He looked at me, forced a pale smile that was half apology, half recognition, then looked away again. I felt sorry for him as he lay there but then I'd felt sorry for him ever since he'd stepped aboard the Morning Rose. A man dedicated to his craft, lean, hollow-checked, nervous , and perpetually balanced on what seemed to be the knife edge of agonising decisions, he walked softly and talked softly as if he were perpetually afraid that the gods might hear him. It could have been a meaningless mannerism but I didn't think so: no question, he walked in perpetual fear of Gerran who was at no pains to conceal the fact that he despised him as a man just as much as he admired him as an artist. Why Gerran, a man of indisputably high intelligence, should behave in this way, I didn't know. Perhaps he was one of that far from small group of people who harbour such an inexhaustible fund of ill will towards mankind in general that they lose no opportunity to vent some of it on the weak, the pliant or those who are in no position to retaliate. Perhaps it was a personal matter. I didn't know either man or their respective backgrounds well enough to form a valid judgement.

"Ah, "he's the good healer," a gravelly voice said behind me. I turned round without haste and looked at the pyjama-clad figure sitting up in his bunk, holding fast with his left hand to a bulkhead strap while with the other he clung equally firmly to the neck of a Scotch bottle, three parts empty. "Up the ship comes and down the ship goes but naught will come between the kindly shepherd and his mission of mercy to his queasy flock. You will join me in a post-prandial snifter, my good man?"

"Later, Lonnie, later." Lonnie Gilbert knew and I knew and we both knew that the other knew that later would be too late, three inches of Scotch in Lonnie's hands had as much hope as the last meringue at the vicar's tea party, but the conventions had been observed, honour satisfied.