lhoun, but didn't add to the statement.

"But--I will tell you," she offered. "The police were after me. I had
to get away from Weald! I had to! I'd stolen--"

He shook his head.

"No," he said. "If you were a thief, you'd say anything in the world
except that you were a thief. You're not ready to tell the truth yet.
You don't have to, so why tell me anything? I suggest that you get
some sleep. Incidentally, there's no lock on the cabin door because
there's only supposed to be one person on this ship at a time. But you
can brace a chair to fasten it somehow or other. Good night."

She rose slowly. Twice her lips parted as if to speak again, but then
she went into the other cabin and closed herself in. There was the
sound of a chair being wedged against the door.

Murgatroyd blinked at the place where she'd disappeared and then
climbed up into Calhoun's lap, with complete assurance of welcome. He
settled himself and was silent for moments. Then he said, "_Chee!_"

"I believe you're right," said Calhoun. "She doesn't belong on Weald,
or with the conditioning she'd have had, there'd be only one place
she'd dread worse than Orede, which would be Dara. But I doubt she'd
be afraid to land even on Dara."

Murgatroyd liked to be talked to. He liked to pretend that he carried
on a conversation, like humans.

"_Chee-chee!_" he said with conviction.

"Definitely," agreed Calhoun. "She's not doing this for her personal
advantage. Whatever she thinks she'd doing, it's more important to her
than her own life. Murgatroyd...."

"_Chee?_" said Murgatroyd in an inquiring tone.

"There are wild cattle on Orede," said Calhoun. "Herds and herds of
them. I have a suspicion that somebody's been shooting them. Lots of
them. Do you agree? Don't you think that a lot of cattle have been
slaughtered on Orede lately?"

Murgatroyd yawned. He settled himself still more comfortably in
Calhoun's lap.

"_Chee_," he said drowsily.

He went to sleep, while Calhoun continued the examination of highly
condensed information. Presently he looked up the normal rate of
increase, with other data, among herds of _bovis domesticus_ in a wild
state, on planets where there are no natural enemies.

It wasn't unheard-of for a world to be stocked with useful types of
Terran fauna and flora before it was attempted to be colonized. Terran
life-forms could play the devil with alien ecological systems--very
much to humanity's benefit. Familiar microorgan