Kane watched both groups disappear over the hill, then followed, muttering thoughtfully. He felt he could safely assume—if anything could be said to be safe about the situation—that the lack of discipline he had just witnessed was typical of all the men. They were all young and healthy and for sixteen hours out of each day they were side by side with the almost nude, provocatively feminine, Sanctuary girls.
Their weakness was understandable. It was also very dangerous. Heads would roll if Y'Nor ever learned what was going on and it required no psychic ability to guess whose head would roll the fastest and farthest.
He would have to have it stopped, at once.
He took a short cut to Brenn's cottage, by a sleepy, shady street he had never been down before. Halfway along it was an open-air eating place of some kind, with tables placed about under the trees. There seemed to be no customers at the moment but he stopped, anyway, to take a closer look for errant guards.
A tawny head lifted at a table half hidden by a nearby tree and he looked into the surprised face of the mountain girl, Barbara.
"Well!" she said. "Come on over and let me offer you a glass of cyanide."
He walked over to her table. She was wearing a blouse and skirt similar to that of the day he had met her but the pistol was gone.
"I thought I told you to go back to your hills," he said.
"I decided it would be more fun to work in the plant and sabotage things."
"Let Y'Nor learn you said that and you'll be in a fix I can't help you out of."