"Human ship!" said the signal desperately. "Heading for Earth! Prisoner escaping from Khasr!
There was never any answer. Naturally! But Johnny listened to it while loneliness ate at his vitals. A Khasr doesn't get lonely. A human does. Johnny went through an agonizing human experience, wholly inconsistent with his conviction that he was a Khasr. He had solitary confinement without even the break of a daily visit by a jailer. A week would rack the nerves of an adult human. A month would drive him mad. Fortunately, Johnny was fourteen years old and tougher than a human adult in such matters. But he had two months and a week and two days of it.... He was not a normal Khasr when the ship began to decelerate. He wasn't even an artificial one.
WHEN the warning-drum boomed for pop-out—the Khasr didn't like the sound of bells—Johnny was hanging on to sanity by the knowledge that presently he would have to talk to men and persuade them that he also was human. He would talk to someone—something—that was alive. He would have the company of the monstrosities he had come to destroy. And he craved company so desperately that he actually wanted even human company.
Which the Khasr, of course, had been completely unable to anticipate.
With a leisurely unfolding of the interspace field, the Khasr ship popped back into normal space. There was a pale-yellow sun not far away—bright enough almost to have a disc. There was all the magnificence of the galaxy for Johnny to stare at, after chaos. There were the thousands of millions of stars of every imaginable color against a background of velvety black.
Johnny stared, trembling. And then his communicator growled, while his recognition-signal still babbled its message.
"You on the Khasr ship," said a sardonic voice. "Any last words, or do we blast you now?"
Johnny gasped. Then he saw the sleek Earthship, swimming grimly toward him through emptiness. He stabbed the communicator-button and moved in range. "I—escaped from the Khasr," he gasped. "I—I—Please keep on talking!"
If the Khasr had heard him, they would have been wonderfully pleased. It was the one truly convincing thing he could have said. He heard a reflective whistle, and then a voice speaking aside from the microphone in the Earthship. . .
"Look at this! How good are those Khasr at making robots? Or is it really human?"
Johnny sweated. Robots do not sweat. Nor Khasr. He gulped:
"I've been—alone since I left. S—somebody please come on board!"
That was part of the original scheme. The Khasr had hoped originally only for a suicidal dash of their ship into collision with Earth, with Johnny using his human form and voice to delude those who would have intercepted him. And he wouldn't know it was suicide. But this was better. Johnny had planned it. But he meant it differently now!
He trembled when the space-lock opened. He almost broke down when a human figure came out into the Khasr ship, blaster ready, and looked at him with suspicious eyes. He was gladder to see this human being than he'd ever been to see a Khasr. But he'd never been alone before. The Khasr couldn't imagine what loneliness would do to Johnny.
They had not imagined how Johnny, being just fourteen years old, would affect the humans who found him, either.
They took him off the Khasr ship—but he remembered enough to make them promise to let him come back to it—and a human crew moved it toward Earth. And Johnny was among mankind. He told them the story that had been planned, of course. He'd been captured as a baby, he said, and raised by the Khasr for study. He didn't know how true that was. And he said that three human prisoners had been brought in to the Khasr planet, and he talked to them, and the four of them made plans to steal a Khasr ship and get away. But when the three prisoners made their break they were killed, so he had to make the break alone. He had three authentic names to give, as those of the prisoners. His whole story was a masterpiece of synthesis by the Khasr psychologists.
The only trouble was that it fell to pieces instantly it was checked—though Johnny didn't know it. Space messages went among the stars, and men who knew the three supposed prisoners were found. Johnny couldn't describe them. He didn't know the nicknames they called each other. His story was plainly a lie from beginning to end.
Also, a normal examination of the Khasr ship revealed that its whole substance was a highly unstable allotrope, which, however, was not radioactive. Yet when triggered it would explode in total annihilation of its own substance—not in fission explosion nor in fusion, but in annihilation—and they found the trigger. It would have set off the three-thousand-ton ship-bomb when it touched Earth, whether Johnny did anything or not. In fact, it was known from almost the first instant that Johnny was on a mission to destroy humankind, and that he was lying and still trying to carry it out.
The trouble was, of course, that he still believed himself a Khasr. The battleship was an alien environment to him. When they put him in a cabin by himself, it had four walls instead of eight. The bunk was on a shelf, not a soft cushion on the floor, and there was no sleeping-frame from which Khasr could have dangled in slumber by the hooks on their legs. Johnny didn't know that the cabin was a place to sleep in. He stayed in it because he was put there—the Khasr had not trained him to do anything but what he was told—and when someone came for him many hours later, he was shaking and panicky because of the strangeness. He was anguished when left alone.
They assigned a midshipman to introduce him to human ways. The midshipman's name was Mike, and he was red-haired and freckled, and had apparently been assigned to the battleship to get in the way of other people. He was not much older than Johnny, and he had no purpose in life except the blithe enjoyment of each moment as it came. He was very good for Johnny.
Tolerantly, he instructed Johnny in the eating end sleeping manners and customs of human beings. It was difficult for him to imagine anybody knowing more than he did, about anything, but he did ask some questions about the Khasr. However, he grew bored when Johnny essayed to answer him. He dismissed the Khasr as "spiders"—a new word to Johnny —and reverted to his normal preoccupations. They led to trouble. Specifically, there was a purloining of ship's edible stores, and Johnny was in the trouble with him. But Johnny blindly told the truth when questioned, because the Khasr had no prejudice against tattletales. Mike did, though. Scornfully, he let Johnny know. Johnny„had been surrounded by contempt and hatred all his life, but it had been hidden from him. Now, when Mike despised him, Johnny's loneliness was almost hysterical. When Mike angrily pushed him away, Johnny wildly and unskillfully hit back.
A fight began, but Johnny did not know how to fight, and Mike regarded him in open-mouthed amazement. Then he began to grasp the degree of Johnny's abysmal ignorance. In sudden large tolerance he instructed Johnny in the fine art of fist-fighting. Johnny acquired black eyes but he had Mike's tentative respect because he kept at the job of learning. One day out from Earth, he gave Mike a black eye. Then his throat went dry in apprehension.
"That's the way to do it!" said Mike warmly. "You're doing good!" Then he went to wheedle a poultice from the ship's cook.
WHEN the vast bulk of Earth loomed out the ship's ports, Johnny shivered. Soon, he believed, he would be let back into the ship he'd brought, and he would press a certain stud, and all this ghastly race of human beings would be destroyed without anybody having felt an instant's uneasiness. Then he would go back to his fellow-Khasr.