pilot had brought her in by will, hope and a faith he speedily lost.

He received a plasta-hand, the best the medical center could supply
and a pension for life, forced by the public acclaim for a man who had
saved ships and lives. Then--the sack because a crazed Tors Wazalitz
was dead. They dared not try to stick Hume with a murder charge; the
voyage record tapes had been shot straight through to the Patrol
Council, and the evidence on those could be neither faked nor tampered
with. They could not give him a quick punishment, but they could try
to arrange a slow death. The word had gone out that Hume was off pilot
boards. They had tried to keep him out of space.

And they might have done it, too, had he been the usual type of pilot,
knowing only his trade. But some odd streak of restlessness had always
led him to apply for the rim runs, the very first flights to newly
opened worlds. Outside of the survey men, there were few qualified
pilots of his seniority who possessed such a wide and varied knowledge
of the galactic frontiers.

So when he learned that the ships' boards were irrevocably closed to
him, Hume had signed up with the Out-Hunters' Guild. There was a vast
difference between lifting a liner from a launching pad and guiding
civ hunters to worlds surveyed and staked out for their trips into the
wild. Hume relished the exploration part--he disliked the
leading-by-the-hand of nine-tenths of the Guild's clients.

But if he had not been in the Guild service he would never have made
that find on Jumala. That lucky, lucky find! Hume's plasta-flesh
fingers curved, their nails drew across the red surface of the table.
And where was Wass? He was about to rise and go when the golden oval
on the wall smoked, its substance thinning to a mist as a man stepped
through to the floor.

The newcomer was small compared to the former pilot, but he had
breadth of shoulder which made the upper part of his torso overbalance
his thin hips and legs. He was dressed most conservatively except for
a jeweled plaque resting on the tightly stretched gray silk of his
upper tunic at heart level. Unlike Hume he wore no visible arms belt,
but the other did not doubt that there were a number of devices
concealed in that room to counter the efforts of any assassin.

The man from the mirror spoke with a flat, toneless voice. His black
hair had been shaven well above his ears, the locks left on top of his
skull trained into a kind of bird's c