Acid Bath, Page 3
Bill Garson
he toasted. Then he drained the glass at agulp.
Its taste was bitter, and he felt hot prickles jab at his scalp. It waslike eating very hot peppers. His eyes filled with tears. He coughed asthe stuff went down.
But he was still alive, he thought in amazement. He'd drunk the hemlockand was still alive.
The reaction set in quickly. He hadn't known until then how tense he'dbeen. Now with the torture ordeal over, he relaxed. He laid down on thepallet and went to sleep.
There was one lone Steel-Blue watching him when he rubbed the sleep outof his eyes and sat up.
He vanished almost instantly. He, or another like him, returnedimmediately accompanied by a half-dozen others, including themulti-tentacled creature known as No. 1.
One said,
"You are alive." The thought registered amazement. "When you lostconsciousness, we thought you had"--there was a hesitation--"as you say,died."
"No," Jon Karyl said. "I didn't die. I was just plain dead-beat so Iwent to sleep." The Steel-Blues apparently didn't understand.
"Good it is that you live. The torture will continue," spoke No. 1before loping away.
The cylinder business began again. This time, Jon drank the bitterliquid slowly, trying to figure out what it was. It had a familiar,tantalizing taste but he couldn't quite put a taste-finger on it.
His belly said he was hungry. He glanced at his chronometer. Only 20days left before the SP ship arrived.
Would this torture--he chuckled--last until then? But he was growingmore and more conscious that his belly was screaming for hunger. Theliquid had taken the edge off his thirst.
It was on the fifth day of his torture that Jon Karyl decided that hewas going to get something to eat or perish in the attempt.
The cylinder sat passively in its niche in the circle. A dozenSteel-Blues were watching as Jon put on his helmet and unsheathed hisstubray.
They merely watched as he pressed the stubray's firing stud. Invisiblerays licked out of the bulbous muzzle of the pistol. The plasticsplintered.
Jon was out of his goldfish bowl and striding toward his own iglooadjacent to the service station when a Steel-Blue accosted him.
"Out of my way," grunted Jon, waving the stubray. "I'm hungry."
"I'm the first Steel-Blue you met," said the creature who barred hisway. "Go back to your torture."
"But I'm so hungry I'll chew off one of your tentacles and eat itwithout seasoning."
"Eat?" The Steel-Blue sounded puzzled.
"I want to refuel. I've got to have food to keep my engine going."
Steel-Blue chuckled. "So the hemlock, as you call it, is beginning toaffect you at last? Back to the torture room."
"Like R-dust," Jon growled. He pressed the firing stud on the stubraygun. One of Steel-Blue's tentacles broke off and fell to the rockysward.
Steel-Blue jerked out the box he'd used once before. A tentacle dancedover it.
Abruptly Jon found himself standing on a pinnacle of rock. Steel-Bluehad cut a swath around him 15 feet deep and five feet wide.
"Back to the room," Steel-Blue commanded.
Jon resheathed the stubray pistol, shrugged non-committally and leapedthe trench. He walked slowly back and reentered the torture chamber.
The Steel-Blues rapidly repaired the damage he'd done.
As he watched them, Jon was still curious, but he was getting madunderneath at the cold egoism of the Steel-Blues.
By the shimmering clouds of Earth, by her green fields, and darkforests, he'd stay alive to warn the SP ship.
Yes, he'd stay alive till then. And send the story of the Steel-Blues'corrosive acid to it. Then hundreds of Earth's ships could equipthemselves with spray guns and squirt citric acid and watch theSteel-Blues fade away.
It sounded almost silly to Jon Karyl. The fruit acid of Earth to repelthese invaders--it doesn't sound possible. That couldn't be the answer.
Citric acid wasn't the answer, Jon Karyl discovered a week later.
The Steel-Blue who had captured him in the power room of the servicestation came in to examine him.
"You're still holding out, I see," he observed after poking Jon in everysensitive part of his body.
"I'll suggest to No. 1 that we increase the power of the--ah--hemlock.How do you feel?"
