Secret of the Stars (4 page)

3

About the Port of Siwaki the landscape was almost lunar in starkness. Only the harshness of the jagged peaks which enclosed the cup of the valley were muffled—one could not say softened—by a thick growth of vegetation on the lower slopes. This vegetation existed in the cold months as odd spongelike skeletons with stem surfaces which could withstand even a tri-steel blade, and was a slate-blue in color.

That blue stain spread up to meet the snow. And always the cold bit deep, through thermo underclothing and furs, through the heated walls of the living domes, stinging inward to a man’s bones.

Fenris was alibite. Men went to the mines, ore came back. A fringe of businesses based on that two-way traffic made up Siwaki. And there were a few fools mad enough to try trapping for furs in the river valleys. But they were only a handful, the remnants of men who had pioneered Fenris before the companies fastened their strangleholds on the port and the three-quarters-frozen world.

This morning four of those independents had paused to scan the notice of an E-ship auction posted on the government board.
Two of them shrugged, one spat eloquently, but the fourth continued to read on into the fine print of the clipped code of governmental
language, until one of his companions tugged at the sleeve of his outer fur coat.

“No use trying to buck that.”

The reader’s eyes, which were all that showed between the shielding roll of lamby wool about his hood and the frost mask covering nose and mouth, still held to the poster. Although the outdoor garb of Fenris added bulk to the body it covered, there was a hint of youthfulness in the way he shook off his fellow’s hold.

“We’ll stay,” he spoke flatly, the authority of his tone not muffled by his mask. The man with him shrugged, but his mittened hand rested on the second belt about his middle, the one which supported the universal blaster of the frontiersman and a twenty-inch knife in a fur-tufted sheath.

At that moment, the numbed cargo mentioned in the poster was beginning to revive. Joktar, his memories of the E-station very hazy now, heard the muted chorus of mutters, moans, and such other symptoms of distress as he had heard in the N’Yok pens.

“This one’s breathing.”

He was grabbed, armpits and feet, swung out on a flat surface. Swift jabs of pain, then he was flung back to the misery of full revival. For misery it was, as the torture of returning circulation carried with it a belated realization of where he must be and why.

Sitting up, he blinked at the lights in the room, rubbing his hands over his bare body as if their pressure could relieve the tingling. For some reason he seemed to have recovered more quickly than the rest, for of the twenty men lying along the shelflike projection, he was the
first to move freely. Memory supplied a name . . . Fenris. Just a name . . .
he had no idea what kind of world lay outside the walls of this room.

“Stir up!” Men appeared in the doorway, wearing coveralls with the symbol of the port service on back and breast. They worked with rough efficiency to rouse the rest of the captives. Joktar sat where he was, a dull hatred seething inside him, wise enough not to resist. But his desire for escape was fast crystallizing into a drive almost as basic as his will to live.

The head guard reached him, gave a half-grin as he surveyed Joktar’s slim body.

“The E’s must be baby snatching now,” he commented. “You’ll end up on the bargain counter, sonny.”

“All right, all right! On your feet, you dead heads!” The captives were pushed into a ragged line. “Get these on.”

A duffel bag was produced and from it the guards pulled small bundles of cloth, tossing one to each man in line. Joktar drew on the pair of shorts, snapped the belt cord about his narrow waist.

“Mess . . .” They were pushed past the door, each handed a pleasantly warm container. Joktar felt real hunger, twisting off the top to swallow down a thick liquid, half-stew, half-soup.

“Now get this!” The head guard mounted a platform at the end of the room. “You’re on Fenris. And this is no planet where you can go over the hill and live to get away.” He snapped a terse word to his underlings and they put up a video projector. “There’s only two places a man can live here. Right at this port, and up at the mines. You try to blast off, and this is what’ll happen.”

At a second snap of his fingers, a series of vivid video scenes appeared on the wall above his head. If the horrors they pictured had been faked, the creator had had a very morbid imagination. Joktar did not believe that they had been. Every stark detail of what could happen to a runaway was there in three-dimensional color: blanket storms, lamby on the prowl, poison springs, and half a dozen other terrors native to this wolf world. Even breathing without any protection meant that the icy crystals in the winds could bring a quick and fatal lung disorder. As a lesson against escape the show was very forceful. But the pictures did not in the least modify Joktar’s private plans to stage a break-out at the first opportunity.

“Now you’re going up for auction,” the guard told them. “You’ll probably be mine fodder. Play along with the rules, don’t try any tough stuff, and you can maybe buy your time someday. First ten of you, this way.”

By chance, Joktar was numbered among that ten. He was hustled on into a larger room, standing with his group on the platform facing a small audience of perhaps a dozen or so. Most of them were seated at ease, their outer furs slung back. But there were three or four others to the rear of the room who did not look so much at home.

“. . . certified fit and able for labor . . .” someone droned. A man in E-service uniform was reading from the ship record.

The Fenrian guards thrust their charges into line again. One by one, they took a man by the shoulders, turned him slowly about for the inspection of the buyers. As they reached him, Joktar heard a voice rise from the bidders.

“What’s that kid doing here? Nobody could get a full week’s worth out of a skinny little worm like that!”

