Wolfling

Chapter 3

The feline creature flashed forward and upward into Jim’s face—and vanished.

Jim had not moved. For a moment he was alone in the long, rectangular room; and then suddenly there were three of the High-born males around him, one of them with the dragonlike insignia upon his shirt, or tunic, front. That one had brought Jim here. Of the other two, one was almost short by High-born standards—barely three inches taller than Jim. The third was the tallest of the three—a slim, rather graceful-looking man with the first expression resembling a smile Jim had ever seen on purely onyx-colored features; and this last of the three High-born wore a red insignia which looked somewhat like the horns and head of a stag.

“I told you they were brave, these Wolflings,” drawled this last member of the group. “Your trick didn’t work, Mekon.”

“Courage!” said the one addressed as Mekon angrily. “That was too good to be true. He didn’t even move a muscle! You’d think he’d been—” Mekon bit off the words abruptly, glancing hastily at the tall Slothiel, who stiffened.

“Go on. Go on, Mekon,” drawled the tall High-born, but there was an edge to his drawl now. “You were going to say something like… ‘warned’?”

“Of course Mekon didn’t mean to say anything like that.” It was Trahey, almost literally pushing himself between the other two men, whose eyes were now fixedly fastened on each other.

“I’d like to hear Mekon tell me that,” murmured Slothiel.

Mekon’s eyes dropped. “I—of course, I didn’t mean anything of the sort. I don’t remember what I was going to say,” he said.

“Then I take it,” said Slothiel, “that I’ve won. One Lifetime Point, to me?”

“One—” The admission clearly stuck in Mekon’s throat. His face had darkened with a rush of blood similar to the flush that Jim had noticed come too easily to the face of Ro. “One Lifetime Point to you.”

Slothiel laughed. “Don’t take it so hard, man,” he said. “You can have a chance to win it back anytime you’ve got a decent wager to propose.”

But Mekon’s temper had flared again. “All right,” he snapped, and swung to face Jim. “I’ve given up the point—but I’d still like to know why this Wolfling didn’t even twitch when the beast went for him. There’s something unnatural here.”

“Why don’t you ask him?” drawled Slothiel.

“I am asking him!” said Mekon, his eyes burning upon Jim. “Speak up, Wolfling. Why didn’t you show any sign of a reaction?”

“The Princess Afuan is taking me to the Throne World to show me off to the Emperor,” Jim answered quietly. “I could hardly be shown off if I were badly torn up or killed by an animal like that one. Therefore, whoever was responsible for the cat coming at me was certain to make sure that I wouldn’t be hurt by it.”

Slothiel threw back his head and laughed loudly. Mekon’s face, which had paled back to its normal color, now flushed again with a dark rush of angry blood.

“So!” snapped Mekon. “You think you can’t be touched, is that it, Wolfling? I’ll show you—”

He broke off, for Ro had suddenly appeared in the room beside them; and now she literally shoved herself between Jim and the angry High-born.

“What’re you doing to him?” she cried. “He’s supposed to be left with me! He’s not for the rest of you to play with—”

“Why, you little mud-skinned throwback!” snapped Mekon. His hand darted out to the small black stick running through the two loops of the ropelike material that acted as a belt to her white dress. “Give me that rod!”

As his hand closed upon it, she snatched at it herself; and for a moment there was a tug-of-war in which the rod had come loose from the belt and they both had hold of it.

“Let go, you little—” Mekon raised one hand, clenching his fingers into a fist as though to strike down at Ro; and, at that moment, Jim stepped suddenly up to him.

The High-born yelled suddenly—it was almost a bass scream—and let go of the rod, falling back and holding his right arm with his left hand. All down along his forearm a line dripped red, and Jim was putting the little knife back into its scabbard.

There was a sudden, utter, frozen silence in the room. Trahey, the heretofore self-possessed Slothiel, and even Ro were utterly still, staring at the blood running down Mekon’s forearm. If the walls of the ship had begun to crumble about them, they could not have looked more overwhelmed and stupefied.

“He—the Wolfling damaged me,” stuttered Mekon, staring wildly at his bleeding arm. “Did you see what he did?”

