Hell's Gate

pouring a thick brown fluid (maple syrup?) down onto him. He could hardly move his legs in the stuff. He could hardly breathe. Or think…
        The brown syrup grew darker… and darker still.
        Then it was black, speckled with thousands of stars of blue and white. Someone reached up and flicked off the switch. The stars faded like pinpoints of light on a thousand television screens, were gone. He let the nothingness envelop him.

CHAPTER 15
        
         He was on a wide, flat and bitterly cold desert at midnight. There was a harsh white moon shining on the flat rocks and glistening in the sand. Then, behind him, he heard the keening, turned to run again. It was a wild ululating cry. He made it to the top of the rise, looked back. The first of the sucker-mouthed lizards came into view, then others. A hundred. A thousand. Hundreds of thousands and millions after that. A sea of alien faces. Then he began to scream -
        
        He woke.
        The reality was not much better than the nightmare. He was strapped firmly in a chair, his hands tied together with some plastic-covered wire that ensured they would remain together, a hasty handcuffing but an effective one. Behind him and to either side were vacii guards with their guns drawn. In front, another vacii paced. When it saw the flutter of Salsbury's eyelashes and realized he was awake, it slipped into the chair opposite him and stared with those mad crimson eyes.
        “How did you get in,” it asked, the voice a thin, hissed guttural whisper.
        When he refused to answer, the guards shifted uneasily. He tested the wire and found it was as tight as it had seemed at first, much too tight. He thought, still, if he saw the worst coming, he might just be able to break it. It would require all his strength and some of that adrenalin chemical from the interior of his liver. What the wire would do to his wrist while he strained to break it would not be pleasant, but it would be preferable to death. And death might be exactly what the vacii had in mind. He thought about what he had done to their fellows since he had arrived in this probability line, and he wondered how strong their revenge motivations were. Then he remembered the 810-40.04 had said vacii were nearly emotionless; he felt just the slightest bit better.
        “Pleasse make it eassier on yoursself,” the vacii said.
        “I broke in,” he said. They did not seem to know of the violation of the prober chamber, and he was not about to tell them.
        “How?” the inquisitor asked.
        “Through the front door. When the guard wasn't looking, I-”
        The inquisitor dispensed with such lies simply by refusing to listen to them. He stood and paced in front of Salsbury, sucker mouth working, puckering, then going flaccid and loose like the pendulously lipped mouths of drunkards, then puckering again. There was a faint, unpleasant odor to the alien that Salsbury had noticed on other vacii, and which had been stronger in the ventilation shafts. It was the odor of fish, of slimy things that laid in mud flats and sunned themselves. “There iss no guard on the door. There iss no way you could have gotten in except by palm-printing the lock. And your printsss would surely not be on file!”
        Salsbury said nothing.
        The inquisitor pointed to the weapons next, the gas pellet gun and the micro-bombs in the rucksack which they had opened and gone through. It wanted to know where he had obtained such things.
        “They aren't mine,” Salsbury said.
        The bony hand slapped him hard. The question was repeated,
        “I found them here,” he said.
        He was slapped again. His head trembled, as if his neck had turned to jelly. There was a ringing in his ears; colored lights did sloppily choreographed dances behind his eyes. “I made them,” he said next.
        “How?” Even filtered through the alien voice box and the sucker mouth, there was scorn in the words.
        “With my tools. In my basement.”
        “You are very foolissh. We haven't the devicess to make you talk here. But on One Line, there are such thingss.”
        He turned to the other vacii guards and instructed them. The straps were yanked loose, and Salsbury was hustled to his feet without any ceremony. The guards took him into the corridor, down to the end of it where another alien lounged against the wall, chewing on a bright orange stick, his eyes heavily