And I see you have heard it, too,” she sighed. “Just as my father wrote it. About my mother. My own mother.”

“Oh, Lavinia,” said Rod, “I’m sorry. I never thought it was you. And you my own cousin only three or four times removed. But Lavinia, there’s something wrong. How can your mother be mad if she was looking fine at my house last week?”

“She was never mad,” said Lavinia. “My father was. He made up that cruel song about my mother so that the neighbors complained. He had his choice of the Giggle Room to die in, or the sick place, to be immortal and insane. He’s there now. And the Onseck, the Onseck threatened to bring him back to our own neighborhood if I didn’t do what he asked. Do you think I could forgive that? Ever? After people have sung that hateful song at me ever since I was a baby? Do you wonder that I know it myself?”

Rod nodded.

Lavinia’s troubles impressed him, but he had troubles of his own.

The sun was never hot on Norstrilia, but he suddenly felt thirsty and hot. He wanted to sleep but he wondered about the dangers which surrounded him.

She knelt beside him.

“Close your eyes a bit, Rod, I will spiek very quietly and maybe nobody will notice it except your station hands, Bill and Hopper. When they come we’ll hide out for the day and tonight we can go back to your computer and hide. I’ll tell them to bring food.”

She hesitated, “And, Rod?”

“Yes?” he said.

“Forgive me.”

“For what?”

“For my troubles,” she said contritely.

“Now you have more troubles. Me,” he said. “Let’s not blame ourselves, but for sheep’s sake, girl, let me sleep.”

He drifted off to sleep as she sat beside him, whistling a loud clear time with long long notes which never added up. He knew some people, usually women, did that when they tried to concentrate on their telepathic spieking.

Once he glanced up at her before he finally slept. He noticed that her eyes were a deep, strange blue. Like the mad wild faraway skies of Old Earth itself.

He slept, and in his sleep he knew that he was being carried.

The hands which carried him felt friendly, though, and he curled himself back into deep, deeper dreamless sleep.

When Rod finally awakened, it was to feel his shoulder tightly bound and his arm throbbing. He had fought waking up because the pain had increased as his mind moved toward consciousness, but the pain and the murmur of voices caused him to come all the way to the hard bright surface of consciousness.

The murmur of voices?

There was no place on all Old North Australia where voices murmured. People sat around and spieked to each other and hiered the answers without the clatter of vocal cords. Telepathy made for brilliant and quick conversation, the participants darting their thoughts this way and that, soaring with their shields so as to produce the effect of a confidential whisper.

But here there were voices. Voices. Many voices. Not possible.

And the smell was wrong. The air was wet — luxuriously, extravagantly wet, like a miser trying to catch a rainstorm in his cabin!

It was almost, like the van of the Garden of Death.

Just as he woke, he recognized Lavinia singing an odd little song. It was one which Rod knew, because it had a sharp catchy, poignant little melody to it which sounded like nothing on this world. She was singing, and it sounded like one of the weird sadnesses which his people had brought from their horrible group experience on the abandoned planet of Paradise VII:

His eyes opened and it was indeed Lavinia whom he saw at the edge of vision. This was no house. It was a box, a hospital, a prison, a ship, a cave or a fort. The furnishings were machined and luxurious. The light was artificial and almost the color of peaches. A strange hum in the background sounded like alien engines dispensing power for purposes which Norstrilian law never permitted to private persons. The Lord Redlady leaned over Rod; the fantastic man broke into song himself, chanting—

When he saw the obvious signs of Rod’s perplexity, he burst into a laugh,

“That’s the oldest song you ever heard, my boy. It’s prespace and it used to be called ‘general quarters’ when ships like big iron houses floated on the waters of Earth and fought each other. We’ve been waiting for you to wake up.”

“Water,” said Rod, “please give me water. Why are you talking?”

“Water!” cried the Lord Redlady to someone behind him. His sharp thin face was alight with excitement as he turned back to Rod, “And were talking because I have my buzzer on. If people want to talk to each other, they jolly well better use their voices in this ship.”

“Ship?” said Rod, reaching for the mug of cold, cold water which a hand had reached out to him.

“This is my ship, Mister and Owner Rod McBan to the hundred and fifty-first! An Earth ship. I pulled it out of orbit and grounded it with the permission of the Commonwealth. They don’t know you’re on it, yet. They can’t find out right now because my Humanoid-robot Brainwave Dephasing Device is on. Nobody can think in or out through that, and anybody who tries telepathy on this boat is going to get himself a headache here.”

“Why you?” said Rod. “What for?”

“In due time,” said the Lord Redlady. “Let me introduce you first. You know these people.” He waved at a group.

Lavinia sat with his hands, Bill and Hopper, with its workwoman Eleanor, with his Aunt Doris. They looked odd, sitting on the low, soft, luxurious Earth furniture. They were all sipping some Earth drink of a color which Rod had never seen before. Their expressions were diverse: Bill looked truculent, Hopper looked greedy, Aunt Doris looked utterly embarrassed, and Lavinia looked as though she were enjoying herself.

“And then here…” said the Lord Redlady.

The man he pointed to might not have been a man. He was the Norstrilian type all right, but he was a giant, of the kind which were always killed in the Garden of Death.

“At your service,” said the giant, who was almost three meters tall and who had to watch his head, lest it hit the ceiling, “I am Donald Dumfrie Hordern Anthony Garwood Gaines Wentworth to the fourteenth generation, Mister and Owner McBan. A military surgeon, at your service, sir!”

“But this is private. Surgeons aren’t allowed to work for anybody but government.”

“I am on loan to the Earth Government,” said Wentworth, the giant, his face in a broad grin.

“And I,” said the Lord Redlady, “am both the Instrumentality and the Earth Government for diplomatic purposes. I borrowed him. He’s under Earth rules. You will be well in two or three hours.”

The doctor, Wentworth, looked at his hand as though he saw a chronograph there:

“Two hours and seventeen minutes more.”

“Let it be,” said the Lord Redlady, “here’s our last guest.”

A short, angry man stood up and came over. He glared out at Rod and held forth an angry hand.