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ability. He had the familiar look of fearing that action was going to get away from him again. I couldn't help laughing down at him.
"Well, Tyron, before this is over you'll have a chance to catch a lot of those devils--and when we do you may get those hands you're so proud of, singed. Carry on!"
I settled myself in my seat before the universal view screen [*1], thinking, "There's nothing to do now until we catch sight of whatever is making this trail." I, myself, was as impatient for action as Tyron, but in the long years since I left the culture farms of Mother Mu, I had learned to restrain my desire for adventure until the opportunity came to unleash my energies into effective action.
The irritation I felt at being forced to stay on duty was just another score I had to settle with the fugitive fleeing through space somewhere ahead of us. Here, aboard ship, I have my duty, and when it is performed, the course checked and affirmed, the log set to rights, and my officers assigned to their special duties, my time is my own. And woe betide the unfortunate who unnecessarily disturbs my meditations and experiments in my own ship-board laboratory. It is a well equipped laboratory--befitting the ennobled station the Gods of Nor have seen fit to bestow upon their humble servant and brother. Only in the capital cities of the God race are there comparable laboratories. I have spent years and many a long voyage in some of the less frequented reaches of space to equip it for the work I do when I am not on the errands of the Gods. Full of apparatus picked up in the strange ports of a thousand far off planets--perhaps a little evil-smelling at times, but it is my life, and in it is life--little lives whose efforts are at times vastly more successful than man's own... poor doomed mankind whose glorious ancestors are the immortal gods themselves.
On most of the assignments that I took my ship, the Darkome, I had plenty of time for my own experiments, far from the distracting social activities of my o