Gately laughed harshly. "You were pretty smooth back at the Jetty," he said. "But you forgot that the dehydrators would dispose of the fumes from your paralysis-pellet in a few moments. You forgot also that we travel by hydrocar."
Simms' fists clenched. Suddenly an overpowering urge to smash Halleck's sneering face blinded all his reason. Before the Kamali guards could restrain him, he threw himself forward and planted a driving blow into the space-rat's jaw with his two lashed fists.
But that was as far as Simms got. The Oligarch spoke a quick command then, and a rush of webbed feet sounded. Something heavy crashed down on the lieutenant's skull. He felt himself falling—into a pit of blackness.
Curiously, he was aware of no lapse of time when he opened his eyes. He lay on the floor of the a low ceilinged room that was bare of furnishings.
Dizziness claimed him, and it was several minutes before he could gather sufficient strength to stand erect. He headed first for the door. It was locked, and the two circular windows were both grilled with stout metal bars. For the second time in a few hours Simms was a prisoner.
He turned, surveyed the room with eyes of growing despair. An antiquated paralysis gun hang from a peg on one wall. He tore it free and flipped open the charge chamber. But as he had expected, it was green with mold and quite useless.
The circular windows opened out on the extreme end of the village. Peering between the bars, Simms saw an endless line of Kamalis padding in from the other side of a vine screen, depositing the contents of baskets on a growing pile of black slag. A dozen Kamalis squatted there, pounding pieces of the slag with little flat-nosed hammers.
This then was the Deleon Salt industry, the secret of which was so jealously guarded.
Abruptly Simms found his gaze focused on a larger conical building he had not noticed before. Even as he stared at its smooth windowless sides, a sound emerged from it. A low drone at first, it rapidly mounted the octaves until it became a high-pitched siren-like shriek. The sound pulsed through the walls of the hut, bludgeoned against the lieutenant's eardrums, seemed to eat into his very brain.