The Andre Norton Megapack - 15 Classic Novels and Short Stories

But would the aliens keep their part of the bargain? He no longer believed that.
    Why not give these barbarians a chance, and the colonists. Sure, he was breaking the stiffest rule of the Service. But, perhaps by now the flitter was gone, he might never reach the RS 10 . It was not his war, right enough. But he’d give the weaker side a fighting chance.
    Dalgard followed him into the globe ship, climbing the ladders to the engine level, watching with curious eyes as Raf inspected the driving power of the ship and made the best disposition possible of one of the bombs.
    Then they were on the ladder once more as the ship shook under them, plates buckling as a great wound tore three decks apart. Raf laughed recklessly. Now that he was committed to this course, he had a small-boy delight in the destruction.
    “They won’t raise her again in a hurry,” he confided to Dalgard. But the other did not share his triumph.
    “They come—we must move fast,” the scout urged.
    When they jumped from the hatch, they discovered that the mermen had been busy in their turn. As many of the supplies as they could move had been pushed and piled into one great mass. Broken crystal littered the floor in shards and puddles of strange chemicals mingled smells to become a throat-rasping fog. Raf eyed those doubtfully. Some of those fumes might combine in the blast—
    Once again Dalgard read his mind and waved the mermen back, sending them through the door to the ramp and the lower engine room. Raf stood in the doorway, the bomb in his hand, knowing that it was time for him to make the most accurate cast of his life.
    The sphere left his fingers, was a gleam in the murky air. It struck the pile of material. Then the whole world was hidden by a blinding glare.
    It was dark—black dark. And he was swinging back and forth through this total darkness. He was a ball, a blast bomb being tossed from hand to hand through the dark by painted warriors who laughed shrilly at his pain, tossed through the dark. Fear such as he had never known, even under the last acceleration pressure of the take-off from Terra, beat through Raf’s veins away from his laboring heart. He was helpless in the dark!
    “Not alone—” the words came out of somewhere, he didn’t know whether he heard them, or, in some queer way, felt them. “You are safe—not alone.”
    That brought a measure of comfort. But he was still in the dark, and he was moving—he could not will his hands to move—yet he was moving. He was being carried!
    The flitter—he was back on the flitter! They were air-borne. But who was piloting?
    “Captain! Soriki!” he appealed for reassurance. And then was aware that there was no familiar motor hum, none of that pressure of rushing air to which he had been so long accustomed that he missed it only now.
    “You are safe—” Again that would-be comfort. But Raf tried to move his arms, twist his body, be sure that he rested in the flitter. Then another thought, only vaguely alarming at first, but which grew swiftly to panic proportions—He was in the alien globe—He was a prisoner!
    “You are safe!” the words beat in his mind.
    “But where—where?” he felt as if he were screaming that at the full power of his lungs. He must get out of this dark envelope, be free. Free! Free Men—He was Raf Kurbi of the Federation of Free Men, member of the crew of the Spacer RS 10 . But there had been something else about free men—
    Painfully he pulled fragments of pictures out of the past, assembled a jigsaw of wild action. And all of it ended in a blinding flash, blinding!
    Raf cowered mentally if not physically, as his mind seized upon that last word. The blinding flash, then this depth of darkness. Had he been—?
    “You are safe.”
    Maybe he was safe, he thought, with an anger born of honest fear, but was he—blind? And where was he? What had happened to him since that moment when the blast bomb had exploded?
    “I am blind,” he spat out, wanting to be told that his fears were only fears and not the truth.
    “Your eyes are covered,” the answer came quickly enough, and for a short space he was comforted until he realized that the reply was not a flat denial of his statement.
    “Soriki?” he tried again. “Captain? Lablet?”
    “Your companions”—there was a moment of hesitation, and then came what he was sure was the truth—“have escaped. Their ship took to the air when the Center was invaded.”
    So, he wasn’t on the