To Outrun Doomsday by Kenneth Bulmer

Author:Kenneth Bulmer [Bulmer, Kenneth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: sf, Fiction, sci fi
Publisher: Ace Books, N.Y.
Published: 1967-02-20T00:00:00+00:00

IX

BRASSILY SUSPENDED between the burning sea and the burning sky with heat shimmer around outline denuding solidity of substance, a painted abstraction of a ship sailing a splotched-on stirred-up hocus-pocus surrealistic sea, the galley Moonflower, seven days out from Meroe of the five cities of the Scorso, labored with detumescent sails against the horizon. Without wind to give reason to the segregation of quarters smells transferred themselves, changing the places of master and indentured, bringing out pretty scented kerchiefs and opening nostrils too-long clogged with the unmentionable although natural odors of humanity.

How had the mighty fallen! For Jack Waley–poor, gullible, lecherous Jack Waley–the trap had swung down with grinning teeth and raking claw.

And all of it, every last frantic despair, was all of his own making.

Oh–-benighted Jack Waley!

Trapped, caged, barred in, he had resisted and, perfunctorily had been beaters and whipped below. Waking with a fermenting head, feeling the fetters, brutally beaten, slave-starved, he had tried to reconcile himself to the change in his condition. Gone the happy carefree days with Drubal and Mimi, learning. Gone the happy free-booting forest days with Krotch and Salome, learning. Gone, even, the promise of happy drinking days at Dolly’s Dallier, learning. Now, aboard a galley, flesh to be whipped to mechanical use, arms to bulge with muscle, shoulders to broaden–if he lived–he had reached the end of learning. He had learned–too late.

Still and all–he was young, strong, toughened. He ought to stand the life. With the wind in his beard and the oar in his hands, he would pull or push with the others of his comrades in distress, planning the great breakout, developing muscles of iron, sinews of steel, a heart of obsidian. He would lead the revolt, slaughtering the prissy pansy overlords in their silks and satins, reserving the choicest of the–well, time enough for that…

Stubborn Jack Waley, determined to find comfort in the midst of distress…

The wind had driven them briskly all that first day and Waley had listened to the groans and vomitings of other newly indentured, unused to the sea, unused, as was Waley, to the deeps between the stars. Then the wind died.

Aloft, Waley advanced with an almost pathetic eagerness, a desire to begin the period of torture, to strengthen his back and arms, develop his muscles, pull with all his heart set on the great day of rebellion.

“Why don’t you unfetter our hands?” he asked, shaking the six inch bar, rigidly clamping his wrists together. “I can’t row like this.”

“Row! Row! Get up into the cage, you miserable little scousing treader!”

Waley looked about the galley Moonflower with numb wonder. Trim and compact she was, mused a shaken and shaking Jack Waley, climbing into the cage. His comrades, bearded, stark naked as he, murmured and cursed and climbed into that cage of communal suffered.

At once Waley thought of mice, or budgerigars.

Athwartships six cylindrical cages, beamed from wood, lashed and mortised strongly together, split down the center to form a separate starboard and port line, stretched like lobster-pots.

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