Milt now struggled to his feet. Con spoke to him in a low voice. Bergen picked his way over the wreckage to the corner of the room, dropped to a sitting position, let go of the jug, and found the broken double-bitted ax.
His eyes were becoming accustomed to the relative dimness of the cabin. Holding the ax head by the remnant of its splintered handle, he crossed the room to a still dimmer corner behind a clutter of wreckage. He crouched behind an overturned table, took a fresh grip on the ax head, and carefully worked it back and forth as the blade cut through the rope.
At the window, Milt, swaying slightly, looked into the room. Bergen massaged his wrists, quietly picked up a solid round table leg.
The door opened, and Con eased in, blinking and holding a billet of wood in either hand.
Bergen tossed a small broken stool across the room at the jug. The jug smashed. Con slung a billet of wood toward the noise. Bergen sprang past the pile of wreckage, and rammed the end of the table leg into Con’s stomach. The rush carried him out the door. He caught a glimpse of Milt climbing in the window, smashed him on the back of the neck, knocking him all the way in, followed him inside, hit him over the head, and looked around.
Con was stretched out by the door. Milt was stretched out by the window. Bergen glanced outside. The woman was leaning against the porch post of the next cabin, watching him.
From one of the tall circular mounds in the field, a column of marching insects was winding out across the field, its far end nowhere in sight. Bergen stepped out on the porch, and looked all around.
When he glanced back, the woman was standing about six feet away, smiling. Her eyes had a glazed look.
“Honey,” she breathed, and swayed toward him.
Bergen uneasily stepped back.
From somewhere came a peculiar rustling. He looked around, to see that the ribbon of insects issuing from the mound in the field had changed direction, and was approaching the cabins in a wide lane. As he watched, the insects burst out of the grass onto the porch.
The woman looked around, screamed, and fainted.
Bergen swore, heaved her onto his shoulder, and stumbled toward the next cabin. The rustling continued, apparently all around him, and he saw another wide line of insects pour onto the porch of the cabin in front of him.
A faint shadow swung across the side of the cabin in front of him.
Bergen whirled and strode toward the edge of the field. For a moment, his thinking processes were almost blotted out by the realization of what must be happening to the unconscious men in the cabin. But there was nothing he could do about it.
Meanwhile, as his thoughts dwelt on this, the shadow he’d briefly noticed streaked fast across the field, there was a rush of wind, sharp talons sank in at the base of his neck and left shoulder, there was an agonizing wrench, and then the ground was falling away, the woman lying on the ground looking blankly up at him, huge leathery wings creaking around him, and he was carried up, and up, to hover high over a large stained boulder, and then he was let go.
There was a terrific concussion.
* * *
Bergen dazedly opened his eyes.
The colonel was standing by the cot. He beamed. “I had my doubts for a while there. But you made it.”
Bergen sat up dizzily. He took a deep breath. “Your mind has to be always on the problem, doesn’t it? You have to keep looking for a chance, an opening, and be poised to take advantage of it.”
“Let’s say,” said the colonel, “that there’s a certain hard-to-define attitude you have to attain, a certain frame of mind. In the other tests, it was incidental, though lack of it would finish you in time. In this test, it was central. Self-pity, complaining, prolonged indecision, fear, dread, any of a number of distractions would finish you in short order. The test was programmed to keep the crises coming at you faster and faster. You bungled the first part, but once you straightened out you did well. We’re proud of you.”
Bergen felt the heady flush of victory. He had succeeded. He had outwitted the stockade.
The colonel gripped his hand, then turned toward the hatch. “Follow me, my boy, and we’ll get you your outfit. Then you can begin training immediately.” He led the way out through a storeroom filled with temporarily paralyzed gorillas, alligators, grizzly bears, and other assorted tools-of-the-trade.
To make conversation as he passed through this place, Bergen remarked, “It’ll be a relief to get to work. That’s the roughest entrance exam I’ve ever heard of.”
“Oh, sure,” said the colonel, brushing aside a sack full of coral snakes. “But we have to make the process of selection tough, so you can survive the training.” He gave Bergen a look of fatherly pride. “The time will come, my boy, when you’ll look back on these admission tests and smile.”
The colonel stepped out into the corridor.
A chill passed through Bergen as he followed.
As he trailed the colonel down the hall, now a full-fledged recruit in the Interstellar Patrol, a little question occurred to Bergen:
“Just what was so bad about the stockade?”
THE ROYAL ROAD
I
Colonel Valentine Sanders of the Interstellar Patrol had just emerged from a session with the simulator when the call came. Against this opponent, the colonel always lost. Scarcely anyone was able to hold the simulator to a draw until the preset time was up. Nearly always, sooner or later, it found some weakness in the man, and by means of the weakness, beat him. This time, the colonel had wasted a precious fraction of a second congratulating himself on his performance, and that fraction of a second, once wasted, was the margin by which he lost. Now, seeing it all clearly, the colonel was in an angry frame of mind as the call buzzer sounded.
“Code number,” demanded the colonel.
On the gray bulkhead opposite, the numeral “4” appeared.
The colonel frowned. “Go ahead.”
The gray bulkhead vanished, to show a strongly built man with piercing blue eyes, seated at a desk facing him.
“We have a little problem, Val.”
The colonel’s expression was alert. “This business with the Space Force?”
“No, that will work out however it works out. If they open fire, we’ll fuse a few turrets, to get it across that Imperial Trasimere will stand for no nonsense. Right this minute, we’re beaming our recognition signal at them, and this new recruit’s ship is giving Larssen enough hints so that even a Space Force general ought to catch on.”
“Larssen has high-grade steel between the ears.”
“Can’t be helped. He’s Space Force.”
“How did we get in this spot?”
“As nearly as I can figure it out, it started when the main gravitor went haywire on one of Interstellar Rapid Transport’s fast freights. The nearest repair facility seemed to be on Boschock III, so they headed there for help.”
“Ouch,” said the colonel.
“Exactly. They discovered that the settled part of the planet was nothing but a gigantic slum, run by a computer.”
“What did they do?”
“We’d like to know. Whatever they did led the planetary computer to divert effort from maintenance and rebuild the repair facility to help them.”
“Quite a feat.”
“Wasn’t it? Since, at that time, we had nothing but a set of out-phased watch satellites observing the planet, we don’t know just what they did. But of course, after they left, we watched them, and the watch quickly boiled down to a surveillance of three men—Roberts, the captain; Hammell, the cargo-control officer; and Morrissey, the communications officer. These three took their accumulated leave, and started looking around for a ship to go back to Boschock III.”
“So they could perfect what they’d used there before?”
“Why else would anyone go back to that place?”
“Hm-m-m. So then we found out what they were using before they got back?”
“We did not. We sent an ‘I’-class crew after them. As usual, we were short-handed, but that should have been enough. However, these three men are tough, and secretive. There wasn’t anything to be found. Then Roberts, the captain, latched onto a ‘J’-class ship planted in a salvage cluster. It rejected the other two men, but accepted him.”
“Complicates the issue.”
“Yes. Now we were up against our own stuff. SymComp was perfectly happy, of course, since it could follow what was happening through this J-ship’s own symbiotic computer. But where did that leave us? Roberts, of course, merely thought he’d bought a good ship at a comparative bargain price. We couldn’t contact him because that would wreck his trial period. Meanwhile, on this end, SymComp was perfectly bland and uninformative. Doubtless Link knew what was going on, but we weren’t informed from there, either.”