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as ours. If anything happens to him, stop and think of our chances of meeting another contact!
    “Remember, he normally lives in a gravity field from two hundred to nearly seven hundred times as strong as Earth’s. We certainly won’t follow him home to meet his relatives! Furthermore, there probably aren’t a hundred of his race who are not only in the same business but courageous enough to go so far from their natural homes. Of those hundred, what are our chances of meeting another? Granting that this ocean is the one they frequent most, this little arm
of it, from which this bay is an offshoot, is six thousand miles long and a third as wide—with a very crooked shore line. As for spotting one, at sea or ashore, from above—wet!, Barlennan’s Bree is about forty feet long and a third as wide, and is one of their biggest oceangoing ships. Scarcely any of it is more than three inches above the water, besides.
    “No, Mack, our meeting Barlennan was the wildest of coincidences; and I’m not counting on another. Staying under three gravities for five months or so, until the southern spring, will certainly be worth it. Of course, if you want to gamble our chances of recovering nearly two billion dollars’ worth of apparatus on the results of a search over a strip of planet a thousand miles wide and something over a hundred and fifty thousand long—”
    “You’ve made your point,” the other human being admitted, “but I’m still glad it’s you and not me. Of course, maybe if I knew Barlennan better—” Both men turned to the tiny, caterpillarlike form crouched on the waist-high platform.
    “Barl, I trust you will forgive my rudeness in not introducing Wade McLellan,” Lackland said. “Wade, this is Barlennan, captain of the Bree, and a master shipman of his wortd—he has not told me that, but the fact that he is here is sufficient evidence.”
    “I am glad to meet you, Flyer McLellan,” the Mesklinite responded. “No apology is necessary, and I assumed that your conversation was meant for my ears as well.” He performed the standard pincer-opening gesture of greeting. “I had already appreciated the good fortune for both of us which our meeting represents, and only hope that I can fulfill my part of the bargain as well as I am sure you will yours.”
    “You speak English remarkably well,” commented McLellan. “Have you really been learning it for less than six weeks?”
    “I am not sure how long your ‘week’ is, but it is less than thirty-five hundred days since I met your friend,” returned the commander. “I am a good linguist, of course—it is necessary in my business; and the films that Charles showed helped very much.”
    “It is rather lucky that your voice could make all the sounds of our language. We sometimes have trouble that way.”
    “That, or something like it, is why I learned your English rather than the other way around. Many of the sounds we use are much too shrill for your vocal cords, I understand.” Barlennan carefully refrained from mentioning that much of his normal conversation was also too high-pitched for human ears. After all, Lackland might not have noticed it yet, and the most honest of traders thinks at least twice before revealing all his advantages. “I imagine that Charles has learned some of our language, nevertheless, by watching and listening to us through the radio now on the Bree.”
    “Very little,” confessed Lackland. “You seem, from what little I have seen, to have an extremely well-trained crew. A great deal of your regular activity is
done without orders, and I can make nothing of the conversations you sometimes have with some of your men, which are not accompanied by any action.”
    “You mean when I am talking to Dondragmer or Merkoos? They are my first and second officers, and the ones I talk to most.”
    “I hope you will not feel insulted at this, but I am quite unable to tell one of your people from another. I simply am not familiar