fied."

Tiger Martin took off his earphones and set them carefully on the
control panel. "You know," he said to Jack, "you're lucky."

"Really?"

"You're lucky I don't wipe that sneer off your face and scrub the walls
with it. And you'd better not crowd your luck, because all I need right
now is an invitation." He stood up, towering over the dark-haired Blue
Doctor. "You bet I'm satisfied. And if you got a black mark along with
the rest of us, you earned it all the way."

"That still doesn't make it right," Dal said from across the room.

"You just keep out of this for a minute," Tiger said. "Jack has got to
get a couple of things straight, and this is the time for it right now."

Dal shook his head. "I can't keep out of it," he said. "You got me off
the hook by shifting the blame, but you put yourself in trouble doing
it. Dr. Tanner could just as well have thrown us both out of the service
as not."

Tiger snorted. "On what grounds? For a petty little error like this? He
wouldn't dare! You ought to read the log books of some of the other GPP
ships some time and see the kind of bloopers they pull without even a
reprimand. Don't worry, he was mad enough to throw us both out if he
thought he could make it stick, but he knew he couldn't. He knew the
council would just review the case and reverse his decision."

"It was still my error, not yours," Dal protested. "I should have gone
ahead and finished the case on the spot. I knew it at the time, and I
just didn't quite dare."

"So you made a mistake," Tiger said. "You'll make a dozen more before
you get your Star, and if none of them amount to any more than this one,
you can be very happy." He scowled at Jack. "It's only thanks to our
friend here that the Black Doctor heard about this at all. A hospital
ship would have come to take the patient aboard, and the local doctors
would have been quieted down and that would have been all there was to
it. This business about losing a contract is a lot of nonsense."

"Then you think this thing was just used as an excuse to get at me?"

"Ask him," Tiger said, looking at Jack again. "Ask him why a Black
Doctor and a Four-star Surgeon turned up when we just called for a
hospital ship."

"I called the hospital ship," Jack said sullenly.

"But you called Dr. Tanner too," said Tiger. "Your nose has been out of
joint ever since Dal came aboard this ship. You've made things as
miserable for him as you could, and you just couldn'