He produced a surprisingly delicate handkerchief and patted his face with it.

"Find what you were looking for?" he asked.

"Wasn't looking for anything special," I said.

He chuckled. "Seems as if you did an awful lot of work, looking for nothing."

"That's just an exploratory trench," I said.

"Why are you exploring?"

"How about telling me who are and why you want to know?" I said.

He ignored my question and went over to the trench. He paced along its length, stooping a couple of times and peering down into it. While he was doing this, the other man walked over to my shelter. I called out as he reached for my knapsack, but he opened it and dumped it anyway.

He was into my shaving kit by the time I got to him. I took hold of his arm, but he jerked it away. When I tried again, he pushed me back and I stumbled. Before I hit the ground, I had decided that they were not cops.

Rather than getting up for the next performance, I kicked out from where I lay and raked him across the shins with the heel of my boot. It was not quite as spectacular as the time I had kicked Paul Byler in the groin but was more than sufficient for my purposes. I scrambled to my feet then and caught him on the chin with a hard left. He collapsed and did not move. Not bad for one punch. If I could do it without a rock in my hand I'd be a holy terror.

My triumph lasted all of a pair of seconds. Then a sack of cannonballs was dropped on my back, or so it seemed. I was clipped from behind and borne to the ground in a very unsportsmanlike fashion. The heavyset one was much faster than his appearance had led me to believe, and as he twisted my arm up behind my back and caught hold of my hair I began to realize that little, if any, of his bulk was of the non-functional, fatty variety. Even that central-bulge was a curbstone.

"All right, Fred. I guess it's time to have our talk," he said.

Stardance ...

Lying there, with my abrasions, contusions, aches and confusions, I decided that Professor Merimee had come very near that still, cold center of things where definition lurks. Absurd indeed was the manner in which a dead hand was extended to give me the finger.

Lying there, cursing subvocally as I retraced my route to the moment, I became peripherally aware of a small, dark, furry form moving along my southern boundary, pausing, staring, moving again. Doubtless something carnivorous, I decided. I fought with a shudder, transformed it into a shrug. There was no point in calling out. None whatsoever. But there could be a small measure of triumph to going out this way.

So I tried to cultivate stoicism while straining after a better view of the beast. It touched my right leg and I jerked convulsively, but there was no pain. After a time, it moved over to my left. Had it just eaten my numbed foot? I wondered. Had it enjoyed it?

Moments later it turned again, advancing upward along my left side, and I finally got a better look at it. I saw a stupid-looking little marsupial that I recognized as a wombat, harmless-seeming and apparently curious, hardly lusting after my extremities. I sighed and felt some of the tension go out of me. It was welcome to sniff around all it cared to. When you are going to die, a wombat is better than no company at all.

I thought back to the weight and the twisting of my arm, as the heavy man, ignoring his fallen companion, had sat upon me and said, "All that I really want of you is the stone. Where is it?"

"Stone?" I had said, making the mistake of adding the question mark.

The pressure on my arm increased.

"Byler's stone," he said. "You know the one I mean."

"Yes, I do!" I agreed. "Let up, will you? It's no secret what happened. I'll tell you all about it."

"Go ahead," be said, easing up a fraction.

So I told him about the facsimile and how we had come by it. I told him everything I knew about the damned thing.

As I feared, he did not believe a word I said. Worse yet, his partner recovered while I was talking. He was also of the opinion that I was lying, and he voted to continue the questioning.

This was done, and at one point many red and electric minutes later, as they paused to massage their knuckles and catch their breath, the tall one said to the heavy one, "Sounds pretty much like what he told Byler."

"Like what Byler said he told him," the other corrected.

"If you talked to Paul," I said, "what more can I tell you? He seemed to know what was going on-which I don't-and I told him everything I knew about the stone: exactly what I've just told you."

"Oh, we talked to him, all right," the tall man said, "and he talked to us. You might say he spilled his guts-"

"But I wasn't sure of him then," the fat man said, "and I'm less sure of him now. What do you do the minute he kicks off? You head for his old stamping grounds and start digging holes. I think the two of you were in this together somehow and that you had matching stories worked out in advance. I think the stone is around here someplace, and I think you have a pretty good idea how to put your hands on it. So you will tell us. You can do it the easy way or the hard way. Make your choice."

"I've already told you-"

"You've made your choice," he said.

The period that followed proved something less than satisfactory for all parties concerned. They obtained nothing that they wanted, and so did I. My greatest fear at the time was mutilation. From a pummeling I can recover. If someone is willing to lop off fingers or poke out an eye, though, it puts talking or not talking a lot closer to a life-death situation. But once you start that business, it is a kind of irreversible thing. The interrogator has to keep going himself one better for so long as there is resistance, and eventually there is a point where death becomes preferable to life for the subject. Once that point is achieved, it becomes something of a race between the two of them, with information as one goal and death the other. Of course, uncertainty as to whether the interrogator may go this far can be just about as effective as knowing that he will. In this case, I was pretty certain they were capable of it, because of Byler. But the heavy man was unhappy with Paul's story, I could see that. If I were to reach that same turning point and then win the race, he would be even less happy. Since he was unwilling to believe that I really did not have the information he was after, he must have assumed that I had fortitude to spare. I guess this determined his decision to proceed carefully, while in no way reducing the harsher eventuality.

All of which I offer as preamble to his comment, "Let's put him in the sun and watch him turn into a raisin," followed by several moments of silken brow-blotting as he awaited my response. Disappointed by it, they staked me out where I could wrinkle, darken and concentrate my sugars, while they returned to their vehicle for an ice chest. They took up a position in the shade of my shelter, periodically strolling over to stage a beer commercial on my behalf.

Thus the afternoon. Later, they decided that a night's worth of wind, sand and stars were also necessary for my raisinhood. So they fetched sleeping bags and the makings of a meal from their vehicle and proceeded to encamp. If they thought the cooking odors would make me hungry, they were wrong. They just made me sick to my stomach.

I watched the day drive west. The man in the moon was standing on his head.

How long I had been unconscious I did not know. There were no sounds of movement from the camp and I could see no light in that direction. The wombat had crawled off to my right and settled there, making soft, rhythmic noises. He rested partly against my arm and I could feel his movements, his breathing.

I still did not know my tormentors' names, nor had I obtained a single new fact concerning the object of their inquiries, the star-stone. Not that it should actually have mattered, save in an academic sense. Not at that point. I was certain that I was going to die before very long. The night had delivered a jaw-jittering chill, and if it didn't finish me I figured my inquisitors would.