"Get the yokel! Get the bum!... We'll fix his wagon good...."
The pack was on the way—getting closer with every heartbeat. Never in his life had Endlich experienced so harrowing a time as this; never, if by some miracle he lived, could he expect another equal to it.
To stand and fight, as he would have done if he were alone, would mean simply that he would be cut down. To try the peacemaking of appeasement, would have probably the same result—plus, for himself, the dishonor of contempt.
So, where was there to turn, with grim, unanswering blankness on every side?
John Endlich felt mightily an old yearning—that of a fundamentally peaceful man for a way to oppose and win against brutal, overpowering odds without using either serious violence or the even more futile course of supine submission. Here on Vesta, this had been the issue he had faced all along. In many ages and many nations—and probably on many planets throughout the universe—others had faced it before him.
To his straining and tortured mind the trite and somewhat mocking answers came: Psychology. Salesmanship. The selling of respect for one's self.
Ah, yes. These were fine words. Glib words. But the question, "How?" was more bitter and derisive than ever.
Still, he had to try something—to make at least a forlorn effort. And now, from certain beliefs that he had, coupled with some vague observations that he had made during the last hour, a tattered suggestion of what form that effort might take, came to him.
As for his personal defects that had given him trouble in the past—well—he was lugubriously sure that he had learned a final lesson about liquor. For him it always meant trouble. As for wanderlust, and the gambling and hell-raising urge—he had been willing to stay put on Vesta, named for the goddess of home, for weeks, now. And he was now about to make his last great gamble. If he lost, he wouldn't be alive to gamble again. If, by great good-fortune, he won—well he was certain that all the charm of unnecessary chance-taking would, by the memory of these awful moments, be forever poisoned in him.