"Don't change," he said firmly. "Not willingly. I'm not going to be the guy to send someone to a psychiatrist to have his identity worked over. I've been hoping that you'd get your fill of roistering all over the Solar System, looking for rare bugs and viruses. I've almost been willing to get some conditioning myself so that I could join you—but you know what that would mean."

"Poor Cal," said Tinker softly. "You do love me. But Cal, don't you change either! Understand? If you change your identity, you'll not be the Cal I love. If the change comes normally, good and well, but I'll not have an altered personality for my husband. You love your ciphers and your codes and your cryptograms. You are a romanticist, Cal, and you stick to the rapier and the foil."

"Excepting that I get accused of cowardice every now and then," snorted Blair.

"Cowardice?"

"I've a rather quiet nature, you know. Nothing really roils me except Benj and his tricks. So I don't go around insulting people. I've been able to talk a lot of fights away by sheer reasoning, and when the battle is thrust upon me, I choose the rapier. There's been criticism, Tink, because some have backed out rather than cross rapiers with me, and those that do usually get pinked. I've been accused of fighting my own game."

"That's smart. That's your identity, Cal, and don't let them ridicule you into trying drillers."

"I won't. I can't shoot the side of a wall with a needle beam."

"Stay as you are, Cal."

"But that's no answer. You like space flying. I hate space flying. You love medicine and neurosurgery. I hate the smell of neoform. I hate space and I hate surgery—and you love 'em both. To combine them? To call them Life? No man in his right mind would do that. No, Tinker, I'll have nothing to do with either!"

The ghost of Hellion Murdoch, pirate, adventurer, and neurosurgeon stirred in his long, long sleep. Pirates never die, they merely join their fellows in legend and in myth, and through their minions—the historians and novelists—their heinous crimes are smoothed over, and they become uninhibited souls that fought against the fool restrictions placed upon them by a rotten society.

Hellion Murdoch had joined his fellows, Captain Kidd, Henry Morgan, Dick Turpin, and Robin Hood three hundred and fifty years ago. And like them, he 

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