CHAPTER VIII

There were six of the Irrians, counting Vannevan. They wore vac-suits and they were all armed. Two of them went immediately to Thile and Kara and searched them for weapons, but they had none. The time for resistance was past.

Another man, on Vannevan's instructions, began to tear open the lockers that were still intact, looking for papers. The others stood guard. They handled themselves easily, experts at null gravity.

Birrel looked at Vannevan and said sourly, "Out of the frying pan into the fire. I don't know which of you is worse."

Vannevan's eyes were bright, cruel, competent and happy. Very happy. He had wiped out, and with interest, the defeat he had suffered at the farmhouse. He had crushed the Ruunites completely. For him, it was a good day.

He smiled at Birrel. "You see what happens to meddlers."

"I wouldn't call it meddling," Birrel said. "We caught a spy. It was natural to want to know who he was working for, and why."

"When you found out," Vannevan said, "why didn't you report back to your superiors? You were free. I remember distinctly that you were free."

Birrel indicated Kara with a savage movement of his chin. "She talked me out of it, damn her. With a gun."

"So," said Vannevan, and smiled, and shook his head. "But she had no weapon. I myself had seen to that."

"She had one," Birrel said bitterly. "In the hopper. She told me there was another car hidden there for emergencies, and like a fool, I believed her. Instead there was that flying-thing, and she pulled a weapon from inside it. The next thing I knew I was aboard this ship, a prisoner. They were going to take me back to Ruun whether I wanted to go or not."

Kara spoke sullenly. "His people killed Rett. It was the least we could do."

"Listen," said Birrel, struggling angrily against the straps that held him. "I don't give a curse what quarrel you have between you. I don't care if you blow each other's worlds out of the sky. I'm an Earthman. I don't belong here. I--"

He looked around at the broken ship, at space gaping monstrously beyond the riven hull. It was not difficult for Birrel to let an expression of fear come into his face.

"I want to go back," he said.

Vannevan looked at him. "How badly?"

Birrel would not meet his eyes. He muttered, "Bad enough."

"Well," said Vannevan. "We'll see." He motioned to one of his men. "Cut him loose. Did you find anything?"

The Irrian who had been searching shook his head, and Thile said, "I could have told you. We don't keep written records."

Vannevan shrugged and said, "Let's go."

They floated gracefully through the ship, with Birrel lumbering and floundering in their midst. They passed through the airless lock and into the life-craft. In a short time they were being taken up into the belly-pod of the Irrian ship, and a little while after that Birrel found himself a prisoner with Thile and Kara in a locked cabin.

The ship paused only long enough to finish the destruction of the derelict. Then it went into overdrive, on its way to Ir.

During the rest of the voyage, knowing full well that they were being watched, the three kept up their pretense of hostility. But Birrel came more and more to admire Thile and Kara. They were personally defeated and in a desperate situation. Their mission was a failure. Their world and way of life, which had hung on that mission, were threatened with destruction. But they clung quietly to their hope and courage and never whined--in striking contrast to Birrel himself, whose part called for constant complaint.

Birrel thought he was establishing himself sufficiently well as a frightened man who might be talked into doing almost anything for the right reward. He hoped so. Because not only his own life but the lives of Thile and Kara depended upon that, not to speak of the safety of several worlds, including his own. He was a little upset to discover that Kara's safety loomed larger in importance than anything else. He decided then that he was in love with her.

There came finally a time when the warning rang, and the lights burned blue and the ship shuddered, and then the port unmasked.

"We're out of overdrive," said Thile. "We're there."

* * * * *

An awe fell on Birrel as he looked out the port with them. The ship, in normal space again, was sweeping in a curved pattern toward a sun whose diamond incandescence eclipsed the stars.

Almost lost in that overpowering glare, three points of light swung far on the other side of this system. It was toward the biggest of the three that Thile and Kara were gazing.

"Ruun," whispered Kara. "If they only knew, if we could only get a message to them--"

Thile said bitterly, "What good would it do even if we _could_ send a warning? Our cautious government would merely say, as they did before, 'You have no proof that the Irrians mean war, and without proof we cannot act'."

The ship swung on in its landing-pattern and now, below, Birrel saw a planet coming up toward them.

It was a scarred world of black-and-green. He thought at first that these were land-and-water divisions, but as they went lower he saw that they were not--that the green were fertile plains but that the ominous black areas were utterly lifeless lands, black and blasted and barren.

"That's what the oligarchs of Ir have made of their world," said Kara. "Those burned-out regions are the scars of their wars between themselves. And now, with no fissionable matter left, they must go to space for the means of destruction!"

The ship went down toward one of the wide green areas. There was a city here--a far-stretching grimness of gray, massive buildings, with a movement of hoppers and ground-cars over and through it. A spaceport lay outside the city, with the silver towers of many ships there flashing back the diamond sun.

