The end result of those instructions was the conversation that they were having now as they sat in the lounge looking across at Vouhroi. The timbre of Miles’ voice and that of Chak’ha’s were very close—close enough so that practice could make them almost identical. For more than a week now, Miles had been secretly practicing with Chak’ha to imitate the pronunciation Chak’ha gave to Vouhroi’s name.
Now he repeated the name after Chak’ha. The tigerfaced alien nodded.
“Right,” he said at last. “It sounds right the way you say it now.”
“Good,” answered Miles. He glanced across at Vouhroi, apparently dozing, with half-closed eyelids, across the lounge. “I’ll go forward now. You wait a few minutes and then stroll aft.”
Miles got up from his chair in the lounge and wandered toward the front end of the lounge and from there into the corridor leading to the control room in front. He went halfway up the corridor, turned, put his shoulders against the wall, and waited.
With his mind he measured the slow seconds as they flowed by. Ever since the Center Aliens had changed him physically, he had been aware of differences in mind and mental skills as well. One of these was this ability to keep time in his head as well as any watch. So he waited while the minutes passed, and after perhaps three and a half minutes Eff came down the corridor from the control room, gave him the barest glance, and passed on without pausing, his rotund figure disappearing into the lounge. Miles waited another minute and a half. Then, quietly, he walked down the corridor until he was just out of sight of the lounge and the position of Vouhroi’s chair in the lounge.
From where he stood flattened against the inside wall of the corridor, he could just see the entrance to the farther corridor leading back to the crew quarters and could see against the inner wall there the blocky outline of Chak’ha waiting.
Then he shouted, in the closest imitation of Chak’ha’s voice and accent he could manage.
“Vouhroi!”
“Vouhroi!” It was a shout in Chak’ha’s voice from the other corridor. Chak’ha was now running into the lounge, continuing to shout as he came. “Vouhroi! Vouhroi! Vouhroi…”
Miles launched himself toward the lounge, running at top speed and as noiselessly as he could. He had a moment’s glimpse of Chak’ha rushing in from the opposite direction—of Vouhroi with his back turned, staring at Chak’ha. Then Miles hit the lynxlike alien with a hard tackle at waist level.
He slammed the unprepared Vouhroi down against the deck of the lounge—hard enough, Miles would have thought, to knock out a human being. But even as he was thrown to the deck, Vouhroi was attempting to twist around in Miles’ grasp, and though his head slammed hard on the uncarpeted surface beneath them, he did not appear to be stunned.
Miles already had Vouhroi in the same full nelson which had worked so well with Chak’ha. At the same time that Miles began to exert pressure against the other’s neck, he clamped his own human legs around the legs of Vouhroi and tried to hold them as Vouhroi attempted to kick and scramble loose. But the alien’s legs were too powerful. They broke free, and Miles shifted his leg grip to a scissors hold around Vouhroi’s narrow waist.
Vouhroi surged about and for one furious moment succeeded in rising to his feet, with Miles riding on his back. Then Miles’ weight overbalanced him and he fell backward. Lying underneath the alien, Miles continued to apply pressure to Vouhroi’s neck. He half expected the overdrive strength to come to his aid, as it had with Chak’ha. But it did not come, and it was not needed.
Already Vouhroi’s neck was starting to give. It did not, indeed, have as much inner stiffness and strength as had Chak’ha’s. Miles felt it bend—and almost at once the tranquilizing gray fog, the feeling of weakness and indifference, closed in about him and his opponent, and he drifted dimly off into unconcern, the battle fires of emotion within him damped and extinguished.
When he woke on his bunk after this second battle, however, there was a face looming close above him. It was the face of Chak’ha, and coming from Chak’ha, Miles sensed clearly a strange emotion—something between glee and triumph.
“Awake, Miles?” asked Chak’ha.
“Awake,” replied Miles a little thickly.
The face of Chak’ha came closer. He lowered his voice to what, for him, was the equivalent of a whisper.
“We did it, Miles! Didn’t we do it?”
“I did it,” said Miles. “With your help.”
“That’s what I mean,” whispered Chak’ha savagely. “With my help. You did it with my help. The two of us together.”
Chak’ha’s eyes half-closed. Once more there came from him, to Miles’ emotion-sensing capability, a feeling of great relief and joy and friendship.
For the first time, Miles realized that Chak’ha had expected to be disowned by Miles once Miles had moved one more step up the ladder. There was something deeply touching about the emotion that flowed from the tiger-faced individual bent closely above his bunk. Miles reached out to grasp one of the thick, stubby, clawed hands of Chak’ha in his own. Chak’ha looked down at the joined extremities in surprise.
“This is how we do it among my people,” said Miles and shook Chak’ha’s hand, then let it go. Chak’ha looked for a moment wonderingly at his own released hand, then stared back at Miles, and the feeling of happiness from him increased.
Miles drifted back off into slumber, carrying that feeling of happiness and friendship with him.
In the next few weeks that followed, he fought his way up through the pecking order. In each case, after winning, he tried to make friends with the alien he had just conquered. One or two of those he had beaten became friendly. But none of them became as close to him as Chak’ha, who now followed him about continually. In time, there were left only two crew members aboard who did not acknowledge Miles’ presence or answer when he spoke to them. These were Eff and Luhon, the one whom nobody else could beat.
The opposition had grown progressively more difficult as Miles had mounted the ladder of the pecking order. His last fight, with a dark-skinned humanoid named Henaoa, had taken all of Miles’ strength and skill to win. Logically, therefore, he could not expect to conquer the two remaining crew members. Even if he did somehow manage to conquer Eff, certainly he would not be able to conquer Luhon.
The secrets of their individual strengths were now quite clear to him. In Eff’s case, the rotund body was all muscle—he was not plump, he was a chunk of heavy-bodied power. In Luhon’s case, his secret was that speed which Miles had already observed. Certainly there must be strength connected with it. But in any case, Luhon’s reflexes were such that it would be necessary for Miles to conquer the gray-skinned alien with his first blow—because the chances were that he would not have a chance to land a second.
But Luhon was in the future. Eff was in the present, and Miles was aware that Eff had been subtly on guard ever since Miles’ last victory—for all that the rotund alien appeared to ignore everyone but Luhon.
For a full week, Miles studied Eff. At first it seemed that there was no point of weakness about him. The joints of his body were solid and deeply set in muscle and flesh. His neck was so short as to be almost nonexistent. The full nelson that Miles had used to advantage several times now would not work this time—let alone the fact that Eff had undoubtedly noted its use and was on guard. Miles raked over the dead coals of his younger memories before polio had stricken and made useless his arm. There must have been other wrestling holds or tricks that he must have known or read about or heard about, once upon a time. He needed something unexpected to use against Eff.