Freedom's Challenge Read Online Free Page A

dials.”
    â€œIt covered your head or just your face?”
    â€œMy head down to my shoulders. It was heavy.”
    â€œDid you see any blue lights?” Dorothy asked, scribbling again.
    â€œI saw nothing.”
    â€œAnd the sensations? What were they like?” She turned to Kris as Zainal once again considered his answer. “We’re trying to establish if any invasive probe is used: Needles or possibly electrical shock. We need to know whether the brain itself has been entered and damaged: whether or not there has been physical damage—rather than just memory, emotional, and fact erasures.”
    â€œThere aren’t any scars on the Victims?” Kris asked, and Dorothy shook her head.
    â€œNot visible ones, certainly. Which is why Zainal’s recollection is so vital to us.”
    â€œLike electricity,” Zainal said, putting his hands to his temples and moving them up to the top of his broad skull. “And here,” and he touched the base of his cranium. “But no blood. No scar.”
    â€œOh, yes, that’s interesting, very interesting,” andDorothy wrote hastily for a minute. “No pain in the temples?”
    â€œWhere?” Zainal asked.
    â€œHere,” and Kris touched the points.
    â€œOh. Not pain, pressure.”
    â€œIsn’t that where lobotomies are done?” Kris apprehensively asked Dorothy.
    She nodded. “Anywhere else? Pressure or pain or odd sensations? I’m trying to discover just which areas might have been…touched by this device. If they coincide with what factual, emotional, and memory centers humans have,” she added as an aside to Kris. “There are more parallels than you might guess.”
    â€œA sort of stabbing, very quick, to the…” and Zainal put his hand to the top of his head, “inside of my head.”
    â€œQuite possibly a general stimulation,” Dorothy murmured. Then, with a kind smile, went on. “So you were assessed and passed. Then what happened?”
    â€œI was told who to report to for training.” Then he grinned. “I know that my uncles were disappointed that I was acceptable. My father was relieved. More glory for our branch of the family.”
    â€œHow old are you now?” Dorothy asked, a question which Kris had never bothered to ask.
    Zainal hesitated and then with a grin and a shrug, “Thirty-five. I have been exploring this galaxy for sixteen years.”
    â€œSixteen?” Kris was surprised.
    â€œThat would make only four years of formal training? Of any sort?” Dorothy asked, surprised.
    â€œThree. I have been here two years now. Two Catteni years.” And he grinned at Kris.
    â€œPilot training is all you had?”
    â€œI learned what I needed to know to do the job which the Eosi ordered for me. I worked hard and learned well,” Zainal said with a touch of pride.
    â€œAmazing,” Dorothy murmured as she made more notes.
    â€œBut you know a lot about a lot of things,” Kris protested.
    Zainal shrugged. “Once I am officially a pilot,” and he gave Kris a mischievous look out of the corner of his eye, “it was no longer wrong for me to learn what I wish so long as I pilot well. The Eosi,” and his face slid briefly into Catteni impassivity again, “require their hosts to have been many places and seen many things.”
    â€œThen you don’t have any knowledge about your own body? No biology?” Dorothy asked.
    â€œBi-o-lo-gy?” Zainal repeated.
    Dorothy explained, and he laughed.
    â€œAs long as my body does what I need it to do, I do not ask how it does it.”
    Both Dorothy and Kris smiled.
    â€œWhen I compare what our astronauts went through to qualify as space pilots…” and Dorothy raised one hand in amazement.
    â€œThe earliest aviators flew by the seat of their pants,” Kris remarked.
    â€œSeat of their pants?” Zainal asked, frowning so