was by the speakers, she should hear him within a mile. She did not
appear. He went to a small and inconspicuous closet and armed himself.
A Med Ship man was not ever expected to fight, but there were
blast-rifles available for extreme emergency.

When he'd slung a power-pack over his shoulder and reached the
airlock, there was still no sign of his late stowaway. He stood in the
airlock door for long minutes, staring angrily about. Almost certainly
she wouldn't be looking in the mountains for men of Dara come here for
cattle. He used a pair of binoculars, first at low-magnification to
search as wide an area down-valley as possible, and then at highest
power to search the most likely routes.

He found a small, bobbing speck beyond a faraway hill crest. It was
her head. It went down below the hilltop.

He snapped a command to Murgatroyd, and when the _tormal_ was on the
ground outside, he locked the port with that combination that nobody
but a Med Ship man was at all likely to discover or use.

"She's an idiot!" he told Murgatroyd sourly. "Come along! We've got to
be idiots too!"

He set out in pursuit.

There was blue sky overhead, as was inevitable on any
oxygen-atmosphere planet of a Sol-type yellow sun. There were
mountains, as is universal in planets whose surface rises and falls
and folds and bends from the effects of weather or vulcanism. There
were plants, as has come about wherever microorganisms have broken