CHAPTER VI

Rodrik of Mish-kin

In the moments that followed, Steve Duane could feel his mantle of "godhood" slipping from him; its loss was plain to be seen in the eyes of the Women who were his companions.

He had no doubt that, given their own choice, Jain's warriors would have died then and there rather than submit to the Venusians' bonds. His conciliatory policy had caused him to "lose face" before these battle-scarred veterans. Beth did not like it, nor did Chuck Lafferty approve. Lafferty argued hotly, "It's one thing to walk into their town, Steve, but it's another to be _toted_ in like a trussed duck! There's only six of these white lobsters. Say the word, and--"

"The word," said Steve grimly, "is--_wait_!"

But even he was forced to admit to himself that he hadn't expected this sort of treatment at the hands of the invaders. After all, they had approached the Daan fortress openly, had neither evaded nor attempted to withstand these others. More humane captors would, under the circumstances, have dispensed with the added humiliation of gyves. Not so the Daans. From their harnesses they uncoiled lengths of plastic rope, pliant but incredibly tough. With this they lashed their prisoners, linked them in single file, and herded them across the bridge to the fortress-city.

Vainly Steve tried to reason with the corps captain, demanding to know why he and his comrades had been bound; the Venusian merely grunted and, with the muzzle of his odd hand-weapon, prodded him to silence.

Only von Rath seemed to understand the reason behind the Daans' high-handed treatment. To Steve he said stolidly, "But of course they take us prisoner. They could not well do otherwise, could they? After all, we are their enemies."

"But we surrendered freely. We are entitled to sane and decent treatment--"

The Nazi shook his head disdainfully.

"_Ach_, you Yankees! Always the dreamers! Warfare is no silly child's game, _mein Leutnant_. It is a grim business. The true warrior never trusts nor turns his back on his antagonist. As for treatment--the conqueror treats his prisoner as just what he is: a conquered foe. That is realism!"

Steve said caustically, "Yes. I know what you mean. We've all heard about your Nazi concentration camps."

Von Rath shrugged.

"What would you have us do with our captives, coddle them like house-pets?"

"At least," commented Steve, "give them clothing and shelter, sufficient food and medical attention, as we do _your_ soldiers in _our_ prison-camps."

"But," protested von Rath in astonishment, "you hold so few of our brave soldiers, compared to the vast numbers of yours who have deserted to our side! Moreover, you treat our men well because you know you must. Our Fuehrer has promised that the blood of each slain German will be avenged a hundred times over, _nicht wahr_?"

"Your Fuehrer," snorted Chuck, "is good at promises. He promised your army plenty of fuel oil, too. But you ain't got it yet. Trouble with Adolf is, he picked the wrong method of getting it, attacking the Russians. I know an easier way. All he had to do was build a pipeline from Berlin to the Baku oil-fields, and shove one end of the pipe in his mouth. If he could suck like he can blow, Germany would have more oil than the whole state of Texas!"

* * * * *

Von Rath stiffened, his eyes darting malice.

"That," he stormed, "is dirty democratic propaganda! Our Fuehrer is--"

"Was!" interrupted Steve.

"Eh?"

"_Was_," repeated Steve wearily, "not _is_. You two seem to have forgotten where we are. Stop fighting a war that was over fifteen centuries ago!"

Both men stopped wrangling abruptly, glanced at each other rather sheepishly. Chuck said, "Yeah. I guess you got something there, Steve," and von Rath said, "_Ja_, we have been foolish."

Even so, his defense of the Daans had reminded Steve again that even yet the Nazi was not altogether to be trusted.

Meanwhile, they had crossed the bridge into the city now known as "Sinnaty." The bridge carried them to the heart of the city; still it was with the utmost difficulty Duane--who had known Cincinnati--oriented himself.

It was as if a Twentieth Century New Yorker suddenly should find himself treading the muddy footpaths of New Amsterdam. The geography was the same, but the street pattern was so completely altered as to be practically unrecognizable. Where had been rows of smart shops and office buildings, there now ranged clusters of tumbledown shacks, shanties so squalid as to be mere pig-stys.

Gone were the fine asphalt avenues; age had crumbled them to dust; rain and snow had dissolved this dust, the feet of careless generations had turned the roadways to a quagmire of muck. Animals--cats, dogs, swine, an occasional horse or cow--roamed the streets unmolested, cropping the sparse grass by the roadsides or rooting through the garbage that befouled the air.

