t of your own little fat head,"
Fao sneered, "you have set yourself up as Grand High Chief Mogul, and
all the rest of us are to crawl up to you on our bellies and kiss your
feet?"

"If that's the way you want to express it, yes. However, I don't know
how long I personally will be in the pilot's bucket. As I told you, I
will enforce the basic tenet that top Gunther is top boss--man, woman,
snake, fish, or monster."

"Top Gunther be damned!" Fao blazed. "I don't and won't take orders from
_any_ man--in hell or in heaven or on this Earth or on any planet of
any...."

"Fao!" Delcamp exclaimed, "Please keep still--_please_!"

"Let her rave," Garlock said, coldly. "This is just a three-year-old
baby's tantrum. If she keeps it up, I'll give her the damnedest jolt she
ever got in all her spoiled life."

Belle whistled sharply to call Fao's attention, then tight-beamed a
thought. "If you've got any part of a brain, slick chick, you'd better
start using it. The boy friend not only plays rough, but he doesn't
bluff."

"To hell with all that!" Fao rushed on. "We don't have anything to do
with your organization--go on back home or anywhere else you want to.
We'll finish our own ship and build our own organization and run it to
suit ourselves. We'll...."

"That's enough of that." Garlock penetrated her shield as easily as he
had the man's, and held her in lock. "You are _not_ going to wreck this
project. You will start behaving yourself right now or I'll spread your
mind wide open for Belle and Deggi to look at and see exactly what kind
of a half-baked jerk you are. If that doesn't work, I'll put you into a
Gunther-blocked cell aboard the _Pleiades_ and keep you there until the
ship is finished and we leave Margonia. How do you want it?"

Fao was shocked as she had never been shocked before. At first she tried
viciously to fight; but, finding that useless against the appalling
power of the mind holding hers, she stopped struggling and began really
to think.

"That's better. You've got what it takes to think with. Go ahead and do
it."

And Fao Talaho did have it. Plenty of it. She learned.

"I'll be good," she said, finally. "Honestly. I'm ashamed, really, but
after I got started I couldn't stop. But I can now, I'm sure."

"I'm sure you can, too. I know exactly how it is. All us Primes have to
get hell knocked out of us before we amount to a whoop in Hades. Deggi
got his one way, I got mine another, you got yours this