was barely audible above the whine of the jets.

"It's a job the Galactic League can handle," Sria went on. "Now that it's out in the open—or will be as soon as we get to the spacefield. You've done your work, Pandit, and your people won't forget you for it. As for me, my work here is finished too."

"Your work?"

Above the roar of the jet, Sria shouted: "Yes. I am Johnny Mayhem." She smiled in the darkness. Johnny Mayhem, she thought, in a girl's body. Well, he'd been young men and old, weak and strong, sick and healthy, human and alien outworlder—so why not a girl too?

All at once Pandit's hand lay heavily on her shoulder. She turned around and in the darkness but with the lights of the instrument board on it saw the gleam of a knife blade. The face beyond the blade, leering from darkness, was not Pandit's. She hadn't actually known it was Pandit. She hadn't seen him. She'd hardly been able to hear his voice.

It was Raj Shiva.

"Fly us to Denebian Exports," he said, "or I'll kill you and do it myself."

"You're making a mistake. Your people belong with the Galactic League, not with a handful of adventurers who—"

"The Denebians are right," Raj Shiva said fanatically. "My people would be better off left alone."

"I'm flying this jet to the spaceport—and the League."

"I'll kill you. I know all about you, Mayhem. You're not a woman, really. You're not even a native. That's a dead body, isn't it? But if I kill it—again—while you're in it, you die to. You'll do what I say!"

This very night, unless something was done about it, the cache of thermonuclear weapons would be space-bound, the first hydrogen bombs loose in the galaxy for almost five hundred years. Wouldn't mankind ever begin to learn? Mayhem-Sria thought wearily. He knew the answer, of course: most men would, but the few who refused could bring destruction to an entire galaxy....

Moments before, apparent success of a mission. Now, failure. Or death. Or both.

Sria's hand flashed out suddenly and struck the instrument board. The jet plummeted earthward with a loud whining sound. Sria felt herself shoved back by the tremendous acceleration into the cushions of the pilot chair. She heard a 

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