doing they were working in stealth and fear and Dirrul realized their aim must be illegal. He fought to break free of his bonds so that he might warn the loyal Vininese garrison. The two guards shoved him back roughly. One of them grabbed Dirrul’s tunic in a claw grip and the cloth tore open, revealing Sorgel’s identification disk.
Both guards bent over him, fingering the disk, talking soundlessly with their facile fingers. Suddenly they jerked the disk off, snapping the chain. At the same moment a rolling explosion from within the wall shook the earth.
Dirrul heard a great noise and a terrifying fear filled his mind. It was a steady undiminishing fear that gripped every muscle of his body. His throat was ice-cold. His heart pounded and gasped for breath. Every nerve-end in his body quivered and his imagination was swamped with a flood of shattering ephemeral horrors.
Nothing could shake off the terror. Dirrul’s skill with reason and logic failed him. It was impossible to organize his thinking to combat the sensory shock waves disrupting his thoughts. Logical patterns made no sense. The very process of trying to build meaning into them—the process of thinking itself—left him weak and trembling.
The guards watched his terror for a moment, watched while he clung close to the ground, trying to dig his fingers into it. Then one of them laughed—a piercing discordant shriek, shrilling louder than the din behind the wall. The second man, snarling viciously, kicked Dirrul in the ribs.
For Dirrul the blaze of pain was almost a relief. As his body responded to it on a level of instinct, the chattering terror in his mind diminished. A second blow on the head sent him reeling close to the brink of unconsciousness. His perceptive reactions went slightly out of focus.
In a wavering mist he saw the black figures emerge from the gate, dragging a dozen or more captives with them. A second explosion rocked the earth and flames leaped high behind the yellow wall. In the glare Dirrul recognized Glenna, struggling frantically in the arms of her masked captor.
Dirrul’s memory after that was a vague patchwork of unrelated episodes. He saw huge saddled reptilian bipeds dragged out of the concealing brush. The captives were bound in the saddles and the black-robed figures mounted behind them. Later two of the men pulled Dirrul up and tied him across a saddle too.
At a sickening gallop the caravan moved away from the green highway, striking out over the purple plain. For a while Dirrul lost rational control of sensation. He felt but without understanding. His brain pulsed in a continuous terror that seemed to resolve itself into sound—a continuous high-pitched scream coming from within his own mind. His body throbbed with pain and nausea wrenched emptily at the muscles of his stomach. But he could not sort out the feelings, classify them or adjust to them.
At the edge of the plain the caravan turned up a steep rocky trail which led into the ragged range of mountains banked behind the Vininese city. They came to a stop in a stony ravine, concealed beneath a tangle of gigantic purple-leafed vines.
Dirrul’s captors dismounted and removed their black cloaks, hiding them among the rocks. Underneath they wore the warm gray skintight workers’ clothing of Vinin. The majority left their animals tethered to the roots of the vine and began the steep descent on foot to the city. Only three remained behind to guard the prisoners.
They built a small fire and prepared food, serving the hot sweet chunks of white meat in large wicker baskets. As soon as Dirrul discovered that he could stomach the food he wolfed his share hungrily. The guards brought him more. He felt better. Except for the sing-song ringing in his head he might have been able to think clearly enough to evaluate his own position.
But that could be done later. He was overcome by an immense drowsiness. He relaxed and slept.
VI
A shrill scream woke him with a start of horror. His captors had taken him from his saddle and propped him against a mound of rocks, along with the other prisoners. His muscles were numb and dead, so limp it was almost impossible for him to turn his head. Faintly the whirring terror whispered in his mind.
Dirrul’s eyes focused slowly on the clearing. One of the prisoners had been carried there, close to the fire. It was Glenna. Two of her captors held her while the third bent over her head, probing her ear with a sharp instrument. His arm moved. Glenna screamed and fainted. For a moment Dirrul saw the side of her face smeared with a spreading stain of blood. Then nausea swept over him. When he opened his eyes again the three men were working over another prisoner at the fire.
Vaguely Dirrul knew he had to escape. He forgot the Movement—he thought of nothing any loftier than his own personal survival. The idea was elemental, built upon the simplest sort of observation and hypothesis.
Yet it came slowly and painfully, as if he had just tried to understand after one reading the Cranmor-Frasher Theory of Diminishing Corelatives. As he verbalized the conclusion two things happened—the drug-like languor in his muscles began to disperse and the shrilling note of terror burst up loud in his mind once more.
Two of the men brought their last victim back from the fire and laid his body on the stones close to Dirrul. Dirrul feigned sleep when they stood over him. One of them prodded him with the tip of a dusty boot—then they both laughed.
They went back to the fire and talked soundlessly to their companions, holding up the identification disk which had been ripped from Dirrul’s neck hours before. That amused them briefly, until one of the three snatched the disk and hurled it toward the mouth of the ravine in violent anger.
The three men pulled thick white skins together near the fire and crept into them. Dirrul waited until he was sure they slept. It was the only chance he would have to escape, but when he tried to creep away his hands collapsed from sheer terror. The crying fear in his mind was so loud his head seemed to vibrate physically with the sound.
Thought was impossible. Judgment and decision were impossible. If he tried to consider even a problem as simple as the safest means of passing the dying fire—reason failed him. He could weigh nothing critically—he could not consider probable courses of rational action.
Nonetheless he inched forward. It took all the courage and stamina he possessed. Gradually a strange and foggy understanding formed in his brain. The terror seemed to die if he planned nothing, merely responding without thought to the instinctive urge to escape. Let instinct do the trick then.
Detached from the control panel of his cerebral cortex his body mechanism functioned perfectly. It was like a space-ship smoothly piloted by its automatic navigators. Dirrul gave himself over to his own built-in stimulus-response relays and the screeching fear shriveled and died.
Calm and unhurried he walked past the fire and the sleeping men. As calmly he searched the mouth of the ravine for Sorgel’s disk. When he found it he stuffed it into the pocket of his tunic and strode confidently along the trail that led down from the hills.
It was dawn. In the pink morning light he could see the Vininese city at his feet, neat, clean, well-blocked streets and towering buildings of black stone. On the outskirts were the circular space-fields and the long low flat-roofed interplanetary freight depots. Farther away, dotting the countryside at regular intervals, were curious block-shaped windowless structures surrounded by double walls.
Dirrul had never seen anything like them before but, through a process of judicial elimination, he decided they must be the Vininese Beam Transmitters. The defense of Vinin was remarkably thorough, far surpassing anything of a similar nature on Agron.
It came to him with something of a shock that he was thinking rationally once more. His mind was completely clear. He felt ashamed of the foolish, groundless terror that had unnerved him in the ravine. He tried to understand what had happened to him but it was beyond analysis. In retrospect he realized that the danger had been less than what he faced on any normal day in the Air-Command emergency maintenance service.
The only logical explanation was the food they had given him. It must have been heavily drugged with a new poison known to the Vininese. Dirrul was tempted to go back and rescue Glenna, if she were still alive