d at me, hard-eyed. "If you do this against my advice, I
won't be able to step in and pull you out of a jam later on, you know.
And God help you if you start up the machines and can't stop them."

I knew that. A month wasn't much. Wolf is forty thousand miles of
diameter, at least half unexplored; mountain and forest swarming with
nonhuman and semi-human cities where Terrans had never been.

Finding Rakhal, or any one man, would be like picking out one star in
the Andromeda nebula. Not impossible. Not _quite_ impossible.

Mack's eyes wandered again to his child's face, deep in the transparent
cube. He turned it in his hands. "Okay, Cargill," he said slowly, "so
we're all crazy. I'll be crazy too. Try it your way."

CHAPTER FOUR

By sunset I was ready to leave. I hadn't had any loose ends to tie up in
the Trade City, since I'd already disposed of most of my gear before
boarding the starship. I'd never been in better circumstances to take
off for parts unknown.

Mack, still disapproving, had opened the files to me, and I'd spent most
of the day in the back rooms of Floor 38, searching Intelligence files
to refresh my memory, scanning the pages of my own old reports sent
years ago from Shainsa and Daillon. He had sent out one of the nonhumans
who worked for us, to buy or acquire somewhere in the Old Town a
Dry-towner's outfit and the other things I would wear and carry.

I would have liked to go myself. I felt that I needed the practice. I
was only now beginning to realize how much I might have forgotten in the
years behind a desk. But until I was ready to make my presence known, no
one must know that Race Cargill had not left Wolf on the starship.

Above all, I must not be seen in the Kharsa until I went there in the
Dry-town disguise which had become, years ago, a deep second nature,
almost an alternate personality.

About sunset I walked through the clean little streets of the Terran
Trade City toward the Magnusson home where Juli was waiting for me.

Most of the men who go into Civil Service of the Empire come from Earth,
or from the close-in planets of Proxima and Alpha Centaurus. They go out
unmarried, and they stay that way, or marry women native to the planets
where they are sent.

But Joanna Magnusson was one of the rare Earth women who had come out
with her husband, twenty years ago. There are two kinds of Earthwomen
like that. They make their quarterings a little bit of home, or a little
bit