he gasped and shuddered; but he came to life and sat up groggily.

"What goes on here?" Cloud demanded ungently, in spaceal. The Chickladorian's wounds had already been bandaged. Nothing more could be done for him until they could get him to a hospital, and he had to report before he blacked out entirely.

"I don't know," the pink man made answer, recovering by the minute. "All the ape said, as near as I could get it, was that I had to show him all about inertialessness."

He then spoke rapidly to the girl—his wife, Cloud guessed—who was still holding him fervently.

The pink girl nodded. Then, catching Cloud's eye, she pointed at the two monstrosities, then at the Manarkan nurse standing calmly near by. Startlingly slim, swathed to the eyes in billows of glamorette, she looked as fragile as a reed—but Cloud knew that appearances were highly deceptive in that case. She, too, nodded at the Tellurian, then talked rapidly in sign language to a short, thick-muscled woman of some race entirely strange to the Blaster. She was used to going naked; that was very evident. She had been wearing a light robe of convention, but it had been pretty well demolished in the melee and she did not realize that what was left of it was hanging in tatters down her broad back. The "squatty" eyed the gesticulating Manarkan and spoke in a beautifully modulated, deep bass voice to the Chickladorian eyeful, who in turn passed the message along to her husband.

"The bonehead you had the argument with says to hell with you," the pilot translated finally into spaceal. "Says his mob will be out here after him directly, and if you don't cut him loose and give him all the dope on our Bergs he'll give us all the beam—plenty."

Luda was, meanwhile, trying to attract attention. She was bouncing up and down, rattling her chains, rolling her eyes, and in general demanding notice of all.

More communication ensued, culminating in, "The one with the fancy-worked skull—she's a frail, but not the other bonehead's frail, I guess—says pay no attention to the ape. He's a murderer, a pirate, a bum, a louse, and so forth, she says. Says to take your axe and cut his damn head clean off, chuck his carcass out the port, and get to hell out of here as fast as you can blast."

Cloud figured that that might be sound advice, at that, but he didn't want to take such drastic steps without more comprehensive data.

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