"I can give you a hand part of the way," Murv offered, grinning at Shahanna.

"If you think you can keep up with me." She grinned back.

"Sharkey! The cube's on the rocks on the lagoon shore. Just where the contact said it would be!" Brack roared through the speaker.

"Oh, oh," Tallav gasped feebly. "However did it survive the storm, unprotected like that!"

"You're seeing things. Brack!" Sharkey roared back. "You're seeing things, I tell you."

"Like your whales, I'm seeing things. You fladding fool, it's clearly visible. Are you through that passage yet?"

"How'n hell could I be beaming to you if I weren't. I'm surfacing!"

"We're landing," Brack countered.

"I'm not sure I can land on that," Tallav said, unable to see any likely surface on the tumbled rockscape.

"You'd better. I don't think I altogether trust this chief engineer of yours," Brack muttered betweeen clenched teeth, his eyes never leaving the cube, white against the black lava on which it sat. "In fact, I find it definitely suspicious that he knew such a convenient channel into this lagoon which even you, as Planetary Administrator, didn't know existed."

"Yes, but... how could he possibly... I mean...."

"There's a flat space big enough for this thing." "ltd be so much easier for Sharkey. After all..."

"Land!"

"Good heavens, he's here already," Tallav exclaimed as he set the drone down on the flattopped slab that was scarcely larger than the drone's landing feet.

"What do you mean?" Brack followed Tallav's gesticulations and saw the figure emerging from the water, heading toward the cube. "How'dya get out of this thing?" he demanded, fumbling with his tunic.

Tallav reached across him and flipped up the hatch release. Brack, his eyes on the figure, suddenly froze.

"That's not Sharkey!"

Tallav looked. "No, it isn't, is it. But who... and-" Tallav broke off, staring at the Investigator. "How would you know what Sharkey looks like?"

"Get out, Tallav," Brack ordered and turned his hand weapon on the startled man.

As the two men emerged from the drone, the figure on the shore reached for the cube and grabbed it, then started off, up the slopes with more speed than either observer thought possible.

"Halt!" Brack shouted and lobbed off a shot after the fleeing figure.

A fishboat broke surface, its hatch flipping open for the flying exit of a man. He also began to shoot, three short cracks, splitting rocks just ahead of the fugitive. The man turned and began to descend as fast as he had climbed in the direction of the fishboat, heading obliquely away from the men by the drone.

"You see," Brack shouted at Tallav, "there's the pirate! We must intercept."

Tallav's previous doubts were swept aside by the urgency in Brack's voice, and he didn't hesitate to follow the man down the torturous escarpment to the beach. Brack paused, whipping off a few shots in the hope of slowing the pirate, but he was closing the distance to the fishboat faster than they could jump down the rocks.

"Be careful of the iodine," Tallav jabbered when the pirate started to use it as a shield.

The man flung the cube into the water and dove in after it, pushing it ahead of him toward the fishboat. He was urged on by Sharkey, who was running down the ventral fin to assist.

When Shahanna, winded and halfblinded with watery eyes, grabbed the shockwebbing for a final heave into the waiting man, she got her first look at his face.

"You're not Murv. You're..." and she grabbed the cube back, frantically kicking out and away from the fishboat.

"Give me that thing or I'll blow you out of the water," Sharkey snarled.

"Shoot and you'll destroy the iodine."

Shots whistled over Shahanna's head, and Sharkey backed behind the flaring dorsal fin. Shahanna heaved herself away from the fishboat and began treading water halfway between both contenders. She used the buoyant cube as a head shield.

"I'm Tallav, Planetary Administrator of Welladay," the shorter of the two men on the shore yelled at her. "Come ashore. If you turn yourself in, I promise you immunity."

Shahanna felt intense relief. They had probably mistaken her for the pirate; that was why they'd shot at her. She struck out to the beach with strong sweeps of her free arm and long legs.

Tallav jumped about in the shallows, splashing water in her face as he vacillated between grabbing the iodine or her hand until she finally shook him off.

"I'm not a pirate. I'm from Seginus. My ship..."

"You survived?" Tallav gasped. "We got the dk relayed from Fleet."

"Your pirate shot my engine away," Shahanna said as Brack joined them, lobbing another shot at Sharkey, who was trapped behind the dorsal fin of the bobbing fishboat.

"Investigator Brack mistook you for a pirate," Tallav explained nervously. "Why didn't you identify?"

