Free Secret of the Stars by Andre Norton Page B

their meaning behind that wall in his brain where Kern’s psych-medic had forever erased his past? Joktar struggled up on his elbow to demand:
    “What language is that? What did you say?”
    The eagerness went out of the spaceman’s face. He was cold-eyed now. “If you don’t know, then it means nothing to you. You were picked up on a regular E-raid?”
    Disappointed, Joktar nodded as he dropped back on the pallet. Now the interrogator proceeded to draw out of him all the details of his life since he had come out of the deep-freeze in Siwaki. When the Terran finished the spaceman shook his head.
    “You’re covered with luck.”
    “You believe everything I told you?” mocked Joktar, his patience worn to a very fine thread.
    The other laughed. “Boy, you couldn’t give me a wrong answer if you wanted to. You had a sniff of ver-talk before you came around.”
    Joktar’s good fist clamped on the fur robe over him. “Don’t take any chances, do you?” he asked in a voice which was even enough, but his eyes were less well-controlled.
    “On Fenris, you don’t. Not if you want to keep out of the companies’ claws. You might have been a plant.”
    Joktar had to accept the truth of that. But the thought of being drugged before he was questioned rankled.
    “Who are you?” he shot back.
    “My name’s Rysdyke, not that that would mean anything to you.”
    A spark of anger dictated Joktar’s reply.
    “Erased the rolls?” he asked casually, watching the other to see if that shot took effect. And he was avenged in measure by seeing a dark stain spread under the other’s deep tan. However, if that question had stabbed deep in a hidden tender spot, Rysdyke did not permit the jab to rattle him.
    “Erased the rolls,” he agreed. Then he stood up. “Get yourself some bunk time. The chief’ll be in to see you later.”
    He turned down the atom lamp and went out. But Joktar did not sleep. Instead he reached back into his memory as far as he could, shuffling and dealing out in patterns all the scraps of recollection, as he might have dealt kas-cards, hoping for a winning hand. Only nothing fell properly into place, there were no brilliants on which to bet.
    Dim, very dim, pictures of a big ship. Of a woman who crooned to herself, or spoke to him, urging always that they must take care, that they were in danger, that men in uniform personified that danger.
    Men in uniform! What uniform? The police? He had never shrunk from them, just known the wariness of the lawless against the law. Spacemen? He had faced hundreds of them across his table with only a general interest in the yarns they could spin, and a slight contempt for their inept playing of a highly skilled game of chance.
    There was the officer in gray, the one who had questioned him at the E-station. Perhaps that sniff of ver-talk had heightened his powers of recall, sparked some hidden memory. Yes, it was a gray tunic he hated. He must fear gray tunics, but why?
    If he could only force past that mental curtain the long-ago conditioning had left in his mind! Rysdyke must know something. What was so odd about his name? And who were the Ffallian? Who spoke that language which had dripped so liquidly from the spaceman’s tongue?
    True, most of the men he knew had two names. But on the streets nicknames were accepted; admittedly, Joktar was unlike any other he had ever heard. Joktar . . . Ffallian . . . his thoughts began to spin fantastic patterns as he drifted into sleep.
    Rysdyke did not return to the hut for the next two days where Joktar, his disappointment and frustration growing, waited to pin him down for an explanation. His nurse, caring for him brusquely but with some experience, was a taciturn man who commented now and then on the state of the weather and carried with him a none-too-pleasant aroma of half-cured skins. He only became animated when Joktar chanced to mention the cat-bear, and then he would favor his patient with a lecture on the habits and