time. As she started blindly towards the door,
Jason's voice snapped after her.

"The guard, Skop, ran out because he didn't want to lose his precious
two-value logic. It's all he has. But you've seen other parts of the
galaxy, Meta, you know there is a lot more to life than
kill-and-be-killed on Pyrrus. You feel it is true, even if you won't
admit it."

She turned and ran out the door.

Jason looked after her, his hand scraping the bristle on his chin
thoughtfully. "Meta, I have the faint hope that the woman is winning
over the Pyrran. I think that I saw--perhaps for the first time in the
history of this bloody war-torn city--a tear in one of its citizen's
eyes."

XXI.

"Drop that equipment and Kerk will undoubtedly pull both your arms off,"
Jason said. "He's over there now, looking as sorry as possible that I
ever talked him into this."

Skop cursed under the bulky mass of the psi detector, passing it up to
Meta who waited in the open port of the spaceship. Jason supervised the
loading, and blasted all the local life that came to investigate.
Horndevils were thick this morning and he shot four of them. He was last
aboard and closed the lock behind him.

"Where are you going to install it?" Meta asked.

"You tell me," Jason said. "I need a spot for the antenna where there
will be no dense metal in front of the bowl to interfere with the
signal. Thin plastic will do, or if worst comes to worst I can mount it
outside the hull with a remote drive."

"You may have to," she said. "The hull is an unbroken unit, we do all
viewing by screen and instruments. I don't think ... wait ... there is
one place that might do."

She led the way to a bulge in the hull that marked one of the lifeboats.
They went in through the always-open lock, Skop struggling after them
with the apparatus.

"These lifeboats are half buried in the ship," Meta explained. "They
have transparent front ports covered by friction shields that withdraw
automatically when the boat is launched."

"Can we pull back the shields now?"

"I think so," she said. She traced the launching circuits to a junction
box and opened the lid. When she closed the shield relay manually, the
heavy plates slipped back into the hull. There was a clear view, since
most of the viewport projected beyond the parent ship.

"Perfect," Jason said. "I'll set up here. Now how do I talk to you in
the ship?"

"Right here," she said. "There's a pre-tuned setting on th