Part 2

Pao Chung hammered the gate again. As before, the racketing animal chorus repeated the sound, with variations. Pao Chung kept pounding until the gate was opened again. This time the head did not appear, but a wiry female voice addressed them from the inside darkness.

"Still here? The police must be hunting you."

"They are."

"Good! I will point you out and stay to watch the kill."

Pao Chung chuckled evilly. "Do that. The record of Khaljean's background and illegal activities is in my safe. My will provides for publication of all such papers upon my death."

The voice hesitated. "It might be worth humiliation or disgrace to be rid of you permanently."

"It might," agreed Pao Chung. "Many people have thought so. I wonder if Khaljean will be one of them."

With a scrape of bare metal, bolts retreated into sockets and the chain was removed. Crack widened enough to permit entrance.

"Come in, then," Teucrete said wearily. "I will let my father decide when he returns. For tonight, you can stay. But I won't answer for your safety. The animals are roused and nervous. I am not sure I can control them with strangers here."

* * * * *

Beastly cacophonies greeted the entrance of the fugitives. An atmosphere of alien and indescribable uneasiness pervaded the vast compound with its rows and piled banks of cages. The atmosphere was the emotion of night-hauntings, and the sound was its voice.

No sign above the gate proclaimed, _Here Dwells Nightmare_, nor, _Through These Portals Pass the Most Incredible Life-Forms in the Known Universe_. There was no circus atmosphere. Just a nameless blending of sounds and smells and alien vibrations that stirred the imagination like evil flames licking at forgotten folk memories. On Venus, the term _unearthly_ has naturally lost meaning, but here was a hint of dreadful abysses beyond even the exotic fecundity of the cloud-veiled planet. Here were half-audible chords beyond all the known octaves. Here, in the troubled darkness one sensed symbols of instincts, minds and feelings that man was never meant to know or understand. Here was the final question mark of evolution--whence, and to what dreadful purpose?

What incredible virtuosity of the Unknown Creator had brought these unthinkable beings into multiform existence? And why? What purpose did they serve in the plan of Creation? Or was there any purpose? Was there even a plan?

Bat Ferris remembered such thoughts from his lonely, monastic youth on Mars, and during the schooling period on Earth. One had time for long unhappy thoughts in such a segregated childhood and some of them still reverberated deep inside him.

The girl drew back to let them enter, flashing the beam of a hand radilume on each in turn. Her glance flicked each of them in examination sharp enough to draw blood. She received them in silence, for Teucrete's mind was not on the duties of a hostess to unexpected guests.

"Wait here," she ordered crisply. Then she went among the tangled avenues between cages and spoke soothingly to the caged brutes. Her voice crackled, purred, coughed, roared, hissed.

The bird people were the first to heed. Their bright, nervous chittering subsided into occasional geysers of chirping. Surly sand leopards from Mars paced their cages and vented sounds like needles caught in the grooves of antique disc recordings. Partially gaseous life forms from Saturn had no vocal apparatus, but showed their uneasy displeasures by flaring into sullen crimsons and bruised purples of luminosity.

Ferris followed the girl closely on her rounds, his eyes staring in wonder at the caged monsters revealed when her light bathed the barred cubicles. Some cages were not cages in the ordinary sense at all. Behind barriers of streaming light crouched protoplasmic entities of no set form. Moondogs sported aimlessly in pools of ionized gas. Wireflies battered themselves against invisible net barriers. Complex mysteries of Plutonian life-forms floated in magnetic fields. Metallic crystals built themselves into coral-like colonies resembling miniature castles.

Less _outre_ creatures inhabited the myriads of cell-blocks--the ordinary and extraordinary varieties of apes and cats and dogs, the bovines and marsupials, the squeaking rats and trumpeting elephants, the endless species of sea-creatures, the tree-haunters and the desert dwellers, the burrowers and the flyers. There were supposedly extinct saurians, and examples of tomorrow's freaks and mutants. There were brute clowns and tragedians. There were--

But Khaljean's has been described often enough in magazine articles, sometimes with tri-dimensional pictures in color. Any reader so inclined may look into the back files of _Inter-Planetary Magazine_ and stupefy himself with the famous issue of July, 2091.

