dive frequented by free spacers. If you really looked for
her you could spot her--just sitting there listening to the
talk--listening and remembering. She didn't open her own mouth often.
But when she did spacers had learned to listen. And the lucky few who
heard her rare spoken words--these will never forget Steena.

She drifted from port to port. Being an expert operator on the big
calculators she found jobs wherever she cared to stay for a time. And
she came to be something like the master-minded machines she
tended--smooth, gray, without much personality of her own.

But it was Steena who told Bub Nelson about the Jovan moon-rites--and
her warning saved Bub's life six months later. It was Steena who
identified the piece of stone Keene Clark was passing around a table one
night, rightly calling it unworked Slitite. That started a rush which
made ten fortunes overnight for men who were down to their last jets.
And, last of all, she cracked the case of the _Empress of Mars_.

All the boys who had profited by her queer store of knowledge and her
photographic memory tried at one time or another to balance the scales.
But she wouldn't take so much as a cup of Canal water at their expense,
let alone the credits they tried to push on her. Bub Nelson was the only
one who got around her refusal. It was he who brought her Bat.

About a year after the Jovan affair he walked into the Free Fall one
night and dumped Bat down on her table. Bat looked at Steena and
growled. She looked calmly back at him and nodded once. From then on
they traveled together--the thin gray woman and the big gray tom-cat.
Bat learned to know the inside of more stellar bars than even most
spacers visit in their lifetimes. He developed a liking for Vernal
juice, drank it neat and quick, right out of a glass. And he was always
at home on any table where Steena elected to drop him.

This is really the story of Steena, Bat, Cliff Moran and the _Empress of
Mars_, a story which is already a legend of the spaceways. And it's a
damn good story too. I ought to know, having framed the first version of
it myself.

For I was there, right in the Rigel Royal, when it all began on the
night that Cliff Moran blew in, looking lower than an antman's belly and
twice as nasty. He'd had a spell of luck foul enough to twist a man into
a slug-snake and we all knew that there was an attachment out for his
ship. Cliff had fought his way up from the back courts of Venaport.