“Mind if I mix up another pot of that coffee we broke open this afternoon?” asked the gambler, heading off for the galley. “Just as well you don’t bring ‘em back alive,” he muttered as he searched for the coffee in the cramped confines of the galley. “This ship sure as hell wasn’t built with an extra passenger in mind.” He uttered a grunt of triumph as he finally found the coffee in amongst a stack of condensed rations.

“Go a little easy on that stuff,” said Cain. “It’s expensive.”

“It tastes expensive. Where’s it from—Belore or Canphor?”

“Brazil.”

“Never heard of it.”

“It’s a country back on Earth.”

“You mean I’ve been drinking coffee from Earth itself?” said Terwilliger. “I’m impressed! You do right well by a guest, Songbird.”

“Thanks—and I keep telling you: my name’s Cain.”

“I’ve been meaning to ask you about that. You don’t sound like you’ve got much of a singing voice, so how come he dubbed you the Songbird?”

“Because my name’s Sebastian Nightingale Cain. He fell in love with my middle name, and I told him he couldn’t use it.” Cain grimaced. “I should have been more explicit.”

“Come to think of it, Black Orpheus does a lot of dumb things,” said Terwilliger. “Like that line about me being a martinet. I’m the sweetest, friendliest guy in the galaxy. He just used it to make a rhyme.”

“I notice you don’t object to the part about pawning your soul,” noted Cain.

Terwilliger laughed. “Hell, that’s the first thing a man gets rid of when he comes to the Frontier. Excess baggage, nothing more.”

“Losing at cards seems to make you cynical,” said Cain.

“It’s got nothing to do with cards,” replied the little gambler. “It’s an obvious fact. You kill men for a living; where would you be with a soul?”

“Back on Sylaria, I suppose,” said Cain thoughtfully.

“That’s the world where you were a revolutionary?”

“One of them.”

“You should have known better,” said Terwilliger. “No matter what kind of promises a man who’s looking for power makes, he’s not going to turn out to be any different from the one he replaces.”

“I was very young,” said Cain.

“It’s hard to imagine you as a callow youth.”

Cain chuckled. “I wasn’t so much callow as idealistic.”

“Well, cheer up—the Frontier is filled with men who were going to make the galaxy a better place to live.”

“So are the seats of power,” said Cain wryly. “You’d think somebody would know how.”

“You keep talking like that and you’re going to convince me you still believe in all that idealistic nonsense.”

“Don’t worry about it,” replied Cain, leaning back and propping a foot up against a bulkhead. “That was a long, long time ago.”