"No."
"Well, I'll send you food later."
He left me, closing the door softly after him. I lay in the shadowed bunk, listening to the silence of the vibrationless little vessel. Across the small sleeping room, the window oval was visible, its alumite shutter halfway down. The open segment was very faintly starlit. Perhaps I had been dozing; my head throbbed; the dank sweat of weakness was still upon me. Then suddenly I was snapped into alertness; it seemed that I had heard a sound on the side deck outside my window.
And abruptly there was a shadow there in the half-oval window opening. Someone looking in? My heart pounded as I stared; and in a second the soundless shadow withdrew. A minute passed. Again I tensed at the sound of a faint creak. My door was opening! Beyond the bunk bottom I could see the door as very slowly, quietly it swung inward. Then the sheen of light from the corridor darkened; a blob slipped into the room; the door softly closed. The blob, hunched, stealthy, came slowly toward me.
Whatever outcry I might have made froze on my lips with my sudden rush of horror. Twitching, I strained at my bonds, but the damnable wire held and merely dug into my flesh from the effort. The hunchback! He came shambling. In one of his dangling hands he held a knife; the hooded light here in the cubby glinted on its naked blade. And in that second the light-sheen caught his face—ghastly, lumped, twisted countenance, with bulbous parted lips as he sucked in his breath.
"Penelle—"
"Get away from me," I rasped. "You'll answer to Torio for this. By Heaven, he'll flay you alive."
"Not so loud! Easy there, I'm not here to hurt you."
What was this? Not a guttural, illiterate voice. I recalled my fleeting impression before that this Durk had the sort of voice one uses for disguise. He was beside me now; and as the light, its hood here within a foot or two, brightly illumined his face, realization came to me. Wax, embedded under the skin, by the Glotz-process of disguise. We of the Shadow Squad sometimes use it, though I must confess I had never seen it so cleverly done as here.
"Who are you?" I muttered.