“There’s a war on. We’re all in it. Soldiers, civilians, and kings, the big fellows and the little ones. When I got my master’s ticket, they told me a man’s duty wasn’t done until his ship was cradled or he was dead.
“My ship’s gone. But I haven’t died, yet.”
Pendleton’s broad, gaunt shoulders drooped. He turned his head away. Loris’ face was a death-mask carved from grey bone. He said, almost inaudibly:
“Shut up, damn you. Shut up.”
The movement was closer overhead, ominously close. The men scattered across the pit had stopped working, watching MacVickers with glistening, burning eyes across hot oil-filmed metal.
MacVickers said harshly, “I know what’s wrong with you. You were broken before you came, thinking the smash was coming and it was no use.”
Pendleton whispered, “You don’t know, the things they do to you.”
Stiff and dry out of the Earthman’s aquamarine mask, came the words, “You’ll learn. There’s no hope, MacVickers, and the men have all they can bear without pain.
“If you bring them more suffering, MacVickers, they’ll kill you.”
Heat. Oil and reeking metal, and white stiff faces filmed with sweat. Eyes shining, hot and glittering with fear. Rocking floor and sucking pumps and a clutching nausea in his belly. Birek, standing straight and still, watching him. Watching. Everybody, watching.
MacVickers put his hand flat on the engine-housing beside him. “There’s more to it than duty,” he said softly, and smiled, without humor, the vertical lines deep in his cheeks. His gaunt Celtic head had a grim beauty.
His voice rang clear across the roar of the machines. “I’m Christopher Rory MacVickers. I’m the most important thing in the universe. And if I have to give my life, it’ll not be without return on the value of it!”
Janu the Martian, away on the other side of the pit, made a shrill wailing cry. Loris and Pendleton flinched away like dogs afraid of the whip, looking upward.
MacVickers glimpsed a dark tentacled shape on the catwalk above, just before the shattering electricity coursed through him. He screamed, once. And then Birek moved.
He struck Loris and Pendleton and the blue-sheathed Earthman out of the way like children. His left leg took MacVickers behind the knees in the same instant that his right hand pushed MacVickers’ face.
MacVickers fell heavily on his back, screaming at the contact of the metal floor. Then Birek sprawled over him, shielding his body with the bulk of his own.
The awful shocking pain was lessened. Lying there, looking up into Birek’s pale eyes, MacVickers made his twitching lips say, “Why?”
Birek smiled. “The current doesn’t hurt much any more. And I want you for myself—to break.”
MacVickers drew a deep, shuddering breath and smiled back, the lines deep in his lean cheeks.
*
He had no clear memories of that shift. Heat and motion and strangling air, and Janu coughing with a terrible, steady rhythm, his own hands trying to guide the oil can. Toward the end of the time he fainted, and it was Birek who carried him up the ladder.
He had no way of knowing how long after that he came to. There was no time in that little hell. The first thing he noticed, with the hair-trigger senses of a man trained to ships, that the motion of the room was different.
He sat up straight on the bunk where Birek had laid him. “The tidal wave,” he said, over a quick stab of fear. “What....”
“We ride it out,” said Loris bitterly. “We always have.”
MacVickers knew the Jovian Moons pretty well. Remembering the tremendous tides and winds caused by the gravitational pull of Jupiter, he shuddered. There was no solid earth on Io, nothing but mud. And the extraction plant, from the feel of it, was a hollow bell sunk under it, perfectly free.
It had to be free. No mooring cable made could stand the pull of a Jupiter-tide.
“One thing about it,” said Pendleton with quiet viciousness. “It makes the bloody Jovies seasick.”
Janu the Martian made a cracked, harsh laugh. “So they keep a weak current on us all the time.” His hatchet-face was drawn, his yellow cat-eyes lambent in the dim light.
The men sprawled on their bunks, not talking much. Birek sat on the end of his, watching MacVickers with his pale still eyes. There was a tightness in the room.
It was coming. They were going to break him now, before he hurt them. Break him, or kill him.
MacVickers wiped the sweat from his face and said, “I’m thirsty.”
Pendleton pointed to a thing like a horse-trough against the bulkhead. His eyes were tired and very sad. Loris was scowling at his stained and faintly filmed feet.
There wasn’t much water in the trough. What there was was brackish and greasy. MacVickers drank and splashed some on his face and body. He saw that he was already stained with the mud. It wouldn’t wash off.
The dying Earthman whispered, “There is food also.”
MacVickers looked at the basket of spongy synthetic food, and shook his head.
The floor dipped and swung. There was a frightening, playful violence about it, like the first soft taps of a tiger’s paw. Loris looked up at the glass roof with the black shapes beyond.
“They get the pure air,” he said. “Our ventilator pipes are only a few inches wide, lest we crawl up through them.”
Pendleton said, rather loudly, “The swine breathe through the skin, you know. All their sense organs, sight and hearing....”
“Shut up,” snarled Janu. “Stop talking for time.”
The sprawled men on the bunks drew themselves slowly tight, breathing hard and deep in anticipation. And Birek rose.
MacVickers faced them, Birek and the rest. There was no lift in his heart. He was cold and sodden, like a chuted ox watching the pole-axe fall. He said, with a bitter, savage quiet,
“You’re a lot of bloody cowards. You, Birek. You’re scared of the death creeping over you, and the only way you can forget the fear is to make someone else suffer.
“It’s the same with all of you. You have to trample me down to your own level, break me for the sake of your souls as much as your bodies.”
He looked at the numbers of them, at Birek’s huge impervious bulk and his great fists. He touched his silver collar, remembering the agony of the shock through it.
“And I will break. You know that, damn you.”
He gave back three paces and set his feet. “All right. Come on, Birek. Let’s get it over with.”
*
The Venusian came toward him across the heaving floor. Loris still looked at his feet and Pendleton’s eyes were agonized. MacVickers wiped his hands across his buttocks. The palms were filmed and slick with oil from the can he had handled.
There was no use to fight. Birek was twice his size, and he couldn’t be hurt anyway. The diamond-sheathe even screened off the worst of the electric current, being a non-conductor.
That gave the dying men an advantage. But even if they had spirit enough left by that time to try anything, the hatches were still locked tight by air-pressure and the sheer numbers of their suffering mates would pull them down. Also, the Jovies were as strong as four men.
Non-conductor. Sheathed skin. Birek’s shoulders tensing for the first blow. Sweat