s left on from the night before. Magnusson, at his desk, looked as
if he'd slept in his rumpled uniform. He was a big bull of a man, and
his littered desk looked, as always, like the track of a typhoon in the
salt flats.

The clutter was weighted down, here and there, with solidopic cubes of
the five Magnusson youngsters, and as usual, Magnusson was fiddling with
one of the cubes. He said, not looking up, "Sorry to pull this at the
last minute, Race. There was just time to put out a pull order and get
you off the ship, but no time to explain."

I glared at him. "Seems I can't even get off the planet without trouble!
You raised hell all the time I was here, but when I try to leave--what
is this, anyhow? I'm sick of being shoved around!"

Magnusson made a conciliating gesture. "Wait until you hear--" he began,
and broke off, looking at someone who was sitting in the chair in front
of his desk, somebody whose back was turned to me. Then the person
twisted and I stopped cold, blinking and wondering if this were a
hallucination and I'd wake up in the starship's skyhook, far out in
space.

Then the woman cried, "Race, _Race_! Don't you know me?"

I took one dazed step and another. Then she flew across the space
between us, her thin arms tangling around my neck, and I caught her up,
still disbelieving.

"_Juli!_"

"Oh, Race, I thought I'd die when Mack told me you were leaving tonight.
It's been the only thing that's kept me alive, knowing--knowing I'd see
you." She sobbed and laughed, her face buried in my shoulder.

I let her cry for a minute, then held my sister at arm's length. For a
moment I had forgotten the six years that lay between us. Now I saw
them, all of them, printed plain on her face. Juli had been a pretty
girl. Six years had fined her face into beauty, but there was tension in
the set of her shoulders, and her gray eyes had looked on horrors.

She looked tiny and thin and unbearably frail under the scanty folds of
her fur robe, a Dry-town woman's robe. Her wrists were manacled, the
jeweled tight bracelets fastened together by the links of a long fine
chain of silvered gilt that clashed a little, thinly, as her hands fell
to her sides.

"What's wrong, Juli? Where's Rakhal?"

She shivered and now I could see that she was in a state of shock.

"Gone. He's gone, that's all I know. And--oh, Race, Race, he took Rindy
with him!"

From the tone of her voice I had thought she was sobbing. Now I realized