Teucrete sensed that she was followed, but with pointed insolence, ignored Ferris and continued her rounds. Gradually, her eerie tones brought calm to the multiform excitements of the compound. She returned eventually to Pao Chung and Angel.

"I will take you back through the laboratories to the inner maze," she said irritably. "Move quietly and do not stumble in the dark. Some of the protection barriers are fragile, and a few exist only in the minds of the creatures in them. If excited too much, they can break through. Many are man-killers."

"One man-killer runs loose in here," observed Angel drily.

Teucrete disposed of the intended compliment with a sneer. "Pao Chung has long had such ideas. Through pressure on my father he has tried to ... to buy or barter for me. Such disposal is mine to make, not my father's. I have my price, but it is high."

It is evidence of Teucrete's more obvious charms that three masculine minds went into gear, calculating resources.

Teucrete laughed viciously. "The first item is Pao Chung's head on a platinum platter."

"A platinum platter is not unobtainable," said Angel speculatively.

Pao Chung was not offended. He chuckled unpleasantly. "Such fire as yours would bring a high price in the slave marts of Yabn," he said. "My head would bring more, locally. Should we not move further from the gates? A scanner could pierce several layers of metal as thin as this stockade. Perhaps I can bring your price down, or my offer up. But another occasion for bargaining would suit both of us better."

"If there are other occasions for any of us," Ferris put in bitterly.

From outside came the sounds of many movements, the rustle and clatter of questing men, hoarse shouts and a confusion of crowd sounds. Above all, like a thin thread of sound, binding the other noises together, was a high, ear-piercing, nerve-wracking drone.

Angel flittered to the top of the stockade and peered warily through the razor-edged metal pilings. He swooped down to his companions with whispered verification of their suspicions.

"The mechanical trackers," he said.

"Perhaps there is still a deal open," muttered Pao Chung. He bowed with sardonic malice toward Teucrete. "We have one possession of greater value than my head or your body. My young friend here--"

Teucrete snorted contemptuously. "Him!" But her glance lingered on Ferris momentarily. "What do you mean?"

"Ferris is a gamma-man," said Pao Chung. Even Angel gasped with shock. Teucrete's eyes widened in incredulity, horror and fear.

III

Fear is a subtle poison.

It began long ago, in a small New Mexico town, long before there were gamma-men or even interplanetary travel. The fear radiated from mushrooming clouds with impossible radiance at the core, and the fear did more harm to the minds of men than the deadly spectra of invisible death did to their bodies.

It began with scientists in cages in the name of national securities; it developed into continual surveillance for all men engaged in atomics. These workers, and their families, led cloistered, monastic lives. They intermarried, since there was little contact with outsiders, and they shared generations of haunted, spy-ridden lives. They lived in the midst of fear and mistrust, while the earth went through its chronic spirals of war and the preparations. Throughout history, scholars and philosophers have warned that knowledge must be free and universal, like sunlight. But there have always been wars and secrets and guarded weapons, and fear is older than man.

Scientists were men of dangerous knowledge, of destructive potentials. As such, they were hostages of fear and illusions of safety. They were segregated, guarded, well-fed, and at first provided with all the deadly toys necessary to their amusements. It was all painfully logical and futile, but all the best brains of mankind were locked up to putrefy for lack of fresh air and the stimuli of mutual thoughts. Their knowledges and prerogatives became hereditary.

Natural law works against segregation. Artificial isolation of any group leads to misunderstandings, prejudices, resentments, mutual fears, and eventually to violence. Fear-hysteria is a serpent devouring its own tail. In time, the once-honored and glorified gamma-men became feared and hated. In the minds of the ignorant and superstitious populace, they were associated with medieval wizards and workers of dreadful miracles. The threat of gamma groups became a political pawn, and was used as a club to beat down restless, unhappy populations.

