my image dissolve in blurring shadows, and feeling the long-healed scar
on my mouth draw up to make the grin hideous. "I'm Cargill, all right.
I've been up on Floor 38 for six years, holding down a desk any clerk
could handle. You for instance."

He gaped. He was a rabbit of a man who had never stepped out of the safe
familiar boundaries of the Terran Trade City. "You mean _you're_ the man
who went to Charin in disguise, and routed out The Lisse? The man who
scouted the Black Ridge and Shainsa? And you've been working at a desk
upstairs all these years? It's--hard to believe, sir."

My mouth twitched. It had been hard for me to believe while I was doing
it. "The pass?"

"Right away, sir." He punched buttons and a printed chip of plastic
extruded from a slot on the desk top. "Your fingerprint, please?" He
pressed my finger into the still-soft surface of the plastic, indelibly
recording the print; waited a moment for it to harden, then laid the
chip in the slot of a pneumatic tube. I heard it whoosh away.

"They'll check your fingerprint against that when you board the ship.
Skylift isn't till dawn, but you can go aboard as soon as the process
crew finishes with her." He glanced at the monitor screen, where the
swarming crew were still doing inexplicable things to the immobile
spacecraft. "It will be another hour or two. Where are you going, Mr.
Cargill?"

"Some planet in the Hyades Cluster. Vainwal, I think, something like
that."

"What's it like there?"

"How should I know?" I'd never been there either. I only knew that
Vainwal had a red sun, and that the Terran Legate could use a trained
Intelligence officer. And _not_ pin him down to a desk.

There was respect, and even envy in the little man's voice. "Could
I--buy you a drink before you go aboard, Mr. Cargill?"

"Thanks, but I have a few loose ends to tie up." I didn't, but I was
damned if I'd spend my last hour on Wolf under the eyes of a deskbound
rabbit who preferred his adventure safely secondhand.

But after I'd left the office and the building, I almost wished I'd
taken him up on it. It would be at least an hour before I could board
the starship, with nothing to do but hash over old memories, better
forgotten.

The sun was lower now. Phi Coronis is a dim star, a dying star, and once
past the crimson zenith of noon, its light slants into a long
pale-reddish twilight. Four of Wolf's five moons were clustered in a
pale bouquet overhead, mingling thi