sergeant of the guard will not permit it. He will—”

“You are not being asked to take the message to the Commandant immediately. It is to be given to him personally when he awakens in the morning.”

“That is different,” said Kolum, vastly relieved. “But I must warn you that if he disapproves of the message he will punish you and not me.”

“He will not punish me lest I in turn punish him,” assured Leeming, as though stating a demonstrable fact. “Write my message down.”

Leaning his gun against the corridor’s farther wall, Kolum dug pencil and paper out of a pocket. A strained expression came into his eyes as he prepared himself for the formidable task of inscribing a number of words.

“To The Most Exalted Lousy Screw,” began Leeming.

“What does ‘lousy screw’ mean?” asked Kolum as he struggled to put down the strange Terran words phonetically.

“It’s a title. It means ‘Your Highness.’ Man, how high he is!” Leeming pinched his nose while the other pored over the paper. He continued to dictate, going very slowly to keep pace with Kolum’s literary talent. “The food is insufficient and very poor in quality. I am physically weak, I have lost much weight and my ribs are beginning to show. My Eustace does not like it. The thinner I get the more threatening he becomes. The time is fast approaching when I shall have to refuse all responsibility for his actions. Therefore I beg Your Most Exalted Lousy Screwship to give serious consideration to this matter.”

“There are many words and some of them long ones,” complained Kolum, managing to look like a reptilian martyr. “I shall have to rewrite them more readably when I go off duty.”

“I know and I appreciate the trouble you are taking on my behalf.” Leeming bestowed a beam of fraternal fondness. “That’s why I feel sure you’ll live long enough to do the job.”

“I must live longer than that,” insisted Kolum, popping the eyes again. “I have the right to live, haven’t I?”

“That is precisely the argument I’ve been using,” said Leeming in the manner of one who has striven all night to establish the irrefutable but cannot yet guarantee success.

“I cannot talk to you any longer,” informed Kolum, picking up his gun. “I am not supposed to talk to you at all. If the sergeant of the guard should catch me he will—”

“The sergeant’s days are numbered,” Leeming told him in judicial tones. “He will not live long enough to know he’s dead.”

His hand extended in readiness to close the spyhole, Kolum paused, looked as if he’d been slugged with a sockful of wet sand. Then he said, “How can
anyone 
live long enough to know that he’s dead?”

“It depends on the method of killing,” assured Leeming. “There are some you’ve never heard of and cannot imagine.”

At this point Kolum found the conversation distasteful. He closed the spyhole. Leeming returned to the bench, sprawled upon it. The light went out. Seven stars peeped through the window-slot—and they were not unattainable.

In the morning breakfast came an hour late but consisted of one full bowl of lukewarm pap, two thick slices of brown bread heavily smeared with grease and a large cup of warm liquid vaguely resembling paralyzed coffee. He got through the lot with mounting triumph. By contrast with what they had been giving him this feast made the day seem like Christmas. His spirits perked up with the fullness of his belly.

No summons to a second interview came that day or the next. The Commandant made no move for more than a week. Evidently His Lousy Screwship was still awaiting a reply from the Lathian sector and did not feel inclined to take further action before he received it. However, meals remained more substantial, a fact that Leeming viewed as positive evidence that someone was insuring himself against disaster.

Then early one morning the Rigellians acted up. From the cell they could be heard but not seen. Every day at about an hour after dawn the tramp of their two thousand pairs of feet sounded somewhere out of sight and died away toward the workshops. Usually that was all that could be heard, no voices, no desultory conversation, just the weary trudge of feet and an occasional bellow from a guard.

This time they came out singing, their raucous voices holding a distinct touch of defiance. They were bawling in thunderous discord something about Asta Zangasta’s a dirty old geezer, got fleas on his chest and sores on his beezer. It should have sounded childish and futile. It didn’t. The corporate effort seemed to convey an unspoken threat.

Guards yelled at them. Singing rose higher, the defiance increasing along with the volume. Standing below his window-slot, Leeming listened intently. This was the first mention he’d heard of the much-abused Asta Zangasta, presumably this world’s king, emperor or leading hooligan.

The bawling of two thousand voices rose to a crescendo. Guards screamed frenziedly and were drowned within the din. Somewhere a warning shot was fired. In the watchtowers the guards edged their guns around, dipped them as they aimed into the yard.

“Oh, what a basta is Asta Zangasta!” hollered the distant Rigellians as they reached the end of their epic poem.

There followed blows, shots, scuffling sounds, howls of fury. A bunch of twenty fully armed guards raced flat-footed past Leeming’s window, headed for the unseeable fracas. The uproar continued for half an hour before gradually it died away. Resulting silence could almost be felt.