With their knowledge, and the popular delusion of their almost supernatural powers, it was easy enough for ambitious men to misuse the Scientists. In some cases, the gamma-men themselves usurped authority, but this noble experiment slipped through their fingers, and they lost control from sheer unworldliness. In truth, from the working of natural law, the juice had run out of them and they no longer understood the basics of normal human relations. In a final paroxysm of public panic, they were disarmed, their toys taken away, and every last gamma-man imprisoned in carefully guarded and isolated colonies. Like the ancient Indians, they were placed in reservations and kept there by force.

After this culminating outrage, the gamma-men lost heart for practical activity. Locked into their libraries, they turned to abstractions and dabbled in dead-end philosophies. Most of them were querulous oldsters, hidebound by tradition, their sciences now become a ritual religion, their books exalted as "The Word," and their fading knowledge still held secret for reasons long forgotten.

Not quite all gamma-men accepted this half-life allotted to them. There were sports, avatars, occasional throwbacks who rebelled and went "off reservation."

None of these actually ran amuck, but so great was the fear-conditioning on one side, and so difficult the adaptation to ordinary living on the other that there were painful accidents and incidents. Nothing genuinely monstrous occurred, but enough friction developed to keep alive and add to the public dread of gamma-men. The term became a byword for nursery terror. And in their turn, the infant generations of gamma-men learned to pity and despise the ignorant and corrupt multitudes of normal humanity. They lost contact with their human heritage.

In recent years, few gamma-men had broken out to mingle with the expanding races now peopling and colonizing the frontiers of the solar system. Those few were hunted down like outlaws, and killed with brutal ingenuity.

But a new generation had come among gamma-men, with an urge so passionate and devout they themselves did not understand it. Either some latent folk-memory, or some emotional mutation, urged them to go forth and civilize mankind. In the old books, they tracked down knowledge and made grandiose plans for engineering the renaissance. Realizing their common origin, and longing for more nearly normal lives, they grouped together and made a pact to see some changes made.

Studying history and the other technologies of man, they soon discovered that social, economic and psychological sciences had lagged far behind the other developments. These were the blind spots of mankind, and these led to all the other serious and tragic misdirections of effort. Always, the sons of Adam had struggled to achieve workable systems, and always these systems had broken down or failed at critical moments.

If some means could be found--

Eventually, the means was tracked down from a clue in one of the oldest books. It was not found, but its existence deduced and proved to the satisfaction of the searchers. Somewhere, hidden in a forgotten corner of the solar system, was the missing tool.

This fact settled, it became necessary to locate and use the missing tool.

It was a pitifully small generation. Only seven bright-eyed and high-hearted young men. But that night they broke out of their prescribed boundaries. They went off reservation, and separated in seven directions. Each had a theory, and a hope to be explored.

Without their ident-armbands of platinum with the old Greek letter deeply incised, they resembled any other seven youths picked at random from the teeming multitudes. They could mingle unquestioned, and their studies had prepared them for various tasks to which their forged papers entitled them. But adaptation was not easy.

A single incautious moment could betray them. Even a routine brain wave check would be sufficient to identify the fugitives, for in subtle ways, the gamma-men were different.

Seven young men with a noble purpose, and fanatical hopes in their hearts.

And now there were two. Five of them had made fatal slips, and had been hunted down to hideous deaths.

Ferris was one of the two survivors.

* * * * *

Four people stood paralyzed while the hammering resounded at the gate. This was no human fist demanding attention, but an odd, robot-like clanking, as if a mechanical beast nosed in determined rooting against the metal leaves of the gate.

It was just such a beast. A burring whine rose into notes of shrill frustration. Metallic and electronic frustration, for the tracker was a bloodhound of vacuum tubes and relays and switches and batteries and transformers. Unerring and inexorable, its robot senses sorted a single frequency from all other brain wave patterns, and it clung to the trail with chilling efficiency. Something about its unhuman lusting numbed most quarry before the pursuers in charge of the monster could check its demonic eagerness for prey.

Now, like a metallic carnivore scenting blood, the robot tracker nuzzled the gate and rebounded to nuzzle again.

