There was flame in his lungs, and fire was burning the insides of his half naked, once strong young body into crumbling, blackened ash. Ride—
"Hold! Hold, or there's a barb through your evil heart!"
The booming command was from the left. And he wheeled the qharaak so sharply it reared and nearly lost its sextuple footing in the shifting sand. A sudden thrummm went past one ear. He tried to loose his legs enough for a kick in the lunging animal's flanks, but the muscles in them were like steel clamps. They would not move.
The reins about his wrists were slippery and stinging with sweat and sand as both mixed with his blood, and were pulled easily enough from his grasp by the vicious, sudden tug from one side.
And then the overpowering odor of the other lathered qharaaks flooded his nostrils as the Dep-Troopers closed in upon him. He retched with it, and was sick.
"Come on, you! You're lucky our orders were dead or alive! Straighten up in that saddle or you'll go back dragged from it!"
A uyja-wood quirt split the skin across his back and somehow brought him nearly erect in the saddle. He let his eyes open a little at a time against the searing blaze of the desert. They had him ringed with their bows and barb shafts, already had his qharaak tethered to one of their own.
And then they were taking him back. Back to the shimmering thing at the horizon that was the outpost village; back to the place where the gear box of his track-car had stalled for want of proper lubricant, and where the chase had begun.
But he would not think about that. He knew about that, knew about the crime of it, and now he must try to think about the answers for the Dep-Court magistrate. They would be the same answers he had given the other times. There could be no new answers. New or old, none would be understood, or believed, for that matter. But he must think about something, or the half-visions in his mind would bring certain insanity now; the half-visions, the things to see that did not exist to be seen, the glaring white-yellow eyes of Procyon herself and her satellite star, the cruel black-gold eyes of the bearded, iron muscled Dep-Troopers that had caught him.