He thought, wildly, _she doesn't know!_ He thought, she is inexperienced. He thought again, she would _never_ know, unless...." He slipped an arm around her bare shoulders and drew her to him. "Like this," he said, looking down into her tip-tilted eyes. Then he kissed her. Her sarong slipped.... * * * * * "I am unhappy with you, Cliff," Commander Spliid said with chilly formality. Rowley leaned back in his chair in Spliid's office aboard the Survey ship. Spliid laid his pipe in the tray on his desk. He said, "What happened to your daily reports?" Rowley stuffed his own pipe, lit it. "I thought you knew. I didn't make any." Spliid's look of exasperation wavered and dimmed through the swirls of blue smoke. It was all over now, and Rowley felt no sense of hurry. Hume was a pinpoint of light in the star-carpeted vestibules of space behind them. In another hour, they would shift into overdrive. Hume would vanish from their lives forever. "I assume," he said, "that Hume is now officially closed." Spliid nodded. He fixed questioning gray eyes on Rowley. "Good," said Rowley. "That's the way it will always be." "Always?" Spliid fumbled with his pipe. "For our life-times, maybe...." "Always," Rowley repeated. He drew on his pipe, enjoying the luxury of keeping the Commander's curiosity at bay. "Human beings have no place on Hume. I found that out the day after you dropped in on me. That's why I made no reports. I just sat around, waiting for the pilot boat." Spliid held a lighter to the dark-stained bowl of his pipe. "So you're satisfied now, too?" Rowley nodded noncommittally. "At first," he said distantly, "I imagined crazy things--like a super-advanced race living underground, giving us the bum's rush with a play-show they had rigged up." "And you found out you were wrong," suggested Spliid. "I found out I was partly right." "I won't buy supermen living in caves, Cliff." "Neither would I. The next crazy thing I thought was that the natives were immortals and they didn't want us to share in it. Silly, huh?" "Pretty silly," Spliid agreed drily. "I knew they wanted to get rid of us," Rowley went on earnestly. "I could feel it. But why? Most inferior races we run against _want_ contact with the galaxy...." "They want refrigerators and washing machines, tractors, railroad trains and automobiles," Spliid interrupted. "If we gave them, their culture would go to pot in a generation. There's a reason for our methods." "A lot of little things about Hume didn't jibe," Rowley continued. "Bathrooms, for instance." "No bathrooms on Hume?" Spliid grinned.