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Bastard. I can guess what it was about."

    "And is it true?" demanded Grimes.

    "Am I Olga Popovsky, the Beautiful Spy? Is that what you mean?"

    "More or less."

    "Come off it, John. How the hell can I be a secret agent for a non-existent government?"

    "You can be a secret agent for a subversive organization."

    "What is this? Is it a hangover from some half-baked and half-understood course in counterespionage?"

    "There was a course of sorts," he admitted. "I didn't take much interest in it. At the time."

    "And now you wish that you had. Poor John."

    "But it wasn't espionage that the Old Man had against you. He had some sort of story about your acting as a sort of recruiting sergeant, luring officers away from the Commission's ships to that crumby little rabble of star tramps calling itself the Sundowner Line . . . ."

    She didn't seem to be listening to him, but was giving her attention instead to the music that drifted from the saloon. It was one of the old, Twentieth Century melodies that were enjoying a revival. She began to sing in time to it.

     
"Goodbye, I'll run
To seek another sun
Where I May find
There are hearts more kind
Than the ones left behind . . ."

    She smiled somberly and asked, "Does that answer your question?"

    "Don't talk in riddles," he said roughly.

    "Riddles? Perhaps—but not very hard ones. That, John, is a sort of song of farewell from a very old comic opera. As I recall it, the guy singing it was going to shoot through and join the French Foreign Legion. (But there's no French Foreign Legion anymore . . . .) We, out on the Rim, have tacked our own words on to it. It's become almost a national anthem to the Rim Runners, as the people who man our ships—such as they are—are already calling themselves.

    "There's no French Foreign Legion anymore—but the misfits and the failures have to have somewhere to go. I haven't lured anybody away from this service—but now and again I've shipped with officers who've been on the point of getting out, or being emptied out, and when they've cried into my beer I've given them advice. Of course, I've a certain natural bias in favor of my own home world. If I were Sirian born I'd be singing the praises of the Dog Star Line."

    "Even so," he persisted, "your conduct seems to have been somewhat suspect."

    "Has it? And how? To begin with, you are not an officer in this employ. And if you were, I should challenge you to find anything in the Commission's regulations forbidding me to act as I have been doing."

    "Captain Craven warned me," said Grimes.

    "Did he, now? That's his privilege. I suppose that he thinks that it's also his duty. I suppose he has the idea that I offered you admiral's rank in the Rim Worlds Navy as soon as we secede. If we had our own Navy—which we don't—we might just take you in as Ensign, Acting, Probationary."

    "Thank you."

    She put her elbows on the bar counter, propping her face between her hands, somehow conveying the illusion of gravitational pull, looking up at him. "I'll be frank with you, John. I admit that we do take the no-hopers, the drunks and the drifters into our merchant fleet. I know far better than you what a helluva difference there is between those rustbuckets and the well-found, well-run ships of the Commission and, come to that, Trans-Galactic Clippers and Waverley Royal Mail. But when we do start some kind of a Navy we shall want better material. Much better. We shall want highly competent officers who yet, somehow, will have the Rim World outlook. The first batch, of course, will have to be outsiders, to tide us over until our own training program is well under way."

    "And I don't qualify?" he asked stiffly.

    "Frankly, no. I've been watching you. You're too much of a stickler for rules and regulations, especially the more stupid ones. Look at the way you're dressed now, for example. Evening wear, civilian, junior officers, for the use of. No individuality. You might as well be in