The narrow street echoed with Haral's wild, reckless laughter. Lurching to his feet, he stood there swaying for a moment, looking this way and that for old Namboina.
But the Shamon had disappeared as if by magic, and from within the kabat-dive came sounds that spoke of preparations for another sally.
Whirling. Haral raced full-tilt for the nearest alley.
When he stopped again, he was half a mile and a hundred worlds away, lost in the tangled maze of passageways that wound through the crumbling heart of the native town. His legs were shaking, his lungs afire, and the kabat-sickness swirled through him in agonizing, nauseous waves. Choking and retching, he slumped exhausted in a murky entryway.
Then that, too, passed, and he lay silent and unmoving in the darkness. But now another sickness was upon him, the sickness that led him to seek surcease in kabat; the sickness that came with the thoughts he could not push out of his brain.
Where would it end, this madness that ever drove him on? What prize lay in power, that he must waste his life away searching, groping, striving for it? Why could he not live and love and die like other men, unplagued by the fierce surge of insane ambition that still pursued him—even here, even now?
Even here, even now. That was the acid that gnawed his vitals. What had it brought him, all his striving? He'd carved a crimson course across half a solar system, till that very system itself disowned him. He'd drenched the warrior worlds in blood to no avail.
And the road ended here.
Was this, then, his destiny—to hide here, rotting, beyond the reach of the Federation, till at last the kabat took its toll? Must he sink lower and then still lower into the slime of this ugly outlaw world of Ulna, harassed at will by such scum as Sark?