"There is a price on your head Murdoch."
Murdoch hesitated again, then said, "There'd be a price on your own if Earth dared to put it there."
Waverill gripped the arms of his seat and stood up, too vigorously for the light gravity. "Never mind all that. I hired this man because he could make the contact and get me here. Can you give me back my eyes?"
"We can but first of all I must warn both of you against trying to steal anything from us or prying into our methods. Several Terrans have tried but none have escaped alive."
Waverill made an impatient gesture. "I've already got more money than I can count. I've spent a lot of it, a very great lot, on the metal you wanted, and I have it here in the ship."
"We have already perceived it and we do not care what it has cost you. We are not altruists."
That, thought Murdoch, could be believed. He felt clammy. If they knew so much about him, they might also be aware of the years he'd spent sifting and assessing the rumors about them that circulated around the tenuous outlaw community of space. Still, he'd been as discreet as was humanly possible.
He wondered if Waverill knew more than he pretended. He thought not; Murdoch's own knowledge was largely meticulous deduction. This much Murdoch knew with enough certainty to gamble his life on it: the treatments here involved a strange virus-like thing which multiplied in one's veins and, for presumably selfish or instinctive reasons, helped the body to repair and maintain itself. He knew for dead certain that the aliens always carefully destroyed the virus in a patient's veins before letting him go.
