United States or Sri Lanka ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
And Taggi and Togi answered with eager whines. The mist was withdrawing more slowly than it had come. Here and there things lay very still on the ground. "Lantee!" This time the call came not into his mind but out of the air. Shann made an effort at reply which was close to a croak. "Over here!" A new shape in the fog was moving with purpose toward him.
And I've seen mind-controlled " He could have bitten his tongue for betraying that. The world of the mind-controlled was very far from the life Thorvald and his kind knew. "Very interesting," commented the other. "For one of so few years you seem to have seen a lot, Lantee and apparently remembered most of it.
Only, this time the Throgs were out of luck. They had picked up one prisoner who could not help them, even if he wanted to do so. The mysteries of the highly technical installations in this dome were just that to Shann Lantee complete mysteries. He had not the slightest idea of how to activate the machines, let alone broadcast in the proper code.
They kept no long-term Terran prisoners and never had. And at least he could take this nest of devil beetles along with him. Not that the thought did anything to dampen the fear which made him weak and dizzy. Shann Lantee might be tough enough to fight his way out of the Dumps, but to stand up and defy Throgs face-to-face like a video hero was something else.
"I am a man!" he hurled that assertion as he might have thrust deep with one of the crude spears he had used against the Throgs. For against what he faced now his weapons were as crude as spears fronting blasters. "I am Shann Lantee, Terran, man...." Those were facts; no haze could sweep them from his mind or take away that heritage.
"Lantee?" "Here. And there's a tunnel right behind you. The wolverines went that way...." To his surprise there was a thin ghost of a smile on Thorvald's usually straight-lipped mouth. "And we'd better be away before visitors arrive?" So he, too, must have thought his way through the sequence of past action to the same conclusion concerning the Throg movements. "Can you see, Lantee?"
It was a feeling he had had so many times in the past that now he hardly gave it a second thought. "Supplies?" He brought the subject back to the present and the practical. What did it matter why or how one Shann Lantee had come to Warlock in the first place? "What we have left of the concentrates we had better keep for emergencies."
"They wished us here. Listen, Lantee, when you jumped down to mix it with that fork-tailed thing, did you wish you had the wolverines with you?" Shann thought back; his memories of what had occurred before that battle were none too clear. But, yes, he had wished Taggi and Togi present at that moment to distract the enraged beast. "You mean I wished them?"
Not that he had the slightest hope of climbing up to even an S-E-Three rating in the service. Part of those menial activities had been to clean the animal cages. And there Shann Lantee had found something new, something so absorbing that most of the tiring dull labor had ceased to exist except as tasks to finish before he could return to the fascination of the animal runs.
He did possess a different type of pride, born of his own stubborn achievement in winning out over a long roster of discouragements, failures, and adverse odds. "Why do we dream?" he repeated Thorvald's question. "No answer, sir." He gave the traditional reply of the Service recruit. And a little to his surprise Thorvald laughed with a tinge of real amusement. "Where do you come from, Lantee?"
Word Of The Day