"I never had the chance," Shahanna protested. "I was checking coordinates..." she trailed off when she caught the look on Tallav's face. She whirled to see that Brack's weapon was trained on them.

"I'll take that iodine. Now," Brack said, smiling slightly. He grabbed it by the shockwebbing, then carefully stepped backward and moved up the rocks, his gun covering Shahanna, Tallav and Sharkey.

Suddenly they were distracted by violent whoshing splashing sounds from the lagoon and a whining whistle from above. Shahanna took the opportunity to launch herself, her body taking every bit of advantage from muscles that had been trained on a heavygravity planet as she leaped at Brack. He could not keep track of three attackers at once so his shots went wild. Shahanna ripped the valuable iodine from his hand, then rolled sideways and down. She ripped her suit against the jagged rocks, but managed to scramble away with the cube.

When she came to rest against a huge black fist of a rock, she dazedly saw Sharkey running up the ledge of his fishboat toward the hatch. Then she heard his despairing scream as half a dozen fishboats closed in on him and he was tumbled into the water to be ground against the converging hulls. A bolt lanced past her ear and she wrenched around, trying to put the rock fist between her and Brack.

Somewhere Tallav was shrieking. "They've got him. They got him. He's getting away. Stop him!" Then abruptly the sounds of the struggles ended and Tallav's exhortations ceased.

Battered and shaking with pain, Shahanna drew herself up. She saw Brack, spread across the rocks just below the drone. Odis was climbing down, hand over hand on the line which Shahanna could see had tangled Brack's feet and brought him down. In the lagoon, where roiling waters lapped around Tallav's knees, only two fishboats remained-one lay unbelievably sideways on the rocks; its belly was barnaclecovered, exposed to glisten in the sun. The second was cruising slowly in to shore near Tallav.

With a sigh Shahanna sagged and laid her scratched cheek against the cool cube.

"I really don't credit what I saw," Tallav protested as he watched Murv and Odis bandage the Seginan girl.

"When I reached my ship under the ledge," Murv said patiently, "I saw the school on sonar, flooding in through the passage after him."

"Then he was kept from Shoulder by the whales?" Tallav asked.

"Hardly matters," Murv remarked. "We've got to get you back to the hospital at Shoulder, Shahanna."

"And the iodine," Tallav said.

"Better get, then," Odis suggested, pointing toward the squall brewing in the west.

"This fardling planet and its fladding storms!" Murv growled.

"I've got to get iodine to Seginus," Shahanna insisted, struggling to rise.

"We will. Just as soon as we fix you up at Shoulder." "But my ship's-" Shahanna began, looking over her shoulder.

"Brack won't require his spaceship anymore," Murv assured her, helping her up and then swinging the cube to his back.

"Now, wait a minute, Murv," Tallav ordered, blocking his path.

"Fair's fair, Tallav. Brack blew her mercy ship up," Murv said, "and considering her help today, that's the least you can do."

"Of course, of course," Tallav replied.

"And to be sure, you can return the iodine to Shoulder," Murv went on, dumping the cube into Tallav's arms, "in Odis's drone."

"I'm left with your fishboat?" Odis asked, slightly amused.

"You're the sailor, friend," Murv laughed, thinking of the rough passage out of the lagoon.

"And that's the only fishboat we've got left until the embargo's lifted," Tallav added. "You be careful with it."

By the time Odis had clambered into the fishboat, the drones were circling above him. He tapped on the outboard panel release, plotted a course across the lagoon. The drones were approaching him now as he cut across the lagoon toward the passage out. They waggled farewell. Odis responded and then began to read his gauges. A man had to keep an eye on the weather of Welladay.

The three stories which follow are basically humorous-or at least they exhibit my own notions of whimsy and proportion. Humor is one of the hardest things to carry off in a story or a novel and especially in sf. But there are many humorous incidents in every life, so I've included such episodes in all my books.

"The Thorns of Barevi" was an attempt to cash in on the lucrative market for soft and hardcore pornography in the 60's. The market paid well for such stories and many sf writers earned their monthly rent from such submissions. I thought I'd give it a try. I didn't really succeed there. But there were seeds in the short story that could eventually germinate a full novel about the modus operand! of the Catteni in subjugating a planet and its inhabitants. But I haven't written that one yet, either.

"Horse from a Different Sea" was written after my three years as a Cub Scout Den Mother. In my youth I was a Girl Scout; my brothers were Boy Scouts. So I have nothing but respect for the work done by scout leaders, and for any woman brave enough to be a den mother. Furthermore, the scouting programs have helped train many responsible and marvelous adults.