All four of the humans inside the compound imagined the scene outside. Pencil beams of hand radilumes glinted here and there, the questing soldiers and police squads, the glittering serpentine body of the tracker, with its scurrying treads churning clouds of dust as it whined and rooted at the gate.

Bat Ferris shot a glance of uneasy calculation at his three companions. The girl was an unknown quantity. Angel, momentarily shocked, was predictable enough within limits. Pao Chung was openly an opportunist, willing to turn any situation to personal profit. Unarmed, Ferris could not even deal with them, let alone with the police outside. He frowned angrily.

Teucrete's stare held on him for a moment, as if puzzled. Her eyes moved on, focusing on Angel, then Pao Chung. Presently, they came back to Ferris, amused and faintly mocking.

"What is a gamma-man doing here?" she asked.

"An interesting question," said Pao Chung ironically. "But not of prime importance at the moment."

Ferris watched a smile writhe on the girl's lips and felt a quick relief. She might help, if only to thwart Pao Chung's idea of throwing him to the human wolves outside.

A harsh voice clamored for admittance.

The animals were growing restive again. An earthy bellow boomed out against a counterpoint of birdlike trills. The sand leopards coughed guttural warnings. Somewhere a pygmy elephant trumpeted, and the giant insects burst into deafening clatters.

Teucrete motioned for silence, then drew the bolts and held the gate ajar on its short chain.

"Who's there?" she demanded roughly.

"Police," several voices explained. "Open the gate, or we'll break it down."

"Have you a warrant?"

"It's a security matter," someone explained hopefully.

"Tell that to the animals," she stormed. "It's as much as your life's worth to come in here tonight. They're upset already, and I can't control them if you keep up this noise. Go away."

An authoritative voice blustered. "This is an important matter. Let me talk to your father."

Teucrete shrugged. "He will be back by noon tomorrow. Come then, and bring a warrant to search. Or--"

She followed the speech with some insulting suggestions, not in the best of taste. The authoritative voice turned into a gargle addressing a slammed gate. Profanity did not disturb the tracker, which continued to root noisily at the metal.

Teucrete shoved bolts into sockets and stood back. She sighed, and beckoned the three men to follow her.

They moved amid a nightmarish cacophony of sounds. In memory roused by the various elements of the uproar, Bat Ferris revisited the far planets. Fortunately the light was too dim to see all the sources of sound, but Ferris mentally identified many of the caged dwellers by ear or by nose.

Wrigglers from the mercury mines of Callisto. Venusian swamp slugs, and grull-cats from the Tihar Forest. Morbau-spawn from the honeycombed caverns of Triton. Wireflies and needle-flies, known by their eerie humming and buzzing. Seven-limbed bat-noses from the twilight zone of Mercury. Iceworms from Neptune and Pluto, and the deadly windharps from Mars. Amiably imbecilic moondogs from the satellites of Saturn pressed blank flat faces against the walls of their insulated glass tanks. Monsters out of nightmare. A madman's miscellany.

There was more, an incredible infinity of animal horizons. But imagination reels back, and description falters. What words can catalog the fringes of morphology!

* * * * *

Ferris focused his interest on the girl. Teucrete. A strange name, and as strange a being as these she lived among. He wondered idly about her racial background. Her father's origin was a mystery, and who could say what mate he had found on fecund Venus? Was his daughter one of those half-human mutants, or was she just what she seemed, a willful and badly raised human girl? Ferris could only guess, and await further evidence of her intentions toward him.

But he liked the way she walked. Tall, straight, slender as a spear, and as poised. Pride was in her, and a hint of warped character in her frigid disdain of weakness or fear. Physically--but Ferris was no authority on feminine beauty. On the reservation women had been scarce, most of them neurotic virgins, or old. He had known women since, but mostly the hard, cynical opportunists of the planetary frontier boom-towns. None to share a life with.

