ction finder passed back
and forth without bringing any answering code click from the mike. "We
may be too far in the mountains to pick up the beam. I wonder...." He
swept the needle in another direction, slightly to the left.

A crackle spat from the mike. Vye could not read code but the very
fury and intensity of that sound suggested panic--even terror.

"What's that?"

Hume spoke without looking away from the control board. "Alarm."

"From the safari?"

"No. Wass." For a long second Hume sat very still, his fingers quiet.
The flitter was on the automatic course, taking them out of the
mountains, and Vye thought that their air speed was such they were
already well removed from that sinister valley.

Hume made a slight adjustment to a dial, and the flitter banked,
coming around on another course. Once more he spun the finder of the
com. This time he was answered with a series of well-spaced clicks
which lacked the urgency of that other call. Hume listened until the
code rattled into silence again.

"They're all right at the safari camp."

"But Wass is in trouble. So what does that matter?" Vye wanted to
know.

"It matters this much." Hume spoke slowly as if he must convince
himself as well as Vye. "I'm the Guild man on Jumala, and the Guild
man is responsible for all civs."

"You can't call him your client!"

Hume shook his head. "No, he's no client. But he's human."

It narrowed down to that when a man was on the frontier worlds--humans
stood together. Vye wanted to deny it, but his own emotions, as well
as the centuries of age-old tradition, argued him down. Wass was a
Veep, one of the criminal parasites dabbling in human misery along
more than one solar lane. But he was also human and, as one of their
own species, had his claim on them.

Vye watched Hume take over the controls, felt the flitter answer
another change of course, then heard the frantic yammer of the
distress call as they leveled off to ride its beam in to the hidden
camp.

"Automatic." Hume had turned down the volume of the receiver so that
the clicks in the mike no longer were so strident. "Set on maximum and
left that way."

"They had a force barrier around the camp and they knew about the
globes and the watchers." Vye tried to imagine what had happened in
that woods clearing.

"The barrier might have shorted. And without the flitter they would
have been pinned."

"Could have taken off in the spacer."

"Wass doesn't have the