Chapter IV

Jupiter was crouching on the floor of his cage when the door to the corridor opened softly behind him. He turned his head.

A girl, he saw, had slipped inside. She let the panel close behind her, stared at him out of wide violet-blue eyes.

She was a slim fragile thing with pale yellow hair like winter sunlight. A Caligan, a pink-skinned woman, he realized. The first he'd seen.

She wore a shoulderless, clinging, single-piece garment of yellow fur. Suddenly the garment moved, pulling itself higher up one shoulder, settling snugly about her waist.

Moved of its own volition!

"It's alive!" Jupiter burst out. "What in Heaven's name is that thing?"

The girl wrinkled her forehead. "Of course, it's alive. It's a boj. Have you never seen one?"

He shook his head.

She lifted the creature away from her skin, held it out to him through the bars.

"Put it on."

Jupiter took it gingerly. It was light and flat with the warm limp feel of a fresh pelt. The under side of the boj was hairless, the skin like foam rubber. He could find neither eyes nor mouth.

The girl sensed what he was looking for, laughed infectiously.

"It hasn't any," she said; "it breathes and feeds through its skin. Put it on."

Jupiter let it touch his body. At once the boj wrapped itself around him. It was electrically alive, vibrant. He could feel a pleasant tingle in his nerve ends and glanced at the Caligan girl in surprise.

She wore an amused expression and nothing else. There was an utter lack of self consciousness about her. Jupiter found himself comparing her soft, delicately rounded figure with Lete's lithe brown boyishness.

The Caligan girl suddenly held out her hand for the boj. He peeled it off reluctantly, asking:

"Who are you?"

"Tabak," she replied. "Did you come to Yogol in a fiery chariot from beyond the stars?"

He nodded.

Tabak's blue eyes widened. She drew close to the cage as if pulled by a magnet, peered intently into his eyes.

"May--may I come into your mind?"

Jupiter's hard, bewhiskered face stiffened in surprise.

"Telepathy! Is that what you mean? Can you do that?"

"A little--if you help. We Caligans are closer to the Anolyn than the other races. But we haven't much time before they come to examine you. Won't you let your barriers down? The whole city is alive with rumors...."

* * * * *

Jupiter had recoiled instinctively from having his innermost privacy violated. He scowled in suspicion, asked: "Who sent you? What're you after?"

"No one." She bit her lip. "There's a legend, a--a myth if you like, about the 'Wanderer-from-Beyond', who is to drive the Anolyn back into the sea."

He scratched his beard which had grown back since his captivity.

"How did you get in here?"

"I'm a favorite of one of the Anolyn. I've the run of the temple. Please, please let me inside. I must know. You'll understand much more about Yogol than I could ever tell you."

Her last words decided him. He needed information desperately if he were ever to escape.

"What shall I do?" he asked in grudging consent.

"Will me to enter. Think! Open your mind to me. There's nothing to fear. No need to be suspicious. I'm not an Anolyn. I can't force myself on you...."

A dazzling light seemed to burst behind Jupiter's eyes. The girl was in. He could feel her!

He was aware of Tabak's mind, questing, probing. His brain pulsed as if he had a violent headache.

At the same time, a whole new set of memory patterns, unfamiliar facts, stray incidents and ideas made themselves felt. It was as if a volume of the Encyclopedia Galactica had been up-ended and all the information therein had been poured into his brain helter-skelter with the utmost confusion.

Somehow, he knew all that Tabak knew, all that she'd ever felt or seen or heard; but horribly jumbled, meaningless like the scrambled parts of an intricate jig-saw puzzle.

He heard her exclaim aloud: "It's true! The Wanderer-from-Beyond!" Then a fear thought: "_I must go! They mustn't find me here!_"

He felt her mind withdraw, saw her slip from the temple room, a slim, graceful figure in the shimmering yellow fur cloak--the living sensuous boj. He was too appalled to try to stop her.

His mind was like a warehouse of unrelated, unassorted, unassimilated facts. He needed time to incorporate the confusing jumble into intelligible order.

