gvars who loosed him, Chet was
docile, happy even--certain they wouldn't hurt him now, but would try to
minimize their former cruelty as they turned him over to the spacemen.

When they put new chains on him, around neck and waist, he thought it
was only to make sure he didn't run away before they could deliver him
ostentatiously to the ship.

A dozen adult males had gathered in the clearing, but that was hardly an
unusual event. Even when they all started out, on a winding trail that
didn't head in the direction of the ship's recent landing-sounds, Chet
was convinced they were just circling some geographic obstacle.

He was interested in the forest of 20-foot mosses and 50-foot evergreen
hardwoods pressing densely on each side of the trail. Unconscious when
they'd carried him from the beach, he'd never been out of the village
since, had never inspected these woods. And he thought his mates from
Earth would want to know about them.

Chet could easily have outdistanced the clumsy Agvars if not forced to
imitate their crouching walk. But he knew from experience that to show
off his erect stance and 18-inch height advantage would make them find
some unpleasant way to put him in his place.

They'd shown him that quite often. He'd show _them_--but later, not just
yet. And after showing them, he'd put these Agvars behind him--them,
their filthy planet, and their scorching sun.

It had often tortured him, that gauzy, amorphous solar blaze, but never
more than now. For the sun of Hedlot, when he glanced at it vengefully,
proved from its position that he was not being taken to the ship, but
away from it.

* * * * *

Disappointment didn't rouse Chet to a fighting pitch--it caused him to
become crafty. Slyness and deceit, the indirect weapons of the
powerless, were not attributes schooled into a student space-pilot. But
he'd learned them tied naked to a sunbaked post. That, too, is an
effective school.

He hung back, faking fatigue. Malingering brought him pokes and jerks,
made the Agvars choke him and beat him and harangue him in their sullen
mutter of clicks and growls and glottal catches. But some sense of
urgency drove them to give up their fruitless sadism after a while, and
drag him through the trail's blue mud by brute strength, two on the
neck-chain, two hauling at his waist.

He let them. Not that he was inured to pain--he just was stubborn.

He wondered, once when they all stop