Slowly Mekon raised his eyes to his two companions.

“Did you see what he did?” Mekon screamed. “Get me a rod! Don’t just stand there! Get me a rod!”

Trahey made a slow move as if to step toward Ro, but Slothiel, with suddenly narrowed eyes, caught Trahey’s arm.

“No, no,” murmured Slothiel. “Our little game isn’t a game anymore. If he wants rods, let him get them himself.”

Trahey stood still. Ro abruptly disappeared.

“Blind you, Trahey!” shouted Mekon. “I’ll collect from you for this! Get me a rod, I say!”

Trahey slowly shook his head, though his lips were almost bloodless.

“A rod—no. No, Mekon,” he said. “Slothiel’s right. You’ll have to do that for yourself.”

“Then I will!” screamed Mekon—and disappeared.

“I still say you’re a brave man, Wolfling,” said Slothiel to Jim. “Let me give you a piece of advice. If Mekon offers you a rod, don’t take it.”

Trahey made an odd little sound, like a man who has started to speak and then suddenly thought better of it. Slothiel turned his eyes upon the other High-born.

“You were going to say something, Trahey?” he asked. “Perhaps you were going to object to my advising the Wolfling?”

Trahey shook his head. But the glance he threw at Jim was baleful.

Mekon suddenly reappeared, his arm still bleeding, but the hand at the end of it clutching two short black rods like the one Ro had worn in the loops of her belt. He held one of these in his good hand, and stepping forward, thrust it at Jim.

“Take this, Wolfling!” he snapped.

Jim shook his head and drew the small knife from his kilt.

“No thanks,” he said. “I think I’ll stick to this.”

Mekon’s face lit up savagely.

“Suit yourself!” he said, and threw the rod he had offered across the room. “It makes no difference to me—”

“But it does to me!” cut in a new voice. It was a woman’s voice, behind Jim. Jim turned quickly and backed off a step so as to keep everyone in the room in front of him. Ro had reappeared, he saw; and with her was a tall female High-born whom Jim believed he recognized as Afuan. Behind both women towered a slim High-born male, possibly even an inch or two taller than Slothiel.

“Well?” went on Afuan, if it was indeed she. “Has something happened to alter the tables of precedence, so that you think you can take it on yourself to rod one of my pets, Mekon?”

Mekon had frozen. Even the expression on his face, caught halfway between rage and astonishment, seemed fixed there by a sort of paralysis.

Behind the two women the unusually tall male High-born smiled slowly. It was a smile something like the lazy smile of Slothiel, but there was more of a feeling of power—and perhaps more of cruelty—in it.

“I’m afraid you’ve offended Her Majesty, Mekon,” he said. “That could cost you more than a few Lifetime Points. Men have been banished to the Colony Worlds for less.”

Surprisingly, it was Slothiel who came to the defense of the paralyzed Mekon.

“Not perhaps in just such a case as this,” said Slothiel. “The Wolfling assaulted Mekon first. Certainly someone like Galyan would understand how a man could react to something like that.”

The eyes of the tall High-born addressed as Galyan went out to meet with Slothiel’s. They looked at each other with a mutual amusement that seemed to hang upon the very lip of animosity. Someday, those looks seemed to say, we will clash, but not now. The Princess Afuan noticed the exchange, and instantly her own manner changed to one of brisk reasonableness.

“Nonsense!” she said. “He’s only a Wolfling, after all! Do you enjoy looking disgusting, man?” This last phrase was addressed to Mekon. “Heal yourself!”

Mekon woke abruptly from his trance and looked down at his wounded arm. Jim looked at it also; and before his eyes he saw the long shallow cut slowly begin to close and firm over—without any of the ordinary signs of scabbing or healing. Within perhaps a second and a half the wound had disappeared, leaving only white-onyx skin that looked as if it had never been cut. The dried blood on the arm remained, but after a second Mekon passed his other hand along it, and this too vanished. He was left with an arm not only whole but clean. Jim put the knife back into its scabbard at his belt.

