（外文电子版资料）A. bertram Chandler- The Cage.pdfVIP

The Cage BERTRAM CHANDLER Imprisonment is always a humiliating experience, no matter how philosophical the prisoner. Imprisonment by ones own kind is bad enough - but one can, at least, talk to ones captors, one can make ones wants understood; one can, on occasion, appeal to them man to man. Imprisonment is doubly humiliating when ones captors, in all honesty, treat one as a lower animal. The party from the survey ship could, perhaps, be excused for failing to recognize the survivors from the interstellar liner Lode Star as rational beings. At least two hundred days had passed since their landing on the planet without a name - an unintentional landing made when Lode Stars Ehrenhaft generators, driven far in excess of their normal capacity by a breakdown of the electronic regulator, had flung her far from the regular shipping lanes to an unexplored region of space. Lode Star had landed safely enough; but shortly thereafter (troubles never come singly) her pile had got out of control and her captain had ordered his first mate to evacuate the passengers and those crew members not needed to cope with the emergency, and to get them as far from the ship as possible. Hawkins and his charges were well clear when there was a flare of released energy, a not very violent explosion. The survivors wanted to turn to watch, but Hawkins drove them on with curses and, at times, blows. Luckily they were up wind from the ship and so escaped the fall-out. When the fireworks seemed to be over, Hawkins, accompanied by Dr Boyle, the ships surgeon, returned to the scene of the disaster. The two men, wary of radioactivity, were cautious and stayed a safe distance from the shallow, still smoking crater that marked where the ship had been. It was all too obvious to them that the captain, together with his officers and technicians, was no