They felt the landing. Then there was silence. They waited for Vannevan to come, but he did not. Instead, armed Irrian guards came and marched them out of the ship onto a blackened concrete apron. They stood there for a few minutes, in a chill wind.

Birrel thought, shivering, "_Not Earth, this world I stand on. Not my own world--_"

The diamond blaze of sunlight was wrong, the color of the sky was wrong, the too-light feeling of his body was strange. The silver ship behind them, the great gray city ahead, all wrong, queer--

"Remember your plan," whispered Kara.

Birrel steadied. He had a part to play, and upon how he carried it through might depend their last slender chance. He played that part now.

He gave a vivid imitation of a man who was in a panic. He looked up at the sun and cried out and shut his eyes, and then opened them again and looked wildly around him. Then, crying out in a voice edged with hysteria, he broke back toward the spaceship.

The guards grabbed him and hauled him back. He told them shrilly, "I can't stay here, I won't stay--I want to go back--"

The Irrian guards laughed at him. When a covered vehicle not unlike a light truck came speeding up, they shoved him and Kara and Thile into it and got in after them, still laughing.

As the truck sped into the city, Birrel shivered, and looked at everything in a numb, scared way.

* * * * *

The city was as grim as it had looked from afar. The gray, utilitarian cement building-material used universally did not make for beauty. The men and women in the streets were mostly in a drab sort of coverall garment that was not beautiful either. Birrel saw them looking at the truck and guards as they passed, and he thought there was a sullenness in some of the watching faces. He remembered what Kara had said, that many of the Irrian people were discontented with their oligarchs' rule but were held down tightly. He thought they looked it.

The truck turned finally into a courtyard and stopped. Heavy gates were locked behind it. Birrel and the others were ordered out. He managed to get close to Kara and give her hand a reassuring touch. Then they were taken inside a building made of greenish stone, instead of cement, with ominous-looking horizontal slits in the walls in place of windows.

Inside, without a word of explanation, they were separated. Thile and Kara were marched away up a stairway while Birrel's guards took him on down a main hallway. The hall was painted a utilitarian gray and it had guards stationed at regular intervals. About halfway down there was a door with a double guard in front of it. Birrel's armed escort stopped him here, spoke to the guard, who spoke to someone inside by means of an intercom with a small video screen. Presently the door opened and Birrel was ushered inside.

Vannevan sat at one side of a big square table. A second man, older than Vannevan and that much more experienced in the ways of those who wage war out of choice and not necessity, sat behind it. His face was a mask, his curiously opaque eyes watching Birrel narrowly as the guards were sent away.

Vannevan said, "This is our Earthman." And to Birrel he said, "This is Wolt, our Minister of Defense."

Birrel refrained from making the obvious comment. From here on he was on his own and had to be careful. Any hope of advantage he might gain by making the Irrians think he was their not unwilling tool could be lost by a single incautious word.

"I understand," said Wolt, "that the Ruunites kidnapped you and brought you into space by force."

"They did."

"A serious act. And I understand that you are quite anxious to return to your world."

Birrel said eagerly, "Can I, is there any way? I can't take this, space and stars and a world I never saw, I've got to get back--"

He saw Wolt and Vannevan watching him keenly as he babbled in pretended hysteria, and he thought they looked satisfied by what they saw.

Wolt said, "Some of our ships will be going back to Earth on a mission. You could go back with them, if--"

"If?" prompted Birrel eagerly.

Vannevan answered. "You're a secret agent of a great Earth power. You could assist our mission."

Now Birrel's face became apprehensive, cautious. "Just how do you mean that, Vannevan? Listen, I want to go back, sure. But I'm not going to betray any secrets or help you steal plutonium or--"

Wolfs hard voice cut in. "Let's consider the situation realistically. The loss of some fissionable material will make very little difference to Earth, with its enormous resources. Isn't that so?"

Cautiously, grudgingly, Birrel said that he couldn't see that it would make much difference, no.

"Now you must accept one fact. No matter what you as an individual may or may not do, we are going to take those materials. The very life of our planet depends on it. You understand that?"

"Yes."

"Very well. Now the decision that faces you is this. Will you be doing your world a greater service by denying us the information we want and thereby forcing us to take possible violent measures in carrying out our mission--or by helping us do it quietly and thus saving a great number of lives?"

"Think of the weapons we have," Vannevan said. "Think how your Earthmen are armed. You know how much chance they have of fighting us off."

Birrel thought they would have a very good chance, but he didn't say so. He frowned, and looked uneasily at the floor.

"What would you want me to do?"

