The reins about his wrists were slippery and stinging with sweat and sand as both mixed with his blood, and were pulled easily enough from his grasp by the vicious, sudden tug from one side. And then the overpowering odor of the other lathered qharaaks flooded his nostrils as the Dep-Troopers closed in upon him. He retched with it, and was sick. "Come on, you! You're lucky our orders were dead _or_ alive! Straighten up in that saddle or you'll go back dragged from it!" A uyja-wood quirt split the skin across his back and somehow brought him nearly erect in the saddle. He let his eyes open a little at a time against the searing blaze of the desert. They had him ringed with their bows and barb shafts, already had his qharaak tethered to one of their own. And then they were taking him back. Back to the shimmering thing at the horizon that was the outpost village; back to the place where the gear box of his track-car had stalled for want of proper lubricant, and where the chase had begun. But he would not think about that. He knew about that, knew about the crime of it, and now he must try to think about the answers for the Dep-Court magistrate. They would be the same answers he had given the other times. There could be no new answers. New or old, none would be understood, or believed, for that matter. But he must think about something, or the half-visions in his mind would bring certain insanity now; the half-visions, the things to see that did not exist to be seen, the glaring white-yellow eyes of Procyon herself and her satellite star, the cruel black-gold eyes of the bearded, iron muscled Dep-Troopers that had caught him. * * * * * "Make the prisoner stand straight before this court, Trooper!" The flesh splitting lash of pain wrenched him into a sort of pseudo-consciousness. He struggled to rise from the rough wooden floor on which he'd been thrown, and brought sound back to his ears, fuzzy sight to his eyes. The sound was of the crowd. A muffled crowd sound; they would still be outside, still struggling for a look at his broken down track despite the heavy trooper cordons that were around it, awaiting a qharaak team of sufficient size to haul it away. And the sight was of a windowless, thin-walled cubicle, sole court of this narrow, desert fringe Department, and of the Prokyman judge, and the Troopers standing idly with their stinging quirts at either side and just behind him. But he had been before Prokyman judges before. Once, even, there had been a jury of the local peasantry, and he had won an easy acquittal then because of his youth--it had been a full five Terrayears ago, when he had been barely 12 years old.