When he was about thirty feet from us, coming fast, he did a body flip, a full spin by one arm. It was perfectly timed.

Ten feet away he let go. He landed gracefully on his toes and halted standing, three feet in front of Countess Krak.

He saw her. He stood up very erect. It was as if somebody had turned on a light inside him.

"HelLO!" he said. "Hello, hello, HELLO! Whatis a beautifulcreature like youdoing in a place like this?"I almost died. Every spacer in every nightclub on every one of a thousand planets has said just that to every prostitute for thousands of years. It is the corniest cliche in any tongue. It is an outright sexual pass! And she had killed men for even reaching toward her. I said to myself, good-bye Heller, good-bye mission! I gripped the blastick.

For seconds she did not move. Then, abruptly, like her legs had given way, she sat down in the chair, turned half away from him.

She just sat there. Her eyes were fixed on a spot a yard in front of her feet. In a low, strained voice, not looking at him, just looking at that spot, she said, "You should not talk to me." There was a silence. She seemed to sink lower in the chair, tense, indrawn. "I am not worthy of you." It was just a monotonous mutter. "I am rotten. I am vile. I am not fit for you to talk to." She took a long painful breath. She sat there rigid and then she said in a kind of wail, "That is the first friendly thing anyone has said to me in three years!"And then she began to cry! Heller was plainly very distressed. He knelt down beside her and reached for her hand. I thought, oh, no, no, no, don't touch her! She has killed for less.

But she didn't move. She just sat there, chin sunk on her chest, crying!

Heller just knelt there, holding her hand.

I waited for something else to happen. Nothing did. After a while I wandered over to the hypnohelmets rack and fiddled around. These helmets produce a field that throws the subject into a hypnotic trance; recorded slides are fed through a slot and the hypnotized person can be speed-trained in various scholastic subjects. I had learned English, Italian and Turkish in one.

Heller was still kneeling beside her on the platform. The tears were making her breast pretty wet, so still holding onto her hand, he used his right to get out his redstar engineer's rag and put it into her free hand. But she didn't wipe away any tears with it. She just pushed it against her mouth to muffle the shuddering sobs which were tearing her apart.

This was getting nowhere, I thought. The day was burning up and we were getting nothing done. But I didn't dare go near them.

I got out a communications disc and whispered into it, ordering a couple guards to be posted outside the door. I eased myself out into the passageway and when the guards arrived I told them not to let Heller escape and then took myself down to the cellular labs. I didn't see Crobe around but I didn't want him anyway. I got one of the assistants to handle my face: he bathed the various contusions, put some of the skin cell culture on them from my private bottle – cultures have to be matched to the individual – and then put on new skin patches. I looked better now. With all the sweating I was doing, I hoped this lot would last.

I went back to the training rooms.

Heller was still kneeling beside her on the platform and she was still dabbing her mouth with the redstar engineer's rag. She was still crying!

What a ruined day! Nothing accomplished at all! I knew where the language files were. After all, my old section itself had made the Earth ones. For some reason there are lots of recorded language courses on Blito-P3: they sell them commercially there; all one has to do is duplicate their playing heads with a proper sort of current and then, interspersing the words with Standard Voltarian, copy them onto recording strips. They print lots of children's schoolbooks and so one can also learn to read and write rather quickly. Raht and Terb, the best Voltarian operatives there, had also done some of their own recordings of the accents. We had cubic yards of Earth languages and materials for instruction. It always amused me that the recordings and books of Blito-P3 bore dire warnings of penalties for copying and promised that some group known as the "FBI" would arrest any offender! Well, good luck to them. I sorted through the cabinet labelled Blito-P3.There was nothing whatever different about the scene on the platform so I took my time.

As near as I could make out, the geographic sections for what we call "zone of operations" would be, in Heller's case, three locales: Virginia, Washington, D.C., and New York City. He would not be spending much time in Turkey – Gods forbid. I could find a "Virginia accent" but I could not find any reference to a "Washington, D.C. accent," so I skipped it. Then I got all tangled up with the "New York accents" because there seemed to be a lot of them. I finally found a note. It said: Ivy League accent is that of the upper classes of the New England section of the United States.

I looked at a map and saw that New York might be on the fringe of "New England" and guessed it would have to do. My own English had been learned with "commercial heterogenic accent" which included the skill of working out accents. But I didn't think Heller would have time for that. I chose "Virginia" and "Ivy League." The tableau on the platform seemed to be less tense. They weren't talking. She wasn't crying as much. The redstar engineer's rag was sopping. I wondered what she was trying to pull. It crossed my mind that maybe I ought to alert Lombar in case this female was laying some deep-seated conspiracy to escape. But I actually couldn't figure out what she wasup to. If she was conspiring, she would be talking. And she wasn't. It was such common knowledge that the Countess Krak was dangerous that this just might be another facet of it. There's no understanding females anyway.

Finally she spoke. It was in a very low voice. She had stopped sobbing. "I'll be all right now." And Heller whispered, "Are you sure?" She nodded her head. She began to dry off her face with the redstar engineer's rag.

Well! I might be able to salvage some of this day after all. I beckoned to Heller and he came over. I knew how to operate these hypnohelmets. If the training section wasn't going to help, I would simply do it all myself. That's common enough in the Apparatus, made up as it is of loonies and crazies and criminals in general.

I slid a recorded slide into the helmet slot and started to put the visored helmet over his head. He looked at it curiously and instead of letting me put it on him, took it out of my hands. I tried to explain to him what it was. He ignored me.

He went over to the cabinet and rummaged around. He put the helmet down and rummaged deeper. And then he found a recorded strip player that was detached from the helmet. He took the first strip marked

Elementary English (Ivy League)

and put it in the player. He carried the lot over to the platform and sat down at the desk.

The Countess Krak was still sitting in the chair. Nobody ever sits at the Countess Krak's desk! She said nothing.

Heller turned the player on. It had a little speaker.

He pushed a button. The strip said, "My name is George."Heller said, "Oh, no, no, no." He pulled a little tool case from his pocket. He opened the back of the player and in a moment had a handful of little gears. Looking up, he said to me, "Call one of your electronic surveillance technicians." Aha, so he knew Spiteos was really wired! Well, that wasn't a very bright supposition. Everything is, these days. I called on my communications disc.

Heller put on a pair of gloves, the kind that resist all heat and transmit none. He took a little spin-carver from his pocket case and began to work on the player gears. He was cutting down a cogwheel. It glowed red hot in his gloved fingers. It was a job usually done on precision machines. But here he was making what appeared to be a perfect little cogwheel.