Two witnesses remained that this had once been Ohio's second largest city. Still intact was that great, paved intersection which had been Fountain Square ... and beside it, heart-stirringly beautiful in this scene of desolation and squalor, still stood proudly erect the mighty spire of Carew Tower. It was toward this building the Daans herded their prisoners.

[Illustration: The mighty spire of Carew Tower still stood proudly erect amid the ruins of Cincinnati.]

A few humans, both men and women, were on the streets. But these slunk along in the shadows of the dilapidated houses, and when they glimpsed the Daans, scurried furtively, hastily, into the nearest shelter. Steve Duane's hands clenched at his sides to see this evidence of mankind's abject peonage, and in that moment he vowed that, though it cost him his life, he must do _something!_--to resurrect the glory which had once been Man's, and the pride which had once been America's!

But if the Overlords of Daan let their subjects live like beasts, they maintained a high standard of existence for themselves. The "Nedlunplaza" was, if anything, an even more gorgeous building than it had been in the days when its great lobby entertained visitors from forty-eight states, a hundred nations.

It had been converted into a stronghold, a fortress, a citadel at once impregnable and breathtakingly opulent. A layer of some gleaming metal--silver, perhaps--overlay its erstwhile granite frame. Buttressed walls had been stretched about it; from the occasional watchtowers of these, Daan warriors looked down over their territory. At a call, the gates were flung open. The captives marched into the Daans' capital. Across terraced flags to that which had once been the hotel's lobby ... thence upward in an elevator....

"But, hey!" muttered Chuck. "How come this elevator? I thought these people didn't know nothing about--"

Steve grunted tightly.

"_Humans_ don't. They have forgotten everything of our mechanistic civilization. Look at Beth and Jain. Scared to death. This probably seems like magic to them. But there's nothing wrong with the Daans' science. _They_ know what these things are--and how to use 'em. Any race which can discover spaceflight--"

"Silence!" rasped the Daan group-leader. "Out, now! This is your prison. You will wait here until sent for."

The moving cage quivered to a stop, the door opened, and the octet of captives were thrust from it. Those who had brought them thus far accompanied them no farther. Stepping from the elevator, they moved into custody of other Venusians not only armed with the now-familiar crystalline hand-weapons but also equipped with short, thick-handled, barb-tipped cat-o'-nine-tails.

These, without curiosity or comment, loosed them of their bonds and rudely shouldered them through heavy bronze doorway. The door _clanged!_ shut and they were alone.

Chuck said, "Well, I'll be damned!"

* * * * *

"Well, I'll be damned!" repeated Chuck Lafferty. "Of all the hoosegows I've ever been in, this one takes the cake! Steve--are we supposed to be _prisoners_?"

"Nothing else but," grunted Duane succinctly.

"But it's nuts!" declared Chuck. "Prisoners oughta be barred or walled or underground or something--"

"You," Steve told him, "should soak up a little bit of von Rath's realism. Or read Elizabethan poetry. Richard Lovelace was right. 'Stone walls do not a prison make', pal! See those windows?"

"Sure I see 'em. And they ain't barred."

"No. But they look straight down about two hundred feet. That's a long way to tumble. Don't kid yourself. We aren't free just because they removed our bonds and loosed us to do as we will."

Von Rath said soberly, "Duane speaks truth, Lafferty. A high, well-guarded tower is the strongest of all prisons. In the Middle Ages all dungeons were built at the tops of castles. Chillon ... _der Rathaus_ ... the bloody tower of London. This is but another evidence of the Daans' superiority over humans. Being wiser, stronger, better organized, they can afford to be contemptuous of their prisoners. They need not bind us. One rebellious move, and they can starve us into submission."

"That's right," agreed Steve. "As a matter of fact, there's only one factor in our favor--and that is the very thing you just mentioned, von Rath. Their contempt for humankind. They have had only to deal with--well, with the poor barbarians of this day. They don't suspect that we three are different. Sharper, more resourceful, and perhaps almost as intelligent as themselves."

The priestess Beth had been listening wide-eyed and comprehending perhaps only half of what she heard. Now, with a small sign of obeisance, "And what," she asked, "do we now, O Dwain? Wait quietly, or prepare magic to destroy our foes upon their return?"

