Why don't you go with
your friends?"

With a grip I thought I had forgotten, I got my hand around Rafe's
knuckles and squeezed. His hand went limp and I snatched the shocker and
pitched it over the ledge.

"One word and I'll pitch you after it," I warned. "Who's hurt?"

Garin was blinking senselessly, half-dazed by a blow; Regis' forehead
had been gashed and dripped blood, and Hjalmar's thigh sliced in a clean
cut. My own knuckles were laid bare and the hand was getting numb. It
was a little while before anybody noticed Kyla, crouched over speechless
with pain. She reeled and turned deathly white when we touched her; we
stretched her out where she was, and got her shirt off, and Kendricks
crowded up beside us to examine the wound.

"A clean cut," he said, but I didn't hear. Something had turned over
inside me, like a hand stirring up my brain, and....

* * * * *

Jay Allison looked around with a gasp of sudden vertigo. He was not in
Forth's office, but standing precariously near the edge of a cliff. He
shut his eyes briefly, wondering if he were having one of his worst
nightmares, and opened them on a familiar face.

Buck Kendricks was bone-white, his mouth widening as he said hoarsely,
"Jay! Doctor Allison--for God's sake--"

A doctor's training creates reactions that are almost reflexes; Jay
Allison recovered some degree of sanity as he became aware that someone
was stretched out in front of him, half-naked, and bleeding profusely.
He motioned away the crowding strangers and said in his bad Darkovan,
"Let her alone, this is my work." He didn't know enough words to curse
them away, so he switched to Terran, speaking to Kendricks:

"Buck, get these people away, give the patient some air. Where's my
surgical case?" He bent and probed briefly, realizing only now that the
injured was a woman, and young.

The wound was only a superficial laceration; whatever sharp instrument
had inflicted it, had turned on the costal bone without penetrating lung
tissue. It could have been sutured, but Kendricks handed him only a
badly-filled first-aid kit; so Dr. Allison covered it tightly with a
plastic clip-shield which would seal it from further bleeding, and let
it alone. By the time he had finished, the strange girl had begun to
stir. She said haltingly, "Jason--?"

"Dr. Allison," he corrected tersely, surprised in a minor way--the major
surprise had blurred lesser ones--that she knew his na