Dalon's guards and Graver's technicians among
them, all of them talking and laughing.

In that area they could not be spied upon by Y'Nor with the ship's
view-screen scanners and even as he watched, a tall, dark young guard
put his arm around the girl walking close beside him. She twisted away
from him and ran on to the next group, there to look back with a
teasing toss of her head.

Kane watched both groups disappear over the hill, then followed,
muttering thoughtfully. He felt he could safely assume--if anything
could be said to be safe about the situation--that the lack of
discipline he had just witnessed was typical of all the men. They were
all young and healthy and for sixteen hours out of each day they were
side by side with the almost nude, provocatively feminine, Sanctuary
girls.

Their weakness was understandable. It was also very dangerous. Heads
would roll if Y'Nor ever learned what was going on and it required no
psychic ability to guess whose head would roll the fastest and
farthest.

He would have to have it stopped, at once.

He took a short cut to Brenn's cottage, by a sleepy, shady street he
had never been down before. Halfway along it was an open-air eating
place of some kind, with tables placed about under the trees. There
seemed to be no customers at the moment but he stopped, anyway, to
take a closer look for errant guards.

A tawny head lifted at a table half hidden by a nearby tree and he
looked into the surprised face of the mountain girl, Barbara.

"Well!" she said. "Come on over and let me offer you a glass of
cyanide."

He walked over to her table. She was wearing a blouse and skirt
similar to that of the day he had met her but the pistol was gone.

"I thought I told you to go back to your hills," he said.

"I decided it would be more fun to work in the plant and sabotage
things."

"Let Y'Nor learn you said that and you'll be in a fix I can't help you
out of."

"Should a Vogarian care?" But the jeering was gone as she said, "When
you gave my pistol back to me--I thought it was a trick of some kind."

"I told you I wasn't your enemy."

"I know ... but it's hard for a Saint to believe any Vogarian could
ever be anything else."

"It doesn't seem to be very hard for the girls in the plant," he
observed glumly.

"Oh ... that's different." She made a gesture of light dismissal.
"Those soldiers and technicians are good boys at heart--they haven't
been brain-washed like you of