In a second all those meanings which the activities of his upper mind had given his life until now were washed away in the brutal impulses from the older centers of his brain. His response to the light and shape and beauty that was art left him. His deep bond with the rest of the human race, which he had forged before being brought to this place, was forgotten. So was Marie. All that was left was the deep, primeval urge to tear and kill.
He had his hands now around the thick-skinned, leathery throat of Chak’ha, his thumbs digging in. Chak’ha’s saber teeth and claws were slashing him wildly, but he felt no pain—he was only dimly aware of the blood running from his many wounds. Die! Die! his mind shouted at the alien as he tried to tighten his grip on the other’s windpipe, wherever in that thick neck it might be…
But Chak’ha was not dying. He was continuing to slash at Miles—and gradually Miles began to realize that his own grip was weakening. All at once he became aware that he was losing blood too fast. He was failing.
A cold inner wind blew suddenly across his hot passion for killing. It was not the alien who was in danger of dying—it was himself. Something deeper than panic moved in him, and suddenly he remembered all that, for a moment, he had forgotten: Marie, the paintings he had yet to do, the people of his Earth. His grip was slipping weakly from Chak’ha’s neck now— but he could not afford to die!
Without warning, for the second time in his life, he went into a state of hysterical strength.
Suddenly the tiger-faced alien was a toy in his hands. Chak’ha had already pulled loose from Miles’ grip on his throat and half turned away. But Miles caught him again now easily. Miles turned him, slid one arm under Chak’ha’s right armpit and the other under the alien’s left armpit, then clasped his hands together behind the other’s neck and pressed. Chak’ha’s neck bent like a straw-filled tube of leather, and there came from it a creaking sound.
Abruptly, a strange gray fog seemed to fold itself about the mind and body of Miles. Dimly, he was aware that it was nothing his opponent had done. Nor was it anything that had been done by any of those standing in a tight circle around him and his enemy. It was something that seemed to come from the ship itself or from something beyond the ship.
Unexpectedly, the fires of his hysteria were smothered. His muscles lost their strength. He was aware of his arms falling limply away, his fingers loosening and losing their grasp together behind Chak’ha’s neck. Like a man under heavy sedation, he rolled off the back of his opponent and lay lost in the gray fog.
He was vaguely aware of the fact that Chak’ha, beside him, was also lying limply, wrapped in the same helpless condition. Above and around him, Miles was vaguely conscious of the circle of onlookers breaking up and drifting away. He saw a couple of them pick up the lax form of Chak’ha and carry it off. Alien hands also grasped him by the shoulders and legs and lifted him.
He felt himself being carried—where or to what, he was indifferent. He saw the ceiling of a corridor swaying above him; he saw the upper part of a doorway and then the ceiling of a smaller room. He felt himself thrown onto what seemed to be a soft surface, the soft undersurface of a niche in the wall that could be a bunk or a bed. Then he was left alone, and he slept.
When he awoke at last, it was a gradual awakening. He felt that he had been asleep for some time that was not a short time. At first he felt nothing; then he became gradually conscious of his stiffness and the soreness that encompassed his whole body.
He still lay on the bunk on which he had been thrown. He lifted his head now to look at himself. Nothing, he could see, had been done for him. On the other hand the deep bites and scratches—in fact, all the injuries he had taken in his battle with Chak’ha—were already scabbed over and healing. He felt weak, but aside from this, and aside from the aches, which were no worse than those after a hard game of football as he remembered it from his junior high school days, he felt as good as ever.
He turned his head. Across the width of the small room from him, on another bunk, was the tiger-faced alien. Chak’ha was also awake and looking back at him. The other’s two tusks glinted in the illumination from the lighting panel overhead, while the rest of the heavy body lay still half-hidden in the shadow of the bunk. It was impossible to read Chak’ha’s expression, but even with the weakness and the aches, Miles felt gathering once more within him the white heat of that lustful joy of killing he had experienced during the fight.
He grinned at Chak’ha challengingly. But the other dropped his own gaze, and abruptly Miles understood, partly through the sensitivity to the emotions of others that had been given him with his new body by the Center Aliens, but partly also through some likeness between him and Chak’ha that had nothing to do with the Center Aliens at all, that he had conquered at least this one of his fellow crewmen.
“Do you jump everybody who comes aboard here for the first time?” asked Miles.
Chak’ha lifted his gaze and answered. “No more,” he said. “This boat is full now. You were the last. Now I’m last.”
There was something odd about the meaning of the word of their strange common shipboard language which Chak’ha had used to give the meaning of “last”—something almost like a pun, a double meaning. It was as if Chak’ha said “last” but at the same time also gave it the meaning of “least.” It was a subtle but undeniable connotation that Miles could not quite pin down, for the odd reason that he found he knew this strange language too well. He spoke it and translated it into English in his head at the same time. But he was not able to compare his translation with the actual sounds that he heard and that his own tongue and lips and throat made, for the reason that the knowledge that the Center Aliens had given him of this tongue was way down within him in the level of automatic verbal habit. He could no more hear with an unprejudiced ear the strange words he spoke than a man can hear with analytical detachment the accent with which he speaks his native tongue.
He shook his head a little and dropped the question of the double meaning.
“What do we do now, then?” he asked Chak’ha.
“Do?” answered Chak’ha. “Nothing. What’s there to do?”
He dropped back on the bed and rolled over on his back, staring at the ceiling of his bunk.
There was a lifelessness, an air of defeat, to Chak’ha’s answer. Puzzled but curious, Miles made an effort to get up. Wincing, he managed to get his legs over the edge of the bed and rise to his feet. He was stiff and sore but, he decided, certainly able with a little bit of willpower to make himself get around. He walked stiffly out of the small room and into the corridor outside.
Another member of the crew was passing. It was a round, bearlike alien. Miles stiffened, ready for anything up to and including physical attack. But the rotund alien merely gave him the briefest and most incurious of glances and walked on. Miles turned to stare after him, then followed. Now would be as good a time as any to explore this vessel to which he had been assigned.
It was exactly that, in the next hour, which he did. Gradually he examined the vessel’s interior from stem to stern. He also counted the rest of the members of the crew. Including himself, there seemed to be twenty-three, each one curiously different from the others.
But even more curious than these differences was the ship itself. Astonishingly, it seemed to have no power plant at all—beyond what might lie concealed in the small space below the console of the control panel in the bow room of the ship. Beyond this control room, which was set up for no more than three individuals to work in at one time, there were crew quarters, rooms with from one to as many as four bunks in them, the number of bunks seeming to vary without reason or purpose from room to room. There was the lounge, which he had first entered, taking up the large middle part of the ship and furnished with a number of different items of what he took to be furniture or recreational devices—among them, he was half-amused, half-embarrassed to see, was a very earthly overstuffed chair with a small, round coffee table alongside it.