Chapter III

Altogether it was the most uncanny interview that Jupiter Jones had ever experienced. He stood paralyzed while the Anolyns scrutinized him.

Not a sound passed between the creatures, not an expression marred their soft white visages. It was impossible to even guess at their thoughts.

Jupiter had more than a smattering of biology, and he'd been confronted with weird forms of life before. But nothing so outlandish. He wished he could get one of the Anolyns on the dissecting table in the Mizar's laboratory.

Suddenly a thought impinged on his consciousness, an emotionless, inhuman query:

"Where did you come from?"

He could feel the alien entity that was the octopod probing at his brain cells with invisible feelers of thought. He could no more resist answering than if he had been under the influence of salanedrin, the Venusian truth serum.

"Earth. A planet of the system of Sol." He gave the galactic space coordinates, but realized that they had no meaning outside their frame of reference. "From beyond the stars," he amplified.

"How?" There was shock, surprise, scepticism in the thought.

He visualized the starship, the space warp that had flung him hundreds of parsecs out of his course. But he had the feeling that he might as well try to explain nuclear physics to a Hottentot.

He was conscious of a growing doubt in the minds of his captors--almost as if they were afraid of him. All at once, he felt himself turn, start out of the pavilion.

The Anolyns, he realized, must have finished their examination. But it was a startling sensation to find himself going back across the clearing like a sleep walker.

What had they learned? Had they picked his mind clean? One of the fighting Nehogans separated himself from his fellows and followed him back to the cages.

Without conscious volition, Jupiter stooped and crawled inside. The door shut after him with a "click". The lean red-haired Nehogan squatted on his heels just outside.

Jupiter wiped the sweat off his forehead, and instantly realized that he had regained control of his muscles.

It was dusk, a hazy burnt amber twilight that made everything appear as if he were wearing tinted glasses. The pink-skins had broken camp, loaded the Rik'gans, formed them into a caravan. A detachment of fighting men moved to the head of the procession.

Jupiter's cage was equipped like the others with stretcher poles. Two squat porters approached and lifted it to their shoulders, moved into line with the other captives. One of the Anolyns gave a blast on a horn. The head of the caravan moved into the jungle.

Imperceptibly, darkness had fallen, but no lights were lit. The inhabitants of this strange world seemed to see as well by night as by day.

Jupiter could feel his bearers fall into a rough trot. The cage swayed, jolted rhythmically--an upsetting motion. He felt progressively worse and worse.

"Damn!" he thought miserably; "it's making me seasick!"

* * * * *

The next two weeks were a period of orientation for Jupiter. The caravan travelled by night to avoid the heat. They were fed twice daily--a thick gruel-like substance in which chunks of meat and vegetables had been diced--and it never varied.

Neither did Jupiter's guard ever leave him. He was an aloof, ferocious man with a hawk nose, a copper-red skin and pale blue eyes--ice blue eyes. His name, Jupiter learned, was Reiloc and he regarded the cavepeople with contempt, the porters with scorn, the pink-skins with loathing.

As they wound down out of the mountains onto a broad plain, Jupiter had managed to pick up a smattering of the language from Lete who occupied the cage just ahead.

The wild girl was devoured by curiosity, but when Jupiter tried to explain where he had come from, she grew frightened and silent.

"The Wanderer-from-Beyond!" he overheard her telling Reiloc in a low voice. "Did you hear him? Is it true, Reiloc?"

The copper-skinned fighting man scratched his head.

"We caught him near your village. He fought with thunder and lightning. He carried many queer tools in a pack, which no one understands. It's very strange, too, that the night before, we saw a blazing ship fall out of the sky. But when we went to investigate, the ship was unharmed. Then it burst into a blinding ball of light. We didn't stay."

Lete clasped the bars, peered at Jupiter wide-eyed.

"The flaming chariot! It was you who came down from the stars!"

Jupiter nodded.

"The Wanderer!" she repeated in an awed voice. "You are the Wanderer-from-Beyond! With the Sword of Fire!"

He frowned, started to shake his head.

"Who is this Wanderer supposed to be?"

"But you must be him," Lete almost pleaded. "At night the old men gather around the fires and tell of his coming." Her voice had taken on a mystic quality. "Out of the night sky he'll come in his chariot of flames, they say, like a star fallen to Yogol. The Wanderer-from-Beyond. He'll come with lighting in his hand--the Sword of Fire--and drive the Anolyn back into the sea, back into the slime from whence they arose.

"He'll free all the men of Yogol and restore their knowledge. Then he'll ascend in a ball of fire, vanish into the beyond."

Jupiter didn't say anything. The legend was only too familiar. Terran history was full of such folk heroes sent to free the people from their oppressors. It was always the same fundamentally, and it always cropped up wherever there was a conquered, downtrodden, helpless people. The myth seemed to answer some universal human need.

Even Reiloc, he saw, appeared excited and uneasy.

"Suppose I am?" Jupiter suggested.

"Why, then--you'll destroy the Anolyn." Lete's face fell. "But you're as helpless as we are! You're not the Wanderer after all. You've been making fun of me."

Reiloc burst into relieved laughter, and Lete looked hurt.

"Stranger things have happened," said Jupiter dryly. He didn't intend to throw away any possible advantage that might accrue to him if these savages believed him to be the mythical Wanderer. He was shrewd enough though, to perceive that he wouldn't appear very impressive in a cage, and filed the idea away, turning the subject to the Anolyn instead.

