The man with the gun said something in a commanding tone of voice and gestured with his free hand. Hale didn't understand the command, but the gesture plainly meant "Get up!"

Leland Hale was never a man to argue with a gun. He stood up slowly.

As he did, the expressions on the faces of the two men altered slightly. Hale couldn't understand the new expressions at first, hidden as they were by the beards. Then, as they backed away a little, he understood. The men were no more than five eight; he towered a good ten inches above them.

The armed man spoke again, waving the gun. Hale interpreted this as "All right, let's go." He complied. He didn't know where they were taking him, but almost anything was better than being alone. He wasn't too worried; he'd been in plenty of tight spots before. Jailbreaking was nothing new to Leland Hale.

It was just barely dawn. The sky was light, but the edge of the sun had not quite shown itself over the eastern horizon, far out to sea.

The trio walked along silently for a couple of miles, then they topped a little rise and went up a long slope to the top of the cliff. Below him, Hale saw a village. Taun. He realized that if he had been walking along the ridge instead of on the shore, he would have seen the town the night before.

Down the slope they went, heading for the little cluster of houses surrounding the small bay.

There weren't many people in the streets of the small town, although there seemed to be plenty of activity around the docks. Hale could see tilled fields to the west of the settlement, where there were people already at work.

A third man in a gray-brown robe met them in the middle of one of the cobblestone streets and asked something of Hale's guards. They stopped, and a long conversation followed. Hale strained his ears to catch the words.

At first, it was complete gibberish, but Hale knew what key words to listen for, and gradually he picked up more and more.

As on every inhabited planet of the galaxy, the language of Cardigan's Green was derived from Terran—basically English, with large additions of Russian, Chinese, and Spanish. Hale had traveled a great deal in his life—partly by choice and partly because often he had no choice. He had heard and spoken a hundred different dialects of Terran, and the assimilation of a new 

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