and Harkaman took her out for her
shakedown cruise.

When they landed again at the Gorram yards, two hundred hours later,
they learned that a tramp freighter from Morglay had come into
Bigglersport in their absence with news of Andray Dunnan. Her
captain had come to Wardshaven at Duke Angus' urgent invitation
and was waiting for them at the Ducal Palace.

They sat, a dozen of them, around a table in the Duke's private
apartments. The freighter captain, a small, precise man with a
graying beard, alternately puffed at a cigarette and sipped from
a beaker of brandy.

"I spaced out from Morglay two hundred hours ago," he was saying. "I'd
been there twelve local days, three hundred Galactic Standard hours,
and the run from Curtana was three hundred and twenty. This ship,
the _Enterprise_, spaced out from there several days before I did.
I'd say she's twelve hundred hours out of Windsor, on Curtana, now."

The room was still. The breeze fluttered curtains at the open
windows; from the garden below, winged night-things twittered.

[Illustration]

"I never expected it," Harkaman said. "I thought he'd take the ship
out to the Old Federation at once." He poured wine for himself. "Of
course, Dunnan's crazy. A crazy man has an advantage, sometimes,
like a left-handed knife-fighter. He does unexpected things."

"That wasn't such a crazy move," Rovard Grauffis said. "We have very
little direct trade with Curtana. It's only an accident we heard
about this when we did."

The freighter captain's beaker was half empty. He filled it to the
brim from the decanter.

"She was the first Gram ship there for years," he agreed. "That
attracted notice, of course. And his having the blazonry changed,
from the sword and atom-symbol to the blue crescent. And the
ill-feeling on the part of other captains and planet-side employers
about the men he'd lured away from them."

"How many men and what kind?"

The man with the gray beard shrugged. "I was too busy getting a
cargo together for Morglay, to pay much attention. Almost a full
spaceship complement, officers and spacemen of every kind. And a
lot of industrial engineers and technicians."

"Then he is going to use that equipment that was aboard, and put in
a base somewhere," somebody said.

[Illustration]

"If he left Curtana twelve hundred hours ago, he's still in
hyperspace," Guatt Kirbey said. "It's over two thousand from Curtana
to the nearest Old Federation planet."

"How f