ere's always plenty of hot food to hand on a hunter-ship;
no regular meal-times, and everybody eats, as he sleeps, when he has
time. This is the only time when a whole hunter crew gets together,
after a monster has been killed and cut up and the ship is resting on
the bottom and nobody has to stand watch.

Everybody was talking about the killing, of course, and the wax we had
in the hold, and counting the money they were going to get for it, at
the new eighty-centisol price.

"Well, I make it about fourteen tons," Ramon Llewellyn, who had been
checking the wax as it went into the hold, said. He figured mentally
for a moment, and added, "Call it twenty-two thousand sols." Then he
had to fall back on a pencil and paper to figure shares.

I was surprised to find that he was reckoning shares for both Murell
and myself.

"Hey, do we want to let them do that?" I whispered to Murell. "We just
came along for the ride."

"I don't want the money," he said. "These people need every cent they
can get."

So did I, for that matter, and I didn't have salary and expense
account from a big company on Terra. However, I hadn't come along in
the expectation of making anything out of it, and a newsman has to be
careful about the outside money he picks up. It wouldn't do any harm
in the present instance, but as a practice it can lead to all kinds of
things, like playing favorites, coloring news, killing stories that
shouldn't be killed. We do enough of that as it is, like playing down
the tread-snail business for Bish Ware and the spaceport people, and
never killing anybody except in a "local bar." It's hard to draw a
line on that sort of thing.

"We're just guests," I said. "We don't work here."

"The dickens you are," Joe Kivelson contradicted. "Maybe you came
aboard as guests, but you're both part of the crew now. I never saw a
prettier shot on a monster than Walt made--took that thing's head off
like a chicken on a chopping block--and he did a swell job of covering
for the cutting-up. And he couldn't have done that if Murell hadn't
handled the boat the way he did, and that was no easy job."

"Well, let's talk about that when we get to port," I said. "Are we
going right back, or are we going to try for another monster?"

"I don't know," Joe said. "We could stow the wax, if we didn't get too
much, but if we stay out, we'll have to wait out the wind and by then
it'll be pretty cold."

"The longer we stay out, the more the crui