She gasped and sprang to her feet.  She snatched out the tiny blaster in her pocket.  She pointed it waveringly at him.

“I have to kill you!” she cried desperately.  “I—­I have to!”

Calhoun reached out.  She tugged despairingly at the blaster’s trigger.  Nothing happened.  Before she could realize that she hadn’t turned off the safety, Calhoun twisted the weapon from her fingers.  He stepped back.

“Good girl!” he said approvingly.  “I’ll give this back to you when we land.  And thanks.  Thanks very much!”

She wrung her hands.  Then she stared at him.

“Thanks?  When I tried to kill you?”

“Of course!” said Calhoun.  “I’d made guesses.  I couldn’t know that they were right.  When you tried to kill me, you confirmed every one.  Now, when we land on Orede I’m going to get you to try to put me in touch with your friends.  It’s going to be tricky, because they must be pretty well scared about that ship.  But it’s a highly desirable thing to get done!”

He went to the ships’ control board and sat down before it.

“Twenty minutes to breakhour,” he observed.

Murgatroyd peered out of his little cubbyhole.  His eyes were anxious. Tormals are amiable little creatures.  During the days in overdrive, Calhoun had paid less than the usual amount of attention to Murgatroyd, while the girl was fascinating.

They’d made friends, awkwardly on the girl’s part, very pleasantly on Murgatroyd’s.  But only moments ago there had been bitter emotion in the air.  Murgatroyd had fled to his cubbyhole to escape it.  He was distressed.  Now that there was silence again, he peered out unhappily.

“Chee?” he queried plaintively. “Chee-chee-chee?”

Calhoun said matter-of-factly, “It’s all right, Murgatroyd.  If we aren’t blasted as we try to land, we should be able to make friends with everybody and get something accomplished.”

The statement was hopelessly inaccurate.

* * * * *

3

There was no answer from the ground when breakout came and Calhoun drove the Med Ship to a favourable position for a call.  He patiently repeated, over and over again, that the Med Ship Aesclipus Twenty notified its arrival and requested coordinates for landing.  He added that its mass was fifty standard tons and that the purpose of its visit was a planetary health inspection.

But there was no reply.  There should have been a crisp description of the direction from the planet’s center at which, a certain time so many hours or minutes later, the force-fields of the grid would find it convenient to lock onto and lower the Med Ship.  But the communicator remained silent.

“There is a landing-grid,” said Calhoun, frowning, “and if they’re using it to load fresh meat for Dara, from the herds I’m told about, it should be manned.  But they don’t seem to intend to answer.  Maybe they think that if they pretend I’m not here I’ll go away.”