Acid Bath, Bill Garson [i have read the book a hundred times .txt] 📗

mind. Or wasn't I keeping a leash on my thoughts?

The Steel-Blue chuckled. "You get—absent-minded, is it?—every once in a while."

Just then four other Steel-Blues appeared lugging great sheets of plastic and various other equipment.

They dumped their loads and began unbundling them.

Working swiftly, they built a plastic igloo, smaller than the living room in the larger service station igloo. They ranged instruments inside—one of them Jon Karyl recognized as an air pump from within the station—and they laid out a pallet.

When they were done Jon saw a miniature reproduction of the service station, lacking only the cannon cap and fin, and with clear plastic walls instead of the opaqueness of the other.

His Steel-Blue said: "We have reproduced the atmosphere of your station so that you be watched while you undergo the torture under the normal conditions of your life."

"What is this torture?" Jon Karyl asked.

The answer was almost caressing: "It is a liquid we use to dissolve metals. It causes joints to harden if even so much as a drop remains on it long. It eats away the metal, leaving a scaly residue which crumbles eventually into dust.

"We will dilute it with a harmless liquid for you since No. 1 does not wish you to die instantly.

"Enter your"—the Steel-Blue hesitated—"mausoleum. You die in your own atmosphere. However, we took the liberty of purifying it. There were dangerous elements in it."

Jon walked into the little igloo. The Steel-Blues sealed the lock, fingered dials and switches on the outside. Jon's space suit deflated. Pressure was building up in the igloo.

He took a sample of the air, found that it was good, although quite rich in oxygen compared with what he'd been using in the service station and in his suit.

With a sigh of relief he took off his helmet and gulped huge draughts of the air.

He sat down on the pallet and waited for the torture to begin.

The Steel Blues crowded about the igloo, staring at him through elliptical eyes.

Apparently, they too, were waiting for the torture to begin.

Jon thought the excess of oxygen was making him light-headed.

He stared at a cylinder which was beginning to sprout tentacles from the circle. He rubbed his eyes and looked again. An opening, like the adjustable eye-piece of a spacescope, was appearing in the center of the cylinder.

A square, glass-like tumbler sat in the opening disclosed in the four-foot cylinder that had sprouted tentacles. It contained a yellowish liquid.

One of the tentacles reached into the opening and clasped the glass. The opening closed and the cylinder, propelled by locomotor appendages, moved toward Jon.

He didn't like the looks of the liquid in the tumbler. It looked like an acid of some sort. He raised to his feet.

He unsheathed the stubray gun and prepared to blast the cylinder.

The cylinder moved so fast Jon felt his eyes jump in his head. He brought the stubray gun up—but he was helpless. The pistol kept on going up. With a deft movement, one of the tentacles had speared it from his hand and was holding it out of his reach.

Jon kicked at the glass in the cylinder's hand. But he was too slow. Two tentacles gripped the kicking leg. Another struck him in the chest, knocking him to the pallet. The same tentacle, assisted by a new one, pinioned his shoulders.

Four tentacles held him supine. The cylinder lifted a glass-like cap from the tumbler of liquid.

Lying there helplessly, Jon was remembering an old fairy tale he'd read as a kid. Something about a fellow named Socrates who was given a cup of hemlock to drink. It was the finis for Socrates. But the old hero had been nonchalant and calm about the whole thing.

With a sigh, Jon Karyl, who was curious unto death, relaxed and said, "All right, bub, you don't have to force-feed me. I'll take it like a man."

The cylinder apparently understood him, for it handed him the tumbler. It even reholstered his stubray pistol.

Jon brought the glass of liquid under his nose. The fumes of the liquid were pungent. It brought tears to his eyes.

He looked at the cylinder, then at the Steel-Blues crowding around the plastic igloo. He waved the glass at the audience.

"To Earth, ever triumphant," he toasted. Then he drained the glass at a gulp.

Its taste was bitter, and he felt hot prickles jab at his scalp. It was like eating very hot peppers. His eyes filled with tears. He coughed as the stuff went down.

But he was still alive, he thought in amazement. He'd drunk the hemlock and was still alive.

The reaction set in quickly. He hadn't known until then how tense he'd been. Now with the torture ordeal over, he relaxed. He laid down on the pallet and went to sleep.

There was one lone Steel-Blue watching him when he rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and sat up.

He vanished almost instantly. He, or another like him, returned immediately accompanied by a half-dozen others, including the multi-tentacled creature known as No. 1.

One said,

"You are alive." The thought registered amazement. "When you lost consciousness, 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 I went to sleep." The Steel-Blues apparently didn't understand.

"Good it is that you live. The torture will continue," spoke No. 1 before loping away.

