Gordon Dickson - Wolfling

He straightened up and turned back to Slothiel.

“What should I do now?” he asked Slothiel.

“I think you should send Afuan back to her quarters now,” said Slothiel, “and tell her that she’s to stay there until she hears something more from you.”

“Yes.” The Emperor’s glance swung around to fasten on Afuan, but she met it for only a moment, before turning furiously upon Jim and Ro, who stood beside him.

“Mud-face! Wild man!” she spat. “Crawl off into the bushes and mate!”

Jim stiffened, but Ro caught hold of his left arm.

“No!” she said, almost proudly. “You don’t need to. Don’t you see—she’s jealous! Jealous of me!”

Still holding strongly to his arm, she looked up into his face.

“I’m going with you, Jim,” she said. “Back to this world of yours.”

“Yes,” said the Emperor unexpectedly but thoughtfully, “that’s right. I saw it that way. Yes, little Ro should go with him…”

“Afuan!” said Slothiel sharply.

The Princess threw him a glance as full of hatred as the one she had directed at Ro and Jim. She disappeared.

Jim’s head swam suddenly. He took a strong grip on himself internally, and the room steadied about him.

“We have to go quickly, then,” he said. “I’ll send you those Starkiens from my ship, Slothiel. You can keep them close to the Emperor until you’re able to get back as many as possible of the other units who’ve been sent out to the Colony Worlds. If you order them back quickly, you shouldn’t lose too many of them to Galyan’s antimatter traps.”

“I’ll do that. Good-bye, Jim,” said Slothiel. “And thank you.”

“Good-bye, Jim,” said the Emperor. He stepped forward, offering his hand. Jim freed his left arm from Ro’s grasp and took the long fingers awkwardly with his own left hand.

“Adok,” said the Emperor, without letting go of Jim’s hand, but glancing over at the Starkien, “do you have a family?”

“No more, Oran,” answered Adok in his usual flat tone. “My son is grown, and my wife has gone back to the women’s compound.”

“Would you like to go with Jim?” asked the Emperor.

“I—” For the first time since Jim had known him, the Starkien seemed at a loss for words. “I am not experienced in liking or not liking, Oran.”

“If I order you to go with Jim and Ro, and stay with them for the rest of your life,” said the Emperor, “will you go willingly?”

“Yes, Oran. Willingly,” said Adok.

The Emperor let go of Jim’s hand.

“You’ll need Adok,” he said to Jim.

“Thank you, Oran,” said Jim.

Ro’s grip tightened on his arm once more.

“Good-bye, Oran. Good-bye, Slothiel,” said Ro. And at once they were no longer in the palace room, but at the docking berth where Jim had left the ship containing his Ten-units of Starkiens.

Harn was standing just outside the ship, like a man on watch, when they appeared. He turned quickly to face Jim.

“It’s good to see you, sir,” he said.

Jim unexpectedly felt ship and berthing dock waver and slip around him once more. He pulled himself back to clearheadedness again just in time to hear Adok speaking to Harn.

“The High-born Vhotan and the Prince Galyan are dead,” Adok was saying quickly, “and three Starkiens have been killed. The High-born Slothiel has taken Vhotan’s place. You and your men are to go to the Emperor.”

“Yes,” Jim managed to say.

“Sir!” acknowledged Harn, and vanished.

Abruptly they were inside the ship, Jim, Ro, and Adok. Another wave of disorientation passed through Jim, and he felt Ro helping him down gently onto the level surface of a hassocklike bed.

“What is it—Adok!” He heard her voice, but distantly, as if at the far end of a tilted corridor, down which he was sliding, ever faster, ever farther away from her. He made a great effort, and visualized in his mind, first, the spaceport at Alpha Centauri III, and then, from there, the spaceport back on Earth from which he had taken off. It was his last effort—from now on it would be up to the ship. But from what he had read out of the Files of the Throne World’s learning centers, he had no doubt the ship would be able to locate Earth from the directions he had just given it.

He let go, and went back to sliding away down the tilted corridor. But there was one thing more yet he had to do. He fought his way back to consciousness and Ro for a second.

“Galyan burned my side as he died,” he muttered to her. “Now I’m dying. So you’ll have to tell them for me, Ro. On Earth. Tell them… everything…”

“But you won’t die!” Ro was crying, holding him fiercely with both her arms about him. “You won’t die… you won’t …”

But even as she held him, he slipped out of her grasp and went sliding—this time with no further check or hope of return—down that long tilted corridor into the utter darkness.

When Jim opened his eyes at last to light after that long slide into darkness, it took him a long time with the help of the light to recognize the shapes of things around him. He felt as if he had been dead for years. Gradually, however, vision sharpened. Perception returned. He became aware that he lay on his back on a surface harder than any hassock; and the ceiling he stared up at was white, but oddly grainy and close above him.

With a great effort he managed to turn his head, and saw shapes that he gradually made out to be a small bedside table, several chairs, and a white screen of the sort used in hospitals. In all, a single room, with a window at the far end that let in a yellow, summer sunlight he had not seen for quite a while. Through the window he could see only sky, blue sky, with a few isolated puffs of white clouds scattered about it. He lay staring at the sky, slowly trying to put things together.

Obviously he was on Earth. That meant that at least five days must have passed while he was unconscious. But if he was on Earth, what was he doing here? Where was here? And where were Ro and Adok, to say nothing of the ship? All this, leaving aside the fact that he seemed to be alive, when he had certainly seemed to have had no right to be so.

He lay still, thinking. After a little while, absently, he felt the side where the flame of Galyan’s torch had penetrated as the Highborn had died. But his side felt smooth and well. Interested, he pulled down the covers, pulled up the blue pajama top he seemed to be wearing, and examined that side. As far as he could see, it looked as if he had never been wounded at all.

He pulled the covers up again and lay back. He felt well, if a little heavy-bodied, as if the lassitude of a long sleep were still clinging to him. He turned his head and looked at the small table by his bedside. It held an insulating plastic pitcher, a glass with some remnants of ice floating at the top of the water within it, and a small box of paper handkerchiefs. The signs were overwhelming that he was in a hospital. This would not be surprising if he still had the deep wound in his side that Galyan’s rod had made. But there was no wound.

He investigated further. Below the top level of the table by his bed was a vertical surface with a telephone handset clinging magnetically to it. He picked up the handset and listened, but there was no dial tone. Experimentally he tried dialing some numbers on the dial set in the center of the inner face of the handset. But the phone remained dead. He put it back, and in the process of doing so, discovered a button on the vertical surface.

He pressed the button.

Nothing happened. After about five minutes of waiting, he pressed it again.

This time, it was only a matter of seconds before the door swung open. A man entered—a heavy-bodied young man not much shorter than himself, with a thick, powerful-looking body dressed in white slacks and white jacket. He came up to the bed, looked down at Jim without a word, and reached to the bed to take Jim’s left wrist. Lifting the wrist, he counted the pulse, gazing at his wristwatch as he did so.