ers, but they chuckled softly on, keeping track of where they
were, where they'd been, and how they'd get home.

It was as though nothing had happened. But Lieutenant Lansing Mason
was still nervous, his slender fingers steady enough, but as cold as
the alien dark outside the ship they controlled.

"You look a little shot again, skipper!" Cain said, grinning like a
Martian desert cat. "What's the matter, Space goblins got you again?"

A retort started at Mason's taut lips, but his third officer was
already speaking.

"Here's a dope sheet from the comps, if anybody's interested in
knowing just where outside the Rim we are," she said. "I make it just
a shade inside the outermost fringes of the Large Magellanic Cloud."
Sergeant Judith Kent's voice had its almost habitually preoccupied
tone, as though the words she said were hardly more than incidental to
a host of more important thoughts running swiftly behind her wide-set,
deep gray eyes. They were serious eyes, and in their way matched the
solemn set of her small features and the crisp, military cut of her
black hair and severe uniform.

"Our little boss-man knows where we are, all right!" Cain said.

Mason gave Cain's six-feet-two a quick glance, wondering as he always
wondered why the big redhead's shoulders always seemed too broad for
the Warrant Officer's stripes on them. "Sergeant Kent's right," he
said. "Here's her comp-sheet. You can look for yourself. Fringe,
Magellanic. And look at that while you can--" he jabbed a forefinger
at the main scanner, its screen studded with unfamiliarly close
constellations--"because we're on our way back. Set up a return on the
comps, will you, Sergeant?" For all his tenseness his voice was low,
and the words it formed were even and swift.

"Hell, Lance, this is the sort of stuff the brain trust pays us
bonuses for."

"Not out here they don't. R-drive when you're ready, Sergeant!"

Cain turned from the deep control bank and gave his full attention to
the scanner as the slender, efficient girl started feeding a tape of
reversal co-ordinates into the computers.

Mason waited the few necessary seconds, pushed disarranged dark hair
out of his eyes and felt the clammy dampness on his forehead, and
wished silently to himself that opportunists like Cain were kept where
they belonged--on the Slam-Bang Run out of Callisto. That's where the
money was. That's where a Warrant like Cain ought to be.

"Ready, sir," he heard Judith s