Of course, by the same token, they surely hadn't gotten any such pointers on us.One of them stepped forward and made an unmistakable Come! gesture.I motioned Chloe back, and shuffled forward, doing my best submissive number. I hoped it had a soothing effect on the Agardir, but I couldn't tell. So without further ado I pulled in my right leg and

launched a flying side-kick at the Agardir's midriff.

It rocked him back, but seemed to have little effect beyond that. A second Agardir gave a thin, high- pitched cry and leaped at me like his remote predatory ancestors: leading with his feet, their three knifelike claws fully extended.

I went to the ground (well, floor) to get under that soaring attack, landing on both hands and bringing my legs around in a hundred-and-eighty-degree sweep that cut the Agardir's descending legs out from under him. He crashed atop me. He was heavier than he looked, and his body odor was acrid. I heaved him off me, into the path of the third Agardir. This gave me time to get to my feet and back into fighting stance.

"Enough."

I swung around and saw the source of the voice, to which my earpiece had imparted a tone of testy

impatience. A Delkar with the physical indicia of middle age was approaching, with several of the security guards behind him. He motioned two of them forward. I saw the weapons they carried.

To say that my blood ran cold would not only be a clich, it would also be misleading, for it implies a

state of icy calm. In fact, all I felt was a panic-stricken desire to grab Chloe and run back down the alley

from which we'd come.

But it would have been useless, and it might have carried a risk of linking us with that eccentric little shop. So I held still as the Agardir-who also recognized those weapons-scrambled to their feet and got out of the way with ludicrous haste.

"Raise your hands slowly," I managed to say to Chloe. "And look as harmless as you can."

It did no good. The Tonkuztra boss gave the guards another curt gesture.

At once, I ceased to have a mind or a soul. All I had was pain. In any meaningful sense, I ceased to be

human; I was nothing more than a vessel of agony.

The neural pulsers, as Section Four had dubbed them, were a very different application of the technology that had produced the paralysis beamer. They, too, acted directly on the nervous system, but

in such a way as to stimulate it into a state of transcendent pain. Every Delkasu government outlawed

them . . . which, of course, meant that outlaws had them.Above the sound of my own throat-tearing screams I heard Chloe's, and since I am trying to give as honest an account as possible, I will say that I didn't care. The capacity to care about another being-even Chloe-no longer existed in me. Love, like pride and dignity and honor, had been crowded out, leaving only the unendurable pain that allowed no room for anything else.

But some tiny part of me somehow clung to what I had been told: that the pain really was unendurable, and that the body would soon shut down rather than endure it.Chloe's screams stopped just before shock took me.

* * * No actual physical trauma caused the pain of the neural gun, so when I awoke it was gone. And my mind was already setting about the blessed process of forgetting how it had felt.

My brutalized nervous system was another matter. Any attempt to move my hands-the only movement I could even think about, for I was strapped down on a hard bed-resulted only in a spasm of twitches. I lay still, managing to slowly turn my head to the right, from which direction I could hear the sound of groans. Chloe was strapped into an identical bed, still in the grip of nightmares. Like me, she was naked.

They'd doubtless done a very comprehensive search of our clothing, which naturally would have turned up Khorat's little trinkets. At least they'd attached catheters to prevent us from soiling the beds.

Delkasu technicians came, examined us and drugged us, all with impersonal efficiency. Time began to

lose its meaning as I drifted in and out of a chemical haze.

Once, one of my lucid periods coincided with one of Chloe's. "Where are we?" she rasped drily. She was blushing down to below her neck in her nakedness.

"I don't know," I replied on my second try, after swallowing the miniscule quant.i.ty of saliva I could summon up. "Have you told them anything?"

"No." A pause. "Not that I know of."

"Neither have I." I didn't bother to repeat her qualifier. We both knew that we could have already blurted out everything-including Khorat's involvement-in our sleep, under the irresistible compulsion of truth drugs that did not require the subject to be awake.

But then again, we might not have. So I said nothing further, given the near certainty of our room being

bugged. Chloe must have figured it out as well, for she also kept quiet.

After a while, the drugs ceased, and time resumed its accustomed pace. At the same time, we found we could move our hands without inducing an uncontrollable fit of trembling. Water was brought, and some kind of tasteless food.

Soon after that, the door of our bleak little chamber slid open to admit the Delkar who had ordered the nerve pulsers used on us, followed by a quartet of his goons. Abject terror gripped me by the guts, before I noticed that they were unarmed except for the leader himself, who carried one of the pistol- sized paralysis beamers.

"You are to be questioned," he stated without preamble. They had left us our translator earpieces. "You

can go willingly, or paralyzed."

"Can't we at least have some clothes?" I demanded. Sudden inspiration: "It's a, uh, cultural imperative with us. We won't be able to give intelligent responses to questions otherwise."

