The girl sat clown beside him. She laid her head on his shoulder. He felt how she trembled. But the words came in glorious anticlimax: “That debuggin’ unit is perfectly good, Dominic.”
He wanted to lean back and shout with sudden uproarious mirth. He wanted to kick his heels and thumb his nose and turn handsprings across the cell. But he held himself in, letting only a rip of laughter come from lips which he hid against her cheek.
He had more than half expected Svantozik to provide a bugscrambler. Only with the sure knowledge that any listening devices were being negated by electronic and sound-wave interference, would even a cadet of Intelligence relax and speak freely. He suspected, though, that a hidden lens was conveying a silent image. They could talk, but both of them must continue to pantomime.
“How’s it been, Kit?” he asked. “Rough?”
She nodded, not play-acting her misery at all. “But I haven’t had to give any names,” she gulped. “Not yet.”
“Let’s hope you don’t,” said Flandry.
He had told her in the hurricane cellar—how many centuries ago? … “This is picayune stuff. I’m not doing what any competent undercover agent couldn’t: what a score of Walton’s men will be trying as soon as they can be smuggled here. I’ve something crazier in mind. Quite likely it’ll kill us, but then again it might strike a blow worth whole fleets. Are you game, kid? It means the risk of death, or torture, or lifelong slavery on a foreign planet. What you’ll find worst, though, is the risk of having to sell out your own comrades, name them to the enemy, so he will keep confidence in you. Are you brave enough to sacrifice twenty lives for a world? I believe you are—but it’s as cruel a thing as I could ask of any living creature.”
“They brought me straight here,” said Kit, holding him. “I don’t think they know quite what to make o’ me. A few minutes ago, one o’ them came hotfootin’ here with the scrambler an’ orders for me to treat you … ” a slow flush went over her face, ” … kindly. To get information from you, if I could, by any means that seemed usable.”
Flandry waved a fist in melodramatic despair, while out of a contorted face his tone came levelly: “I expected something like this. I led Svantozik, the local snooper-in-chief, to think that gentle treatment from one of my own species, after a hard grilling from him, might break me down. Especially if you were the one in question. Svantozik isn’t stupid at all, but he’s dealing with an alien race, us, whose psychology he knows mainly from sketchy second-hand accounts. I’ve an advantage: the Ardazirho are new to me, but I’ve spent a lifetime dealing with all shapes and sizes of other species. Already I see what the Ardazirho have in common with several peoples whom I hornswoggled in the past.”
The girl bit her lip to hold it steady. She looked around the stone-walled room, and he knew she thought of kilometers of tunnel, ramparts and guns, wolfish hunters, and the desert beyond where men could not live. Her words fell thin and frightened: “What are we goin’ to do now, Dominic? You never told me what you planned.”
“Because I didn’t know,” he replied. “Once here, I’d have to play by ear. Fortunately, my confidence in my own ability to land on my feet approaches pure conceit, or would if I had any faults. We’re not doing badly, Kit. I’ve learned their principal language, and you’ve been smuggled into their ranks.”
“They don’t trust me yet.”