* * * * *

This was a hunting party, he learned. They were headed back now for the city. Jupiter wondered what they called it.

The city didn't have a name, Lete insisted. She called it the city by the _Dra Dur_, which meant Red Sea. Yes, there were other cities, but none of them had a name.

"Why should they?" Reiloc grunted.

What were the Anolyn? Such a strange question. Jupiter could see for himself that they were--well, Anolyn.

Neither Reiloc nor Lete understood what he was driving at. The Anolyn were different, they admitted, but all things were different.

It was obvious that the cave girl and the fighting man considered themselves separate species and hated each other cordially.

The humans who associated themselves with the Anolyn, Lete informed him with scorn in her voice, were "Edir".

"Edir" as near as Jupiter could make out, meant "voluntary slave"; a term that brought a savage growl from Reiloc and shut him up for three days.

The Anolyn, Lete told Jupiter, entered into a person once they caught him, and that person was "Edir" forever. He couldn't escape. Why? Because no one ever had.

She didn't know what the thing on the back of her neck was, and neither did Reiloc. The Anolyn had put it there, and it was dangerous to meddle with it.

And that was as much as Jupiter could learn.

* * * * *

On the fifteenth day they struck a small farming community, and after that they traveled by day on a paved road between cultivated fields.

Jupiter saw many more of the green tinted Rik'gans being used like draft animals. There were also black hairy people with tails who were kept in pens and watched the caravan pass out of sad, lack-luster eyes.

The hairy men were Begans, Lete told him. The Anolyn bred them for food. Occasionally they ate the Rik'gans, but the meat was coarse and tough.

Horror sprang into Jupiter's green eyes.

"They eat them?"

Lete shrugged. "Of course. And so have you."

He went deathly pale. He could feel his stomach revolt at the thought.

"The Anolyn breed men for special purposes," Lete went on, unaware of the loathing in his eyes, "fighters, meat animals, the pink-skinned Caligans. Oh, there must be fifteen or sixteen different kinds. They're all 'Edir'," and she dismissed them with a shrug of her shapely brown shoulders.

Jupiter's cage was swaying along the plastic ribbon of a road. It was all he could do to keep from being sick, but he knew now the subtle distinction that had been troubling him.

The humans weren't slaves. They were domesticated--like cattle or dogs or horses. And Lete's people were wild with all the contempt of the wild thing for its tame cousin!

Reiloc, trotting beside the cage, grunted suddenly and raised his arm, pointing ahead. Jupiter lifted his eyes, felt a tingle of excitement run through him.

There, glittering in the rays of the setting sun were the spires and battlements of the city by the _Dra Dur_.

* * * * *

Night had fallen by the time they reached the city gate. Yogol, as Lete called the planet, had no satellite. The darkness was unrelieved except by the faint starshine.

The caravan halted beneath towering walls of deeper blackness. In his cage Jupiter heard a horn sound, then a groaning that must be the massive gate rolling aside. The caravan began to move again.

They passed into a canyon between dark buildings. And all about him he could hear the shuffle of feet, low voices. He was like a blind man in the midst of a crowd.

Strange spicy smells beset his nostrils and a cold, dank, salty odor that must be the _Dra Dur_. He could hear the lap of water and shouts and loud thumpings and the creak of tackle. And through it all ran the sibilant voice of the invisible throng.

After an interminable march, they turned through a massive entrance into a well lit building. The noise of the city stopped as the door swung shut behind them. Jupiter squinted his eyes, blinded by the sudden light.

Sometime before, the caravan had split up, and only the cages holding the wild people remained. Then without warning, they too turned off down a bisecting passage.

"Lete!" he yelled after the girl; "Lete!" His own bearers were carrying his cage straight ahead. The girl waved at him forlornly and called:

"A'towee, Jupiter."

It meant, "Goodbye forever" as near as he could translate it. He felt lonely--more lonely even than after Briggs' suicide.

Good Lord! he thought in alarm. He'd better watch himself. He'd been in space so long that he was growing overly fond of this naked little barbarian. The biological urge could be a damned traitorous emotion, and there was no place for a woman in his plans.

He frowned. Unless he should need Lete to lead him back to his ship....

"Where are they taking the others?" he demanded of Reiloc who still paced soundlessly beside his cage.

"To the training pits."

"And me?"

Reiloc appeared puzzled. "To the house of the Radiant God. But it's very strange."

Before Jupiter could voice the questions rising to his lips, a door opened in the wall ahead. He was borne inside an enormous vaulted chamber, his cage dropped on the floor. Reiloc hadn't entered, and the porters retreated through the door. It closed behind them.

Jupiter though, had scarcely been aware of their departure. His whole attention was focused on a huge statue of an Anolyn dominating the room.

The idol shed a soft luminescence, and there was a sense of power in its execution that was god-like:

"In their own image," he thought irreverently, then he sucked in his breath.

The stuff of the image was radioactive! Some incredibly rich uranium or thorium bearing ore. Radium too! He'd never seen anything quite like it. Neither pitchblende nor carnotite. And it must weigh a ton!

Enough to take him half way across the super galaxy!

He gave a harsh laugh. He had found his fuel. It only remained for him to escape carrying a ton of heathen idol with him!