At exercise time Leeming had the yard to himself, there being not another prisoner in sight. He mooched around, puzzled and gloomy, until he encountered Marsin on yard-patrol.

“Where are the others? What has happened to them?”

“They misbehaved and wasted a lot of time. They are being detained in the workshops until they have made up the loss in production. It is their own fault. They started work late for the deliberate purpose of slowing down output. We didn’t even have time to count them.”

Leeming grinned into his face. “And some guards were hurt?”

“Yes,” Marsin admitted.

“Not severely,” Leeming suggested. “Just enough to give them a taste of what is to come. Think it over!”

“What do you mean?”

“I meant what I said—think it over.” Then he added, “But
you
were not injured. Think that over too!”

He ambled away, leaving Marsin uneasy and bewildered. Six times he trudged around the yard while doing some heavy thinking himself. Sudden indiscipline among the Rigellians certainly had stirred up the prison and created enough excitement to last a week. He wondered what had caused it. Probably they’d done it to gain relief from incarceration and despair. Sheer boredom can drive people into performing the craziest tricks.

On the seventh time round he was still pondering when suddenly a remark struck him with force like the blow of a hammer.
“We had not time even to count them.
"Holy smoke!
That must
be the motive of this morning’s rowdy performance. The choral society had avoided a count. There could be only one reason why they should wish to dodge the regular numbering parade.

Finding Marsin again, he promised, “Tomorrow some of you guards will wish you’d never been born.”

“Are you threatening us?”

“No, I am making a prophetic promise. Tell the guard officer what I have said. Tell the Commandant, too. It might help you to escape the consequences.”

“I will tell them,” said Marsin, mystified but grateful.

The following morning proved that he had been one hundred per cent correct in his supposition that the Rigellians were too shrewd to invite thick ears and black eyes without good reason. It had taken the enemy a full day to arrive at the same conclusion.

At one hour after dawn the Rigellians were marched out dormitory by dormitory, in batches of fifty instead of the usual continuous stream. They were counted in fifties, the easy way. This simple arithmetic became thrown out of kilter when one dormitory produced only twelve prisoners, all of them sick, weak, wounded or otherwise handicapped.

Infuriated guards rushed indoors to drag out the absent thirty-eight. They weren’t there. The door was firm and solid, the window-bars intact. Guards did considerable confused galloping around before one of them detected the slight shift of a well-trampled floor-slab. They lugged it up, found underneath a narrow but deep shaft from the bottom of which ran a tunnel. With great unwillingness one of them went down the shaft, crawled into the tunnel and in due time emerged a good distance outside the walls. Needless to say he had found the tunnel empty.

Sirens wailed, guards pounded all over the jail, officers shouted contradictory orders, the entire place began to resemble a madhouse. The Rigellians got it good and hard for spoiling the previous morning’s count and thus giving the escapees a full day’s lead. Boots and gun-butts were freely used, bodies dragged aside badly battered and unconscious.

The surviving top-ranker of the offending dormitory, a lieutenant with a severe limp, was held responsible for the break, charged, tried, sentenced, put against a wall and shot. Leeming could see nothing of this but did hear the hoarse commands of “Present. . . aim . . . fire!” and the following volley.

He prowled round and round his cell, clenching and unclenching his fists, his stomach writhing like a sack of snakes and swearing mightily to himself. All that he wanted, all that he prayed for was a high-ranking Zangastan throat under his thumbs. The spyhole flipped open but hastily shut before he could spit into somebody’s eye.

The upset continued without abate as inflamed guards searched all dormitories one by one, testing doors, bars, walls, floors and even the ceilings. Officers screamed blood-thirsty threats at sullen groups of Rigellians who were slow to respond to orders.

At twilight outside forces dragged in seven tired, bedraggled escapees who’d been caught on the run. Their reception was short and sharp. “Present. . . aim . . . fire!” Frenziedly Leeming battered at his door but the spyhole remained shut and nobody answered. Two hours later he made another coiled loop with the last of his wire. He spent half the night talking into it menacingly and at the top of his voice. Nobody took the slightest notice.

By noon next day a feeling of deep frustration had come over him. He estimated that the Rigellian break-out must have taken most of a year to prepare. Result: eight dead and thirty-one still loose. If they kept together and did not scatter the thirty-one could form a crew large enough to seize a ship of any size up to and including a space-destroyer. But on the basis of his own experiences he thought they had remote chance of making such a theft.

With the whole world alarmed by an escape of this size there’d be a strong military screen at every spaceport and it would be maintained until the last of the thirty-one had been rounded up. The free might stay free for quite a time if they were lucky, but they were planet-bound, doomed to ultimate recapture and subsequent execution.