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Now what? he asked himself. What regulation had he violated this time? In his mind he inventoried the contents of his bag. It contained only a handful of personal belongings, and the tools of trade which he had needed as a captain of a fighting ship. Everything was legitimate and above-board. Hunter hadn’t even brought Ann a souvenir from the frontier.

* * * * *

After a time, the booth door swung open. A senior inspector, carrying a blaster, crowded into the cubicle.

“Open your bag!” The inspector commanded, motioning with his weapon.

Hunter saw that the blaster dial was set to fire the death charge, not the weaker dispersal charge which produced only an hour’s paralysis.

Hunter thumbed the photocell lock. It responded to the individual pattern of his thumbprint, and the bag fell open. The inspector picked up the worn blaster which lay under Hunter’s shipboard uniform.

“Smuggling firearms, Captain, is a violation of the city code. The fine is–“

“Smuggling?” Hunter exploded. “That blaster was registered to me nine years ago.” He snapped open his wallet.

The inspector frowned over the registration form, biting indecisively at his lower lip.

“That was issued before my time,” he alibied. “I’ll have to check the regulations. It may take a while.”

He left the booth. He was gone for a quarter of an hour. When he returned, both metal doors snapped open. “Your permit is valid, Captain Hunter,” the inspector admitted. “Unrestricted registrations like yours have not been issued for the past five years. That’s why the probe was not adjusted to the special conditions which apply in your case. Your permit is revocable if you are committed for maladjustment.”

Hunter grinned. “I wouldn’t count on that. My adjustment index is zero-zero.”

“A paragon, Captain.” The voice was dry and biting. “But you may find conditions on the Earth a little trying. You haven’t had a chance to get really well-acquainted with your own world since you were a kid of sixteen.”

Hunter’s customs clearance had taken more than an hour. Before he left the municipal building, he made a quick tour of the lobby, searching again for Ann Saymer. Satisfied that she had not come, he put in a call from a public tele-booth to Ann’s apartment residence. After a moment, Mrs. Ames’ face came into sharp focus on the screen, the light coalescing about her hair.

A warm, motherly widow of nearly eighty, Mrs. Ames had been the residence’s owner for a decade, and had taken a great deal of vicarious pleasure in Ann’s romance with the captain. “It’s so different,” she said once to Hunter, “your faith in each other, the way you work together for a goal you both want. If the rest of us could only learn to have some honest affection for each other. But, there, I’m an old woman, living too much in the past.”

As soon as Hunter saw her face on the screen, he knew that something was wrong. She was tense and nervous, tied in the emotional knots of an anxiety neurosis. And Mrs. Ames was not the woman to fall easy victim to mental illness. If Hunter had been guessing the odds, he would have put her adjustment index on a par with his own.

“I haven’t seen Ann for a month,” she told him.

“Where is she? My last micropic from her said something about a commission-job–“

“She’s all right, Max. Did you join the U.F.W.?”

“I’ll be damned if I will.”

Why had she asked him that? Her question seemed totally unrelated to her reassurance as to Ann–another clear symptom of her emotional unbalance.

“About Ann, Mrs. Ames,” he persisted. “Do you know what clinic gave her the commission?”

Mrs. Ames stared at him in surprise. “Ann didn’t tell you in her micropic?”

“We use a personal code,” he explained. “That makes a certain type of communication extremely difficult.”