Ted Wilson picked up the fallen bottle of hadamite capsules and contemplated them sourly. He might have done better by not bothering with the antidote.
He had failed completely.
He had come aboard, only to find his girl in the arms of the pilot, all of them doped and heading for a painless death. He had prevented them from dying, but had kept them alive only to meet some unknown future at the hands of an unknown enemy.
Wilson hurled the bottle of hadamite capsules against the wall where the first searing circle of a cutter was beginning to come through.
He was shaking his fist defiantly at the wall when Viggon Sarri and his two lieutenants came through to meet their first Earthman face to face....
In the commander's quarters aboard the flagship of the alien task force to which Ted Wilson and the three unconscious occupants of the lifeship had been removed, Viggon Sarri faced the Earthman. He spoke to Wilson directly, but his voice was picked up by a microphone. Each word he spoke went into the monster logic computer in Linus Brein's ship, and returned to a loud-speaker that reduced Viggon Sarri's inflections and tones to a tinny mechanical reproduction in the Terran tongue.
"Please relax," he said, "and understand that we want only information."
Wilson was alone now. The others had been placed under a doctor's care.
"After which we get what?" Wilson demanded belligerently.
Viggon Sarri's voice was harsh, but it came through the loud-speaker in a flat monotone. "Whatever course your race prefers to take!"