Commander Krogson grinned. “Schninkle, it’s a pleasure to have you in my command. How would you like me to make you Devoted Servant of the Lord Protector, Eighth Class? It carries an extra shoe ration coupon!”
“If it’s all the same with you,” said Schninkle, “I’d just as soon have Saturday afternoons off.”
XII
As Kurt struggled up out of the darkness, he could hear a gong sounding in the faint distance. Bong! BONG! BONG! It grew nearer and louder. He shook his head painfully and groaned. There was light from some place beating against his eyelids. Opening them was too much effort. He was in some sort of a bunk. He could feel that. But the gong. He lay there concentrating on it. Slowly he began to realize that the beat didn’t come from outside. It was his head. It felt swollen and sore and each pulse of his heart sent a hammer thud through it.
One by one his senses began to return to normal. As his nose re-assumed its normal acuteness, it began to quiver. There was a strange scent in the air, an unpleasant sickening scent as of—he chased the scent down his aching memory channels until he finally had it cornered—rotting fish. With that to anchor on, he slowly began to reconstruct reality. He had been floating high above the floor in the armory and the captain had been trying to get him down. Then he had pushed a button. There had been a microsecond of tremendous acceleration and then a horrendous crash. That must have been the skylight. After the crash was darkness, then the gongs, and now fish-dead and rotting fish.
“I must be alive,” he decided. “Imperial Headquarters would never smell like this!”
He groaned and slowly opened one eye. Wherever he was he hadn’t been there before. He opened the other eye. He was in a room. A room with a curved ceiling and curving walls. Slowly, with infinite care, he hung his head over the side of the bunk. Below him in a form-fitting chair before a bank of instruments sat a small man with yellow skin and blue-black hair. Kurt coughed. The man looked up. Kurt asked the obvious question.
“Where am I?”
“I’m not permitted to give you any information,” said the small man. His speech had an odd slurred quality to Kurt’s ear.
“Something stinks!” said Kurt.