HE was lying motionless on a hard cot, with his eyes closed, yet with his every sense sharply quickened. Tentatively he tightened small muscles in his arms and legs. Across his wrists and thighs he felt straps binding him to the cot.

“So that’s our big, bad man,” a coarse voice above him observed [p143]  caustically. “He doesn’t look so tough now, does he?”

[p

143

]  

“It might have been better to kill him right away,” a second, less confident voice said. “It’s supposed to be impossible to hold him.”

“Don’t be stupid. We just do what we’re told. We’ll hold him.”

“What do you think they’ll do with him?”

“Execute him, I suppose,” the harsh voice said matter-of-factly. “They’re probably just curious to see what he looks like first. They’ll be disappointed.”

Zarwell opened his eyes a slit to observe his surroundings.

It was a mistake. “He’s out of it,” the first speaker said, and Zarwell allowed his eyes to open fully.

The voice, he saw, belonged to the big man who had bruised him against the locker at the spaceport. Irrelevantly he wondered how he knew now that it had been a spaceport.

His captor’s broad face jeered down at Zarwell. “Have a good sleep?” he asked with mock solicitude. Zarwell did not deign to acknowledge that he heard.

The big man turned. “You can tell the Chief he’s awake,” he said. Zarwell followed his gaze to where a younger man, with a blond lock of hair on his forehead, stood behind him. The youth nodded and went out, while the other pulled a chair up to the side of Zarwell’s cot.

While their attention was away from him Zarwell had unobtrusively loosened his bonds as much as possible with arm leverage. As the big man drew his chair nearer, he made the hand farthest from him tight and compact and worked it free of the leather loop. He waited.

The big man belched. “You’re supposed to be great stuff in a situation like this,” he said, his smoke-tan face splitting in a grin that revealed large square teeth. “How about giving me a sample?”

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