Doomsday Warrior 18 - American Dream Machine (12 page)

“I’d like that,” Rock said. “When?”

“I will return, if possible, in an hour.”

Now, they were friends. Her cold gray eyes had changed, and become a warm pair of baby blues. “Never was a man so kind to a girl,” she spoke, as she slipped on her scanties. “I never had any pleasure from the sex act.”

“I can’t believe that,” Rock said, finding a cigarette.

“On Esmerelda, sex is performed because children have to be made or because some people find the pressure of not doing it for a while to be intolerable.” Qettm raised herself up reluctantly. “Only so much time allotted for sex during a month, and after that you have to get out and do your work. It is the system, for citizens as well as prisoners. It is, they say, for our own good.”

Rockson nodded. All tyranny, he knew, sought to control joy, to deny the “feeling” part of life.
For your own good,
the rulers of Esmerelda said,
for your own effectiveness, you have to be deprived of joy.

“With you,” Qettm added lowly, “I wish sex to last for many months! There’s no one like you on all of Esmerelda. Something about being with you is different from other men I’ve known.”

He couldn’t bring himself to say that the difference was simply that he enjoyed making
her
happy, and as a result she had set herself to make him very happy in turn. There was probably an Esmereldan dictionary with a definition of the word “pleasure,” but any citizen stumbling across it probably raised his eyebrows and hurried away to find another more comfortable word. He felt a pang of empathy for her.

After Qettm put on her clothes, she turned on impulse to kiss Rock full and warmly on the lips.

“There! I never did that before unless I knew I was going to make extra credits with the man! I must thank you for having caused me to feel so good, for giving me—
hope?
Is that the word? Yes, hope that there is more than work.”

Not until she was gone, having used her voice-activation code to get out of the room, did Rock lazily remind himself that he ought to have asked about the Zrano. The audi-writing was still available to him, of course.

Sanders’s clear and urgent tones came through at his touch, as he lay puffing on a Camel: “I’ve heard stories from men who wouldn’t lie to me. Now in order to get away we have to meet in the main square, called The Concourse, as soon as possible. The first one out on the asteroid will try to get all the others to join the escape. Six have a better chance of making it. There won’t be any trouble putting the guards out of commission. All it needs is a few sharp-edged metallic objects and a little guts. From the minute we get back to our rooms where they take us, we’ve got to get busy. Hide something sharp in your one-piece! Remember, our lives depend on it. Remember, it’s escape, or the Zrano!”

Rock turned it off and crushed out his cig. Escape? There was no sense trying to get away from an asteroid if there was no ship waiting to fly you away. Rock wondered if Sanders was sane. He tilted the audi-writing square so that the long, thin sliver of toggle would fall out. He watched it dissolve. Once the evidence was self-destroyed, Rockson put his considerable skill in mimicking voices to use. He imitated the sex-girl’s voice and after three tries, the door slid open, activated by his close copy of her throaty tones. He had decided to talk Sanders and the others out of doing themselves harm by making any escape try. The penalty for attempted escaping, everyone knew, was
brain-sapping
—a ray that basically erases your mind. That wouldn’t do! The others might disagree, but he’d talk about making the best of this situation. Maybe Rock had found his true vocation at last: “Realist!” Or “Model prisoner!”

Nobody was in this narrow white corridor. Were there guards in this area? Cameras? Stun-traps?

Sanders’s door was wide open. Had he figured out how to open it also?

Rock guessed what he would find inside Sanders’s room. And sure enough, the room was empty, all right. It was as if Sanders hadn’t ever been there. Maybe the man was roaming around looking for booze? Or was already trying an escape—in space! If so, it seemed like a stupid gesture to have left the door open. Rock wondered why he suddenly felt as if he had sustained a bad chill.

“Going somewhere?” It was Dovine’s voice, which startled him.

Rock spun around. “I—”

“It’s all right,” Dovine smiled, “you were very clever to get out of your room. Now you wonder what happened to Sanders? Well, he was a
bad
boy. He was plotting you know. We had to let him take a stroll . . .”

“Stroll?”

“Yes,” Dovine smirked, coming closer, slapping a swagger stick in his hands. “Sanders has taken a walk outside the spacecraft. Without a spacesuit. He won’t be back.”

