told us you came from Earth, then."

"I was not lying. Give me some alcohol, Captain."

"No. How do I know it won't revive you?"

"My word on it."

Pink gave the hardest and briefest bark of laughter ever heard on the spaceways. It became silent. Finally he leaned forward to stare at it. "Your eyes have faded," he said. "By God, I think you aren't paralyzed. I think you're dying!"

After another silence it said, "Yes. I am dying."

"I couldn't be happier," said Pinkham viciously. "I even hope it's painful."

"It is not. The only pain came with the passage through my molecules of the l—" it halted abruptly.

"Ah," said Pink, hefting the Colt. "Of the lead. It had to be that, of course; but thanks for reassuring me. Your tribe's allergic to lead in a rather high degree."

The flames leaped in its eyes. "I haven't told you anything so valuable," it said, with a kind of weak bravado. "There are too many of us, too few of you, and not enough lead in this whole system to conquer us. You have found the secret, but you'll never carry it back to Earth. My people shall go there instead, when they have sucked the methods from your broken body."

"When will you die?" he asked it. In spite of his hatred, humanity was rising in him. It was beaten and he was too much of a man to crow for long.

"I hear remorse in your tone," said the alien. "For the love of God, then, give me some alcohol."

He remembered the headless corpse of Wright. He said, "No."

Perhaps a quarter of an hour passed. It began to talk to itself in a monotone, a sort of feverish delirium.

"I never thought of it, at least not often, for I steered my mind away from it; but once a decade or every thirty years I would remember, perhaps one of us would say, 'Oh, to have a flagon of palm wine,' and then the agony of desire would wrack me until I must fight my body and tear it proton from proton so that I hurt badly and the remembrance would leave me. Al-kuhl, al-kuhl! Why in all the universe must there be this one combination of stupid elements which drags every fleck of 

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