The rock didn't come within a yard of Marnick's cage. It struck against the violet force-halo, bounded back and clattered to the floor. Marnick's lips split into what might have been a grin; he touched a button beside him and the cage dropped the rest of the way to the cave floor. Its door opened and the two Jovian brutes stepped quickly out. Grinning through thick, blubbery lips, with huge powerful hands reaching out, they strode purposefully toward McGowan.
McGowan made no defensive gesture. He stood there still smiling a little, as though hugely satisfied with what he had done. The Jovians seized him ungently, hurried him back to the cage and into it. The door closed and the cage slowly began to rise. The Jovians released his arms then, and McGowan acted with customary deliberateness as his right fist lashed up and crashed into Marnick's mouth. Marnick staggered back, his face a gushing well of red; but with a seeming flick of the wrist his paralyzer tube was in his hand, its pale beam spurting out. McGowan sank down in a huddled little heap, but even so, his very attitude as he lay there unconscious seemed one of satisfaction. The cage rose swiftly up and out of sight.
I didn't allow myself to think of the fate that would be McGowan's now. As we worked we listened again for the sound of Marnick's insane laughter. But it never came. He knew that we hated him, and he loved it. It was a sort of little game he played with us. He knew that we would be listening for his laughter now, so he chose not to let us hear it; to make us wonder. Psychologically it was much more terrible.
That Marnick was a devil.
Four days later McGowan came back to us.
Rumor among us had it that Marnick maintained special quarters up on the surface of this satellite, a stone house against the barren rock; and that in this house was a certain room into which Marnick thrust the men who displeased him. Beyond this even rumor failed to go, but we often hazarded guesses. The most prevalent guess was that Marnick released hordes of Callistan Gnishii into this room, then stood at a glass-paned door and shrieked with insane laughter at the antics of the unfortunate victims. The Gnishii are tiny little sharp-tipped devils, scarcely three inches in length. Hard-shelled, blazing red in color, they surely must be a spawn of hell; for they are quite harmless except when in the presence of human flesh, and then they seem to go wild.
We guessed that Marnick might be employing these Gnishii, because several of his victims who came back to us had hundreds of fresh scars covering their legs from ankles to knees. But these men seemed to prefer not to speak of what they had undergone, and the rest of us weren't too anxious to know.
So now, four days later, McGowan came back to us. He stumbled into our quarters along the murky tunnel just above the vein we were at present working. I rose up out of restless sleep and saw McGowan going along the tunnel to certain of the men, silently rousing them. Kueelo and V'Narik, both Martians, joined him; as well as Smith and Blakely and Wilkinson, Earthmen. These five, together with McGowan, had formed a special little cliche among themselves, and almost daily went off for a secret meeting somewhere during our sleep period. Innumerable times I had seen them do that, but I didn't much care, feeling that whatever they might be planning would be futile in the end.