We're still in my Wilmington years with "The Great Canine Chorus." Actually, we acquired Wizard in New Jersey. He became one of the first K9's to serve the Wilmington Police Force. He was an unusually intelligent beast, about eightyfive pounds' worth and so fast on his feet that he never had to bite, even when it was all legal. He never needed to, his handler told me: he'd trip up the guy he was chasing. Wizard was honorably retired after three years of service when it was discovered that he had displacia of the hip. He lived another five years in comfort before the condition worsened enough to cause him constant pain. He sired one litter of pups, and Chet kindly gave me one. Merlin, who is the hero of a novel.

Wilmington is often maligned by its residents as being a onehorse town because of the equestrian statue of Caesar Rodney (one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence), which inhabits the park in the center of town.

Although there's a lot of good music in Wilmington, and many fine semiprofessional singers, there never was a canine chorus... that I heard about it, at any rate! Who knows what's happened since I left?

The Thorns of Barevi

CHRISTIN BJORNSEN WONDERED IF SUMMER on the planet Barevi could possible be the only season. There had been remarkably little variation in temperature in the nine months since she'd arrived here. She'd been four months in what appeared to be the single, sprawling city of the planet when she'd been a slave, and now had racked up five months of comparative freedom-toothandnail survival-in this jungle, after her escape from the city in a stolen flitter.

Her sleeveless, onepiece tunic was made of an indestructible material, but it would not be very warm in cold weather. The scooped neckline was indecently low and the skirt ended midway down her long thighs. It was closely modeled, in fact, after the miniskirted sheath she had been wearing to class that spring morning the Catteni ships had descended on Denver. One moment she was on her way to the college campus; the next, she was one of thousands of astonished and terrified Denverites being driven by forcewhips up the ramp of a spaceship that made the Queen Mary look like a bathtub float. Once past the black maw of the ship, Chris, with all the others, swiftly succumbed to the odorless gas. When she and her fellow prisoners had awakened, they were in the slave compounds of Barevi, waiting to be sold.

Chris aimed the avocadosized pit of the gorupear she was eating at the central stalk of a nearby thicket of purplebranched thombushes. The bush instantly rained tiny darts in all directions. Chris laughed. She had bet it would take less than five minutes for the young bush to rearm itself. And it had. The larger ones took longer to position new missiles. She'd had reason to find out.

Absently, she reached above her head for another gorupear. Nothing from good old Terra rivaled them for taste. She bit appreciatively into the firm reddish flesh of the fruit and its succulent juices dribbled down her chin on to her tanned breasts. Tugging at the strap of her sliptight tunic, she brushed the juice away. The outfit was great for tanning, but when winter comes? And shouldn't she concentrate on gathering nuts and drying gorupears on the rocks by the river for the cold season? She wrinkled her nose at the halfeaten pear. They were mighty tasty, but a steady diet of them...

A lowpitched buzz attracted her attention. She got to her feet, balanced carefully on the high limb of the tree. Parting the branches, she peered up at the cloudless sky. Two of the umpteen moons that circled Barevi were visible in the west. Below them, dots that gave off sparkles of reflected sunlight were swooping and diving.

The boys have called another hunt, she mused to herself and, still standing, leaned against the tree trunk to take advantage of her grandstand seat.

Before her chance to escape had presented itself, Chris had picked up a good bit of the lingua Barevi, a bastardization of the six or seven languages spoken by the slaves. She had gleaned some information about her captors, the Catteni. They were not, for one thing, indigenous to this world but came from a much heavier planet nearer galactic center. They were one of the mercenaryexplorer races employed by a vast federation. They had colonized Barevi, using it as a clearinghouse for spoils acquired looting unsuspecting nonfederation planets, and as a restandrelaxation center for their great ships' crews. After years of the freefall of space and lightergravity planets, Catteni found it difficult to return to their heavy, depressing home world. During her brief enslavement, Chris had heard the Catteni boast of dying everywhere in the galaxy except Catten. The way they "played," Chris thought to herself, was rough enough to insure that they died young, as well as far from Catten.

Huge predators roamed the unspoiled plains of Barevi, and the Catteni considered it great sport to stand up to the rhinolike monsters with only a single spear. That is, Chris remembered with a grim smile, when they weren't brawling among themselves over imagined slurs and insults. Two slaves, friends of hers, had been crushed under the massive bodies of Catteni during a freeforall.

