ped them off in their entrance lock, and dashed
back to the _Teegar_ with the lifeboat. Gloomily Jack and Tiger followed
Dal into the control room, a drab little cubby-hole compared to the
_Teegar_'s lounge.

"Well, it was fun while it lasted," Jack said finally, looking up at
Dal. "But the way that guy slammed you, I wish we'd never gone."

"I know," Dal said. "The commander just thought he saw a perfect setup.
He figured you'd never question the contracts if I backed him up."

"It would have been easy enough. Why didn't you?"

Dal looked at the Blue Doctor. "Maybe I just don't like people who give
away surgical sets," he said. "Remember, I'm not a Garvian trader any
more. I'm a doctor from Hospital Earth."

Moments later, the great Garvian ship was gone, and the red light was
blinking on the call board. Tiger started tracking down the call while
Jack went back to work on the daily log book and Dal set up food for
dinner. The pleasant dreams were over; they were back in the harness of
patrol ship doctors once again.

Jack and Dal were finishing dinner when Tiger came back with a puzzled
frown on his face. "Finally traced that call. At least I think I did.
Anybody ever hear of a star called 31 Brucker?"

"Brucker?" Jack said. "It isn't on the list of contracts. What's the
trouble?"

"I'm not sure," Tiger said. "I'm not even certain if it's a call or not.
Come on up front and see what you think."

CHAPTER 8

PLAGUE!

In the control room the interstellar radio and teletype-translator were
silent. The red light on the call board was still blinking; Tiger turned
it off with a snap. "Here's the message that just came in, as near as I
can make out," he said, "and if you can make sense of it, you're way
ahead of me."

The message was a single word, teletyped in the center of a blue
dispatch sheet:

GREETINGS

"This is all?" Jack said.

"That's every bit of it. They repeated it half a dozen times, just like
that."

"_Who_ repeated it?" Dal asked. "Where are the identification symbols?"

"There weren't any," said Tiger. "Our own computer designated 31 Brucker
from the direction and intensity of the signal. The question is, what do
we do?"

The message stared up at them cryptically. Dal shook his head. "Doesn't
give us much to go on, that's certain. Even the location could be wrong
if the signal came in on an odd frequency or from a long distance. Let's
beam back at the same direction and in