He had to force himself to touch the annunciator plate. There was a low whirring as photoelectrics checked and O.K.'d his fingerprints; then the door opened and Talman walked into the dim hallway. He glanced behind him to where, beyond the hills, the spaceport's lights made a pulsating, wan nimbus. Then he went on, down a ramp, into a comfortably furnished room where a fat, gray-haired man was sitting in an easy chair, fingering a highball glass. Tension was in Talman's voice as he said, "Hello, Brown. Everything all right?" A grin stretched Brown's sagging cheeks. "Sure," he said. "Why not? The police weren't after you, were they?" Talman sat down and began mixing himself a drink from the server near by. His thin, sensitive face was shadowed. "You can't argue with your glands. Space does that to me anyway. All the way from Venus I kept expecting somebody to walk up to me and say, 'You're wanted for questioning.' " "Nobody did." "I didn't know what I'd find here." "The police didn't expect us to head for Earth," Brown said, rumpling his gray hair with a shapeless paw.
