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Katsulos' two assistants hurried to obey, arranging cables and a directional
antenna. One asked: "He's the one you were training to assassinate Hemphill?"
"Yes. His brain rhythms are on the chart. Focus on him quickly!"
"Set them free and arm them!" Hemphill's image shouted, from a guardroom
viewscreen. "You men there! Fight with us and I promise to take you to freedom
when the ship is ours; and I promise we'll take Johann Karlsen with us, if
he's alive."
There was a roar from the cells at the offer of freedom, and another roar at
Karlsen's name. "With him, we'd go on to Esteel itself!" one prisoner shouted.
When the beam from the temple of Mars struck downward, it went unfelt by
everyone but Jor. The others in the guardroom had not been conditioned by
repeated treatments, and the heat of their emotions was already high.
Just as Jor picked up the keys that would open the cells, the beam hit him.
He knew what was happening, but there was nothing he could do about it. In a
paroxysm of rage he dropped the keys, and grabbed an automatic weapon from the
arms rack. He fired at once, shattering Hemphill's image from the viewscreen.
With the fragment of his mind that was still his own, Jor felt despair like
that of a drowning man. He knew he was not going to be able to resist what was
coming next.
When Jor fired at the viewscreen, Lucinda understood what was being done to
him.
"Jor, no!" She fell to her knees before him. The face of Mars looked down at
her, frightening beyond anything she had ever seen. But she cried out to
Mars: "Jor, stop! I love you!"
Mars laughed at her love, or tried to laugh. But Mars could not quite manage
to point the weapon at her. Jor was trying to come back into his own face
again, now coming back halfway, struggling terribly.
"And you love me, Jor. I know. Even if they force you to kill me, remember I
know that."
Jor, clinging to his fragment of sanity, felt a healing power come to him,
setting itself against the power of Mars. In his mind danced the pictures he
had once glimpsed inside the temple of Venus. Of course! There must be a
countering projector built in there, and someone had managed to turn it on.
He made the finest effort he could imagine. And then, with Lucinda before him,
he made a finer effort still.
He came above his red rage like a swimmer surfacing, lungs bursting, from a
drowning sea. He looked down at his hands, at the gun they held. He forced his
fingers to begin opening. Mars still shouted at him, louder and louder, but
Venus' power grew stronger still. His hands opened and the weapon fell.
Once the gladiators had been freed and armed the fight was soon over, though
not one of the cultists even tried to surrender. Katsulos and the two with him
fought to the last from inside the temple of Mars, with the hate projector at
maximum power, and the recorded chanting voices roaring out their song.
Perhaps Katsulos still hoped to drive his enemies to acts of self-destructive
rage, or perhaps he had the projector on as an act of worship.
Whatever his reasons, the three inside the temple abosorbed the full effect
themselves. Mitch had seen bad things before, but when he at last broke open
the temple door, he had to turn away for a moment.
Hemphill showed only satisfaction at seeing how the worship of Mars had
culminated aboard Nirvana II. "Let's see to the bridge and the engine room
first. Then we can get this mess cleaned up and be on our way."
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Mitch was glad to follow, but he was detained for a moment by Jor.
"Was it you who managed to turn on the counter-projector? If it was, I owe you
much more than my life."
Mitch looked at him blankly. "Counter-projector? What're you talking about?"
"But there must have been... "
When the others had hurried away, Jor remained in the arena, looking in awe at
the thin walls of the temple of Venus, where no projector could be hidden.
Then a girl's voice called, and Jor too hurried out.
There was a half minute of silence in the arena.
"Emergency condition concluded," said the voice of the intercom station, to
the rows of empty seats. "Ship's records returning to normal operation. Last
question asked concerned basis of temple designs. Chaucer's verse relevant to
temple of Venus follows, in original language:
"I recche nat if it may bettre be
To have victorie of them, or they of me
So that I have myne lady in myne armes.
For though so be that Mars is god of Armes,
Your vertu is so great in hevene above
That, if yow list, I shall wel have my love... "
Venus smiled, half-risen from her glittering waves.
Men always project their beliefs and their emotions into their vision of the
world. Machines can be made to see in a wider spectrum, to detect every
wavelength precisely as it is, undistorted by love or hate or awe.
But still men's eyes see more than lenses do.
THE FACE OF THE DEEP
After five minutes had gone by with no apparent change in his situation,
Karlsen realized that he might be going to live for a while yet. And as soon
as this happened, as soon as his mind dared open its eyes again, so to speak,
he began to see the depths of space around him and what they held.
There followed a short time during which he seemed unable to move; a few
minutes passed while he thought he might go mad.
He rode in a crystalline bubble of a launch about twelve feet in diameter.
The fortunes of war had dropped him here, halfway down the steepest
gravitational hill in the known universe.
At the unseeable bottom of this hill lay a sun so massive that not a quantum
of light could escape it with a visible wavelength. In less than a minute he
and his raindrop of a boat had fallen here, some unmeasurable distance out of
normal space, trying to escape an enemy. Karlsen had spent that falling minute
in prayer, achieving something like calm, considering himself already dead.
But after that minute he was suddenly no longer falling. He seemed to have
entered an orbit-an orbit that no man had ever traveled before, amid sights no
eyes had ever seen. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]