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looked at him for a long time without speaking. ‘Tell me, Miller, what odds are you offering on the boys on Kheros?’
    ‘Yeah.’ Miller nodded heavily. ‘Yeah, the boys on Kheros. I’d forgotten about them. I just keep thinkin’ about me and that damned cliff.’ He looked hopefully across the table at the vast bulk of Andrea. ‘Or maybe Andrea there would carry me up. He’s big enough, anyway.’
    Andrea made no reply. His eyes were half-closed, his thoughts could have been a thousand miles away.
    ‘We’ll tie you hand and foot and haul you up on the end of a rope,’ Stevens said unkindly. ‘We’ll try to pick a fairly sound rope,’ he added carelessly. The words, the tone, were jocular enough, but the worry on his face belied them. Mallory apart, only Stevens appreciated the almost insuperable technical difficulties of climbing a sheer, unknown cliff in the darkness. He looked at Mallory questioningly. ‘Going up alone, sir, or –’
    ‘Excuse me, please.’ Andrea suddenly sat forward, his deep rumble of a voice rapid in the clear, idiomatic English he had learnt during his long association with Mallory. He was scribbling quickly on a piece of paper. ‘I have a plan for climbing this cliff. Here is a diagram. Does the Captain think this is possible?’
    He passed the paper across to Mallory. Mallory looked at it, checked, recovered, all in one instant. There was no diagram on it. There were only two large, printed words: ‘Keep talking.’
    ‘I see,’ Mallory said thoughtfully. ‘Very good indeed, Andrea. This has distinct possibilities.’ He reversed the paper, held it up before him so that they could all see the words. Andrea had already risen to his feet, was padding cat-footed towards the door. ‘Ingenious, isn’t it, Corporal Miller,’ he went on conversationally. ‘Might solve quite a lot of our difficulties.’
    ‘Yeah.’ The expression on Miller’s face hadn’t altered a fraction, the eyes were still half-closed against the smoke drifting up from the cigarette dangling between his lips. ‘Reckon that might solve the problem, Andrea – and get me up in one piece, too.’ He laughed easily, concentrated on screwing a curiously-shaped cylinder on the barrel of an automatic that had magically appeared in his left hand. ‘But I don’t quite get that funny line and the dot at –’
    It was all over in two seconds – literally. With a deceptive ease and nonchalance Andrea opened the door with one hand, reached out with the other, plucked a wildly-struggling figure through the gap, set him on the ground again and closed the door, all in one concerted movement. It had been as soundless as it had been swift. For a second the eavesdropper, a hatchet-faced, swarthy Levantine in badly-fitting white shirt and blue trousers, stood there in shocked immobility, blinking rapidly in the unaccustomed light. Then his hand dived in under his shirt.
    ‘Look out!’ Miller’s voice was sharp, the automatic lining up as Mallory’s hand closed over his.
    ‘Watch!’ Mallory said softly.
    The men at the table caught only a flicker of blued steel as the knife arm jerked convulsively back and plunged down with vicious speed. And then, incredibly, hand and knife were stopped dead in mid-air, the gleaming point only two inches from Andrea’s chest. There was a sudden scream of agony, the ominous cracking of wrist bones as the giant Greek tightened his grip, and then Andrea had the blade between finger and thumb, had removed the knife with the tender, reproving care of a parent saving a well-loved but irresponsible child from himself. Then the knife was reversed, the point was at the Levantine’s throat and Andrea was smiling down pleasantly into the dark and terror-stricken eyes.
    Miller let out a long breath, half-sigh, half-whistle.
    ‘Well, now,’ he murmured, ‘I guess mebbe Andrea has done that sort of thing before?’
    ‘I guess maybe he has,’ Mallory mimicked. ‘Let’s have a closer look