wish. All right, there'll be no more questions."

She turned and moved toward the door to the cabin. Calhoun looked
after her.

"Maril."

"What?"

"Why were you crying?"

"You wouldn't understand," she said evenly.

Calhoun shrugged his shoulders almost up to his ears. He was a
professional man. In his profession he was not incompetent. But there
is no profession in which a really competent man tries to understand
women. Calhoun, annoyed, had to let fate or chance or disaster take
care of Maril's personal problems. He had larger matters to cope with.

But he had something to work on, now. He hunted busily in the
reference tapes. He came up with an explicit collection of information
on exactly the subject he needed. He left the control room to go down
into the storage areas of the Med Ship's hull. He found an ultra
frigid storage box, whose contents were kept at the temperature of
liquid air.

He donned thick gloves, used a special set of tongs, and extracted a
tiny block of plastic in which a sealed-tight phial of glass was
embedded. It frosted instantly he took it out, and when the storage
box was closed again the block was covered with a thick and opaque