s no routine shakedown!" he said. "What _is_ a Wenberg
electrophoresis?"

"A method of separating serum proteins," Jack Alvarez said. "You ran
them in third year biochemistry. And if we _do_ hit a virus epidemic,
you'd better know how, too."

He gave Tiger an unpleasant smile, and started back down the corridor as
the count-down signal began to buzz.

But for all the advance arrangements they had made to divide the ship's
work, it was Dal Timgar who took complete control of the _Lancet_ for
the first two weeks of its cruise. Neither Tiger nor Jack challenged his
command; not a word was raised in protest. The Earthmen were too sick to
talk, much less complain about anything.

For Dal the blast-off from the port of Seattle and the conversion into
Koenig star-drive was nothing new. His father owned a fleet of Garvian
trading ships that traveled to the far corners of the galaxy by means of
a star-drive so similar to the Koenig engines that only an electronic
engineer could tell them apart. All his life Dal had traveled on the
outgoing freighters with his father; star-drive conversion was no
surprise to him.

But for Jack and Tiger, it was their first experience in a star-drive
ship. The _Lancet_'s piloting and navigation were entirely automatic;
its destination was simply coded into the drive computers, and the ship
was ready to leap across light years of space in a matter of hours. But
the conversion to star-drive, as the _Lancet_ was wrenched, crew and
all, out of the normal space-time continuum, was far outside of normal
human experience. The physical and emotional shock of the conversion hit
Jack and Tiger like a sledge hammer, and during the long hours while the
ship was traveling through the time-less, distance-less universe of the
drive to the pre-set co-ordinates where it materialized again into
conventional space-time, the Earthmen were retching violently, too sick
to budge from the bunk room. It took over two weeks, with stops at half
a dozen contract planets, before Jack and Tiger began to adjust
themselves to the frightening and confusing sensations of conversion to
star-drive. During this time Dal carried the load of the ship's work
alone, while the others lay gasping and exhausted in their bunks, trying
to rally strength for the next shift.

To his horror, Dal discovered that the first planetary stop-over was
traditionally a hazing stop. It had been a well-kept patrol secret; the
outpost clinic on Tempe