THRILL-MILLS, F.O.B.
The first three Kel Celeste rooted out were loyal to their species.
Unto death.
The fourth, it seemed, felt differently about it. Even life in the FedGov's interplanetary zoo, apparently, was acceptable, when weighed against no life at all.
Our problems resolved themselves into routine, almost, after that ... a course to set, the ship to steer, messages to send to lure other globes into range of FedGov weapons.
Then, finally, the job was done. The last Kel ship save this one had been swept from space and blasted into atoms.
Now, in a rush, fatigue welled up to claim me. I slumped, half-sick. By the time our craft came to rest on Rizal, I wasn't sure I even had strength left to climb out.
Then, at last, our hatches swung open. Aid parties swarmed aboard.
I moved back out of sight. Somehow, I couldn't face the excited flummery and fawning.
Celeste Stelpa, too, seemed to have vanished. No matter where I looked, I couldn't find her.
The first party into the globeship brought paraguns and proton blasters with them. Relentlessly, they cleared out what was left of the Kel crew, pushing past me almost without notice in the grimness of their work.
Wave Two hoisted Controller Kruze and the other prisoners up from their spherical scarlet dungeon.
It was a moment to remember. For if I couldn't stand the thought of obsequiousness and adulation, Security's chief had no such inhibitions. His heavy body seemed to swell. He beamed and puffed and pranced and strutted.
Conveniently, too, he made no slightest mention of me. Without saying so in so many words, he made it ever so clear that Controller Alfred Kruze himself had saved mankind from the Kel menace.
I smiled a small and twisted smile. That was the way of officialdom, it seemed—in this world or any other.
And what did it really matter?
Only then, without warning, someone said, "—and these people, Controller: the ones who received thrill-mills from the Kel and kept it secret. What do you plan to do about them?"
Kruze's heavy features grew dark. "What would you have me do—to traitors?" He wheeled like an angry mastiff; shook his fist. "They die, of course! All of them! The very fact of past or present possession of a thrill-mill be punished by summary execution, without trial, as collaboration with the Kel!"
I almost cried out, then, by instinct.
Only that could do no good. The thinking part of my brain knew it. So I stood silent, instead; immobile. This quick wave of approval from Kruze's adulators roused only numb shock in me.
Then the controller's aides moved him on out. The rescue parties followed.
I let them go. For my own part, I couldn't leave. Not quite yet.
The last stragglers disappeared. The echoes died. Aching with weariness, I began my own bleakly purposeful tour of inspection.
A dozen times, I lost my way in the maze of rooms and shafts and intersecting passages. A hundred—a thousand—I came upon strange sights, alien things my human mind could never hope to fathom.
Now fatigue bore me down till I had to stop and lean against a wall to rest. I began to wonder if I'd come on a fool's errand.
Then, close to the globeship's exit hatch, I glimpsed a narrow storage niche—a niche stacked high with neat oblong cases.
Fibrox transit boxes.
Involuntarily, my breathing quickened. Dragging down the nearest box, I ripped it open.
A folded paper fell to the floor: a cargo manifest.
I clawed it up ... fumbled it open with fingers numb and stiff as sticks.
And there was the stamp, the familiar scarlet label:
CLASSIFIED FEDGOV SECURITY SUPPLIES!
PORT INSPECTION FORBIDDEN
—The label that would permit these boxes to pass customs checks at any port on any planet, throughout FedGov Security's whole far-flung field of operations.
I turned back to the case itself and tugged out one of the smaller boxes within ... tore off its wrapper, read the nameplate: 'Apex Perceptual Intensifier'.
Behind me, Celeste Stelpa asked, "Who is it from, Mark?"
I whirled, already crouching. "What are you doing here?"
Her wan smile didn't change. "Waiting for you, of course." And then: "You see—I knew you wouldn't go till you'd run this down. There's still too much of your hate left in you."
"Oh?"
"Hate's that way, Mark, when you displace it. Even if you win one fight, you've got to turn around and hunt another. Because the thing you fight isn't the thing you're really trying to destroy."
I said harshly, "I don't know what you're trying to say. I don't think you do, either. But whether you do or don't, I don't care. So far as I'm concerned, you're just another traitor to your race. You're like that Kel who helped us kill the rest of them so he could live. You did the same thing when the globes took over Bejak II. You let them bring you here, helped them put out these thrill-mills—"
I broke off as Celeste began to shake. My own hands suddenly weren't steady.
A minute passed, and then another and another.
Slowly, then, Celeste raised her face. "I hope you think it through sometime, Mark Traynor," she whispered in a tear-choked voice. "I hope you ask yourself what's back of all the hate that's in you, and then try to link that up with me, so you can find the reason why I helped the Kel put out their thrill-mills."
I stood very still. "Go on."
"Why should I? You already know the answer. Or if you don't, you haven't the mind ever to understand it."
Her hands drew into fists, then. Her words came in a furious rush: "I hated them, do you understand? I hated them more than you could ever dream of! I was on Bejak II! I saw the things they did—the way the people were slaughtered.
"Only I saw other things too, Mark Traynor! I saw it wasn't the Kel's fault, not all of it. We could have fought them off, if it hadn't been for the FedGov and its racked compulsory conditioning.
"That conditioning—it made us like so many sheep. It robbed us of our imagination, our lust for life, our fighting spirit. And then, later on, when my own patterns broke and I found what our world looked like when inhibition wasn't muting our senses and our feelings—"
Another change of mood, a shift in fervor. Warmth replaced rage. Pleading took the place of anger:
"That's why I did it, Mark. All at once it dawned on me I was hating the wrong thing, the wrong race. I thought that if even a few of our kind could break loose, throw off their patterns, there might be a chance for human freedom. And with freedom, we could beat the Kel.
"You know how I felt, Mark—because you've felt the same way! You hated going back, being reconditioned. Every time, it got harder for you to give up freedom. Only you didn't dare admit it, not even to yourself."
"So I took it out on the Kel, you mean?" It was an effort to keep my own voice steady. "You may be right."
"Then—"
"No. Because this is something else again." I gestured to the boxes that held the thrill-mills. "Do you know where these came from?"
"I can guess."
"Then you know why I've got to follow through on them."
"But—"
"Say that it's for the cause of human freedom. The freedom of all those poor lost souls Kruze has ordered executed. No matter what I have to do, I'm not going to see them die."
Abruptly, I was tired of talking, tired of listening. I turned away.
Celeste said, "But he's gone, Mark. Beyond your reach."
I stopped short. "What—?"
"He warped back as soon as he left the globeship, here. All the way back, clear to the Interplanetary Center."
It rocked me, for an instant. Then I shrugged. "Fair enough."
"You mean—?"
"I warped out to Rizal without a clearance. I can leave the same way."
"No Mark! You mustn't! He could kill you!"
"I'll have a paragun by the time I get there."
"Then I'll go too, Mark! Take me with you!"
"No."
"But why, Mark? Why? Don't you understand how I feel? No matter what happens, I want to be with you."
I said, "You still can't go, Celeste. For two reasons.
"In the first place, I still don't trust you.
"In the second, and no matter what you do or have done, I'm not going to let anything further happen to you. Not if I can help it."
"Mark, I don't care! Even if you try to leave me here, I'll follow!"
"You'll have to, then." Smiling, I pushed past her towards the exit. "Goodbye, Celeste."
"No, Mark! I won't let you go!"
"Goodbye, Celeste," I said again, patting her cheek.
Still smiling, then, I hammered home a knockout blow....