s does not surprise me, at all.

"Lizzie my love," says he, "you are twice blessed being not only witty
yourself but a cause of wit in others; was that bit of Primitive Lee
with which M'Clare regaled us really not from the hand of the
mistress, or was it a mere pastiche?"

I say Whoever wrote that it was not me anyway.

"It seemed to me pale and luke-warm compared with the real thing,"
says Cray languidly, "which brings me to a point that, to quote dear
Kirsty, seems to have been missed."

I say, "Yep. Like what language it was that these people wrote their
log in that we can be _certain_ the Incognitans won't know."

"More than that," says B, "we didn't decide who they are or where they
were coming from or how they came to crash or anything."

"Come to think of it, though," I point out, "the language and a good
many other things must have been decided already because of getting
the right hypnotapes and translators on board."

B suddenly lights up.

"Yes, but look, I bet that's what we're here for, I mean that's why
they picked us instead of Space Department people--the ship's got to
have a past history, it has to come from a planet somewhere only no
one must ever find out _where_ it's supposed to be. Someone will have
to fake a log, only I don't see how--"

"The first reel with data showing the planet of origin got damaged
during the crash," says Cray impatiently.

"Yes, of course--but we have to find a reason why they were in that
part of Space and it has to be a _nice_ one, I mean so that the
Incognitans when they finally read the log won't hate them any more--"

"Maybe they were bravely defending their own planet by hunting down an
interplanetary raider," I suggest.

Cray says it will take only the briefest contact with other planets to
convince the Incognitans that interplanetary raiders can't and don't
exist, modern planetary alarm and defense systems put them out of the
question.

"That's all he knows," says B, "some interplanetary pirates raided
Lizzie's father's farm once. Didn't they, Liz?"

"Yes in a manner of speaking, but they were bums who pinched a
spaceship from a planet not many parsecs away, a sparsely inhabited
mining world like my own which had no real call for an alarm system,
so that hardly alters the argument."

"Well," says B, "the alarm system on Incognita can't be so hot or the
observation ships could not have got in, or out, for that matter,
unless of course they have some o