Between the rich oxygen and the dizziness of hunger, Jon was a bitdelirious. But he answered honestly enough: "My guts feel as if they'rechewing each other up. My bones ache. My joints creak. I can'tcoordinate I'm so hungry."
"That is the hemlock," Steel-Blue said.
It was when he quaffed the new and stronger draught that Jon knew thathis hope that it was citric acid was squelched.
The acid taste was weaker which meant that the citric acid was thediluting liquid. It was the liquid he couldn't taste beneath the tang ofthe citric acid that was the corrosive acid.
On the fourteenth day, Jon was so weak he didn't feel much like movingaround. He let the cylinder feed him the hemlock.
No. 1 came again to see him, and went away chuckling, "Decrease thedilution. This Earthman at last is beginning to suffer."
* * * * *
Staying alive had now become a fetish with Jon.
On the sixteenth day, the Earthman realized that the Steel-Blues alsowere waiting for the SP ship.
The extra-terrestrials had repaired the blue ship where the servicestation atomic ray had struck. And they were doing a little targetpractice with plastic bubbles only a few miles above the asteroid.
When his chronometer clocked off the beginning of the twenty-first day,Jon received a tumbler of the hemlock from the hands of No. 1 himself.
"It is the hemlock," he chuckled, "undiluted. Drink it and your tortureis over. You will die before your SP ship is destroyed.
"We have played with you long enough. Today we begin to toy with your SPship. Drink up, Earthman, drink to enslavement."
Weak though he was Jon lunged to his feet, spilling the tumbler ofliquid. It ran cool along the plastic arm of his space suit. He changedhis mind about throwing the contents on No. 1.
With a smile he set the glass at his lips and drank. Then he laughed atNo. 1.
"The SP ship will turn your ship into jelly."
No. 1 swept out, chuckling. "Boast if you will, Earthman, it's your lastchance."
There was an exultation in Jon's heart that deadened the hunger andwashed away the nausea.
At last he knew what the hemlock was.
He sat on the pallet adjusting the little power-pack radio. The SP shipshould now be within range of the set. The space patrol was notoriousfor its accuracy in keeping to schedule. Seconds counted like years.They had to be on the nose, or it meant disaster or death.
He sent out the call letters.
"AX to SP-101 ... AX to SP-101 ... AX to SP-101 ..."
Three times he sent the call, then began sending his message, hopingthat his signal was reaching the ship. He couldn't know if theyanswered. Though the power pack could get out a message over a vastdistance, it could not pick up messages even when backed by an SP ship'spower unless the ship was only a few hundred miles away.
The power pack was strictly a distress signal.
He didn't know how long he'd been sending, nor how many times his wearyvoice had repeated the short but desperate message.
He kept watching the heavens and hoping.
Abruptly he knew the SP ship was coming, for the blue ship of theSteel-Blues was rising silently from the asteroid.
Up and up it rose, then flames flickered in a circle about its curiousshape. The ship disappeared, suddenly accelerating.
Jon Karyl strained his eyes.
Finally he looked away from the heavens to the two Steel-Blues who stoodnegligently outside the goldfish bowl.
Once more, Jon used the stubray pistol. He marched out of the plasticigloo and ran toward the service station.
He didn't know how weak he was until he stumbled and fell only a fewfeet from his prison.
He crawled on, around the circular pit in the sward of the asteroidwhere one Steel-Blue had shown him the power of his weapon.
He'd been crawling through a nightmare for years when the quiet voicepenetrated his dulled mind.
"Take it easy, Karyl. You're among friends."
He pried open his eyes with his will. He saw the blue and gold of aspace guard's uniform. He sighed and drifted into unconsciousness.
* * * * *
He was still weak days later when Capt. Ron Small of SP-101 said,
"Yes, Karyl, it's ironical. They fed you what they thought was suredeath, and it's the only thing that kept you going long enough to warnus."
"I was dumb for a long time," Karyl said. "I thought that it was theacid, almost to the very last. But when
