a small disinterested shrug

There was no way to measure time, in the Mekhar slave ship, except by meal-periods and by the periods when the ship, or at least the slave quarters, were darkened for sleep. Nevertheless Dane Marsh estimated afterward that some three weeks, by his own reckoning, passed without any major incident. The main event of this time, by his own awareness, was the slow return of Dallith from willful death to life. She slept, that time, for some hours, and when she woke Dane fed her again. The next time he encouraged her to sit up for a few minutes and, when she was able to stand and move around, he asked Rianna to help her to the bathing quarters set apart for the females in their section. He had made the request with some qualms-after all, Rianna had expected, almost wanted the girl to lie there and die, and he had halfway foreseen that she would refuse to involve herself at all-but to his surprise she agreed and thereafter she took over a good part of Dallith's daily care, with an almost motherly concern. Dane didn't try to understand it, but he accepted it gratefully. For a long time Dallith was not strong enough to talk much, and he did not press her. He was content to sit by her side and let her hold his hand . . . almost, he thought, as if in some way he could give her some of his own strength and vitality. But she was growing in strength daily, and one day she smiled at him and asked about him. "And you're from a world none of us have ever heard of. Strange, that they should risk so much to come there. Or perhaps not, if all your people are as strong as yourself." He shrugged. "I've spent most of my life hunting new adventures. This is just a little more bizarre than most, that's all. I got hooked early on the idea that nobody would willingly pass up any kind of experience that was-what do they say-neither illegal, immoral, nor fattening." She laughed a little. Her laugh was enchanting, as if all the gaiety in the world dwelt within her voice. "Are all your people like that?" "No, I guess not A lot of them settle down early and never do anything.

 

But the adventurer strain keeps coming back. I guess it's a pretty durable part of our makeup." He remembered then that Rianna had told him that Dallith's people invariably died, away from their home world, and bit his lip to keep from asking questions about that But as if she followed his thoughts, a shadow passed over her face. Her sadness seemed as all-pervasive as her gaiety, as if her small slight body held room for only one emotion at a time and it wholly possessed her. She said, "I only hope your strength and bravery don't mean that the Mekhars have some especially fearful fate planned for you." "All I can do is wait and see what happens," he said, "but like I told you, while there's life, there's hope." The shadow lay deep on her. She said, "I could not imagine, could not even dream, of hope or anything good ahead, away from my world and my people." Her voice was desolate. "Oh, others have left our world, but with some purpose, and never-never alone." Dane said, "It's like a miracle that you came back. But it's a miracle I still can't completely understand." She said simply, "You reached me. I felt your strength, and your will to live, so that I could believe in life again. It was that which fed me ... your own hope and your belief in life ahead as well as behind. And with so much will to live, there was no room in me for death, and so death took his hand away from me and I began to live again. The rest was"-a small disinterested shrug-"only mechanics. The important thing was that you still believed in life, and you could share your belief with me." He clasped her small hand in his. The fingers were as soft as if they were boneless, completely pliant, molded to his. "Come, Dallith, are you trying to tell me that you read my mind, or my emotions, or something?" "Of course," she said, surprised. "What else?" Well, how can I say it isn't true? It seems to have happened, and anyway she believes it,

 

Dane thought, but he still felt a little disquieted; uncanny. Still, he was content, for as her strength grew, Dallith clung to him more and more. Sometimes it almost frightened him, that she should be so completely dependent on his will-what would she do if they were separated? he thought-but mostly it did not trouble him, for she was not obtrusive or demanding. Most of the time she was content to sit quietly at his side, without speaking, almost like a shadow, while, during the next days and weeks, he took the measure of his fellow prisoners. He seemed to be the only one-at least in their separate cell-from an isolated world. All of the others were, more or less, from the same interstellar civilization as Rianna. They were a mixed crew. The spider-thing was from a hot, wet world where his race was in a minority, and his name was an incomprehensible mangle of sibilants. And even the enormous lizard-man, Aratak, found his mental processes inaccessible, although he tried. He told Dane kindly, "He is very bewildered. I do not think he is sure what has happened; his mental processes have been shocked." Dane was less charitable; orivatelv he didn't believe the spidery alien had any mental processes worth noticing. All he seemed able to do was huddle in a corner, hissing at anyone who came near, and when food was brought sidle out in a rush, take it, and retreat with it. Dane wrote him off as probably being of no use in their present trouble.

