But
don't ask more than that. Just _alive_. And don't ask me how."
He'd be alive when I got through with him. Sure, he'd be alive.
Just.
CHAPTER FIVE
It was getting dark when I slipped through a side gate, shabby and
inconspicuous, into the spaceport square. Beyond the yellow lamps, I
knew that the old city was beginning to take on life with the falling
night. Out of the chinked pebble-houses, men and woman, human and
nonhuman, came forth into the moonlit streets.
If anyone noticed me cross the square, which I doubted, they took me for
just another Dry-town vagabond, curious about the world of the strangers
from beyond the stars, and who, curiosity satisfied, was drifting back
where he belonged. I turned down one of the dark alleys that led away,
and soon was walking in the dark.
The Kharsa was not unfamiliar to me as a Terran, but for the last six
years I had seen only its daytime face. I doubted if there were a dozen
Earthmen in the Old Town tonight, though I saw one in the bazaar, dirty
and lurching drunk; one of those who run renegade and homeless between
worlds, belonging to neither.
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