Beastchild

of the two miniature creatures took on a green glow. As the gnome had done before them, they began to melt…
        They clawed frantically at the glass.
        The Isolator had given them intelligence and emotions of a sort, in order to make the torturing more enjoyable.
        They dissolved.
        They became quivering pieces of flesh.
        The Isolator maintained their consciousness even to this point, thrusting them through wave after wave of excruciating horror and pain.
        Then it abruptly dropped the ball into its mass and digested it. There was no fun in such games. Not really. It could not strike from its mind that it had failed on the real mission. But who would ever have expected a naoli to work against it? It had been expecting help from the lizard that was with the human-and had received only hindrance.
        It burbled in the tank. It was restless.
        A glass ball rose out of its pudding-like mass and hovered in the darkness. Inside was a gnome, dancing and gibbering on milky threads, laughing happily to itself.

Chapter Seventeen
        
        When Hulann leaned over David's shoulder to watch the young man programming the train's complex computers on the simple keyboard, the human jumped in the command chair as if struck by a bullet, his entire body convulsing in what must have been, at least, a slightly painful spasm. His face drained to the color of dry sand bleached by the sun, and his eyes were circles stamped out by a die-press. Hulann stepped backwards, shuffling his large feet, then went to the side window to look at the passing scenery.
        "I told you that he wouldn't harm us. He's our friend," Leo said impatiently.
        David looked sheepishly at Hulann's back; he swallowed hard. "I'm sorry," he said.
        Hulann nonchalantly waved a hand to indicate that the incident had been of no import. He could hardly expect a grown man, conditioned by twenty years and more of anti-naoli propaganda, to respond to him as quickly and as easily as an eleven-year-old boy whose mind was still fresh and open to changes of every magnitude. He remembered how reluctant he had been to touch Leo in that cellar when the boy had needed his leg wound dressed. How much harder it must be, then, for one of the defeated race to get accustomed to the presence of one of those responsible for the death of his kind.
        "Why don't you sit down?" David asked. "I get jumpy; but it's the truth-when you're parading around behind me like that."
        "Can't sit comfortably," Hulann explained.
        "What?" David asked.
        "His tail," Leo said. "Your chairs here don't have any holes in them to let his tail hang out. A naoli has a very sensitive tail. It hurts them just to sit on it."
        "I didn't know."
        "So he has to stand," Leo said.
        Confused, David returned to the keyboard and finished typing his instructions to the computer. Yesterday, such a short time ago, he had been serene, content to flee from the enemy in his swift-wheeled magic wagon; today, he was ferrying a naoli across the country and was no longer certain he could tell an enemy from a friend. It had begun yesterday when he had watched, from the corner of his eye, what seemed to be a shuttle pacing the train, yet attempting to remain concealed.
        Near dusk, he came to a place where debris clogged the tracks and was forced to stop the Bluebolt and examine the disaster before trying to nose through it.
        The blockage was a mangled trio of shattered shuttle-craft. On every side, the country was littered with dilapidated and decaying machines. People had congregated here as they had in all the "wild" areas of the world, seeking to escape the burning, exploding, crumbling, alien-infested cities where the major battles roared. But the naoli had come here too. It had only taken a little longer. And in trying to escape at any cost, the shuttle drivers had collided as in this tangled despair. David did not look too closely at the mess, for fear he would see skeletons that had once been drivers, bony fingers clutching wheels, and empty eye sockets staring through shattered glass.
        When he finally determined that he could move the wreckage with the engine's cowbumper and proceed on his way, he turned to board the Bluebolt again-and came face-to-face with a naoli!
        His first instinct was to go for a weapon, though he had nothing lethal and was not the type to use a