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His relief was so great that he put out his hand to draw it along the sleek side of the craft as he might have caressed a well-loved pet. "Kurbi?" At Hobart's bark he stiffened. "Yes, sir!" "We camp here tonight. Have to make some plans." "Yes, sir." He agreed with that. To attempt passage of the mountains in the dark was a suicide mission which he would have refused.
"So far we've managed not to understand that. And if anyone tries it on his own, refer him to me understand?" "Yes, sir!" Some of the relief in Raf's tone came through, and he saw that the captain was watching him narrowly. "You don't like these people, Kurbi?" The pilot replied with the truth. "I don't feel easy with them, sir. Not that they've shown any unfriendliness.
He wanted badly to see clearly the other's face, to be able to read his expression. Yet it seemed that somehow he was able to see that sober face, as sincere as the words in his mind. "You will come again," Dalgard said with certainty. "And we shall be waiting because you, Raf Kurbi, made it possible." There was something so solemn about that that Raf looked up in surprise.
"Message of some kind I'd swear to it!" Hobart snapped into action. "Kurbi set down there!" His choice of a landing place was the flat top of a near-by building, one which stood a little apart from its neighbors and, as Raf could see, was not overlooked except by a ruined tower. He circled the flitter.
"I said that one of you had to remain by the machine. Then they said that you, in particular, must come along, Kurbi." "But I'm the pilot " Raf began and then realized that it was just that fact which had made the aliens attach him to the exploring party.
From the earphones Soriki had left on the seat the gabble had risen to a screech and one part of Raf's brain noted that the sounds were repetitious: was an order to surrender being broadcast? His thumb was firm on the firing button of the gun and he was about to send a warning burst to the right of the alien when an order from Hobart stopped him cold. "Take it easy, Kurbi."
"Danger " The merman's verdict fed his own unease. Danger had crossed the night, from east to west. And to the west lay what they had always feared. What was going to happen now? Raf Kurbi, flitter pilot and techneer, lay on the padded shock cushion of his assigned bunk and stared with wide, disillusioned eyes at the stretch of stark, gray metal directly overhead.
What if something like Pax ruled here? They had no way of knowing for sure. Raf's eyes met Soriki's, and the com-tech's hand dropped to hook fingers in his belt within touching distance of his side arm. The flitter pilot nodded. "Kurbi!" Hobart's impatient call sent him on his way.
Free Men He was Raf Kurbi of the Federation of Free Men, member of the crew of the Spacer RS 10. But there had been something else about free men Painfully he pulled fragments of pictures out of the past, assembled a jigsaw of wild action. And all of it ended in a blinding flash, blinding! Raf cowered mentally if not physically, as his mind seized upon that last word.
Maybe it's because they're alien " He had said the wrong thing and knew it immediately. "That sounds like prejudice, Kurbi!" Hobart's voice carried the snap of a reprimand. "Yes, sir," Raf said woodenly. That had done it as far as the captain was concerned. The fierce racial and economical prejudices which had been the keystones of the structure of Pax had left their shadow on Terra's thinking.
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