In all the tour took nearly twenty minutes. When it was over Chandris thanked the engineer profusely, let him escort her back through the door to the lower-class section, and said a warm and grateful good-bye.

Two minutes later she was back, slipping in through a second entrance she'd spotted across the room during the tour. Hidden from view of the crewers by a long thick pipe he'd called a catalytic-balance slifter, she made her way forward. The other end of the room opened onto a short corridor lined with unlocked doors; choosing one, she went inside.

The room was small and, inevitably, filled to the ceiling with equipment—pipes and pumping sorts of stuff this time. Turning on the dim overhead light, she pulled out her newly acquired toy and sat down cross-legged on the floor to take a closer look.

It was a hand computer, all right. An expensive one, too, from the look of it. She turned it over—

"Nurk it," she muttered to herself. Stamped into the back of the casing was the Xirrus's logo. A

ship's computer, then, tied into the Xirrus's central nexus and hard-programmed only with ship's data and business. On the open market, worth just fractionally above zero.

For a moment she glared at the flat little plate, letting her annoyance at it subside. It wouldn't have brought in that much money; and anyway, it would probably have taken her forever to locate a safe buyer in an unfamiliar market. Besides, it wasn't like the thing was completely useless.

It took her a minute to locate a wall power plate, and another minute to pry the back off the computer with her little pocket multi-knife. The computer's ID register... there it was. Snapping out two of the knife's blades and the specially insulated screwdriver, she eased one of the blades into the lowest voltage socket on the plate and brought the computer's ID register up to lightly touch the other blade.