The cylinder business began again. This time, Jon drank the bitter liquid 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 20 days left before the SP ship arrived.

Would this torture—he chuckled—last until then? But he was growing more and more conscious that his belly was screaming for hunger. The liquid had taken the edge off his thirst.

It was on the fifth day of his torture that Jon Karyl decided that he was going to get something to eat or perish in the attempt.

The cylinder sat passively in its niche in the circle. A dozen Steel-Blues were watching as Jon put on his helmet and unsheathed his stubray.

They merely watched as he pressed the stubray's firing stud. Invisible rays licked out of the bulbous muzzle of the pistol. The plastic splintered.

Jon was out of his goldfish bowl and striding toward his own igloo adjacent 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 his way. "Go back to your torture."

"But I'm so hungry I'll chew off one of your tentacles and eat it without 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 to affect you at last? Back to the torture room."

"Like R-dust," Jon growled. He pressed the firing stud on the stubray gun. One of Steel-Blue's tentacles broke off and fell to the rocky sward.

Steel-Blue jerked out the box he'd used once before. A tentacle danced over it.

Abruptly Jon found himself standing on a pinnacle of rock. Steel-Blue had 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 leaped the 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 mad underneath at the cold egoism of the Steel-Blues.

By the shimmering clouds of Earth, by her green fields, and dark forests, 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 equip themselves with spray guns and squirt citric acid and watch the Steel-Blues fade away.

It sounded almost silly to Jon Karyl. The fruit acid of Earth to repel these 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 service station came in to examine him.

"You're still holding out, I see," he observed after poking Jon in every sensitive 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 bit delirious. But he answered honestly enough: "My guts feel as if they're chewing each other up. My bones ache. My joints creak. I can't coordinate I'm so hungry."

"That is the hemlock," Steel-Blue said.

It was when he quaffed the new and stronger draught that Jon knew that his hope that it was citric acid was squelched.

The acid taste was weaker which meant that the citric acid was the diluting liquid. It was the liquid he couldn't taste beneath the tang of the citric acid that was the corrosive acid.

On the fourteenth day, Jon was so weak he didn't feel much like moving around. He let the cylinder feed him the hemlock.

No. 1 came again to see him, and went away chuckling, "Decrease the dilution. 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 also were waiting for the SP ship.

The extra-terrestrials had repaired the blue ship where the service station atomic ray had struck. And they were doing a little target practice 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 torture is over. You will die before your SP ship is destroyed.

"We have played with you long enough. Today we begin to toy with your SP ship. Drink up, Earthman, drink to enslavement."

Weak though he was Jon lunged to his feet, spilling the tumbler of liquid. It ran cool along the plastic arm of his space suit. He changed his mind about throwing the contents on No. 1.

With a smile he set the glass at his lips and drank. Then he laughed at No. 1.

"The SP ship will turn your ship into jelly."

No. 1 swept out, chuckling. "Boast if you will, Earthman, it's your last chance."

There was an exultation in Jon's heart that deadened the hunger and washed away the nausea.

At last he knew what the hemlock was.

He sat on the pallet adjusting the little power-pack radio. The SP ship should now be within range of the set. The space patrol was notorious for 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, hoping that his signal was reaching the ship. He couldn't know if they answered. Though the power pack could get out a message over a vast distance, it could not pick up messages even when backed by an SP ship's power 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 weary voice 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 the Steel-Blues was rising silently from the asteroid.

Up and up it rose, then flames flickered in a circle about its curious shape. The ship disappeared, suddenly accelerating.

Jon Karyl strained his eyes.

Finally he looked away from the heavens to the two Steel-Blues who stood negligently outside the goldfish bowl.

Once more, Jon used the stubray pistol. He marched out of the plastic igloo and ran toward the service station.

He didn't know how weak he was until he stumbled and fell only a few feet from his prison.

The Steel-Blues just watched him.

He crawled on, around the circular pit in the sward of the asteroid where one Steel-Blue had shown him the power of his weapon.

He'd been crawling through a nightmare for years when the quiet voice penetrated 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 a space 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 sure death, and it's the only thing that kept you going long enough to warn us."

"I was dumb for a long time," Karyl said. "I thought that it was the acid, almost to the very last. But when I drank that last glass, I knew they didn't have a chance.

"They were metal monsters. No wonder they feared that liquid. It would rust their joints, short their wiring, and kill them. No wonder they stared when I kept alive after drinking enough to completely annihilate a half-dozen of them.

"But what happened when you met the ship?"

The space captain grinned.

"Not much. Our crew was busy creating a hollow shell filled with water to be shot out of a rocket tube converted into a projectile thrower.

"These Steel-Blues, as you call them, put traction beams on us and started tugging us toward the asteroid. We tried