Sky and sea were dull blue-green, without star or horizon. There was a stink of sulphur, and then a stink of fish, and then another stink of sulphur.... He sat and sweated, thinking his gloomy thoughts.
Shoemaker was not a moral man, but the sense of personal doom was strong upon him. Suppose there really were a Hell, he thought, only the preachers were wrong about everything but the heat.... A splitting skull.... No liquor.... No women.... A stinking, slime-blue seascape that was the same right-side up, upside-down, or crossways.... And the little green men. He had almost forgotten them.
When he looked up, he remembered.
The third little man was slimmer, and had no whiskers at all. He carried a shiny golden dagger, almost as big as himself. He was walking forward purposefully.
Shoemaker waited, paralyzed.
The little man fixed him with his gleaming eye. "We're through kidding around," he said grimly. "Question is now!"
And he laid the golden dagger in Shoemaker's quaking palm.
Shoemaker's first impulse was to cut his own throat. His second was to throw the dagger as far away as possible. Those two came in flashing tenths of a second. The third was stronger. He rose effortlessly into the air, landed facing the sallyport, and, mouth wide open but emitting no sound, ran straight through it. He passed the closed inner door more by a process of ignoring it than by bursting it open.
Directly opposite was the door of Burford's chubby, just now open far enough to show Burford's startled face. When he saw Shoemaker, he tried hastily to shut the door, but Shoemaker by now had so much momentum as to have reached, for practical purposes, the status of an irresistible force. In the next second, he came to a full stop; but this was only because he was jammed against Burford, who was jammed against the far wall of the room, which was braced by five hundred tons of metal.
"Ugg," said Burford. "Whuff—where did you get that knife?"