He

Muscles—can

He can’t see beyond Klim at the moment, so he’s riding a small panic just now. He’ll be all right again—after tomorrow.”
She waited then, but Grevan couldn’t think of anything else to say. “Well, good night, Grevan!”
“Good night, Freck.” He watched her move off like a slender ghost towards the dim glow of the fire. The cubs felt they’d won—simply by living long enough to have left the musty tang of half-alive, history-old Central Government worlds far behind them and to be breathing a wind that blew over an ocean no ­human being had seen before. Whatever happened now, they were done with CG and all its works, forever.

And the difference might be simply, Grevan realized, that he wasn’t done with it yet. He still had to win. His thoughts began to shift back slowly, almost cautiously, to the image of a woman whose name was Priderell and who had stood impossibly at the foot of his ship’s ramp, smiling up at him with slanted green eyes. She had been in his mind a good deal these months, and if present tensions couldn’t quite account for that momentary hallucination, the prospect of future ones might do it. Because while the cubs didn’t know it yet, once he had them settled safely here, he was going to make his way back into CG’s domain and head for a second-rate sort of planet called Rhysgaat, where—to be blunt about it—he intended to kidnap Priderell and bring her back to round out the Group.
It wouldn’t be an impossible undertaking if he could get that far unspotted. It seemed s