“That’s better,” said Afuan. She turned to the tall man beside her. “I’ll leave it to you now, Galyan. See that Mekon pays some kind of a fine.”

She vanished.

“You can go too, girl,” Galyan said, looking down at Ro. “I didn’t have a chance to watch this Wolfling putting on his act on the planet. After I deal with Mekon, I’d like to examine the wild man myself.”

Ro hesitated. Her face was unhappy.

“Go along,” said Galyan softly but sharply. “I’m not going to hurt your Wolfling! You’ll have him back in perfect shape before you know it.”

Ro hesitated a second longer, then vanished, in her turn, casting a strangely appealing glance at Jim just before she went, as if to caution him against any act that might lead to further trouble.

“Come with me, Wolfling,” said Galyan. He disappeared. After a second, he reappeared, smiling quizzically at Jim.

“So you don’t know how to move around in the ship, do you?” he said. “Very well, Wolfling. I’ll provide your motive power.”

At once Jim found himself in a large, oval, low-ceilinged room with yellow walls, which more resembled an office or a place of work than any of the rooms he had so far visited aboard the vessel. At hard-surfaced slabs of what looked like stone floating in midair and plainly in use as desktops, three men were at work—none of them High-born.

Two were brown, squat men—about the color of a white-skinned human from Earth with a good heavy suntan. They were no more than five and a half feet tall. The third, who was looking at what appeared to be a map, was possibly six inches taller and a hundred pounds heavier than the other two. His greater weight was not in body fat, but plainly in a very heavy, even massive skeleton and corresponding musculature. Unlike the two shorter men, who had long, straight brown hair hanging down their backs almost in the fashion in which the white hair of the High-born women was allowed to hang, the third man was completely bald. His round, hairless skull, with its grayish skin stretched tightly over the bone beneath, was the most prominent feature about him, so that it made his eyes, his nose, his mouth, and even his fairly good-sized ears seem small by comparison. This third man got up on seeing Galyan and Jim appear in the room.

“No, no. It’s all right, Reas,” said Galyan. “Back to your work.”

The powerful-looking man sat down again without a word and returned to his map study.

“Reas,” said Galyan, waving a hand at him, and looking down at Jim, “is what you might call my bodyguard. Although I don’t need a bodyguard—no more than any of the High-born do. Does that surprise you?”

“I don’t know enough about it to be either surprised or not surprised,” answered Jim.

Galyan nodded, surprisingly, as if in approval.

“No, of course you don’t,” he said. He sat down on a handy cushion and reached out a long arm.

“Let me see that tool of yours,” he said. “The one you used to hurt Mekon.”

Jim drew the knife and passed it over, hilt first. Galyan accepted it gingerly, holding it between a thumb and two opposing fingers. He held it up in the air before his eyes and tenderly touched its point and edges with the long forefinger of his left hand. Then he handed it back to Jim.

“I suppose you could kill an ordinary man with something like that,” he said.

“Yes,” said Jim.

“Very interesting,” said Galyan. He sat for a moment, as if caught up in his own thoughts. Then his eyes focused on Jim once more. “You realize, I suppose, that you aren’t allowed to go around damaging the High-born with tools like that?”

Jim said nothing. In the face of his silence, Galyan smiled, almost as he had smiled at Slothiel—a little enigmatically, a little cruelly.

“You’re very interesting, Wolfling,” he said slowly. “Very interesting indeed. You don’t seem to realize that you exist like an insect in the palm of any one of us who are High-born. Now, someone like Mekon would have closed his hand and crushed the life out of you long before this. In fact, that is just what he was about to do when Afuan and I stopped him. But I’m not the sort of High-born that Mekon is. In fact, I am like no other High-born you will meet—except the Emperor; and, since we’re first cousins, that’s not surprising. So I’m not going to close my hand on you, Wolfling. I’m going to reason with you—as if you were High-born yourself.”

“Thank you,” said Jim.

“You do not thank me, Wolfling,” said Galyan softly. “You do not thank me, or curse me, or plead with me, or praise me. You do nothing where I am concerned—but listen. And answer when you are questioned. Now, to begin with. How did you get into that room with Mekon, Trahey, and Slothiel?”

