won't like. He called and told me the news this afternoon. I knew it was something he'd always wanted and so I poured on a little flattery. I told him that I thought it was pretty generous of him to take time from his business to devote his talents to government. I even mentioned that the Federation should have more public-spirited citizens like him."

"That must have pleased him."

"Ha!" said Manning without humor. "He said he was glad that I felt that way because he had a job for me to do and he would expect me in his office on Rigil Kentaurus at three-thirty this afternoon."

"Oh," said Vega. Now she understood. "But you can't possibly leave the business now, darling! This is the middle of the vacation season."

"I explained those things to him," Manning said bitterly. "His only answer was to tell me that as Secretary of Planets he has the right to draft any citizen for special emergency jobs. He said that if I weren't in his office by three-thirty, he'd send the police after me. He would, too."

"What are you going to do?"

"Go to Rigil Kentaurus. On the way, I'm going to try to figure out some way of legally removing a father-in-law. Come on, help me pack. I'd better take a few things. When your father has something he wants me to do I'm liable to need anything from an extra pair of socks to a few spare lives."

"All right, darling," Vega said. She followed him into their bedroom. "But if Daddy sends you chasing off to some strange planet, remember one thing, Manning Draco. No girls—not even platonic ones. No reverting to type."

"You wrong me, dear," Manning said in wounded tones. "I never chased after women in my life. They chased me. Take, for example, that lovely girl, the former Vega—"

"All right," Vega interrupted, "only be sure that you run faster than you did when I chased you."

"I can't help it if I'm irresistible to women," Manning purred and ducked the shoe she aimed at him.

A few minutes later, a vacuum-packed traveling case under his arm, Manning Draco bestowed a brief kiss on his sleeping son, a longer one on his wife, and took an air-cab to the Nuyork spaceport. He had phoned them from the office so that his space cruiser, the Alpha Actuary, was already on the launching rack. He climbed in, cleared with the control tower, and blasted off.

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