His sight came back and there was a huddled blackness on the floor.
And now his hand was shaking and he crouched there, without moving, and felt the sickness heaving at his stomach and the weakness crawl along his body.
You must not waste.
You must not throw away.
Those were spoken laws. But there were other laws that never had been spoken because there had been no need to speak them. They had not spoken you must not steal another's wife, they had not spoken you must not hear false witness, they had not spoken you must not kill—for those were crimes that had been wiped out long before the star-ship had leaped away from Earth.
Those were the laws of decency and good taste. And he had broken one of them.
He had killed a fellow man.
He had killed his friend.
Except, he told himself, he was not my friend. He was an enemy—the enemy of all of us.
Jon Hoff stood erect and stopped his body's shaking. He thrust the gun into his belt and walked woodenly down the corridor toward the huddle on the floor.