"

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."

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

"Maril."

"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, annoyed, 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 may have slept, or maybe not. Calhoun lay relaxed in a
chair which at the touch of a button became the most comfortable of
sleeping places. Murgatroyd remained in his cubbyhole, his tail curled
over his nose.

There were comforting, unheard, easily dismissable murmurings now and
again. They kept the feeling of life alive in the ship. But for such
infinitesimal stirrings of sound, carefully recorded for this exact
purpose,