eel of
his hand.

"I don't think I want to kill him. He saved my life once, though he
has tried to lose it for me a dozen times since. Let's get upstairs to
the ship and I'll tell you about it. There are more healthy spots than
this to have a conversation."

XII

Washed, shaved, scrubbed, cleaned, filled with good food and slightly
awash with alcoholic drink, Jason collapsed into the acceleration
couch and firmly swore that life was worth living after all.

"You can't appreciate the simple things of life until you have gone
without them for a while. Or the better things either." He reached out
and took Meta's hand. She pulled it away and fed more digits into the
computer.

"How did you find me?" he asked, trying to discover a subject that she
might warm to.

"That should be obvious. We saw the markings on the ship that took you
away and charted a directional trace before it went into jump-space.
We identified the markings and I went to Cassylia, but the ship had
never arrived there. I back-tracked the straight-line course and found
three possible planets near enough to have registered in the ship
during jump-space flight. Two are highly organized with modern
spaceports and would have known if the ship had landed. It hadn't.
Therefore you must have forced the ship down on the planet we just
left. And once you were there you would find one of the radios to send
a message. Which is what you did. It is obvious. Who is she?" The
final words were in a distinctly chillier tone of voice, and there
could be only one she, Ijale, who crouched across the room, obviously
unhappy and wide-eyed with fear at this voyage in a spaceship, not
understanding the language the others spoke.

"I've told you before--just a friend. She was with us, and helped us,
too. I couldn't let her go back to the life in the desert, it's more
brutal than you can possibly imagine. There is an entire planetful of
slaves back there, and of course I can't save them all. But I can do
this much, take out the one person there who would rather see me live
than die."

"What do you intend to do with her?" The sub-zero temperature of
Meta's voice left no doubt as to what she wanted to do with her. Jason
had already given this a good deal of thought, and if Ijale was going
to live much longer she had to be separated as soon as possible from
the deadly threat of female Pyrran jealousy.

"We stop at the next civilized planet and let her off. I have enough