Dal turned and started across the main concourse of the great airport.
He felt a stir of motion at his side, and looked down at the small pink
fuzz-ball sitting in the crook of his arm. "Looks like we're out of
luck, pal," he said gloomily. "If we don't get on the next plane, we'll
miss the hearing altogether. Not that it's going to do us much good to
be there anyway."

The little pink fuzz-ball on his arm opened a pair of black shoe-button
eyes and blinked up at him, and Dal absently stroked the tiny creature
with a finger. The fuzz-ball quivered happily and clung closer to Dal's
side as he started up the long ramp to the observation platform.
Automatic doors swung open as he reached the top, and Dal shivered in
the damp night air. He could feel the gray fur that coated his back and
neck rising to protect him from the coldness and dampness that his body
was never intended by nature to endure.

Below him the bright lights of the landing fields and terminal buildings
of the port of Philadelphia spread out in panorama, and he thought with
a sudden pang of the great space-port in his native city, so very
different from this one and so unthinkably far away. The field below was
teeming with activity, alive with men and vehicles. Moments before, one
of Earth's great hospital ships had landed, returning from a cruise deep
into the heart of the galaxy, bringing in the gravely ill from a dozen
star systems for care in one of Earth's hospitals. Dal watched as the
long line of stretchers poured from the ship's hold with white-clad
orderlies in nervous attendance. Some of the stretchers were encased in
special atmosphere tanks; a siren wailed across the field as an
emergency truck raced up with fresh gas bottles for a chlorine-breather
from the Betelgeuse system, and a derrick crew spent fifteen minutes
lifting down the special liquid ammonia tank housing a native of