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open and the crewman charged out. Judy Galland screamed.
    Dillingham lunged at the captain, but the officer was ready. The beam from the prism stabbed savagely into his leg. Dillingham fell, clutching at the wound.
    When the pain abated, he found Miss Galland standing beside him, her dark hair disarranged. The crewman had the prism again, and was covering them both.
    "Doctor! Are you hurt?"
    It was just like her to overlook the incredible in favour of the commonplace. She was not the fainting type, fortunately. He inspected his leg.
    "Just a burn. It was set on low." He stood up.
    The captain resumed his seat. The crewman aimed the prism at the girl.
    So much for resistance. The show would go on.
    "I don't think they mean any harm, Doctor," Miss Galland said. "They must be desperate." No hysterics from her; she had adapted to the situation far more readily than he.
    Dillingham approached the patient. He had to quiet the shivering of his hand as he held a probe. Aliens, heat-beams—this was hardly the ordinary fare of a dentist.
    But the problem of anaesthesia remained. Massive excavation would be required, and no patient could sit still for that without a deadened jaw. He studied the situation, perplexed, noting that the crewman had put away the prism.
    The captain produced a small jar of greenish ointment. It seemed that this contingency had been anticipated. These creatures were not stupid.
    Dillingham touched his finger to the substance. There was a slight prickly sensation, but nothing else. The captain gestured to his mouth.
    Dillingham scooped out a fingerful and smeared it carefully along the gingival surfaces surrounding the affected teeth. The colour darkened.
    The captain closed his mouth. "How do they chew ?" Miss Galland inquired, as though this were a routine operation. She had assumed her role of assistant naturally.
    He shrugged. "The moment they take their eyes off you, slip away. We can't be sure of their motives."
    She nodded as the captain reopened his mouth. "I think they're doing just what we would do, if we had trouble on some other world."
    Dillingham refrained from inquiring just what type of literature she read during her off hours. He probed the raw surface that had been so sensitive before. No reaction.
    So far, so good. He felt professional envy for the simplicity of the alien anaesthetic. Now that he was committed to the job, he would complete it as competently as he could. His ethical code had been bent by the aliens but not broken.
    It was a full-scale challenge. He would have to replace the missing and damaged portions of the teeth with onlays, duplicating in gold as precisely as he could the planes and angles witnessed in the healthy set. While it would have helped immensely to know the rationale of this strange jaw, it was not essential. How many centuries had dentists operated by hit or miss, replacing losses with wooden teeth and faithfully duplicating malocclusals and irregularities? The best he could hope for would be fifty per cent efficiency—in whatever context it applied—yet if this stood up until the patient returned to his own world, it sufficed. There was no perfection.
    Would a gold alloy react unfavourably with the alien system? He had to chance it. Gold was the best medium he had to work with, and another metal would be less effective and more risky. A good cobalt chromium alloy would be cheaper, but for really delicate work there was no substitute for gold.
    He drilled and polished, adjusting to the old internal convolutions, while Miss Galland kept the water spray and vacuum in play. He shaped the healthy base of each tooth into a curve that offered the best foundation. He bored a deep hole into each for insertion of the stabilizing platinum-iridium pins. He made a hydrocolloid impression of the entire lower jaw, since the better part of the reconstruction would have to take place in the laboratory.
    Both aliens started when he used the hydrocolloid, then relaxed uneasily.