"First," Steve told her, "we get one thing straight. You've got to stop addressing me like something on a marble pedestal. Our chances of success depend on the Venusians not finding out who we are. So lay off that, 'O Dwain!' stuff."

"It shall be as you say, O Dwain," agreed the dust-gold maiden meekly. "But--but how should one address one of the gods--"

"I'm not one of the--Oh, hell!" snorted Steve. "Do we have to go through all that again? Look, Beth--I've told you time and time again that I am a man!"

"Yes, Master. A Man-god."

"Man-god your--Well, never mind! If I were one of the Men of your Clan, you'd call me by my given name--right? Well, from now on that's the ticket. I'm Steve, get it? And this is Chuck, and this is--what's your name, von Rath?--oh, yes, I remember--Eric!"

"Steve ... Chuck ... Ay-rik. Very well, Wise Slumberer. Henceforth it shall be as you say. Jain, you hear?"

"Yes, priestess. We hear and obey."

"Good!" sighed Steve. "Well, now, that's settled--let's take a look around this joint. I don't see any PRIVATE: KEEP OUT signs on the doors, so I guess we're free to wander."

* * * * *

For in addition to the windows which lighted the room, several doors other than the bronze portal through which they had entered off it. Toward the nearest of these Steve led his wondering group.

The door opened easily. And it opened upon a scene which surprised them all. They were not the only prisoners in the tower of Nedlunplaza. The chamber into which they strode was vast, and thickly strewn with humans of all ages, colors and descriptions. Conditions, too. Many were of the furtive, fearful type Duane had seen in the streets of Sinnaty, others were "Wild Ones" like Jon and his tribe--but a few were of a type whose existence in this era the time-exiles had not even suspected. Strong-thewed, intelligent-seeming Men like themselves!

At their entrance, all heads turned at once. Voices raised, for the most part in mourning, but a scattered few in a sort of gloating triumph. And this spontaneous roar roused to movement; the gleeful cries coalesced into a single word:

"Women!"

So swiftly that even Steve Duane, whose mind usually accepted new circumstances with lightning speed, was shocked into immobility, male figures rose and hurtled forward toward the newcomers!

But if the three time-travellers were stunned motionless, not so the women of the Tucki Clan. Barbaric they might be, superstitious they undoubtedly were--but their defensive reflexes had been trained in a hard school; the bitter school of experience.

In the twinkling of an eye, the warrior captain Jain had cried, "_On guard!_"--and like automatons trained to split-second precision she and her three fighters had whipped steel from scabbards and formed a shield before their priestess and their gods.

Against this biting rampart, not even such a woman-hungry sea of males dared dash itself. The cries assumed an angry, baffled tone, but the attack slowed ... stalled. For an instant there was silence, then one voice, boldly desperate, cried, "On them! What mean their weapons? They are but four, and we are many--"

Steve understood, now, why the Daans had not removed their sidearms while in all other ways holding them in strict bondage. Here was sickening evidence of the difficulties he faced in welding the pitiful remnants of humanity to a force which might overthrow Earth's invaders. Here were men who, though serfs to a master race, spent their blood, their hate, their energies upon each other rather than those who should be their natural enemies.

Eyes blazing, he thrust himself into the forefront beside Jain; his cry was a flaming challenge.

"What manner of men are you? We came in peace--but if war is what you want, then--come on! Who would first like the hot blood let from his veins?"

Answer came from an unexpected source. From the far side of the chamber ... from another door which opened suddenly ... appeared one tall and fair as Stephen Duane himself. In a glance the newcomer appraised the situation, his voice put an end to the mob's mutterings.

"Hold! What have we here? Aaah--new Women?" His cold, gray-blue eyes swept the newly-arrived group, lighted appreciatively as they came to rest on Beth, who had taken her place at Steve's side. "Good! Subdue the men and divide the warriors as you will. But touch not the golden one. She is mine!"

Chuck gasped, "Hoddya like _that_ for nerve, Steve!"

Steve didn't like it. Not a bit. His brow darkened dangerously. "Yours?" he cried. "Guess again, buster! She's not yours till you take her! By what right--?"

"By the right of the power," mocked the other, "that is mine, stranger. I am Rodrik. Rodrik of Mish-kin--ruler of the prisoners of Nedlunplaza!"