Jean Palmer leaned over, touched his arm with a slender hand. "I'm glad you're the one taking me to my father," she said. "If there is anything wrong, I'm certain you can straighten it out."

"I'll try." Don Denton met the girl's eyes squarely. "Now you'd better take a dose of sleep rays; after all, it will be about eighty hours before we land."

"Sleep rays on a space ship!"

"Yes!" Don Denton paused with one hand on a control stud. "You see, a scouter isn't like a pleasure craft or a freighter. Nine-tenths of the time aboard is spent sleeping—conserves food and oxygen."

"All right, Don," Jean said, relaxed comfortably in the cushions.

Don Denton pressed the stud, sighed deeply as the purple ray coned down from the overhead bulb and bathed the girl in its nimbus. He straightened the girl's arms a trifle, careful not to permit his head to be touched by the rays, then swung back to the integrator. Jean slept peacefully, a slight smile skidding a dimple into sight, the curves of her breasts rising and falling in a gentle rhythm.

Don Denton shrugged, bent again over the integrator. He set up the combination he desired, pressed keys, glanced absently at the answer. Nodding, he set the course on the robot-pilot, sighed gustily, sank tiredly into the heavy cushions of his seat.

He sat quietly for moments, the smile going from his eyes, a slight frown thinning his mobile mouth. He was more worried than he would have admitted. For this was the first time in eighteen months that the Lanka shipments had not come through on schedule from Venus.

The fern-like Lanka plants were of incalculable value to the inhabited worlds, for the oil rendered from the plants was the only perfect cure for cancer and numerous other diseases. Its curative powers had been discovered accidentally by two wrecked spacers on Venus three years before when one of the spacers had been cured of space-tuberculosis by an enforced diet of cooked plants and Venusian fish.

Don Denton remembered the regularity with which the shipments had been coming through and the worry the head office had felt when the oil had failed to arrive on time two months before. He had been called in as a last resort, because he knew the planet from past experience, and because of his reputation as a trouble shooter who always got results.

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