fellows, all seeming derelicts and
seemingly abandoned. He was able to walk on the nearest because of
magnetic-soled shoes. He trusted his life to them and to a flimsy
space rope which trailed after him out the Med Ship's airlock.

Time passed. A clock ticked in that hurried tempo of five ticks to the
second which has been the habit of clocks since time immemorial. Very
small and trivial noises came from the background tape, preventing
utter silence from hanging intolerably in the ship.

Maril found herself listening tensely for something else. One of the
four bound blueskins snored, and stirred, and slept again. Murgatroyd
gazed about unhappily, and swung down to the control room floor, and
then paused for lack of any place to go or anything to do. He sat down
and began half-heartedly to lick his whiskers. Maril stirred.

Murgatroyd looked at her hopefully.

"_Chee?_" he asked shrilly.

She shook her head. It became a habit to act as if Murgatroyd were a
human being. "No," she said unsteadily. "Not yet."

More time passed. An unbearably long time. Then there was the faintest
of clankings. It repeated. Then, abruptly, there were noises in the
airlock. They continued. They were fumbling noises.

The outer airlock door closed. The inner door opened. Dense white fog
came out of it. There was motion. Calhoun followed the fog out of the
lock. He carried objects which had been weightless, but were suddenly
heavy in the ship's gravity-field. There were two spacesuits and a
curious assortment of parcels. He spread them out, flipped aside his
faceplate, and said briskly, "This stuff is cold! Turn a heater on it,
will you, Maril?"

He began to work his way out of his own vacuum-suit.

"Item," he said. "The ships are fuelled _and_ provisioned. A practical
tribe, the Wealdians! The ships are ready to take off as soon as
they're warmed up inside. A half-degree sun doesn't radiate heat
enough to keep a ship warm, when the rest of the cosmos is effectively
near zero Kelvin. Here, point the heaters like this."

He adjusted the radiant-heat dispensers. The fog disappeared where
their beams played. But the metal spacesuits glistened and steamed,
and the steam disappeared within inches. They were so completely and
utterly cold that they condensed the air about them as a liquid, which
re-evaporated to make fog, which warmed up and disappeared and was
immediately replaced.

"Item," said Calhoun again, getting his arms out of t