Twelve

F
ourteen hours later, after a sleep period:

“Step inside, please,” Dovine said. “I hope that the last one will close the door.” There were only five of them now: Rock, Skinny Jones, Reelk, Jansen and Horse-face.

Reelk, the mournful-looking prisoner with only a few teeth, was the last in, and did what he had been asked. Rockson noticed with relief that all four other prisoners had come in response to the order to report to Dovine. So Sanders was the
only
one jettisoned. The dining table had been taken away, and five chairs faced the dais now. Two dull gray boxes had been set down on the table in front of Dovine, one at each end.

“You all will be seated. There will be no need to discuss Sanders at this meeting—is that clear?”

No one said anything.

Rock was the only prisoner to sit down so that the bright ceiling light wouldn’t batter down on his head.

“You’ve
killed
him,” Reelk blurted. And then he held a fist against his blabbermouth.

“No,” Dovine replied. “He had a fair chance to survive,” Dovine spoke smoothly. “Not as fair as some of you will get, but as much chance as he deserved. He tried to escape in a shuttle capsule and he hadn’t properly sealed its air lock. So, I didn’t do anything, not really. Just let him—escape.”

“I don’t believe you,” Rock said. “You killed him.”

Dovine just shrugged. “I’m innocent.”

“You’ve got no right to kill Sanders,” the toothless one continued to mutter.

“Please be
quiet
and watch.” Dovine moved a switch on the box to his right and another on the one to his left. The boxes were visi-screens, it seemed, for they soon presented identical pictures. The video pictures were of a gladiator-type arena. It was empty. Rock felt his muscles knot up at the sight; he had the feeling he didn’t want to see this tape.

“What in the name of hell is going on?” Reelk muttered as they waited for the action. “What is this stuff?”

“We’re probably going to watch visi-flicks, like a bunch of damn kids,” Jansen, the fat one, complained.

“At least it’s something to do,” the lantern-jawed Horse-face said, fidgeting. “I didn’t get a prosti-visit. I had no good behavior credits and—I’ve been biting my nails down to the armpits without anything in the way of work.”

“Shut up!” Dovine snapped. “Just look!” On the screen, the camera panned up, showing an expectant audience of about five hundred people in the arena, maybe more. Rock wondered who the guy with a whole box to himself was. He was old, looked mean, and was dressed sort of like Nero would have been, laurel wreath and all.

“That’s the warden on the goddamn prison-asteroid,” Reelk said. “He used to be warden on Venus. His name is Langdon.”

“Hey, look now! There’s the bottom of the arena! That’s where it’s all gonna happen, whatever
it
is,” Jansen shouted.

“It’s gonna be like one of those shows you see on Venus-Blue where two guys beat each other’s brains out,” Reelk offered.

Rockson wished they would shut the hell up. But Skinny Jones said, “No, it’s not! Look at those gates, one very big, and one about human size. Reminds me more of an arena for those Spanish bullfights! But that gate is way too big for any bull I ever heard of.”

Something dark was coming out of that large gate.

“That’s no bull. It’s only got two legs,” Reelk said, in a low tone. “God, what is it?”

The
thing,
a massive black shape, stayed in shadows. Out of the small gate came a man—a naked, well-muscled man. He was being prodded out with long pointed tridents by two uniformed guards. The guards were laughing; the naked man was crying.

Reelk said, “Jeez! He’s turning back to the little gate, like he’d give anything to be back on the other side.”

“Poor bastard!” Rock muttered. Having guessed what was going to happen, Rockson watched Dovine’s expressionless face, the face of somebody very, very evil. Horse-face said, “Look at that other gate! The big one! Something’s coming now. Whatever it is, it’s huge!”

“It’s coming, now,” Reelk agreed.

Rock saw a dark, immense shape moving in the shadows, and then nothing! The camera panned down, and avoided giving a clear shot of the thing! Frustrating!

For a split second, Rock thought they had seen something like an elephant-sized lizard-creature, something out of every man’s nightmares, a four-o’clock-in-the-morning creature, a hangover creature. But he wasn’t sure.

