may get that flare, and it may not be two days coming,"
he finished.

With that the Amerind sprang catlike to a hand-hold on the edge of the
central tunnel and vanished back towards the engineering station, from
which he would control the test-spin of the big wheel.

* * * * *

Bessandra Khamar, educated in Moscow, traced her ancestry back to one
of the Buryat tribes of southern Siberia, a location that had become
eventually, through the vast vagaries of history, known as the Buryat
Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic.

She was of a proud, clannish people, with Mongolian ancestry and a
Buddhist background which had not been too deeply scarred by the
political pressures from Western Russia. Rebellious of nature, and of
a race of people where women fought beside their men in case of
necessity, she had first left her tribal area to seek education in the
more advanced western provinces with a vague idea of returning to
spread--not western ideologies amongst her people--but perhaps some of
their know-how. This she had found to be a long and involved process;
and more and more, with an increase of education, she had grown away
from her people, the idea of return moving ever backwards and
floundering under the impact of education.

She had been an able student, though independent and quite
argumentative, with a mind and will of her own that caused a shaking
of heads amongst her fellow students.

Having sought knowledge in what, to her, were the western provinces of
her own country, she had delved not only into the knowledge of things
scientific, but into the wheres and whyfores of the political
situations that made a delineation between the peoples of Russia and
the other peoples of the world.

Somehow she had been accepted as part of a trade mission to South
America, and with that first trip out of her own country her horizons
had broadened. Carefully she had nurtured that which pleased others in
such a way that she had been recommended to other, similar tasks. And
eventually she had gone to the U.N. on an extended tour of duty. It
was here for the first time that she had heard of the recruitment of a
staff for the new U.N. Space Lab project, and here she had made a
basic decision: To seek a career, not in her own country or back among
the peoples of her own clan, but in the U.N. itself, where she could
better satisfy the urge to know more of all people.

[Illustration]

She had, o