“I dunno, Lars, those skinny ones sometimes are tougher than you think.” Another man arose and came forward to the edge of the platform. “Let’s see your paws, kid.”

The guard didn’t give the Terran time to obey on his own. Clamping a grip on the captive’s elbows, he swung his arms out. The bidder stabbed critically at the nearest palm.

“Soft. Well, that’ll harden up using a digger. Might make a sorter of him. Only they’d better take a mark down on his price.”

Joktar was shoved back into line and his neighbor brought out. The bidding began and, when they reached Joktar once again, he saw one of the men by the doorway move forward.

“Ten skins, prime lamby,” the words broke through the monotonous offers of credits. The man who had examined Joktar’s hands swung around in his seat, scowling.

“Who let this woods beast in?” he demanded.

The newcomer continued to thread a way between the seats until he stood by the E-officer.

“E-auction, right?” he asked, his tone holding much the same bite as had that of the mine man.

“Yes.” The officer was plainly bored by it all.

“No privileged bidders, at least the notice didn’t say so.”

“No privileged bidders.”

“Then I offer ten prime lamby skins.” He stood there, his feet in their fur-lined, fur-cuffed boots, slightly apart, his body balanced as if he were about to issue a call out for a blaster meeting.

“Ten prime lamby skins bid,” repeated the E-officer.

“Fifty credits!” snapped the challenging company man.

“Fifteen skins.”

“One hundred credits!” a second of the miners cut in.

The E-officer waited a moment and then spoke to the other. “You still interested?”

Joktar watched the newcomer glance to his fellows by the door as if in appeal. When there came no answer from them, he shrugged, walked back. A snicker arose from the company men.

“Stay out in your mountain dens and freeze!” called the victorious bidder. Then he turned to the business at hand. “Well, do I get him for a hundred?”

The E-officer nodded and Joktar became the property of one of the companies.

They were sorted out into company groups at the end of the sale, fed, given quarters for the night, and each a suit of thermo clothing. Joktar listened eagerly to the guards, treasuring every scrap of information. He was now owned by the Jard-Nellis Corporation and their holdings were in a newly opened sector edging into the Kamador mountains; he had not been particularly fortunate. He tried to learn something about that other bidder, but discovered only that he was a trapper and that his bid was probably only another move in the old struggle between the companies and the handful of men who had pioneered Fenris on their own.

Early the next morning, the emigrants were loaded into the cargo hold of a crawler bound for the mines. Aircraft was not practical on the wolf world. Freakish storms had brought about too many crashes during the early days of settlement. Now transportation followed the archaic modes of travel, the roads themselves patrolled constantly against washout and storm damage. And against something or someone else, Joktar surmised, when he assessed the number and quality of the weapons carried by an unnecessarily large number of guards riding the crawler.

None of the emigrants were the type to rebel in order to break-out into the highly inhospitable wilderness they had already been indoctrinated to fear. So why the guards? And blasters and needlers were no protection against storms.

The heavy vehicle ground away from the port, but the emigrants in its windowless middle section had no view of the countryside. Fifteen men, drifters from the streets, happy-smokers already sunk in the gloom of a cut-off addict, a couple of bruisers who might have been the personal guards of some vip, shared those cramped quarters. The bruisers Joktar studied until he decided that they were not the stuff from which rebels were made. They might instead, if they survived the initial months of breaking in, serve as guards over their fellows.

As the men in the crawler began to shake down into a gang, he held aloof. Already the muscle men were asserting themselves. Joktar did not fear having to face either of them alone in rough and tumble, he knew too many tricks of infighting. But the two of them together would be a different matter.

The long day ended when the crawler sheltered for the night at a way station and the men were hustled from its warm interior, through a chill which bit like acid, into a dome. It was then that Joktar learned something new about himself. That cold which ate at his fellows, even subdued the bruisers, did not strike at him with the same intensity. His thermo suit was no better than theirs, and he had none of the outer furs of the guards. But to him that change of air was more exhilarating than numbing.

He thought about that as he swallowed the canned stew, remembering one or two other odd happenings out of the past. Those summer days in N’Yok when Kern had rallied him on always appearing cool, he had not been able to understand why others of the SunSpot staff swore at the heat every time they were forced to venture out of the air-conditioned building. And another time, further back when the cook, crazy mad from drinking sar-juice, had locked him, then only a small boy, into the freeze room. The dark cavern of the freeze room had scared him some but not the cold. When Mei-Mei, Kern’s current favorite, had found him, she’d been scared, too, but because he had walked out under his own power. At the time he hadn’t understood clearly what had excited her so much; now he began to. Suppose he could stand extremes of both hot and cold better than most men?

If that were true, it became a point on which to build an escape plan. He was so intent upon his thoughts that he momentarily forgot his surroundings. Then a foot struck against the knee of one of his outstretched legs.

“You there, bones, pay attention when a man talks.”

Joktar glanced up. This would have come sooner or later, he had
been resigned to such trouble ever since he had sighted the muscle men in their group. They were making the old, familiar play of the streets. Since he was, to outward appearances, fair game, someone they could belt around as an object lesson, they were going to put on a show. But neither was armed and it looked as if he had only to take one at a time.