use sextants, watches, compasses. And, just to make it
worse, we have one video recording of a priest laying out a course on an
accurate chart. He was using a protractor, which was divided into
Galactic degrees. That was the clincher. Somebody's out of place, and
we've got to find him--or them."

He took the sword from Banasel. "I think we'd better go on to the
eastern continent, see what we can find, then we can deal with our
friends. But first, Ban, you'd better run out a call for one of the
Sector Guardsmen to back us up if necessary. We could run into something
too hot for us to handle."

Banasel nodded and turned to the communicator. Lanko dropped into the
pilot seat, glanced at the screens, and moved controls. In the
viewscreen, the sea tilted, drew farther away, then became a level,
featureless blue expanse.

* * * * *

"Well, here's your eastern continent. In fact, this is the city of
Kneuros. It's where you wanted to go, isn't it?"

Musa looked at Banasel thoughtfully.

"Yes," he admitted. "It's where I thought I wanted to go, but now I
really know what I wanted in the first place."

"Oh?"

"Certainly. I was restless. I thought I liked being a trader in Karth,
and I was a fairly good trader, too. But I was just getting things at
secondhand. I turned down just what I really wanted, because it scared
me. That was a long time ago." He looked at the control panel. He'd
understood such panels once, some years ago.

"How do you plan to find your aliens--if there are any?"

"Search pattern." Lanko shrugged. "We'll cruise around in a grid pattern
until we pick up some sort of reading, or until we spot something
abnormal." He pointed at a series of instruments.

"They're bound to have a ship somewhere, and we'll pick up a small
amount of power radiation from their screens. If their ship were
orbiting in space, we'd have picked it up long ago, so we must assume
it's grounded. I think we'd better go right into a pattern. We can use
Kneuros as origin." He stared at the plotting instruments.

"Let's see. If I wanted to hide a ship, I'd use the most inaccessible
location I could find. We do that ourselves, in fact. And there are some
mountainous regions inland." He set up course and speed.

"Yeah," Banasel added, "and I'd worry a lot more about ground approach
than air accessibility, at least on this planet."

The ship gained altitude, accelerated, and sped eastward.

Day by