“Better look busy,” the slave on my left tipped me off. He was a medium-sized Drathian with a badly scarred face; that made us pals on two counts. I followed his advice.
There wasn’t anything complicated about the work; you grabbed your chzik, held him by the blunt end, hooked a finger under his carapace, and stripped it off him. Then you captured his four flailing limbs, and with a neat twist of the wrist, removed them. The chziks were active creatures, and they showed their resentment of this treatment by writhing frantically during the operation. When you found yourself tackling a big fellow—weight ten pounds or more—it could sometimes be a little difficult to carry out the job as smoothly as the overseers desired. They usually let you know when this was the case by hitting you across the back with the golf club.
At first, my fingers had a tendency to bleed, since the carapaces were razor-sharp and as tough as plexiglass, and the barbs on the legs had a way of lodging in my palms. But the wounds healed cleanly; the microorganisms of Drath were too alien to my metabolism to give rise to infections. And after a while calluses formed.
I was lucky in timing my arrival near the end of a shift; I was able to look busy enough to keep the overseer away, and make it under my own power to the shed. There were no bunks, no assigned spaces. You just crowded in as far as possible from the weather side and dropped. There was no insomnia on the rafts. The scarred Drathian—the same one who had given me some good advice the first night—helped me out again the next shift, by showing me how to nip off a chunk of raw chzik and suck it for the water content. The meat itself was spongy and inedible as far as I was concerned; but the slop dipped up to us at the regular feeding time was specially designed to be assimilable by a wide variety of species. When an off-brand worker showed up who couldn’t live on the stuff, he soon starved, thus solving the problem.
Instead of the regular cycle of alternating work- and rest-shifts, we harvesters worked two shifts out of three, which effectively prevented any chance of boredom. For six hours at a stretch, we manned our places by the chute with the squirming heaps of chziks arriving just a little faster than we could shell them out. The slippery mat under foot rose and fell in its never-ending rhythm, and beyond its edge, the steel-gray sea stretched to the horizon. Sometimes the sun beat down in a dead calm, and the unbelievable stink rose around us like a foul tide. At night floodlights glared from high on the derricks, and the insects swarmed in to fly into our mouths and eyes and be trampled underfoot to add to the carpet. Sometimes rain came, hot and torrential, but the line never slowed. And later, when gray sleet coated the rigging and decks with soft ice, and the wind cut at us like sabers, we worked on, those of us who could stand the cold; the others settled into the muck and were hauled away and put over the side. And some of us who were still alive envied them.
I remembered reading, years before, back on old Earth, of concentration camp prisoners, and I wondered what it was that kept men going under conditions that made life a torture that never ended. Now I knew; it wasn’t a high-minded determination to endure, or a dauntless will to take a blood-curdling revenge. It was an instinct older than thought, older than hate, that said: “Survive!”
And I survived. My hands toughened, my muscles strengthened, my skin hardened against the cold and the rain. I learned to sleep in icy slush, without protection, with horny feet stumbling over me in the dark; to swallow the watery gruel and hold out the cup for more; to take the routine club-blows of the overseers without hitting back; in the end, without really noticing. There were no friendships on the rafts, no recreations. There was no time or energy for anything not directly related to staying alive for one more day. The Drathian who had helped me on the first day died one wet night, and another took his place; I had never even learned his name.
During my years in space, I had developed an instinctive time-sense that told me when a week, or a month, Earth-style, had passed. I had been almost five years away, now. Sometimes I wondered what had happened during those years, back on that small planet. But it was so far away that it seemed more like a dream than a reality.
For hours at a stretch, sometimes for a whole double shift, my mind would wander far away from the pelagic rafts of Drath. My memories seemed to become more vivid with time, until they were almost realer than the meaningless life around me.
And then one night, the routine broke. A morose-looking Drathian boss-overseer caught me as I went toward the chzik chute, shoved me toward the boat wharf.
“You’re assigned as a net-handler,” he told me. Except for the heavy leather coat he was wearing, he looked as cold and filthy and miserable as the slaves. I climbed down into the twenty-foot, double-prowed dory that was pitching in the choppy water at the foot of the loading ladder, and we shoved off. In five minutes the high-sided raft was out of sight in the ragged fog.
I sat in the stern and stared at the oily gray surface of the water. It was the first new sight I’d seen in many months. The wake was a swirl of foam that drifted aft, forming a pattern like an ugly face that leered up at me through the murky water. The face grew clearer, and then it broke water, a devil-mask of rippling black leaves edged with feathery red gills. An arm swept up, dripping water; I saw the flash of a knife blade as it swept down toward me—and felt the rope fall from my neck. A wide hand clamped on my arm, tumbled me over the stern, and before I could draw a breath, had dragged me down into the cold and the dark.
5
I woke up lying on my back in a warm, dry place. From the motion and the sound, I could tell I was on a boat. The air that moved over my face carried the sweet, clean smell of the sea. Fsha-fsha was standing beside the bunk; in the soft glow from the deck lamp, his face looked almost benign.
“It’s a good thing I recognized you,” I said, and was surprised at the weakness of my voice. “I might have spoiled things by putting a thumb in your eye.”
“Sorry about the rough treatment,” he said. “It was the best we could work out. The tender-master wasn’t in on it; just the boss-overseer.”
“It worked,” I said, and stopped to cough, and tasted the alien saltwater of Drath. “That’s all that counts.”
“We’re not clear yet, but the trickiest part went all right. Maybe the rest will work out, too.”
“Where are we headed?”
“There’s an abandoned harbor not far from here; about four hours’ run. A filer will meet us there.” I started to ask another question, but my eye was too heavy to hold open. I closed it and the warm blanket of darkness folded in on me.
6
Voices woke me. For a moment, I was back aboard Lord Desroy’s yacht, lying on a heap of uncured Nith-hides, and the illusion was so strong that I felt a ghostly pang from the arm, broken and mended so long ago. Then Fsha-fsha’s voice cut through the dream.
” . . . up now, Danger, have to walk a little way. How do you feel?”
I sat up and put my legs over the side of the cot and stood. “Like a drowned sailor,” I said. “Let’s go.”
Up on the deck of the little surface cutter, I could see lights across the water. Fsha-fsha had put a heavy mackinaw across my shoulders. For the first time in a year, I felt cold. The engines idled back and we swung in beside a jetty. A small, furtive-looking Drathian was waiting beside a battered cargo-car. We climbed up into the box and settled down under some stiff tarpaulins, and a moment later the truck started up and pulled out in a whine of worn turbos.
I slept again. The habit of almost a year on the rafts, to sleep whenever I wasn’t on the line, was too strong to break in an hour; and breathing the salt seas of Drath isn’t the best treatment for human lungs. When I woke up this time, the car had stopped. Fsha-fsha put a hand on my arm and I lay quiet. Then he tapped me and we crawled out and slid down the tailgate, and I saw we were parked at the edge of the spaceport at Drath City. The big dome loomed up under the black sky across the ramp, as faded and patched as ever; and between us and it, the clumsy bulk of an ancient cargo-carrier squatted on battered parking jacks.