s folly, and yet not to hope was no longer to care.

She twisted away quickly from Cain's muscular arm.

"What's eating you, duchess? Your conscience giving you trouble, or
are you just plain scared?" When she didn't reply, he laughed shortly,
and gestured toward the scanner. In it, the slender Thrayxite craft
was growing steadily larger as Cain's swift pursuit gradually folded
the gap of curved Space between them. "In a couple of minutes, we'll
be ready to talk turkey, sweetheart. They ought to be aware of us
right this minute. I think they'll listen to what we have to offer."

"To what _you_ have to offer!"

He laughed again. "It's more than Mason ever had! You know, sometimes
I think you were torching for that space-happy has-been!"

She felt the burn of rising color in her cheeks and turned quickly
away from him.

"You don't get it yet, do you duchess?" his heavy voice was saying
behind her. "It's never occurred to you that there are other places to
be beside with your own flock; that there are other men among whom to
seek your fortune if the ones you were born among didn't offer the
opportunities you expected. What are we among the stars at all for if
it's not to find our destinies anywhere we think they might lie?
What's this Big Freedom for, if not to use to some kind of advantage?
And me, I'm sick of being a Warrant under worn out space-neurotics
like Mason! And I don't want to end up being one, either!"

Judith held her lips tight against the thing that surged hotly inside
her. There would have to be a way to stop this man. And if there
weren't--How the pampered friends whom she'd left so proudly to choose
this calling would laugh at her, would say "_that was what the
hot-headed little rebel deserved ... she had it coming if she couldn't
act like a lady_." And they _were_ wrong!

But this man was hideously twisting all the things she had thought
were good and right, worth hoping and striving for. All the priceless
things that had stood for more than the soft, idle and pointlessly
shallow existence to which she'd been born.

"But I guess you wouldn't get it," Cain was saying. "Born with a
silver shovel in your mouth, you don't have to worry about sweating
out your pile! Quit any time and there it all is after your little
adventure, still waiting for you to come home to! Maybe they'll even
want you to write a book! But me--my father wasn't a lucky
g-prospector."

A proximity alarm clanged, and Cain qu