2
LATER, he was never able to remember an exact moment in which he began once more to be aware of what was around him. In between was an interval of half-consciousness and nightmare; of faces that swelled and dwindled, coming close and then going away from him.
First, the face of Alia Braight, once more the thin, tomboyish young girl who had tagged after him around the weedy hills and fields surrounding Kalestin City. Then Alia again—but adult now—as she had been when she had come all the way back out to that Frontier World two months ago. She had come, she said, now that the troubles between the Old Worlds and the Frontier were four years over, to talk him into coming back with her to Earth, and taking up once more his graduate studies in architecture under Albert Monns at Michigan State.
Alia, adult and beautiful now, arguing for his return. Then Alia, turning strangely contrary aboard the ship bringing them both to Earth. Alia, reviving all the old political arguments between the Old Worlds and the Frontier. Finally, Alia, the day their ship had landed, a week and a half back, turning away from him in the spaceship lounge, as the ship settled on the Long Island Spaceport pad:
“Cully, it’s no use. I thought you’d have changed—but you haven’t. You’re still just as much a Frontier revolutionist as you ever were. Maybe we’d better not see each other . . . for a while, anyway . . .”
And a few seconds later:
“No, I won’t call you, Cully. I’ll wait until you call me. . . ”
Alia, going away from him, reflected in the wall mirror of the lounge as she mingled with the debarking crowd at the top of the lounge gangplank. His own sharp-boned face under its blond hair, for once somber, mirrored there also, gazing after her. Then, several minutes later, when Cully had followed, the neat-mustached, thin, young face of a World Police lieutenant waiting at the foot of the gangplank. The Lieutenant, flanked by two black-uniformed enlisted men, one of whom was a corporal, looking at Cully’s papers from under the trim visor of his uniform cap. The Lieutenant’s voice, asking:
“Culihan When? Not the spacelifter who hijacked more of our spaceships than any other Frontiersman during the Frontier Revolt?”
“Ex-spacelifter. That’s my pardon you’re holding—signed by one of your own Tri-World Council Members, Amos Braight. What is this?” Cully had demanded. Then sudden understanding exploding within him. Abruptly he had looked for Alia, and found her already lost in the crowd of passengers streaming ahead toward the Terminal Building. He had turned back toward the Lieutenant. “If you’re arresting me, what’s the charge?”
“Charge? Oh, no charge at all, sir. Just some routine questions . . .” The young Lieutenant’s face lifted, smoothly polite among the gathering small crowd of disembarking passengers. “But if you’ll just come with us for a minute . . .”
Afterwards, the Police Corporal’s fist like a door slammed unexpectedly across Cully’s mouth, once they had brought him into the back room of the Police Section of the Spaceport Terminal. The Corporal’s hard-fat, savage face under stiff black hair . . . his arm drawn back again as other Police hands locked Cully’s arms behind him. The Corporal’s voice, thickly . . .
“Look at him! This one wants to bite. Hold him still, now . . .”
“All right, Corporal!” The Lieutenant, on his feet, neat and military behind the desk, speaking evenly and slowly toward the official interview recorder on his desk. “I’m aware of the trouble this man offered to cause you as you were bringing him in, and I saw the threatening gesture he made toward you just now that forced you to strike him in self-defense—but we’ll have no violence, here. You other two men put the restraints on him.”
The Lieutenant, sitting down again, as the cool, enfolding metal of the spring restraints enclosed Cully’s arms from wrist to elbow behind him . . . “Name, please?”
“Damn you, you know my name!”
“Name please . . .”
And then the whirling visions of the week and a half of nightmares. Nightmares that slowly thinned and gave way to the black and utter sleep of exhaustion.
When full clearheadedness finally returned, it came slowly, like a man drifting up into daylight from the dark of deep waters. But it brought with it a freedom at last from pain, and a new peace of mind.
He had put it all into proper context finally. Alia had tricked him into returning to Earth so that the Old Worlds, now become near-paranoic with space fears, could lock him up. He, who had been the greatest thorn in their sides during the Frontier Revolt, which the Bill of Agreements had theoretically resolved, six years since.
But he could see now how Alia was not to blame for what she had done to him. She was still the daughter of Amos Braight, once Kalestin’s Governor and Cully’s guardian, but now Senior Member of the Tri-Worlds Council, governing Earth, Mars and Venus. Being the kind of person she was, Alia could be placed under pressure by arguments of her father that her naturally loyal nature could not resist.
Therefore, Alia had not been changed into his enemy, after all. She had only been ill-advised, and that condition could be corrected. At that conclusion, a deep, fierce warmth of challenge began to burn in Cully, and he welcomed it like an old friend. Always there had been this quality of recoil in him. The harder he was hit, the higher he bounced. He could feel his spirits returning now.