"Vannevan tells me that your people are in possession of a certain probe-ray record that was taken from our man. We'd want that back."

"That's impossible," Birrel said. "The President himself couldn't get at it."

Wolt shrugged. "In that case, you would have to supply us with similar information."

There was a long silence. Then Birrel said, with just the right lack of conviction,

"No, I can't do it."

Vannevan stood up. "I think we'd better show him the cavern, Wolt. I don't believe he understands yet just how much the safety of Earth depends on him."

Wolt nodded. He rose, too, and walked to the wall. It appeared perfectly blank and solid, but under the pressure of his hand a segment of it swung in, revealing a tiny lift. The three men got in, the door closed, and the lift plunged down.

Birrel tried to keep his excitement well hidden. His act was already paying off--apparently they were about to show him something that even the Ruunites didn't know about.

Just how he might use that knowledge to help himself and his two friends he could not figure yet. But his stretch in the OSS had taught him well. Keep your mind alert and flexible, play it by ear, and wait for the break which may come in a hundred ways and from the most unexpected sources.

The lift let them out onto a narrow platform beside a car that ran from a track through a tunnel hollowed roughly out of bedrock underneath the city. They got into it and the car shot through stale darkness relieved by a few dim lights. It went fast.

* * * * *

Birrel stole a glance at the other two men, and decided against any precipitate action. Vannevan had something hidden in his hand, and it would be something small and nastily potent as a weapon, he was sure. He'd wait, play it along--

There was light again, sudden and bright. The car burst into it, into vast and unexpected space. For a second Birrel thought they had come back to the surface again. Then he saw the rocky vault high overhead and the walls going away on either side and he knew it was a mammoth cavern.

The car stopped. They stepped out onto a platform.

"This way," said Wolt. "I want you to see it all."

They moved off the platform and onto a railed shelf cut out of the rocky wall. And Birrel stared in amazement.

The end of the tunnel and the shelf on which they stood were about halfway up the cavern wall. Below, and stretching away as far as he could see, rank upon rank of great metal shapes stood, some painted in dour red or gray, others naked, gleaming steel or copper. There was no one in the cavern, no sound, no movement--nothing but the brooding silence and the loom of the endless rows of enigmatic mechanisms.

Wolt and Vannevan looked down on them, with the faces of men who see a beautiful and splendid vision. And Wolt said,

"Do you know what those are?"

Birrel said, "No."

"And how should you? Your world is still in the nursery. Those are weapons--or they will be, when they are mounted in ships. Mighty weapons, that lack just one thing--the fissionable matter that must power them. The matter that our world doesn't have. Perhaps you understand now why we must raid your atomic stockpiles?"

"But," said Birrel, staring wide-eyed at the terrifying array of giants below him, "where are your ships? You'd need hundreds--"

"We have them," Vannevan said. "All we need to put at end to the domination of Ruun forever."

He turned to Birrel with an expression of serious and friendly candor that might have fooled him if he not known Vannevan so well.

"We have no interest whatsoever in Earth as a conquest. But don't overlook the fact that now the Ruunites know how rich your planet is. They might decide to take it over, just as they've taken over every world in this system but Ir. So in helping us break Ruun's power, you're actually protecting your own world. Now what do you say?"

Birrel looked out over the silent cavern with the endless ranks of deadly machines. He pretended to be miserable, torn between doubt and longing. Finally he said,

"I've got to think it over. Give me time--"

Wolt started to speak, but Vannevan shot him a look and said easily, "Of course, take all the time you want. There will be several days before the ships are ready."

"Ships?"

"Going to Earth. I'll be going with them, of course, to lead the raid. Or I should say, ahead of them. They'll wait in space until they get my signal. You could come back with me, if you decide to help."

Again, on a note of desperation, Birrel said, "I've got to think."

They took him back to the car and through the tunnel and into the building again. There guards took him upstairs and placed him in a small square room without even slits in the wall, furnished with a bed, a table, and a chair. They locked the door and left him alone there, with nothing to do and nothing to see, and nothing even to hear but the soft blowing of air through an iron-barred duct in the ceiling.

Maximum security, and no distractions. In this place a man couldn't do anything but think.

Food was brought. The guard who brought it admitted it was now night outside, but he refused to say anything about Kara and Thile, where they were or if they were still alive.

Birrel ate. A little after that the lights went off. He groped his way to the bed and lay down, trying to see a way out, a way to help Thile and Kara and stop the evil that was about to be done, and seeing only darkness.

Eventually, without meaning to, he fell asleep.

He was wakened by a sound. It was a very slight sound, and it took him a minute to identify it as the clink and creak of an iron grating being moved. By that time it was too late.

Somebody was already in the dark room, and before Birrel could call out a man's body was on top of him and strong hands were fastening on his throat.