JUDAS RAM
BY SAM MERWIN, Jr.
Illustrated by JAMES VINCENT
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Galaxy Science Fiction December 1950.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
The house was furnished with all
luxuries, including women. If it only
had a lease that could be broken—
Roger Tennant, crossing the lawn, could see two of the three wingsof the house, which radiated spoke-like from its heptagonal centralportion. The wing on the left was white, with slim square pillars,reminiscent of scores of movie sets of the Deep South. That on theright was sundeck solar-house living-machine modern, something like amontage of shoeboxes. The wing hidden by the rest of the house was, heknew, spired, gabled and multicolored, like an ancient building inpre-Hitler Cracow.
Dana was lying under a tree near the door, stretched out on a sortof deck chair with her eyes closed. She wore a golden gown, long andclose-fitting and slit up the leg like the gown of a Chinese woman.Above it her comely face was sullen beneath its sleek cocoon of auburnhair.
She opened her eyes at his approach and regarded him with nothing likefavor. Involuntarily he glanced down at the tartan shorts that were hisonly garment to make sure that they were on properly. They were. He hadthought them up in a moment of utter boredom and they were extremelycomfortable. However, the near-Buchanan tartan did not crease or evenwrinkle when he moved. Their captors had no idea of how a woven designshould behave.
"Waiting for me?" Tennant asked the girl.
She said, "I'd rather be dead. Maybe I am. Maybe we're all dead andthis is Hell."
He stood over her and looked down until she turned away her reddeningface. He said, "So it's going to be you again, Dana. You'll be thefirst to come back for a second run."
"Don't flatter yourself," she replied angrily. She sat up, pushedback her hair, got to her feet a trifle awkwardly because of thetight-fitting tubular gown. "If I could do anything about it...."
"But you can't," he told her. "They're too clever."
"Is this crop rotation or did you send for me?" she asked cynically."If you did, I wish you hadn't. You haven't asked about your son."
"I don't even want to think about him," said Tennant. "Let's geton with it." He could sense the restless stirring of the womanwithin Dana, just as he could feel the stirring toward her withinhimself—desire that both of them loathed because it was implantedwithin them by their captors.
They walked toward the house.
It didn't look like a prison—or a cage. Within the dome of thebarrier, it looked more like a well-kept if bizarre little countryestate. There was clipped lawn, a scattering of trees, even a clearlittle brook that chattered unending annoyance at the small stoneswhich impeded its flow.
But the lawn was not of grass—it was of a bright green substance thatmight have been cellophane but wasn't, and it sprouted from a fabricthat might have been canvas but was something else. The trees lookedlike trees, only their trunks were bark all the way through—exceptthat it was not bark. The brook was practically water, but the smallstones over which it flowed were of no earthly mineral.