The man across from me set his mug back down on the table with a slightlyimpatient-sounding clunk. Turning my eyes and thoughts away from the hoodedPatth, I got back to business. "What time do you want to leave?"

"As early as possible," he said. "Say, six tomorrow morning."

I thought about that. Meima was an Ihmis colony world, and one of thepeculiarities of Ihmisit-run spaceports was that shippers weren't allowedinside the port between sundown and sunup, with the entire port sealed during thosehours. Alien-psychology experts usually attributed this to some quirk of Ihmissuperstition; I personally put it down to the healthy hotel business thepolicygenerated at the spaceport's periphery. "Sunrise tomorrow's not untilfive-thirty," I pointed out. "Doesn't leave much time for preflight checks."

"The ship's all ready to go," he reminded me.

"We check it anyway before we fly," I told him. "That's what 'preflight'means.

What about clearances?"

"All set," he said, tapping his tunic. "I've got the papers right here."

"Let me see them."

He shook his head. "That's not necessary. I'll be aboard well before—"

"Let me see them."

For a second he had the expression of someone who was seriously consideringstanding up and going to look for a pilot with a better grasp of the properservility involved in an owner/employee relationship. But he merely dug intohis inside jacket pocket and pulled out a thin stack of cards. Maybe he liked myspirit, or maybe he was just running out of time to find someone to fly hisshipfor him.

I leafed through them. The papers were for a modified Orion-class freightercalled the Icarus, Earth registry, mastership listed as one Alexander Borodin.

They were also copies, not the originals he'd implied he was carrying. "YouBorodin?" I asked.

"That's right," he said. "As you see, everything's in order for a morninglift."