been chased from Earth, a pariah and a criminal, eight years ago,
who had been mortally wounded on a wild planet deep within the
Saggitarian Swarm, whose life had been saved--after a fashion--by the
white magic of that planet. Mayhem, doomed now to possible immortality
as a bodiless sentience, an _elan_, which could occupy and activate a
corpse if it had been frozen properly ... an _elan_ doomed to wander
eternally because it could not remain in one body for more than a month
without body and _elan_ perishing. Mayhem, who had dedicated his
strange, lonely life to the service of the Galactic League because a
normal life and normal social relations were not possible for him....

"One thing, Mayhem," the Firstman said, now, on Neptune. "How much
longer you have in that body of yours?"

"Five days. Possibly six."

"That doesn't give you much time. If you're caught out there when your
month is up--"

"I won't be. We're wasting time talking about it."

"--it would mean your death."

"Then let's get started."

* * * * *

The Firstman stared at him levelly. "You're a brave man, Mayhem."

"Let's say I'm not afraid to die. I've been a living dead man for eight
years. Come on."

One of the so-called coffins, a tiny one-man ship barely big enough for
a prone man, food concentrates and water, was already waiting at the
station spacefield.

Ten minutes after hearing about _Mozart's Lady_, without fanfare, Mayhem
blasted off in pursuit.

* * * * *

Maintaining top speed all the way, House Bartock brought _Mozart's Lady_
across almost two billion miles of space from Neptune's to Pluto's orbit
in three days. He was delighted with the speed. It would have taken the
average space-tub ten days to two weeks and, since as far as Bartock
knew there were nothing but average space-tubs on Neptune, that gave him
a considerable head-start.

It was Jane Cummings-First Violin who discovered Bartock's identity.
Bartock was studying the star-map at the time and considered himself
safe from discovery because he kept the control door of _Mozart's Lady_
locked. However, Jane Cummings had established something of a liaison
with the pilot outward bound from Earth and Mars, so she had been given
a spare key which she'd kept, secretly, all the time the symphony was on
Triton. Now, curious about the new pilot for the same reason that the
miners on Triton had been curious about th