Smocks were brought-even more dehumanizing than the kind you get in human hospitals, since these were scaled for Delkasu dimensions. The goons unstrapped us and helped us to our feet . . . only to have us collapse from the weakness of hunger and the sheer stiffness that had set in while we'd lain immobilized. The head Delkar impatiently sent for his culture's equivalent of wheelchairs, which floated a few inches above the floor on extremely powered-down impellers. They wobbled alarmingly under our human size and weight, and the seats were a d.a.m.ned uncomfortable fit for us, but we managed to get settled in, after which the goons pushed us along the featureless corridors of wherever it was we were.

We came to a small room with a table in its center. The goons maneuvered us into two chairs on one side of the table. They were modern Delkasu chairs, which meant they tried valiantly to adjust to us, but without success. The goons departed, but their boss remained, his paralysis beamer trained on us.

"The individual who is to question you will be here shortly," he informed us.

That turned out to be an understatement. Before I could even frame a question about the nature of this individual, the door slid open to admit Renata Novak.

CHAPTER ELEVEN.

At first Novak ignored us, turning instead to the Delkar with the paralysis beamer.

"You know the agreement," she said coldly. "I am to be allowed to question them alone, with no eavesdropping."

"An agreement made against my advice." The surliness came through my earpiece.

"Still, Tosava'litan made it, on behalf of the gevroth. Are you prepared to defy her?"

The Delakar stiffened, but spoke mildly. "No, of course not. You know how to summon a.s.sistance if

you should need it." A note of sheer malice entered the translation. "You recall, of course, that the agreement on which you are relying specifies that you release us from all responsibility for your own safety and comfort if that 'a.s.sistance' should become necessary." He departed, motioning to the goons to follow him.

Novak continued to ignore us as she sat down and took a small device out of her handbag. She studied its readouts, while I considered and rejected the idea of trying anything. Clearly, it would accomplish nothing but our own deaths. Judging from what we'd just heard, Novak's hostage value would be limited.

"All right," she finally said, to herself more than to us, "they really aren't bugging this room." Only then did she acknowledge our presence by addressing us directly. "Well, Mr. Devaney, I see your tendency to meddle in matters that are none of your concern is unabated."

The breathtaking injustice of this overcame my resolve to just glare at her in jut-jawed silence. "In case you've forgotten, I'm the security officer. What could be more my concern than tracking down traitorous slime?"

Novak's eyes went cold and narrow, but she spoke levelly. "You also haven't lost the habit of being resentful when you ought to be grateful. If it wasn't for me, you two would be dead by now-and it wouldn't have been a nice death."

"Don't give me that. The Tonkuztra want information, not corpses.""That's just it. The truth drugs they tried on you don't seem to work on humans-something about the body chemistry. And they had reason to believe that the drugs they hadn't tried would kill you. I gather the Tosava gevroth-that means, approximately, 'family'-has had opportunities to experiment on humans. So they were all for using old-fashioned torture on you. I persuaded them that I could get you to confide in me."

I gave a harsh laugh. "You're no d.a.m.ned good at this, you know. You should have told us we sang like

birds under their drugs, and that you're just here to get clarification of a few details. Afterwards, you

could have turned us over to your Tonkuztra masters."

Novak's jaw muscles twitched with the effort of sustaining her primness in the face of my second attempt to get a rise out of her. "They're hardly my 'masters.' At most, they're business a.s.sociates-and I have every intention of terminating even that relationship as soon as the current transaction is finalized.

I'm talking to you privately because I want to know how you learned of that meeting. If you'll gratify my curiosity, I'll do my best to convince them that you just got lucky, and have no knowledge worth the trouble of extracting from you. You have my word on that."

"Your word?" Chloe's voice was rich with scorn. "What a joke!"

"Except that jokes are supposed to be funny," I put in. "And by the way, I don't believe for a second that little act about this room not being bugged."

"It's true. Why should I want to sell you out to the Ton-kuztra?"

"Why should you want to sell out the entire human race?" Chloe's question started out defiantly rhetorical, but by the end of the sentence it had become something closely resembling a cry from the heart.

For the first time, Novak's facade cracked. "Sell out the human race? Good G.o.d, Chloe, is that really what you think I'm doing? I'm saving the human race!"At first, we simply stared.

"Saving it from what?" Chloe finally ventured."You know perfectly well!" All the strained self-control was abruptly gone as Novak leaned forward, face flushed as though heated from within by the fire that blazed through her eyes. "The Delkasu and the other races that have learned from them have foreclosed the future. You've heard Dr. Fehrenbach's lectures about life in the galaxy: the instant one race discovered the secret of interstellar travel, it was as though a movie film had been frozen on a single frame. I suppose it could have been worse. If the Delkasu or somebody else had colonized Earth a few million years earlier, the human race wouldn't even exist, just like G.o.d knows how many unborn intelligent species that have been consigned to limbo. But that might have been more merciful. As it is, we're trapped in a universe that has no place for us. We were just a little too late."

"We all know this, Renata," Chloe said carefully. "It's the very problem the Project exists to cope with."