“Very well; I have some questions to ask; you will answer them truthfully.”
“Why, sure,” Magruder said agreeably. “Fire away.”
“We can tell if you are lying,” Thagobar continued. “It will do you no good to tell us untruths. Now—what is your name?”
“Theophilus Q. Hassenpfeffer,” Magruder said blandly.
Zandoplith looked at a quivering needle and then shook his head slowly as he looked up at Thagobar.
“That is a lie,” said Thagobar.
The specimen nodded. “It sure is. That’s quite a machine you’ve got there.”
“It is good that you appreciate the superiority of our instruments,” Thagobar said grimly. “Now—your name.”
“Edwin Peter St. John Magruder.”
Psychologist Zandoplith watched the needle and nodded.
“Excellent,” said Thagobar. “Now, Edwin—”
“Ed is good enough,” said Magruder.
Thagobar blinked. “Good enough for what?”
“For calling me.”
Thagobar turned to the psychologist and mumbled something. Zandoplith mumbled back. Thagobar spoke to the specimen.
“Is your name Ed?”
“Strictly speaking, no,” said Magruder.
“Then why should I call you that?”
“Why not? Everyone else does,” Magruder informed him.
Thagobar consulted further with Zandoplith and finally said: “We will come back to that point later. Now… uh… Ed, what do you call your home planet?”
“Earth.”
“Good. And what does your race call itself?”
“Homo sapiens.”
“And the significance of that, if any?”
Magruder considered. “It’s just a name,” he said, after a moment.
The needle waggled.
“Another lie,” said Thagobar.
Magruder grinned. “Just testing. That really is a whizzer of a machine.”
Thagobar’s throat and face darkened a little as his copper-bearing blue blood surged to the surface in suppressed anger. “You said that once,” he reminded blackly.
“I know. Well, if you really want to know, Homo sapiens means ‘wise man.’ ”
Actually, he hadn’t said “wise man”; the language of the Dal didn’t quite have that exact concept, so Magruder had to do the best he could. Translated back into English, it would have come out something like “beings with vast powers of mind.”
When Thagobar heard this, his eyes opened a little wider, and he turned his head to look at Zandoplith. The psychologist spread his horny hands; the needle hadn’t moved.
“You seem to have high opinions of yourselves,” said Thagobar, looking back at Magruder.
“That’s possible,” agreed the Earthman.
Thagobar shrugged, looked back at his list, and the questioning went on. Some of the questions didn’t make too much sense to Magruder; others were obviously psychological testing.
But one thing was quite clear, the lie detector was indeed quite a whizzer. If Magruder told the exact truth, it didn’t indicate. But if he lied just the least tiny bit, the needle on the machine hit the ceiling—and, eventually, so did Thagobar.
Magruder had gotten away with his first few lies—they were unimportant, anyway—but finally, Thagobar said: “You have lied enough, Ed.”
He pressed a button, and a nerve-shattering wave of pain swept over the Earthman. When it finally faded, Magruder found his belly muscles tied in knots, his fists and teeth clenched, and tears running down his cheeks. Then nausea overtook him, and he lost the contents of his stomach.
Thagobar Verf turned distastefully away. “Put him back in his cell and clean up the interrogation chamber. Is he badly hurt?”
Zandoplith had already checked his instruments. “I think not, Your Splendor; it is probably only slight shock and nothing more. However, we will have to retest him in the next session anyhow. We’ll know then.”
Magruder sat on the edge of a shelflike thing that doubled as a low table and a high bed. It wasn’t the most comfortable seat in the world, but it was all he had in the room; the floor was even harder.
It had been several hours since he had been brought here, and he still didn’t feel good. That stinking machine had hurt! He clenched his fists; he could still feel the knot in his stomach and—
And then he realized that the knot in his stomach hadn’t been caused by the machine; he had thrown that off a long time back.
The knot was caused by a towering, thundering-great, ice-cold rage.
He thought about it for a minute and then broke out laughing. Here he was, like a stupid fool, so angry that he was making himself sick! And that wasn’t going to do him or the colony any good.
It was obvious that the aliens were up to no good, to say the least. The colony at New Hilo numbered six thousand souls—the only humans on New Hawaii, except for a couple of bush expeditions. If this ship tried to take over the planet, there wouldn’t be a devil of a lot the colonists could do about it. And what if the aliens found Earth itself? He had no idea what kind of armament this spaceship carried nor how big it was—but it seemed to have plenty of room inside it.
He knew it was up to him. He was going to have to do something, somehow. What? Could he get out of his cell and try to smash the ship?
Nope. A naked man inside a bare cell was about as helpless as a human being can get. What, then?
Magruder lay on his back and thought about it for a long time.