He turned and walked away. But he had hardly taken a dozen steps across the sunlit library before she called his name.

“Donal!”

He turned and saw her staring after him, her face stiff, her fists clenched at her side.

“Donal, you… you can’t go,” she said, tightly.

“I beg your pardon?” He stared at her.

“You can’t go,” she repeated. “Your duty is here. You’re assigned here.”

“No.” He shook his head. “You don’t understand, Ev. This business of Oriente’s come up. Fm going to ask the marshal to assign me to one of the ships.”

“You can’t.” Her voice was brittle. “He isn’t here. He’s gone down to the Spaceyard.”

“Well, then, I’ll go there and ask him.”

“You can’t. I’ve already asked him to leave you here. He promised.”

“You what!” The words exploded from his lips in a tone more suited to the field man to this quiet mansion.

“I asked him to leave you here.”

He turned and stalked away from her.

“Donal!” He heard her voice crying despairingly after him, but there was nothing she, or anyone in that house could have done, to stop him then.

He found Galt examining the new experimental model of a two-man anti-personnel craft. The older man looked up in surprise as Donal came up.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Could I see you alone for a minute, sir?” said Donal. “A private and urgent matter.”

Galt shot him a keen glance, but motioned aside with his head and they stepped over into the privacy of a tool control boom.

“What is it?” asked Galt.

“Sir,” said Donal. “I understand Elvine asked you if I couldn’t continue to be assigned to your household during the upcoming business we talked about with Patrol Chief Lludrow earlier today.”

“That’s right. She did.”

“I did not know of it,” said Donal, meeting the older man’s eyes. “It was not my wish.”

“Not your wish?”

“No, sir.”

“Oh,” said Galt. He drew a long breath and rubbed his chin with one thick hand. Turning his head aside, he gazed out through the screen of the control booth at the experimental ship. “I see,” he said. “I didn’t realize.”

“No reason why you should,” Donal felt a sudden twist of emotion inside him at the expression on the older man’s face. “I should have spoken to you before sir.”

“No, no,” Galt brushed the matter aside with a wave of his hand. “The responsibility’s mine. I’ve never had children. No experience. She has to get herself settled in life one of these days; and… well, I have a high opinion of you, Donal.”

“You’ve been too kind to me already, sir,” Donal said miserably.

“No, no… well, mistakes will happen. I’ll see you have a place with the combat forces right away, of course.”

“Thank you,” said Donal.

“Don’t thank me, boy.” Abruptly, Galt looked old. “I should have remembered. You’re a Dorsai.”

“Welcome aboard,” said a pleasant-faced Junior Captain, as Donal strode through the gas barrier of the inner lock. The Junior Captain was in his early twenties, a black-haired, square-faced young man who looked as if he had gone in much for athletics. “I’m J.C. Allmin Clay Andresen.”

“Donal Graeme.” They saluted each other. Then they shook hands.

“Had any ship experience?” asked Andresen.

“Eighteen months of summer training cruises in the Dorsai,” answered Donal. “Command and armament — no technical posts.”

“Command and armament,” said Andresen, “are plenty good enough on a Class 4J ship. Particularly Command. You’ll be senior officer after me — if anything happens.” He made the little ritual gesture, reaching out to touch a close, white, carbon-plastic wall beside him. “Not that I’m suggesting you take over in such a case. My First can handle things all right. But you may be able to give him a hand, if it should happen.”

“Be honored,” said Donal.

“Care to look over the ship?”

“I’m looking forward to it.”

“Right. Step into the lounge, then.” Andresen led the way across the small reception room, and through a sliding bulkhead to a corridor that curved off ahead of them to right and left. They went through another door in the wail of the corridor directly in front of them, down a small passage, and emerged through a final door into a large, pleasantly decorated, circular room.

“Lounge,” said Andresen. “Control center’s right under our feet; reversed gravity.” He pressed a stud on the wall and a section of the floor slid back. “You’ll have to flip,” he warned, and did a head-first dive into the hole.

Donal, who knew what to expect, followed the J.C.’s example. The momentum of his dive shot him through and into another circular chamber of the same size as the lounge, in which everything would have been upside down and nailed to the ceiling, except for the small fact that here the gravity was reversed; and what had been down, was up, and up was down instead.

“Here,” said Andresen, as Donal landed lightly on the floor at one side of the opening, “is our Control Eye. As you probably saw when you were moving in to come aboard, the Class 4J is a ball-and-hammer ship.”

He pressed several studs and in the large globe floating in the center of the floor, that which he had referred to as the Control Eye, a view formed of their craft, as seen from some little distance outside the ship. Half-framed against the star-pricked backdrop of space, and with just a sliver of the curved edge of Freiland showing at the edge of the scene, she floated. A sphere thirty meters in diameter, connected by two slim shafts a hundred meters each in length to a rhomboid-shape that was the ship’s thrust unit, some five meters in diameter at its thickest and looking like a large child’s spinning top, pivoted on two wires that clamped it at the middle. This was the “hammer.” The ship, proper, was the “ball.”

“No phase-shift equipment?” asked Donal. He was thinking of the traditional cylinder shape of the big ships that moved between the stars.

“Don’t fool yourself,” answered Andresen. “The grid’s there. We just hope the enemy doesn’t see it, or doesn’t hit it. We can’t protect it, so we try to make it invisible.” His finger stabbed out to indicate the apparently bare shafts. “There’s a covering grid running the full length of the ship, from thrust to nose. Painted black.”

Donal nodded thoughtfully.

‘Too bad a polarizer won’t work in the absence of atmosphere,” he said.

“You can say that,” agreed Andresen. He flicked off the Eye. “Let’s look around the rest of the ship by hand.”

He led out a door and down a passage similar to the one by which they had entered the lounge. They came out into a corridor that was the duplicate of the curving one they had passed in the other half of the ship.

“Crew’s quarters, mess hall, on the other one,” explained Andresen. “Officer’s quarters, storage and suppliers, repair section, on this one.” He pushed open a door in the corridor wall opposite them and they stepped into a section roughly the size of a small hotel room, bounded on its farther side by the curving outer shell of the ship, proper. The shell in this section was, at the moment, on transparent; and the complicated “dentist’s chair” facing the bank of controls at the foot of the transparency was occupied; although the figure in it was dressed in coveralls only.

“My First,” said Andresen. The figure looked up over the headrest of the chair. It was a woman in her early forties.

“Hi, All,” she said. “Just checking the override.” Andresen made a wry grimace at Donal.

“Antipersonnel weapons,” he explained. “Nobody likes to shoot the poor helpless characters out of the sky as they fall in for an assault — so it’s an officer’s job. I usually take it over myself if I’m not tied up with something else at the moment. Staff Liaison Donal Graeme — First Officer Coa Benn.”