Chapter 5: In The Dungeons

My cellmate in the dark stone room under the arena was a handsome tanned man named Joel Lars. We soon became fast friends, not merely because we were padlocked together but because we shared a great community of interests and also believed in the manly virtues and a planned program of daily exercise.

"We will not be called into the arena for many days," Joel Lars told me.

"Unfortunate," I said. "For I have only now re-met a girl for whom I have searched many centuries on many worlds."

"Too bad," he replied with real sympathy. "Speaking of girls, would you care to hear my story?"

"It would help pass the dark hours here."

"It took place on Venus, which as you may know, is a planet in this system of ours."

"I am a great admirer of that planet," I said, "Please to continue."

"Of the overall surface of that planet I know little," went on Joel Lars. "Of its interior I know only too much. For it is there that the only woman I will ever love, Virl Yank, is at this moment a captive of the fiendish Yes Men of Venus."

"How does she happen to be inside Venus?" I asked.

"Let me go back a bit," said Joel Lars. "My parents were missionaries and one fine day they took their spaceship to Venus. Our crewmen proved disloyal and in a dispute over shorter hours they threw my beloved parents and myself over the side. We were stranded in the steamy jungles and my parents soon succumbed to the moist living. I, a mere boy of seven, survived and was raised to manhood by the Boogdabs, what the Martians would call Yarznigs, roughly equivalent to the Earth's great apes."

"What of the cursed Yes Men and your dear Virl Yank?"

"Being raised by great apes has a strange effect on one," answered Joel Lars. "It took several years of therapy to completely rid me of the idea that I might be an ape myself. I still dream sometimes that my mother was. Now, as to the Yes Men."

His narrative was cut short at this point by the arrival of a group of guards who flung our cell open and pulled us to our feet. "There has been a last minute cancellation," one of them, a coarse hairy fellow, explained. "The star gladiator is ill and you two will have to go on in his place."

CLOSING NOTE: What transpired next would fill a book itself. And this is exactly what my agent has advised me to do with it.

THE END