The Skarmer slept all around him. In an Earthly camp, fires would have lit his way-and let sentries see him. The Minervans had no fires; they liked the weather fine. Lopatin knew they had set sentries. With luck, he could evade them in the dark.

He slid out of his sleeping bag, quietly rolled it up, and stuffed in into his pack. He slung his rifle over his shoulder. He wanted to carry it, but knew he might need both hands free. Shooting his way to freedom would surely fail anyhow; even if it didn’t, it would wreck the Soviet mission. But he missed the comfort of having the Kalashnikov ready to fire.

He slipped through the slumbering natives. Going in the right direction was easy, even in the darkness: any way uphill was right.

He wondered how he would ever get back across Jotun Canyon to return to Tsiolkovsky-after abandoning the Skarmer here, he would not be popular among them. Perhaps it would not matter. With Marquard dead, the Americans would have the supplies to let him fly home aboard Athena.

Home? No, to fly back to Earth. He doubted he could ever go home again. Times had changed since the Great Patriotic War, when so many Soviet soldiers earned time in the Gulag merely for seeing what western Europe was like. They had not changed so much, however, that a KGB man could expect to be greeted with open arms after being debriefed by the CIA, as Lopatin knew he would be.

He wanted to laugh. He wanted to cry. He wanted to swear. He was a good Party man and a loyal Soviet citizen, and he knew he would have to defect. Very slowly, he kept creeping out of the Skarmer camp.

Finally, after what seemed forever, the Skarmer began to thin out. Lopatin no longer had to pay attention to his every footstep for fear of falling over a native. He could move faster now.

The wind picked up. Clouds scudded by. One of the Minervanmoons-Lopatin had no idea which one-shone through a break in the cover overhead. Far fainter than Earthly moonlight, it was better than the near-blackness he had known before. He picked up the pace again.

The moonlight also let a Skarmer sentry spot motion he might otherwise have missed. “Halt!” the male called. “Who goes?” Lopatin froze. Too late-the sentry had already picked up the alien quality of the way he moved. “The human! The human is running away!” the Minervan screamed.

That did it, Lopatin thought, hearing hubbub break out behind him as the outcry jerked warriors from sleep. “This way! This way!” the sentry shouted.

Swearing now in good earnest, the KGB man ran that way. Don’t panic, he told himself. The terrain gave him plenty of cover. He dashed from boulder to boulder, keeping low, trying not to give that cursed sentry another glimpse of him. The Minervan moon stayed visible. Where moments before he had been glad to see it, now he wished it into the hottest pits of hell.

He scuttled over to yet another rock and paused, listening.

Most of what he heard from the camp was chaos, but not all. Some males were moving purposefully after him, calling as they came. He shivered in his latest hiding place. Not even his darkest nightmares included pursuit by a pack of screaming maenads.

They were getting closer, too, terrifyingly fast. That alarmed him in a way different from their banshee cries-he had swerved away from his earlier direction of travel, away from where the sentry spied him. Yet the Minervans somehow still tracked him.

He found out how a moment later, when the warriors drew close enough for him to make sense of some of their shouts. “No, fool,” one male yelled to another, “the scent trail leads this way!”

Scent! Lopatin was up and running again in an instant. Hiding would do him no good if the Minervans did not need to see him to find him. The KGB had cooked up a dozen stenches to throw dogs off the track. They would have been of more use to Lopatin had they been on the same planet as he was.

He was tempted to turn around and fire a couple of clips into the warriors behind him. That would drive them off, he knew. What he did not know was what would happen to his crewmates if-no, when-someone from here got back across Jotun Canyon with word that he had opened fire.

And so he hesitated and suffered the usual fate of those who hesitate. A Minervan sprang out from in back of a rock. Either Fralk had shouted orders at the beginning of the chase or the warrior was uncommonly wise about firearms: the first thing he did was smash the rifle out of Lopatin’s hand with a spear. It clattered to the ground and rolled away. Lopatin dove after it. The Minervan jumped on him.

The spear had fallen, too. Even so, it was not much of a fight. Lopatin got in a kick that made the warrior wail, but the Minervan’s fingerclaws stabbed through clothes to pierce the KGB man’s flesh. One scored his cheek and missed his eye by only a couple of centimeters.

By then, other males were rushing up. “Human, we all have spears!” one shouted. “We will use them if you do not yield.”

Lopatin went limp. The male he had been wrestling with cautiously disengaged. “Good idea,” he said when he was convinced the fight was gone from his foe. “You almost kicked my insides out-those cursed funny big legs you humans have.” He sounded more professionally interested than angry; after a moment, Lopatin recognized Juksal’s voice.

“Here is his strange weapon,” a male said from a few meters away.

“Good,” Juksal said. “Hang on to that. We need it. We need it more than we need him. Without their fancy tools, these humans aren’t so dangerous.” If any Minervan had the right to say that, Lopatin thought dully, Juksal did. He wished none of them had the right.

Wishing did not help. Prodding him along with spears, the warriors led him back toward the camp. They met Fralk before they got there. “Oleg Borisovich, have you gone mad?” the Minervan demanded. Hearing the question in Russian only made Lopatin feel worse.

“Nyet,” was all he said.

“Then what?” Excited or upset people waved their arms in the air. So did excited or upset Minervans. Having three times as many arms as a human being, Fralk looked three times as excited or upset. He sounded that way, too.

“Politics. Human politics. I am sorry, Fralk, but I cannot help you anymore against the Omalo or the Americans.”

The KGB man expected Fralk to get even more upset, perhaps to threaten all sorts of torture: he would have, standing where Fralk was. Instead, the Minervan wiggled his eyestalks with a peculiar rhythm Lopatin had not seen before.

He said just what Juksal had. “Oleg Borisovich, it no longer matters whether or not you help us. We have your rifle, we have your bullets. We do not need you.”

He was still speaking Russian. For the benefit of the warriors standing around, he translated his words into the Skarmer tongue. They all wiggled their eyestalks that same strange way.

So now, Lopatin thought, I know how Minervans laugh a nasty laugh. It was one bit of knowledge he would just as soon have been without.

Reatur had never seen more than half an eighteen of Skarmer at one time before. If he never saw even another one again, that would suit him fine. Altogether too many of them were coming up to the rim of Ervis Gorge now, straight at him.

He peered down at them. The gorge’s slope grew shallower at the top; the warriors were approaching almost as quickly as if they had been on flat ground. But the ground was not fiat. As soon as the Skarmer drew a little nearer, they would find out why he had let them come so close to getting out of the gorge before he dealt with them.

Which one was Fralk? The domain master wanted to smash him personally. But, he decided reluctantly, he could not let the Skarmer get close enough for him to tell them apart. They were still well out of spear range, especially uphill. That was fine with Reatur. He did not need spears to smash them.