3
p>
The two outlanders look at one another; schoolboys caught fighting in the alley by a monitor who demands a bite of their apple in lieu of a visit to the principal. As if loath to touch one another they reach forward hesitantly and handshake in a quick light grip.
"Good!" glows the mercenary. He waves a hand and his fellows converge with contract-platen and etching stylus. "Now, gentlemen, please state the terms for Xanabar."
* * * * *
Peter Hawley strolled down a side street with a dog at his heel. It was a dog of many breeds, but not a mixture of careless parentage. Peter paused at a cross-street and looked uncertainly to left and right. "What do you make, Buregarde?"
"The noble dog says right," replied Buregarde.
"Right," said Peter turning up the street. "And stop this 'Noble dog' routine."
"Man is dog's best friend," said Buregarde. "If you'd called me something sensible, I wouldn't have looked it up. There is a statue to me in the Okeefenokee back on Earth. I am the noble dog. Pogo says so."
"I--"
"Easy Peter!" said the dog in a near-whisper.
"All right. Do we play down the chatter?"
Buregarde sat, lifted his nose and sniffed. His natural voice gave a faint whine of discontent. "I'm supposed to have a nose," he complained. "This is like trying to smell out a lone mouse in a zoological garden in midsummer."
"Why the warning?" asked Peter.
"All races smell the same when they are poised for violence," said the dog. "Trouble is that man-smell isn't pointed the way it's going, only where it's coming from."
Peter grunted. "Catch any woman-smell?"
"Just the usual whiff. Stale scent. She was here; she passed this way. But which way?"
"We can guess they made it away from the spaceport."
"Unless," said the dog taking another sniff of the air, "they're taking her back to some other spacecraft." Buregarde looked up at Peter. "Do you catch anything?"
"Just the usual mingled fright and danger, frant