The Star Virus

"Friends, the secret of life… must be kept…”

First the coughing, then the hoarse breathing, faded. They waited in silence, but no further sound came.

"The Master… has retired to his quarters," the leader said quietly. Stepping up to the machine, he depressed a number of levers and retreated immediately to take his place on a vacant cushion.

It seemed to Rodrone, squatting tensely on his own cushion, that the scene was pregnant with delusion. From this distance the lens's pictures were only a swirling rainbow flicker; but the excitement was infectious and he waited eagerly for the outcome.

The beginning of it was a faint, intermittent noise that passed to and fro between the two horns, coming and fading, exactly like the sound of a speeding airboat that flashed from the horizon, passed close by and just as quickly sped away again. Louder the sound swelled, and then Rodrone no longer knew whether he heard it, for a numbing shock seemed to hit his consciousness. It was as if something hard and hot was pressing against the membrane of his mind, striving to enter his brain.

Just as suddenly, the moment of tumult was over. They all sat quietly staring at the flickering lens, and the only difference was the strained, shocked look on all their faces. The twin horns purred quietly, the sound swinging rhythmically to and fro…

But something else had changed. After a pause of a few seconds a spot on the lens seemed to swell up until it occluded everything. With a rush like a sudden gust of wind, the room, the people, everything was swept away and replaced by something utterly alien.

In the instant before the ability to think was stripped from him, Rodrone realized that the society was wrong about what the machine did with the lens. It revealed no "cosmic order," it merely projected selected picture-dramas from its outer ring, giving its beneficiaries the added thrill—or horror—of participation. But he was unable to develop the thought further. All will, all ability to help himself, was absent.

He seemed to be standing on a wide, windy ledge. Over the edge of it could be seen a flat yellow landscape laced with rivers, which were at least two miles below. Dimly he was aware that the ledge was part of a building, a palace, and that some sort of regal struggle was nearing its end.

Roughly he was pushed forward. His arms were bound tight to his sides. Around him stood a number of figures, bipedal but not human, with jeering skull-like faces.

The wind rose, keening a dirge. Vainly he struggled as he realized he was being propelled inexorably towards the edge. Hoots of weird laughter rained about him. Then, with a final lunge, he was over, the air rushing past him, falling, falling…

The sense of terror did not leave him but the scene abruptly altered. He was in some underground place. A dim chamber whose boundaries were indefinite, hidden by the grotesque instruments that filled it. Screams and groans echoed weirdly through the chamber, which flickered from occasional fires and glowing metal.

Rodrone became frighteningly aware that this was a torture chamber, and that something was being prepared for him. Bound this time at both arms and legs, he was carried to a tangle of a machine and fitted into it. White-hot blades closed in on him, to cut and burn in a hundred cunning ways.

Mercifully the unbearable agony lasted only a few seconds, for the selector moved on to another part of the lens, a part with which Rodrone was already familiar. For once his limbs were free. He was a member of a motley rabble army gathered before the walls of the gleaming city. The siege, though frustrated, was still in full progress. Catapults and ballistae had been constructed, attempting to hurl spiteful masses of rock and filth over the towering walls, which were also being attacked by primitive flame-belching cannon plastering them with gobs of burning substance which clung momentarily and then slithered groundwards, leaving behind a blistered black trail.

Clearly the city was withstanding all this crude fury. Rodrone looked around him and spied the demented monk, railing his slaves for their failure to breach and destroy the walls. He tried to perceive his face, but beneath the cowl there was only shadow.

The monk's features were obscured even when he suddenly looked Rodrone's way. For some reason he became enraged and the lean frame that poked through his rough-spun habit exploded into action. His whip came whistling through the air to catch Rodrone with a stinging blow. He staggered back before the monk's onslaught, unaware that he was being driven towards one of the ballista machines.

With a hard laugh, the monk sent him stumbling across the shaft of the ballista just as it was being released. Up sprang the solid beam, and bone and flesh were crushed horribly between it and the upright restraining bar…