"This is none of your affair!" Renzu snapped. "Go back to your business of running this ship. I didn't hire you to run my business." "This may be your expedition," Arlen replied stubbornly, "but while we're in space, I'm the captain of this ship and my orders are to be obeyed. My orders are to give this Venusian beast humane treatment." A whimpering sob broke from the throat of the brute on the floor. Renzu sullenly twisted his arm loose from the captain's grasp. He appeared more calm now. "You are right, Arlen," he said. "Your orders are to be obeyed. But you aren't a scientist. You don't know Gheal. He's not like the animals we know on the earth. He has to be beaten." "Not while we're in space. I won't stand for it." "You can't stand in the way of science, Arlen. I shall whip Gheal, if I deem it necessary." Renzu ended his words with a suggestive snap of his fingers in Gheal's direction. The monster cringed into a corner of the stateroom. "Come with me, Gheal," Arlen ordered, beckoning to the monster. The creature, seeming to understand, rose to his feet and followed Arlen out of the door. <tb> The captain took the Venusian forward into the control room, where he daubed the welts on the creature's naked shoulders with arnica. McFerson, easy-going, but dependable old spaceman, watched the operation critically. Gheal winced as the arnica touched his skin. He squirmed and tried to resist. "Hold on a minute, Cap," McFerson said. "Look at the right shoulder, where you put the arnica; it's red and inflamed." "So it is, but arnica ought to help." "Look at the left shoulder, where you haven't put any arnica." "Great guns! It's almost healed!" "I'd say maybe arnica wasn't the best treatment." Captain Arlen corked the bottle and put it aside. "Gheal looks like a man. Sometimes he acts like a man. Yet he's entirely different most of the time. "I've been watching him, Cap. I somehow get the idea that Gheal finds it unhandy, most of the time, to be built like a man." The captain laughed. He took Gheal's arm and held it up. "Look at that. Good, human bones, but the body of a monster. I wish you could talk, Gheal. I wish you could tell us more about yourself. Why are you almost a man yet the farthest point south?" Gheal uttered a sort of deep-throated growl. "Renzu says you can be vicious--that you're a killer at heart. Renzu said one of your kind killed Jimmy Brooks on the first expedition. You don't look like a killer. Brooks was a big man. You'd have a hard time killing him." Gheal's sight-glands stared from Arlen to McFerson. Arlen laughed and patted Gheal's hairless head and pointed to a built-in seat in the corner. "You're welcome to stay here as long as you don't bother us," he said.