John half-turned his head, and then felt the numbness strike his body. He stood there, completely rigid for a moment, and then found he could breathe and move his lips and shift his eyes. The commersh stepped back, pressed a red button on the counter.
"You Yorkers must be insane," he said mildly. "Do you think we haven't got adequate protection against criminals of our own group, not to say such pitiful amateurs as you? I can paralyze a whole vendro full of people with this little ornament on my wrist." He showed John the metallic strap and small case. "It's six months Re-education House for you."
The old man shuffled closer, peered at John, said, "The Blasts will be here soon. You can talk. Tell me your name and I'll get word to your folks and your master. Maybe they can help."
The rage was so strong now that John barely heard the old man. He was screaming inside, bellowing insane things that couldn't get through his rigid throat. But the words, "You can talk," penetrated, and he calmed himself.
He tried hard, and squeaking sounds came through his lips. He shaped the words, and then had nothing to say. There wasn't anything bad enough, anything that could hurt this Outsider, anything that could penetrate his shield of superiority.
And then he remembered the ancient word, the forbidden word, the cardinal sin that meant death if used. He'd heard it one night when his father had gotten hold of enough medicinal prychol for a long drunk, and had ranted and raved against the Outsiders.
"Nigger!" John screamed. "Niggers, all of you! Billions of foul-blood Niggers! Planets full of lousy Niggers! All alike! All brown! Only we are white! Only we are pure-bloods! Only we aren't Nig—"
The paralysis intensified, everything stopped, he couldn't breathe, he wanted desperately to breathe. And, more than that, in a final instant of clarity, he wanted to say that it was all a mistake—everything he'd said, everything he'd thought, everything he'd lived by. He too would be a golden brown, like the billions of others. It was his own folk who were the outsiders, but it wasn't their fault either. It was the fault of those few thousand who'd refused Integration when all the rest of Earth's population had decided on mixed breeding as a solution to human conflict. And that was six hundred years ago, and the cults had formed in York, and no one knew how to break the pattern of hatred, envy and fear.
But he was falling into a long tube that had no light and had no end.
That girl on the snake, that lovely girl with the sweet smell and soft eyes and golden skin, that composite of all the white, black, brown, yellow and red races of Earth would never be his. The space ships and wonderful planets would never be his. Never, he thought, because I am dead.