“My successor? raises a question nobody here seems to answer. you can tell me, huh?”

“What is it?”

“Will I be entirely on my own? Or will other Terrans be operating on the same planet? If there will be others how shall I make contact?”

“So far as you’re concerned you’ll be the only Terran for a hundred million miles around,” responded Wolf. “You will have no contacts. By the same token, you won’t be able to betray anyone to the Kaitempi. Nothing they can do will extract from you information that you don’t possess. Maybe you’ll sweat and scream and invent stuff to make them lay off, but it won’t be genuine information.”

“It would sound better if you didn’t smack your lips over the horrid prospect,” reproved Mowry. “Anyway, it would be some comfort and encouragement to know that other wasps are similarly active even if only one to a planet.”

“You didn’t go through this course all on your ownsome, did you? The others weren’t here merely to provide company for you.” Wolf held out a hand: “Good hunting, be a curse to the foe—and come back.”

“I shall return,” assured Mowry; “though the way be flinty and the road be long.”

That, he thought as Wolf departed, was more of a pious hope than a performable promise. To be dropped single-handed upon a hostile planet was to be plunged neck-deep into a genuinely menacing situation. Casualties could be expected sooner or later. Indeed, Wolf’s remark about ‘your successor’ showed that losses had been anticipated and steps taken to provide replacements…

It then occurred to him that perhaps his own status was that of somebody else’s successor. Maybe on the world to which he was going some unlucky character had been trapped and pulled apart very slowly. If so, it would be a world fore-warned and ready for him. Right now the Kaitempi would be watching the skies, licking their chops in anticipation of their next victim, a dope named James Mowry, twenty-six, restless and pigheaded.