Vast perspectives of cages and tanks and pressure vats went off in all directions. He would not have imagined so much area covered by the establishment. It seemed limitless, and all its dimensions were oddly confusing. Intentionally so, since it was laid out in labyrinthine fashion. Unguided, a stranger could lose himself in a matter of minutes. It defied belief that a zoo of such colossal proportions could exist within the precincts of a city, even such a sprawling megalopolis as Castarona. But at last they were through the cage areas, which lined the periphery of the compound, and Teucrete led the men into a building of dazzling white stone.

"My father's laboratory," she explained. "Here we synthesize foods for the animals, and try with all our ingenuity to provide an approximate environment for them."

Her voice brought Ferris back to the present. "It won't work," he said. "Security squads will never wait for a warrant. Even if they do, what good is half an hour? They'll break down your gate and swarm through here like hunting bees."

Teucrete laughed scornfully. "Afraid, gamma-man?"

"If I were I wouldn't be here. But only a fool refuses to recognize danger."

"Relax," she advised. "They will break in, true. But there may be a little difficulty finding their way among the cages. It is a maze, as you saw. And the animals will give them some trouble. I am not forgetting the tracker, but the moondogs and wireflies can confuse anything that operates on electronics. All we need is a slight delaying action. We can count on that."

"There is another exit?" asked Pao Chung eagerly.

Her laugh crystallized in tinkling fragments, like showering shards of glass. "Another exit, yes. The way my father goes when he hunts. If you have the nerve to take it! But compose yourself, Pao Chung. You will need supplies of food, water, air, special clothing. And ... there is a price."

Hesitantly, unhappily, Pao Chung inquired the price.

"The way is dangerous," she said rapidly. "You might not come back. And I must see that my father is protected. Give me an order on your bank or lawyer for all the evidence you have against him; for whatever crimes or stupidities he may have committed."

"How do you know such an order will be honored?" Pao Chung muttered speculatively. "Once I am free--"

The girl tossed her head till the bell of ebony hair swung dangerously. "It had better be honored," she warned crisply. "For there is only one way back ... if you ever come back. And I can control it. I don't think you will like your surroundings well enough to remain there indefinitely."

Pao Chung bowed to the inevitable. Angel chuckled moodily, and Bat Ferris faced Teucrete with admiration on his pleasantly ugly features.

"Well done," he praised. "Is there a price for me?"

"No price to a man who likes animals. I sensed that in you as we passed the cages."

Impulsively, the girl leaned toward Ferris and forced her lips violently on his. "That is for luck, gamma-man. On the house, but the next one might cost you dearly. Watch yourself."

Ferris clung to the sanctuary of masculine silence. Pao Chung glowered sullenly, and Angel's amusement sent iridescent ripples glinting from his wings.

"How about me?" he demanded.

"No kiss, no price," she told him, "but a word of advice, mutant. Keep those wings out of revolving doors."

Angel grinned happily, his gargoyle face wrinkling into impossible contortions. "They are a nuisance."

Newly garbed and equipped, the men followed Teucrete from the building. Stopping to stuff Pao Chung's order into some feminine idea of a safety-vault, not too safe in the company of lecherous males, Teucrete conducted her charges through a lovely formal garden that functioned by concealed hydroponics, and on into another built up area.

But this was no cubicle of stone or steel or plastic. It was a roofless structure of glass. Vertical panels of glass ran off beyond sight. Panels of all colors, all degrees of transparency. Some were as lucid as crystal, some barely translucent, and more bent or mirrored to distort, reflect or refract light. All were tinted, some weakly, others violently stained. The place was stridently illuminated by concealed radi-floods. It was a solid mass of rainbow effects, a forest of crystal mirrors and shafts and flickering, glowing prisms.

One entered by a kind of airlock, or more accurately, a lightlock. There was no change in atmospheric pressure, but the density and beating force of sheer luminosity increased by squares and cubes as the travellers strode through linked cubes of glass.

They entered the light maze. Dazzling splendors beat upon them. Vision was overwhelmed by visible vibrations. They drowned in light.

IV

"Don't touch anything," warned Teucrete. "Exact alignment is important."