An alarm rang: a rising, falling crescendo, a mechanical shriek of panic.  The baritone voice of the ship's Brain blared, "Strac Astrophysics is not in his cabin!  Strac Astrophysics, report to your cabin immediately!  The Hogan's Goat will Jump in sixty seconds."

Verd sat bolt upright, then forced himself to lie down again.  The Hogan's Goat had not lost a passenger through carelessness in all the nearly two centuries of Verd's captaincy.  Passengers were supposed to be careless.  If Strac didn't reach his room Verd would have to postpone Jump to save his life: a serious breach of custom.

Above the green coffin which was his Jump couch the Brain said, "Strac Astrophysics is in his cabin and protected."

Verd relaxed.

"Five," said the Brain.  "Four. Three . ."

In various parts of the ship, twenty-eight bodies jerked like springs released "Oof," came a complaint from the Jump couch next to Verd's.  "That felt strange.  Dam' strange."

"Um," said Verd.

Lourdi Coursefinder tumbled out of her Jump couch.  She was a blend of many subdivisions of man, bearing the delicate, willowy beauty born of low-gravity worlds She was Verd's wife, and an experienced traveler.  Now she looked puzzled and disturbed.

"Jump never felt like that.  What do you suppose-?"

Verd grunted as he climbed out.  He was a few pounds overweight.  His face was beefy, smooth and unlined, fashionably hairless.  So was his scalp, except for a narrow strip of black brush which ran straight up from between his brow ridges and continued across his scalp and downward until it faded out near the small of his back.  Most of the hair had been surgically implanted.  Neither wrinkled skin nor width of hair strip could number a man's years, and superficially Verd might have been anywhere from twenty to four hundred years old.  It was in his economy of movement that his age showed.  He did things the easy way, the fast way.  He never needed more than seconds to find it, and he always took that time.  The centuries had taught him well.

"I don't know," he said.  "Let's find out what it was.  Brain!" he snapped at a wall speaker.

The silence stretched like a nerve.

"Brain?"