to me!" she said fiercely. "I was born among blueskins, and
they're of my blood, and they're hated and I'd have been killed on Weald
if I'd been known as--what I am! And there's Korvan, who arranged for me
to be sent away as a spy and advised me to do just what you
said,--abandon my home world and everybody I care about! Including him!
It's personal to me!"

Calhoun wrinkled his forehead helplessly.

"I'm sorry," he repeated, "Drink your coffee!"

"I don't want it," she said bitterly. "I'd like to die!"

"If you stay around where I am," Calhoun told her, "you may get your
wish. All right. There'll be no more questions, I promise."

She turned and moved toward the door to the sleeping-cabin. Calhoun
looked after her.

"Maril," he called out to her.

"What?"

"Why were you crying?"

"You wouldn't understand," she said evenly.

Calhoun shrugged his shoulders almost up to his ears. He was a
professional man. In his profession he was not incompetent. But there is
no profession in which a really competent man tries to understand women.
Calhoun annoyedly had to let fate or chance or disaster take care of
Maril's personal problems. He had larger matters to cope with.

But he had something to work on, now. He hunted busily in the reference
tapes. He came up with an explicit collection of information on exactly
the subject he needed. He left the control-room to go down into the
storage areas of the Med Ship's hull. He found an ultra-frigid storage
box, whose contents were kept at the temperature of liquid air. He
donned thick gloves, used a special set of tongs, and extracted a tiny
block of plastic in which a sealed-tight phial of glass was embedded. It
frosted instantly he took it out, and when the storage-box was closed
again the block was covered with a thick and opaque coating of frozen
moisture.

He went back to the control-room and pulled down the panel which made
available a small-scale but surprisingly adequate biological laboratory.
He set the plastic block in a container which would raise it very, very
gradually to a specific temperature and hold it there. It was,
obviously, a living culture from which any imaginable quantity of the
same culture could be bred. Calhoun set the apparatus with great
exactitude.

"This," he told Murgatroyd, "may be a good day's work. Now I think I can
rest."

Then, for a long while, there was no sound or movement in the Med Ship.
The girl Maril may have slept, or maybe n