The three men pulled thick white skins together near the fire and crept into them. Dirrul waited until he was sure they slept. It was the only chance he would have to escape, but when he tried to creep away his hands collapsed from sheer terror. The crying fear in his mind was so loud his head seemed to vibrate physically with the sound.
Thought was impossible. Judgment and decision were impossible. If he tried to consider even a problem as simple as the safest means of passing the dying fire—reason failed him. He could weigh nothing critically—he could not consider probable courses of rational action.
Nonetheless he inched forward. It took all the courage and stamina he possessed. Gradually a strange and foggy understanding formed in his brain. The terror seemed to die if he planned nothing, merely responding without thought to the instinctive urge to escape. Let instinct do the trick then.
Detached from the control panel of his cerebral cortex his body mechanism functioned perfectly. It was like a space-ship smoothly piloted by its automatic navigators. Dirrul gave himself over to his own built-in stimulus-response relays and the screeching fear shriveled and died.
Calm and unhurried he walked past the fire and the sleeping men. As calmly he searched the mouth of the ravine for Sorgel's disk. When he found it he stuffed it into the pocket of his tunic and strode confidently along the trail that led down from the hills.
It was dawn. In the pink morning light he could see the Vininese city at his feet, neat, clean, well-blocked streets and towering buildings of black stone. On the outskirts were the circular space-fields and the long low flat-roofed interplanetary freight depots. Farther away, dotting the countryside at regular intervals, were curious block-shaped windowless structures surrounded by double walls.
Dirrul had never seen anything like them before but, through a process of judicial elimination, he decided they must be the Vininese Beam Transmitters. The defense of Vinin was remarkably thorough, far surpassing anything of a similar nature on Agron.
It came to him with something of a shock that he was thinking rationally once more. His mind was completely clear. He felt ashamed of the foolish, groundless terror that had unnerved him in the ravine. He tried to understand what had happened to him but it was beyond analysis. In retrospect he realized that the danger had been less than what he faced on any normal day in the Air-Command emergency maintenance service.
The only logical explanation was the food they had given him. It must have been heavily drugged with a new poison known to the Vininese. Dirrul was tempted to go back and rescue Glenna, if she were still alive after the torture to which she had been subjected. But he knew it was more important for him to contact Vininese Headquarters first. He had a message to deliver. Glenna herself would have wanted that.
In two hours Dirrul was on the plain again. All the suffering of the past few hours was gone. The plentiful purple grass had quenched his thirst and surprisingly eased his hunger as well. He felt keenly alert and alive. The sun was warm, the air was balmy. He was on Vinin.