The trouble lay not in the clean, half-Frontier mind of Alia, but in the sick fear of most of the Old World’s people where the Frontier and the Moldaug aliens were concerned. Alia was too honest not to admit this if Cully could prove it to her beyond doubt. And prove it he would, he thought now. Even if it was necessary to turn the Old Worlds, the Frontier, the Moldaug and everything else upside down to do it. He grinned again, inside his mind, at the picture this thought evoked.
“That’s right,” he told himself silently, part mockingly part seriously. “You never were one for half-measures, were you?”
That self-accusation woke him at last into full consciousness.
He opened his eyes, with the vague memory of having drifted up to just beneath the surface of awareness in this place on a number of previous occasions, only to slip back again.
This time, however, when he came awake he was aware of what seemed to be a sort of cubbyhole with a steeply slanting roof above it that might be the underside of a stairway, for he had vague recollections of boots heard ascending and descending over his head. In this dim cubbyhole, Cully made out three foam mattresses with bedding, which together filled the available space below the slanting metal staircase.
On one of these foam mattresses he himself was lying. It was the mattress closest to the inside wall. The mattress closest to the open side of the cubbyhole was empty. But on the middle mattress, seated crosslegged as a man sits before a fire—as Cully himself had grown into the habit of sitting during his youthful trapping trips into the brush country on Kalestin—was a slim, pleasant-looking Frontiersman with a pleasant, bony face and wiry body, who at first seemed hardly more than Cully’s age, until Cully suddenly realized that the man’s hair was white.
“Feeling better now?” asked the man.
It was the soft, educated voice that had first spoken to the guard, the voice that had belonged to the first pair of brush boots Cully had seen as he lay on the metal floor after being shoved out of the elevator.
“Fine,” said Cully, and the hoarse weakness of his own voice shocked him.
The white-haired man nodded.
“You’ve been needing rest, mainly,” he said. “Food, too—as much food as we could get into you. But mainly rest. Rest cures just about every human ill that’s curable without medicines, and some that medicines can’t cure.”
The choice of words and their Old Worlds pronunciation, in the soft, baritone voice, was scholarly, almost pedantic-sounding, coming from a figure dressed in rough Frontier bush-country clothes and seated like a man long used to open campfires.
“I’m Will Jaimeson,” the white-haired man went on. “My partner’s Doak Townsend. Maybe you were awake enough from time to time to remember him.”
Now that Cully thought of it, he had a hazy memory of a figure certainly no more than five feet tall and looking no more than his late teens—although the smallness of the face and figure may have contributed to the appearance of youthfulness—who had also sat crosslegged watching him, as Will Jaimeson was watching him now.
“I’m . . .” began Cully, and then caution stilled his tongue. It might be that his better safety lay in keeping his identity secret from his fellow prisoners. But Will Jaimeson was already finishing the sentence for him.
“Cully When, of course.” Will nodded. “I know you. In fact I saw you once when you were a boy, living in Amos Braight’s home back when Earth had sent him out to be the Governor on Kalestin.”
“Oh? You go back some years on Kalestin, do you?” asked Cully huskily.
“I go back some years on all the Frontier Worlds,” answered Will. “I was the anthropologist with the First Settlement on Casimir III, forty years ago.”
Cully stared at him with new interest. Unless the man was lying, he could not be less than in his middle sixties. But aside from the white hair, his nearly unlined face and slim body gave no token of being much older than thirty. Of course, perhaps he was simply a little insane. Imprisoned men could become that.
“Funny I haven’t heard your name before,” Cully said slowly. “Someone that started out on the Frontier that far back—”
“I wasn’t on the Frontier Worlds a good share of that time,” answered Will. He smiled gently, but a little wearily also, as if these were questions with which he was overfamiliar.
“Oh? Back here on the Old Worlds?” Cully asked.
“No.”
Cully gazed interestedly at him.
“Correct me if I’m wrong,” Cully said. “But I don’t know any other place you’re likely to find humans besides the Solar System or the Frontier Worlds.”
“But I wasn’t among humans,” said Will. “Most of that time I was out among aliens, deep in Moldaug territory, these last forty-odd years.”
Cully lay still, watching him, thinking he had been right. The white-haired man was probably not all there mentally. For what he had claimed was essentially impossible. The Moldaug had closed their spatial Frontier to humans a dozen years back; and only a year ago they had sent Ambassadors here to the Tri-Worlds Council on Earth, laying claim to the Frontier Worlds where people had settled, saying that the Pleiades had belonged to the Moldaug long before humans came.