Jim told him briefly and emotionlessly.

“I see,” said Galyan. He clasped his long hands around one knee and leaned back a little on his cushion, looking at a slight slant up into Jim’s face. “So you trusted to the fact that the Princess intended to show you off to the Emperor, and that for that reason no one else would dare harm you. Even if such a faith were justified, Wolfling, you showed a rather remarkable control of your nerves to stand absolutely still while that beast jumped at your face.”

He paused, as if to give Jim a chance to say something. When Jim did not, he murmured, almost deprecatingly, “You have my leave to speak.”

“What would you like me to speak about?” asked Jim.

Galyan’s lemon-yellow eyes glowed almost like a cat’s eyes in the dark.

“Yes,” he murmured, drawing the s sound out slowly, “you are most unusual—even for a Wolfling. Though I haven’t actually met that many Wolflings, so that I don’t consider myself much of a judge. You’re fairly good-sized for someone not High-born. Tell me, the rest of your people aren’t as big as you, are they?”

“On the average, no,” said Jim.

“Then there’re bigger males among you?”

“Yes,” said Jim, without expanding on the subject.

“As large as the High-born?” asked Galyan. “Are there any as tall as myself?”

“Yes,” said Jim.

“But not many,” said Galyan, his eyes glowing. “In fact, they’re rare. Isn’t that so?”

“That’s right,” said Jim.

“In fact,” said Galyan, nursing his knee, “to be truthful about it, you might say that they are practically in the case of freaks—aren’t they?”

“You might say that,” said Jim.

“Yes, I thought we’d get at the truth,” said Galyan. “You see, Wolfling, we of the High-born are not freaks. We’re a true aristocracy—an aristocracy of not merely inherited power superior to anything else owned by the various races of man. We’re superior physically, mentally, and emotionally. This is a fact that you will not have grasped yet; and normally the practice would have been to let you discover it the hard way on your own. However, I’ve taken an interest in you…”

He turned to Reas.

“Bring me a couple of rods,” he said.

The heavy-boned bodyguard got up from his map, went across the room, and came back holding a pair of short black rods like the one Jim had seen at Ro’s belt and like the two which Mekon had produced after Jim had used the knife on him. Another black rod, just like the two in Reas’ hands, Jim noticed, was stuck through loops in the ropelike belt that encircled Reas’ thick waist.

“Thank you, Reas,” said Galyan, accepting the two rods. He turned to Jim. “I told you that you won’t find other High-born like me. I’m remarkably free of prejudice toward the lesser races of man—not out of any sentimentality, but out of practicality. But I would like to show you something.”

He turned his head and beckoned to one of the small, brown-skinned men with the brown hair hanging straight down his back. The man got up and came over to stand beside Reas, and Galyan handed him one of the two black rods. The man stuck it through the belt around his own waist.

“Reas, as I said,” said Galyan to Jim, “is not only trained but actually bred to be a bodyguard. Now, observe how he handles his rod, compared to his opponent here.”

Galyan turned to Reas and the other man, who were now facing each other at a distance of about four feet.

“I will clap my hands twice,” said Galyan to them. “The first clap commences the draw—only, Reas will not be allowed to draw until the second clap. Observe, Wolfling!”

Galyan lifted his hands and clapped them softly together twice, the second clap following about a half-second behind the first. At the sound of the first clap, the small brown man snatched the rod from his belt and was just bringing its far end up to point at Reas when the second clap sounded and Reas drew his own rod swiftly and smoothly.

Just then, something in appearance like a cross between the flame of a welding torch and the arc of a static-electricity charge crackled from the end of the rod held by the smaller man. It was aimed directly at the chest of Reas, but it never reached its target. Even as it burst from the end of the rod, Reas’ rod was already in position, and a counterdischarge met and deflected the discharge from the smaller man’s rod, so that both charges went upward.

“Very good,” said Galyan. The discharge from both rods ceased, and both men lowered their rods and turned to face the Highborn. Galyan reached out and took the rod from the small brown man and dismissed him with a wave back to his work.

