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faster. He would do no one any good languishing in the Grendel calaboose and living off mulligan stew.
    Not, he thought gloomily, that he was accomplishing much so far.
    The asteroid night deepened around him. In this shallow atmosphere the stars burned with wintry brilliance. Jupiter was not many millions of kilometers away, so whitely bright that Grendel’s trees cast shadows; you could see the Galilean satellites with the naked eye. A quick green moon strode up over the topplingly close horizon and swung toward Aries – one of the other Anglian asteroids – spinning with its clustermates around a common center of gravity, along a common resultant orbit. Probably New Winchester itself, maddeningly near. When you looked carefully at the sky, you could identify other little worlds among the constellations. The Erse Republic was still too remote to see without a telescope, but it was steadily sweeping closer; conjunction, two months hence, would bring it within a million kilometers of Anglia.
    Herr Syrup, who was a bit of a bookworm, wondered in a wry way what Clausewitz or Halford Mackinder would think of modern astropolitics. Solemn covenants were all very well for countries which stayed put; but if you made a treaty with someone who would be on the other side of the sun next year, you must allow for the fact. There were alliances contingent on the phase of a moon and customs unions which existed only on alternate Augusts and—
    And none of this was solving a problem which, if unsolved, risked a small but vicious interplanetary war and would most certainly put the
Mercury Girl
and the Alt Heideblerg Rathskeller out of business.
    When he re-entered the spaceport, Herr Syrup met a blaze of lights and a bustle of men. Trucks rumbled back and forth, loaded with castings and fittings, sacks of cement and gangs of laborers. The Erse were working around the clock to make Grendel mobile. He dismounted and walked past a sentry, who gave him a suspicious glare, to the berth ladder, and so up to the air lock. He whistled a little tune as he climbed, trying to assure himself that no one could prove he had not merely been out on a spin for his health.
    The ship was depressingly large and empty. His footsteps clanged so loud that he jumped, which only made matters worse, and peered nervously into shadowed corners. There was no good reason to stay aboard, he thought; an inn wouldbe more cheerful and he could doubtless get off-season rates; but no, he had been a spaceman too long, one did not leave a ship completely unwatched. He contented himself with appropriating a case of Nashornbrau from the cargo – since the consignee had, after all, refused acceptance – and carried it back to his personal cubbyhole off the engine room.
    Claus the crow blinked wicked black eyes at him from the bunk. ‘
Goddag
,’ he said.
    ‘
Goddag
,’ said Herr Syrup, startled. To be courteously greeted by Claus was so rare that it was downright ominous.
    ‘Fanden hade dig
!’ yelled the bird. ‘
Chameau!
Go stuff yourself, you scut!
Vaya al Diablo
!’
    ‘Ah,’ said Herr Syrup, relieved. ‘Dat’s more like it.’
    He sat down on the bunk and pried the cap off a bottle and tilted it to his mouth. Claus hopped down and poked a beak in his coat pocket, looking for pretzels. Herr Syrup stroked the crow in an absent-minded way.
    He wondered if Claus really was a mutant. Quite possibly. All ships carried a pet or two, cat or parrot or lizard or uglopender, to deal with insects and other small vermin, to test dubious air, and to keep the men company. Claus was the fourth of his spacefaring line; there had been radiation, both cosmic and atomic, in his ancestral history. To be sure, Earthside crows had always had a certain ability to talk, but Claus’ vocabulary was fantastic and he was constantly adding to it. Also, could chance account for the selectivity which made most of his phrases pure billingsgate?
    Well – there was a more urgent question. How