t
flinching. He'd stopped wondering and now accepted; he meant to get away
from here at the first chance and he was somehow sure he could.

It was made easier by the boundless strength of his new body. He showed
no signs of buckling under physical work that would have killed him on
his own world.

Not all the slaves got up. Two beside him didn't move at all. Sleeping
through that brutal awakening seemed impossible. When Hanson looked
closer, he saw that they weren't asleep; they were dead.

The overseer raged back along the line and saw them. He must be one of
those conjured into existence here from the real Egypt of the past. He
might have no soul, but a lifetime of being an overseer had given him
habits that replaced the need for what had been a pretty slim soul to
begin with.

"Quitters!" he yelled. "Lazy, worthless, work-dodging goldbrick
artists!" He knelt in fury, thumbing back the eyelids of the corpses.
There was little need for the test. They were too limp, too waxen to be
pretending.

The overseer cut them out of the chain and kicked at Hanson. "Move
along!" he bellowed. "Menes himself is here, and he's not as gentle as I
am."

Hanson joined the long line, wondering what they were going to do about
breakfast. How the devil did they expect the slaves to put in sixteen
hours of work without some kind of food? There had been nothing the
night before but a skin of water. There was not even that much this
morning. No wonder the two beside him had died from overwork, beatings
and plain starvation.

Menes was there, all right. Hanson saw him from the distance, a skinny
giant of a man in breechclout, cape and golden headdress. He bore a whip
like everyone else who seemed to have any authority at all, but he
wasn't using it. He was standing hawklike on a slight rise in the sandy
earth, motionless and silent. Beside him was a shorter figure: a pudgy
man with a thin mustache, on whom the Egyptian headdress looked
strangely out of place. It could only be Ser Perth!

Hanson's staring came to an end as the lash cut down across his
shoulders, biting through to the shoulder-bone. He stumbled forward,
heedless of the overseers' shouting voices. Someday, if he had the
chance, he'd flay his own overseer, but that could wait. Even the agony
of the cut couldn't take his mind from Ser Perth's presence. Had Bork
slipped up--did the Satheri know that Hanson was still alive, and had
they sent Ser Perth here to locate him? I