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a nice snug little billet to conduct operations from.”
    Vachell spent the rest of the morning in the police station, checking up on all aliens in the district and the arrangements for their disposal in the event of war. He found the young inspector intelligent and reliable, though well aware of his own virtues. At four o’clock he drove out to the Wests with two hulking native policemen, spruce in their uniform of khaki shorts, blue jerseys and puttees, sharing the back of the car with Bullseye.
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    He arrived in time for a late tea on the veranda. His host was out supervising the afternoon separating, and he was left alone with Janice.
    The sun was behind the house, and the hills across the great valley below looked quite different.
    They had gone from blue to purple, and were full of sharp detail unrevealed before.
    Janice West showed no traces of the fear that had shaken her composure the night before. It seemed as if sunlight had brought reassurance, and the daily chores of a farm had calmed her nerves. They talked about America, about places they both knew; of her childhood in New York, and the summers she had spent in Canada after her father, a professor of psychology at Columbia, had made enough money out of a lucky venture in amusement parks to retire.
    He had taken his daughter on a trip around the world, and that was how she had met Dennis West, then in the China Squadron and stationed at Hong Kong. Acting with a decision and speed proper to the Navy, West had gone straight to New York on his first leave, and a month later they were married.
    Soon afterwards he had retired from the Navy and fulfilled his life’s ambition to invest his small capital in a farm. He had first visited Chania when a sublieutenant in the East India Squadron, which paid it periodic calls, and had decided then and there to make it his eventual home. The climate was fine.
    Living was cheap and easy; the country still free from the more rigid fetters of convention, still with a tinge of the frontier about it. They had been 38
    happy there, Janice said, building a farm from the foundations and making a home. It had been hard work, full of the disappointments farmers always met with, especially on land untouched before by man; but it had been exciting enough at times, and a satisfactory job to do.
    “I used to get homesick at first,” she admitted, “but I wouldn’t care to go back to the United States now, not to live in a city again. You get to depend on the sun, and the way the natives just sit around.
    They don’t worry about stock market averages and the next war and the budget, and I guess they have the right idea. After a while you stop worrying too.
    If I ever get a little nostalgic I think about that professor’s rats — the ones that went nuts when he made them jump off a plank and bump their noses, after he’d gotten them accustomed to finding the ground give way gently and land them on top of a piece of cheese. Being faced with an insoluble problem, that’s what sent them crazy. Well, I guess there are insoluble problems here too, but you don’t go crazy trying to figure them out, you just leave them over till next week.”
    “I’ve noticed it,” Vachell said. “The Government does a swell job on that.”
    Janice laughed. “If the professor’s rats had never jumped at all, they wouldn’t have encountered any problem. That’s the way the Government figures.
    The professor used to blow them over the edge with a gust of hot air. There’s plenty of hot air around 39
    here, at that, but I guess there’s no one who can work the bellows.”
    “You ought to come down to Marula more often,”
    Vachell said, “and brush up your civilization. We have four movies now, a municipal slaughterhouse, and the latest thing in high-powered street lights.
    And a hell of a lot of civic pride. Besides, sometimes there are parties that turn out to be fun.”
    “Dennis doesn’t care a lot for parties. And then it’s hard to get