"I have made a grave error," the thing apologized handsomely, "in thinking that you are not at least my equal. Will you grant me pardon, please?"
"Certainly—if you don't repeat it. But I still don't like the idea of your having that mechanic skinned alive." She thought intensely, lip caught between strong white teeth. "Perhaps there is a way. Where are you going, and when do you want to get there?"
"To my home planet," pointing out, mentally, its location in the Galaxy. "I must be there in two hundred of your G-P hours."
"I see." Kathryn nodded her head. "You can—if you promise that you will do nothing whatever to punish your mechanic. And remember that I can tell whether you really mean it or not."
"As I promise, so I do. But suppose that I do not promise?"
"In that case you'll get there in about a hundred thousand G-P years, frozen stiff. For I shall fuse your Bergenholm down so that it can't ever be fixed; then, after welding your ports solidly to the outer shell, I'll attach to your plating the generator of a screen through which you cannot think. Since you have no tools, I'll leave the rest to your imagination. Decide, now, what you wish to do."
"I promise not to harm the mechanic in any way." He surrendered stiffly, and made no undue protest at Kathryn's entrance into his mind to make sure that the promise would be kept.
Flushed by her easy conquest of a mind which she would previously have been unable to touch, and engrossed in the problem of setting her own tremendously enlarged mind to rights, why should it have occurred to the girl that there was anything worthy of investigation concealed in the depths of that chance-met stranger's mentality?
Returning to her own speedster, she shed her armor and shot away; and it was just as well for her peace of mind that she was not aware of the tight-beamed thought even then speeding from the flitter so far behind her to dread and distant Ploor.
"... but it was very definitely not a human female. I could not touch it. It may very well have been one of the accursed Arisians themselves. But since I did nothing to arouse its suspicions, I got rid of it easily enough. Spread the warning!"