”Sales!” he cried. “The civilian who fought us, when we first captured a Terran ship! Have they set him to chasing me, then?”
“We shamed him, Captain,” murmured Throb. “He lusts for revenge.”
“Even as I do—now!” Goodheart bared his teeth in a grin. “Would he chase me, then? Well, let us seek more information about him, and more—for I will chase him!”
For some reason, the prospect filled Throb with foreboding.
And perhaps he was right—for, alone in his cabin, Goodheart paced the deck, claws emerging and retracting, simmering with anger and frustration—because he realized that, more than anything else, he needed human agents.
How could he recruit even one trustworthy human, when all were so loyal to their race—or so treacherous that they were willing to sell anything for their own wealth, even honor? He didn’t know—but he would find a way. “I must have a human!” he breathed. “I must!”
The other kids never liked Georgie Desrick when he was growing up. Long in the torso and short in the legs, he was never much of an athlete—and whether his clumsiness was inborn, or only the result of the other kids never wanting him on their teams, it was nonetheless extreme. Add to that a face with a receding chin, buck teeth, and huge, bulging eyes (from the distortion of the thick contact lenses he had to wear), and you had a person who didn’t exactly gather friends. Nonetheless, he was very religious, so he managed to put aside all thoughts of revenge and filled his time with books.
Storybooks, “How To” books, encyclopedias, dictionaries—he soaked up everything he could read. By fifth grade, he was already reading high school physics and chemistry; by seventh grade, he was soaking up cybernetics and electronics. Those clumsy hands managed to acquire a modicum of skill with a soldering iron and a chemistry set, and his mind developed compartments for listening to the teacher separately from working on his latest math problem. School lessons would have bored him stiff, if he’d actually had to pay attention to them—after all, they were several years behind his reading—so he became adept at tracking the classroom lectures, able to snap to full consciousness at the mention of his name, and answer the question that had just been asked, while the back of his mind went on planning his next electronic invention.
He got straight A’s, of course. Which made him even less popular.
By the time he graduated from high school, he had several patents to his name and a very good income from royalties—so a high-pressure Navy recruiter talked him into going into the Fleet, promising that he could attend the best colleges on old Earth at government expense for as long as he wanted—provided that, when he graduated, he would work on some problems the government wanted investigated.
And, the recruiter pledged, he’d have companionship.
The companionship turned out to mean that he was quartered with other officer candidates, that they all had to sleep in the same room and eat at the same table. It didn’t mean they had to talk with him.
So they didn’t—they talked past him, over him, and by him; and when they did look at him, their faces held anything but friendship. They were fine-looking, sociable, athletic young men, all of them, and they resented him fiercely.
Georgie threw himself into his studies more fervently than ever.
His roommates took it as snobbish aloofness and disliked him even more.
Georgie graduated in three years—with a doctorate in physics. He stayed another year, to pick up master’s degrees in chemistry and metallurgy. He was starting work on his third dissertation when the Navy told him it was time to collect.
But they had to take him to the planet where the problem lay, so he was signed on as supercargo aboard an FTL training cruiser.
Within a week, the crew resented him for not having to get his hands dirty.
A new midshipman, trying to build a personal power base, chose Georgie as the obvious scapegoat and unified the rest of the middies by building up a huge grudge against the oddball who just stayed in his cabin and read.
Rough hands woke him in the middle of the night, jabbing a gag in his mouth and shackling his hands and feet. Young men, snarling obscenities, rushed him through the darkness and locked him inside a space-going coffin labeled a lifeboat. A mule kicked him in the seat, and he blacked out.
They were caught, of course—but their midshipman leader managed to put it down to a sophomoric prank that had gone too far. The officers let the rest of the crew off with severe discipline, but the leader was cashiered. He turned his back on the Navy and started trying to figure out how to manipulate those around him into making him rich.
Georgie woke in the dark, with no light but the faint instruments on the control panel. He yanked the gag from his mouth, found the water bottle in the emergency rations—not easy, with handcuffs—took a couple of gulps, and remembered that he was marooned. He forced himself to cap the bottle and studied the control panel.
His heart sank.
When the middies had kicked him out of the ship, the lifeboat had dropped back into normal space. It was thirty light-years from the nearest sun.
He started the beacon, but with almost no hope. He started a strict rationing program, so his air regenerator gave out before his food and water did, two weeks after he’d been drifting alone in the darkness.
The loneliness, he was used to. His religious faith sustained him, until the end.
But, as the excess carbon dioxide muffled his thoughts and he began the slide down into unconsciousness, the despair he couldn’t quite contain opened the channel through which all the resentment, bitterness, and years of repressed anger tore loose into a river of hatred—hatred against all things human, who had been too snobbish to befriend him, had sneered at him all his life, and who could not, when last came to last, even leave him alone. The religious part of him cried in dismay, but finally had to admit that burning, tearing hatred that boiled up in a lust for revenge against all of humanity.
A shrilling pierced Georgie’s ears. He winced and forced his eyes open. He was astounded to realize he was still alive.
He was even more astounded to realize he was staring up into the face of a Khalian.
The snout split in a grin—Georgie was flabbergasted; he hadn’t known the creatures could smile—and a furry paw came up to pat his cheek. Then, even more incredibly, the Khalian spoke—in Terran. “Do not be afraid. We have rescued you from your lifeboat—and only just in time, too. Minutes longer, and you would have been dead. You are safe now, and among friends.”
Georgie could only stare.
Then sleep claimed him again.
When he woke a second time, the Khalian in attendance looked up, saw him, and shrilled something into a grille on the wall. Georgie was just trying to struggle up to a sitting position when the Khalian he’d seen before came in and pushed him gently back. “Please, not yet. Give your body time to recover.”
Georgie sank back, realizing that the Khalian was much bigger than most of his kind, and wondering why he was wearing a bright, gaudy necktie. “But—why would you save me? I’m . . . not even your kind. . . .”
Captain Goodheart grinned, all the more widely because that was the same question Throb had posed. “We cannot but admire the valor with which you strove to survive in that lifeboat, when all must have seemed hopeless. We Khalians understand valor. How long were you adrift? A week? Two?”
“Two,” Georgie agreed.
“And how did you come to be there? Shipwreck? Accident?”
“Exile.” Georgie’s jaw firmed. “My own kind threw me out.”