Time and contemplation.

He was to get neither yet, he saw, for the door opened almost on Tabak's heels, and three of the Anolyns crawled in like fat, purple-shelled snails.

* * * * *

Jupiter was put through one of the worst ordeals of his life--all the more degrading because it was conducted in contemptuous silence.

The Anolyns took immediate possession of his mind. He was made to crawl out of his cage and stand stock still while they examined him like judges at a fat cattle show.

From time to time burning mental questions exploded in his brain. Jupiter was enough of a psychologist to know that they were intended to stimulate subconscious memory patterns.

He felt as if he'd been thrust into a press and all his information was being squeezed out of him like cider from an apple. But unlike his experience with Tabak, he could learn nothing from them.

The Anolyn maintained a perfect mental barrier.

In spite of that he began to sense that they regarded him with growing alarm. He could almost feel their control over him tighten.

At length he was directed out into the corridor, marched into a tiny bare cell. Not until the door closed on him with a small final click, did the Anolyn remove their control.

Jupiter sank white and shaken onto the hard, narrow bunk.

The cell was about ten feet square, windowless with walls of bare white plastic. The ceiling was plastered with a green phosphorescent mould, lighting it eerily. There was a single stool and a table and that was all.

He locked his hands beneath his head. His green eyes looked older. They seemed to peer inward as he sought to organize the flood of information he'd received almost instantaneously in that startling, intimate exchange with Tabak.

Gradually it dawned on him that he was in full possession of Tabak's life history--all the millions of insignificant items that went to make up the girl's personality.

Once he realized that, the pieces began to click into place. It was indeed like a jig-saw puzzle. And slowly the picture appeared.

Tabak was a pet, like a cat or dog, and as such she'd had a greater opportunity to observe the purple-shelled octopods.

The Anolyns hadn't always been the dominant life form on Yogol. Ages ago, eons perhaps--Tabak had entertained only the vaguest notion of time--the humans had ruled the planet. They had built splendid cities, now crumbled into dust and even the dust buried beneath the jungle mould. Only the legend remained.

The ancients, according to that legend, had experimented finally with telepathy. They had discovered that the young of the Anolyn--a semi-intelligent, telepathic, parasite--acted as a thought receiver and transmitter if it were allowed to fasten its tentacles directly into the spinal cord.

The fad spread. More and more Yogolians began to make use of the telepathic parasites.

Then one day the adult Anolyn rose from the sea and, through their young, took over the human race.

Not all at once and not everyone.

Some had refused to allow the Anolyn to be fastened to their necks. These few fled to the wilderness, where during ages of warfare with their Anolyn-dominated brothers, they had sunk into barbarism. These were the Kagans, the wild cave people whom the Anolyn now hunted for sport.

As for the Anolyn themselves, they had abandoned the fallen human cities, building their citadels around the inland seas from whence they'd sprung. They had evolved their own unique culture.

They appeared to know only the most rudimentary facts of the physical sciences, though they had made startling advances in the biological field.

Even their cities were built by minute, coral-like creatures working under telepathic direction. Certain insects had been trained to spin thread from their own body secretions and weave fabrics. Humans had been bred for specialized functions: draft animals and meat animals, soldiers and sailors and artisans.

As soon as a Yogolian attained adolescence, a young Anolyn was fastened to his spinal cord. Thus the humans were forced to act both as living incubators for the Anolyn young and as servants for the adults.

It was, Jupiter realized with horror, a wholly parasitic culture. Orgies were held, and gladiatorial combats, one Anolyn pitting its human vehicle against another. Empathy was perfect.

There were other things, unmentionable things which Jupiter tried to thrust from his mind. Scenes from the training pits, the biological breeding stations....

He was sick at his stomach, sick and emotionally exhausted. He could see no hope of escape. Not so long as the horrid parasite remained fastened to his spinal cord.

And by its very nature the creature couldn't be dislodged or killed!

He closed his eyes, feeling as depleted as if he'd run the mile, slid over the lip of consciousness into deep sleep.