The camera had moved so quickly that Rock couldn’t be sure it wasn’t just his mind filling in a
shape.
The camera
did
show the naked victim, with his back against the sharp, guard-held pikes that had propelled him into the arena. He was letting go of his bowels, and screaming. To show a human being who looked the way that man did at that moment was in itself a wicked act.
Not
seeing the thing made it worse.

In a low, awed voice one of the prisoners asked, “What
is
it? I didn’t see.”

“Well,” Dovine said, “I guess it’s a Zrano.”

Rockson didn’t have to look up at Dovine to know that the man would be smiling.

Horse-face said quietly, “The guy has got no place to run, it ain’t fair.”

“Hell, if it was me out there, I’d run like nobody’s business!” Reelk said with conviction.

“You?” Horse-face looked cynically at the speaker. “You’d probably
shit
that damn thing to death!”

Rock wondered if it wasn’t the ability to make bad jokes in times of stress that set human beings apart from other species. His eyes were riveted on the screen and, like the other prisoners in the room, he couldn’t help talking; but his words were aimed at Dovine.

“Why is this being done?”

“You should understand that, of all people. It is a punishment. A simple pleasure for the audience, a punishment for the victim.”

“Is the sight of a man’s dying horribly your idea of—”

“The people of Esmerelda, you realize, work very hard indeed. It shouldn’t surprise you if they want to watch others suffer a bit too? This is a live broadcast, by the way. Many prisoners on Esmerelda have
volunteered
to face the Zrano. They think it’s better than living there.”

“Has anybody ever survived?” Reelk asked—a good question.

“Oh yes, indeed. There’s a gentleman who died very recently of old age who had met the mother of this Zrano. Zranos are living fossils. Monsters very rare indeed, worth
quite
a lot of credits. I might tell you, if it’s of interest, that there will be no descendants of this monster, alas. The rules of biology are immutable, and the birth of this Zrano resulted in—ah, difficulties. At any rate, the games will never resume unless it is with a Zrano-robot, once this one dies. I’m sure a robot-monster won’t be as good.”

This “game” would be over quickly, Rock thought. The monster, its form obscured by a blur deliberately placed in the transmission, located the victim’s quaking form and was moving toward him. It lumbered, but its size was enough to cut off the only possible avenue of retreat, the still-open large gate. The victim’s eyes were half-closed, face twisted in pain now. His lips narrowed primly. His right hand left his face and drifted up into a raised position. “We who are about to die salute you, warden,” he said. Rockson was surprised at that.

The camera zoomed in briefly on the audience, on the mean-looking bastard with a whole box to himself. He yawned, apparently not even interested in what was happening. He was bending over and talking to somebody in the box below: a woman, who fanned herself and tittered. They were joking.

“Now! Here it comes!”
Jansen shouted.

The shape, distorted deliberately again by a device in the camera lens, had cornered the man, and the burly victim screamed out and pulled a dagger. He suddenly charged, a last show of courage! The Zrano raised what would have been a paw in any other monster; it was blurry.
Maybe
it was a claw, like a lobster claw, Rock suspected.

The view on the visi-screen cut suddenly to the carpet of greenery below the victim’s feet. There was a spurt of dark liquid on it, and another . . . bloodcurdling screams with each splash. Now the camera showed the audience on its feet, all cheering. The camera panned back to the scene of “battle.” Now the blurred-out monster was obviously stepping on what was left of a human, doing a three-legged waltz on it. The man’s head vanished under one of the huge clawed feet. Rock didn’t look away. If he was to face this thing, any information he could gather could mean something, could give him a slim chance . . . Damn! It was worse, not seeing it, seeing just the blur.

He was aware of Dovine standing and flicking the pair of viewers off simultaneously. The pictures seemed to fold in on themselves.

All the men were looking awkwardly in Dovine’s direction, waiting for him to speak. Rock finally asked, “When do we go up against—it?” His words came slowly, carefully even in tone. The other prisoners were shocked.

“The games are held every month, except for a special meeting like the one you just saw,” Dovine intoned. “Special meetings happen very rarely—only on holidays. Today is Planetoid Day, so we were lucky, weren’t we?”

“How much time do we have?”

“You all will face the Zrano Tuesday, the next scheduled meeting.”

“In four days,” It was Horse-face now, his voice rising. “But we
can’t
possibly learn to beat a monster in such a short time! We want to work! Please, I’ll be good!”