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“For somebody else to get here,” a tinny, electronically relayed voice answered. It was Lehesu, visible in a monitor screen the robot had installed. In reality, the great being hovered outside in the void not far from the Falcon. Given his size, and Lando’s environmental requirements, this was the closest the three could come to normal face-to-face conversation.

“What?”

Lando stopped what he was doing with a jolt, one hand poised on the cleaning brush, elbow in the air, shoulders suddenly hunched as if someone had punched him in the stomach. He rose. Slowly he turned, step by step he approached the monitor until his nose nearly rested on the screen. At his side, the half-cleaned weapon dripped solvent on the deck plates.

“Who—” he demanded of the manta creature, “—and how the deuce do you know?” Some sort of fire flickered in the gambler’s eyes, but even Vuffi Raa, long acquainted with the man’s moods, couldn’t guess what it signified now.

“Why, Lando, somebody named Wennis,” Lehesu answered in a tone of injured innocence. He’d come a long way, learning to interpret human vocal inflections and the images of facial expressions he received directly in his brain from the ship’s transmitter. He was disturbed now because his friend looked and sounded angry with him.

“As to how I know: it’s practically the only thing they’re talking about out there, can’t you hear them? Something’s going to happen when Wennis gets here, something big. Somebody else named Scuttlebutt has it that—”

“Oh my aching field density equalizers!” As the robot watched, his master’s expression changed, like the face on a sabacc card, from puzzled to exasperated to delighted. The gambler crossed the room again in two strides, threw himself into a recliner, dug around in his shipsuit pockets and extracted a cigar.

“No, Lehesu, I can’t hear them, remember? And even if I could—well, Vuffi Raa can ‘hear’ radio signals, but the military uses codes that are intended to preclude eavesdropping.”

He lit the cigar, heedless of the flammable fluid all over his hands.

“Dear me!” cried the Oswaft in real distress, “have I been doing something unethical? I shall cease immed—”

Lando sat up abruptly, pointing his cigar at the monitor like a weapon. “You’ll do nothing of the sort—you can’t do anything unethical to those goons, it’s philosophically impossible! Here I’ve been getting ready to die bravely, and now, casually, you’ve given us all a chance to survive! By gadfrey, Vuffi Raa, old corkscrew, let’s break out a bottle of—OWWWWCH!”

Lando’s hands glowed a flickering blue as he leaped up from the recliner and began running around the room. Without hesitation, Vuffi Raa thrust out a tentacle and tripped him; he flopped on the deck, yelling, while the robot tossed a jacket that had been hanging on the back of the lounger over the gambler’s hands, and wrapped it tight. The fire was out.

“What’s the matter over there?” the monitor demanded. “Are you all right?”

“I will be, once I learn not to play with fire,” Lando answered as he sat up. He winced as Vuffi Raa unwrapped the jacket. His hands were tender, but not badly burned. The droid was gone a moment, returned with a sprayer of plaskin and coated Lando’s hands until they were shiny with it.

The gambler flexed his fingers with satisfaction. “Pretty close, old fire extinguisher. I’d have had to pick a new profession if it weren’t for your quick thinking. And if it weren’t for this stuff—” With freshly dried digits, he examined the first-aid spray, then his brow furrowed in thought. He helped Vuffi Raa tidy up the gun-cleaning mess while explaining to the Oswaft what had happened, but his voice had an absent quality the robot recognized as the sign of an idea under incubation.

Finally, stubbornly, he relit the cigar he’d flung across the room, sat back in the recliner, and was silent for a solid hour. Vuffi Raa played a few hands of radio sabacc with Lehesu, and let the gambler think. He was fresh