He showed her again. She still did nothing. He slapped her left hand, and left her in a little whimpering heap in a corner of the hut. He strode angrily out and stalked around the village. He wasn’t going to be stymied here, not when he got past every other hurdle so well.
When he returned, night had fallen, and she was waiting for him, holding the thought-converter. She had a bright little smile, and seemed to have forgotten all about the slap. He looked at the thought-converter. The wires were in place. The Crayden luck was holding true to form.
He kissed her, and she responded as he had taught her. After a while, he picked up the thought-converter and held it fondly.
“Kejwa,” she said.
This was his chance to find out, he thought. He reached underneath and snapped on the converter.
Her lips formed the word “Kejwa” again.
But through the converter came a stream of unexpected concepts. “Placator of the gods…noble intervener…royal sacrifice.”
“Sacrifice? What? When?”
She launched into a string of words, and the converter brought them over all too clearly. “Tomorrow is the day you go to the gods, and I should be happy. But I’m sad. I’ll miss you.”
“You mean the Kejwa gets killed?” he asked desperately.
“Oh, no,” the converter translated. “Not killed. You go to meet the gods, to intervene in our favor. One of us is chosen every year. This year you came to us from above and it was good.”
“Where do the gods live?”
She pointed. “Down there. At the bottom of the lake. It is deep. We have never been able to reach the bottom.”
Crayden’s insides jangled. Royal sacrifice? Bottomless lake? So that was the catch?
The Crayden luck was just about being stretched to the breaking-point. For a second his old optimism asserted itself, and he told himself confidently that now that the converter worked he’d be able to talk the natives out of sacrificing him.
But the bleak truth was apparent, and for the first time in his life Crayden saw there was no opportunity he could cling to. Except—except—
He looked out the door of the hut. The night was black. He tiptoed out softly. “Keep quiet,” he told her.
He crept through the sleeping village to the stream where he had so boldly disposed of the rescue-beam radiator the other day. He hadn’t needed it, then, but he did now. If he could find it, he could call the Patrol and get taken back to the prison planet, where he could start all over. He’d break out again, he was sure. For Steve Crayden, optimism was an incurable disease.
Grimly calling on whoever had been taking care of him up till then, he got down on his knees in the water and began to grope frantically for the rescue-beam radiator he’d thrown—who knew where?—somewhere in the stream.
He moved inch-by-inch over the stream’s shallow bed, searching fruitlessly. He refused to give up. The cool waters of the stream washed the feverish sweat from him and left him chilled and shivering.
When the aliens came for him the next morning, he was a hundred yards upstream, blindly rooting up handfuls of mud, still confident he was going to find the rescue beam. It wasn’t till the priest held him poised above the sparkling blue waters of the bottomless lake and started to release him, as a glad cry went up from the watchers—it wasn’t until then that he came to the final realization that there were no angles left for him to play.
But he was still expecting a last-minute miracle as he hit the water. This time there wasn’t any.