 

Rianna and Roxon, the two sturdy red-headed anthropologists, were far more congenial. Dane kept forgetting that they were not Earthmen like himself, unless one of them happened to allude to some commonplace of their lives which to him, was straight out of a science fiction movie . . . Rianna offhandedly saying that she had served a four-year apprenticeship in alien technology surveying an asteroid belt for fragments of the civilization on the exploded world; Roxon complaining that the main axis of the civilization was interested only in proto-feline technologies and tended to ignore the protosimians (or humans) as being superficial. "Just because the damned proto-felines invented the extralight drives, they think they own the Universe," he grumbled more than once. As for Aratak, the lizard-man quickly became a companion, then, surprisingly, a friend. The immense alien seemed quickly more human than any of the others. His gray, rugose skin, his huge claws and teeth, were quickly forgotten; his mind worked, Dane swiftly found out, very much like Dane's own. His philosophy reminded Dane very much of the Hawaiians and Filipinos he had met on his first voyage to the Pacific; a calm acceptance of life, a willingness to take whatever came, not exactly submitting to it, but going along with it until something better came along, and incidentally getting what was good out of it. He never left a crumb of his food, he slept long and well, and he tended to fill every lull in the conversation with some excerpt from the Wisdom of the Divine Egg-who had been, Dane gradually gathered, the Confucius, Lao-Tzu, Hillel, and Hiawatha of his race. On the surface he seemed content and even complacent in their captivity, enough so as to be infuriating.

 

But Dane was sure it was not quite what it seemed. At first this was only a suspicion; on the eighth or ninth "day" of their captivity, the suspicion ripened into certainty. That was the day when a man in the next cage, or cell, went mad. Dane saw him crouch, when the clanging sound came which meant that the Mekhars were on the way with food, tense and huddled within himself and all one purpose which could almost be seen. And the instant that the food-cart came into sight around the curve of the corridor he rushed the door, flung it open, and threw himself against the edge of the cart, sending it careening back and knocking the Mekhar who pushed it off his feet. For an instant Dane tensed, thinking, Now! Now, if they all rush him at once, at once, he couldn't kill more than one or two of themHe actually began to spring; and then the man at the cart began to yell, incoherently, a hoarse half scream. "Come on, you bastards! Kill me all at once, not by inches! Come on, everybody get them, better to die fighting than sit here waiting-" He grabbed the end of the food-cart and ran it over the prostrate body of the Mekhar, by now howling gibberish and screaming. Dallith shrieked and hid her face in her hands. Aratak gripped his claws on the bars, and as Dane tautened his muscles for a rush the lizard-man reached out one hand and grabbed him. His claws dug into Dane's shoulder, tearing his shirt. "Not now," he said. "Don't throw your life away like this. Not now!" The loose prisoner was still howling and raging, charging up and down with the runaway foodcart.

 

The other Mekhar raised his weapon and gestured; the madman did not seem to see him. He ran right up against him and in the instant before the food-cart ran him down the Mekhar with the weapon raised it-almost, it seemed to Dane, reluctantly-and shot him. The man screamed, a terrible tearing sound. He dropped to the floor, writhing, convulsing, froth coming from his mouth as his muscles went into spasm after spasm of shuddering. He screamed and screamed, fainter and fainter, and at last he lay still, twitching and still convulsing. The Mekhar bent and dragged him into his cell, gesturing at his cell-mates with the drawn weapon. They all edged back before it, with horrified gasps and murmurs. The feeding went on without further incident; but Dane could not eat, until Dallith, white as her own loose robe, refused food and faltered into the women's area to vomit; then, with hard selfdiscipline, Dane forced himself to pick up his food and chew it, doggedly. He should have known. Dallith was so much a reflection of his own moods.... With the new knowledge of this, he ate, refusing to think about the would-be escapee; when Dallith, gray and shaking, came back, he pulled her down beside him and gently fed her little pieces from his own tray until the color began to come back into her cheeks, then sat by her until she slept. The wounded man in the next cell moaned and twitched and foamed and screamed more and more faintly, although his cell-mates tended him, until some time that night he died. The next morning at feeding-time the Mekhars hauled his body away.