“Now, watch closely, Wolfling,” said Galyan. He slid the black rod he held into a pair of loops on his own belt; and as if in response to an unseen signal, the bodyguard, Reas, did the same with his rod.

“Now, as I say—observe, Wolfling,” said Galyan softly. “Reas can draw at any time he wishes.”

Reas stepped forward until he was less than an arm’s length from the seated High-born. For a moment he stood completely motionless; then he looked off into a corner of the room; and at the same moment his hand flashed toward his belt.

There was a sudden sharp click! Galyan’s arm was extended, and the rod in his hand was holding Reas’ rod in half-drawn position from its belt loops. Galyan chuckled softly and released the pressure he was putting against the other rod. He handed his rod back to Reas, who took them away across the room.

“You see?” said Galyan, turning to Jim. “Any High-born has faster reflexes than any single human of any of the other races of man. Let alone wild men like yourselves. That was why in going after rods as Mekon did, he was intending to force you into a duel that you had no chance whatsoever of winning. As I say, we are true aristocracy. Not only are my reflexes faster than those of Reas, but my memory is better, my intelligence is greater, my discernment and perceptions are sharper than those of any other human beings—yes, even among the High-born themselves. But, in spite of that, I employ more of the low-born than any of my fellow High-born. I have many things for them to do, and I keep them busy at it. Do you wonder why I do this, when I myself could do any of these things better, by and for myself?”

“I’d assume,” said Jim, “for the simple reason that you can’t be in two places at once.”

Galyan’s eyes glowed with a new intensity.

“What a brilliant Wolfling it is!” he said. “Yes, other men are useful to me, even though they are inferior. And it strikes me, just now, that maybe you and the little tool of yours with which you damaged Mekon might one day be useful to me, too. Are you surprised to hear that?”

“Not after you spent this much time on me,” said Jim.

Galyan rocked himself softly on his cushion, holding to his knee.

“Better and better,” he murmured. “This Wolfling has a brain—raw gray matter, of course. But a brain, nonetheless. I wasn’t wrong. Yes, I may have a use for you, Wolfling—and do you know why you’ll be useful to me when the time comes?”

“You must plan to pay me, some way or another,” said Jim.

“Exactly,” said Galyan. “We High-born do not show our age, so I’ll tell you right now, Wolfling, that while I’m by no means into middle age, as we know lifetimes, still, I’m not a raw youngster anymore. And I’ve learned how to get members of the lesser human races to work for me. I give them whatever they most want by way of reward and payment.”

He paused. Jim waited.

“Well, Wolfling,” said Galyan after a minute, “what is it you want most? If you were not a wild man, I wouldn’t have to ask you. But I don’t know Wolflings well enough to know what they want. What do they want most?”

“Freedom,” said Jim.

Galyan smiled.

“Of course,” he said. “What all wild beasts want—or think they want. Freedom. And in your case, freedom means the right to come and go, doesn’t it?”

“That’s the base of it,” said Jim.

“Particularly the right to go, I should think,” murmured Galyan. “No doubt you never stopped to think of it, Wolfling, but it is simple fact that once you have been taken in by us to the Throne World, you would have no way of ever going back to the place where we first found you. Did you realize that? That, once you joined us on this trip to the Throne World, you would never be able to go home again?”

Jim stared down at him.

“No,” he said, “I hadn’t planned never to go home again.”

“Well, that’s your situation,” said Galyan. He lifted a slim forefinger. “Unless you turn out to be useful to me. I might see to it that you got home again.”

He let go of his knee and rose suddenly to his feet, towering over Jim.

“I’ll send you back to Ro now,” he said. “Carry that thought I’ve just given you away with you. Your only hope of ever seeing the world from which you came again is if in some way you please me.”

The High-born made no further movement, but abruptly Jim found himself back in the glass-walled room with the other pets. Ro was crouched at one end, weeping over the body of one of the feline creatures. It was not the one who had been among the pets, because this one now stood, whining anxiously, just out of reach of the tearful girl. It was another one that lay dead—and it looked rather as if it had been cut almost in half by a thunderbolt.