Since she had come to the valley, she had witnessed half a dozen encounters between rhinos and Catteni. Used to a much heavier gravity than Barevi, the Catteni were able to execute incredible maneuvers as they softened their prey for the kill. The poor rhinos had less chance than Spanish bulls and, in all the fights Chris had seen, only one man was slightly grazed.

As the flitters neared, she realized that they were not acting like a hunting party. For one thing, one dot was considerably ahead of the others. And by God, she saw the light flashes of the trailing flitters' forward guns firing at the "leader."

Hunted and hunters were at the foot of her valley now. Suddenly, black smoke erupted from the rear of the pursued flitter. It nosed upward. It hovered reluctantly, then dove, slantingly, to strike the tumble of boulders along the river's edge, not far from her refuge.

Chris gasped as she beheld a figure, halfleaping, halfstaggering out of the badly smashed flitter. She could scarcely believe that even a Catteni had survived that crash. Wideeyed, she watched as he struggled to his feet, then reeled from boulder to boulder to get away from the smoldering wreck.

With a stunningly brilliant flare, the craft exploded. Fragments whistled into the underbrush as far up the slope as her retreat, and the idiotic thornbushes She had recently triggered sprayed out their lethal little darts.

The smoke of the burning flitter obscured her view now, and Chris lost sight of the man. The other flitters had reached the wreck and were hovering over it, like so many angry KingKongish bees, swooping, diving, trying to penetrate the smoke.

An afternoon breeze swirled the black clouds about and Chris caught glimpses of the man, lurching still further from the crash. She saw him stumble and fall, after which he made no move to rise. Above, the bees buzzed angrily, deprived of their prey.

Catteni don't hunt each other as a rule, she told herself, surprised to find that she was halfway down from her perch. They fight like Irishmen, sure, but to chase a man so far from the city?

The crash had been too far away for Chris to distinguish the hunted man's features or build. He might just be an escaped slave, like herself. If not Terran, he might be from one of the halfdozen other subjugated races that lived on Barevi. Someone who had had the guts to steal a flitter didn't deserve to die under Catteni forcewhips.

Chris made her way down the slope, careful to avoid the numerous thorn thickets that dominated these woods. She had once amused herself with the whimsy that the thorns were the gorupear's protectors, for the two invariably grew close together.

At the top of the sheer precipice above the falls of the river, she grabbed a long vine which she had hung there for a speedy descent. On the river bank she stuck to the dry, flat rocks until she came to the steppingstones that allowed her to cross the river below the wide pool made by the little falls. Down a gully, across another thombushfilled clearing, and then she was directly above the spot where she had last seen the man.

Keeping close to the brown rocks so nearly the shade of her own tanned skin, she crossed the remaining distance. She all but tripped over him as the wind puffed black smoke down among the rocks.

"Catteni!" she cried, furious as she bent to examine the unconscious man and recognized the gray and yellow uniform despite its tattered and blackened condition.

With a disdainful foot, she tried to turn him over.

And couldn't. The man might as well have been a boulder. She knelt and yanked his bead around by the thick slategray hair which, in a Catteni, did not indicate age. Maybe he was dead?

No such luck. He was breathing. A bruise mark on his temple showed one reason for his unconsciousness. For a Catteni, he was almost goodlooking. Most of them tended to have brutish, coarse features, but this one had a straight, almost patrician nose, even if there was a lot more of it than an elephant would want to claim, and he had a wide, wellshaped mouth. The Catteni to whom she had been sold had had thick, blubbery lips, and she'd heard rumors- never mind about them!

A sizzling crack jerked her head around in the direction of the wreck. The damned fools were firing on the burning wreck now. Chris looked down at the unconscious man, wondering what on earth he had done to provoke such vindictive thoroughness. They sure wanted him good and dead.

The barrage pulverized the flitter, leaving the fire no fuel. The wind, laden with coarse dust, blew odorously from the wreckage. The man stirred and vainly tried to raise himself, only to sink back to the ground with a groan. Chris saw the flitters circling to land on the plateau below the wreck.

"Going to case the scene of the crime, huh?" It was completely illogical, Chris told herself, to help a Catteni simply because there were others of his race out to get him. But... she backtracked, just in case he had left any trace for them to follow. She went back as far as she could on the raw rock. Where dirt began, ash had settled in a thick layer, obliterating any tracks he might have made. After all, the Catteni might stumble on her if they thought their victim had escaped the crash.