Frank got to them just as it was over—except for the cursing, the masculine tears of grief and rage, the promises of revenge. Luckily, none of the women had been captured.

Joe Kuzak, full of new antibiotics and coagulants, was still up and around. "So we knocked off a few of them, Frank," he said ruefully in his office bubb. "Several were in Tovie armor. Runaways, or agents? They're crowding us, boy. Hell, what a junk heap this post is going to be, to sort out..."

"Get to it," Nelsen commented.

"You've got something in mind?"

"Uh-huh. Coming in, I heard somebody address somebody else as Fan. Fanshaw, that would be. And I kind of remembered his voice, as he cracked out orders. He was with this group. I'm going after him."

"Good night...! I'll send some of my crowd along."

"Nope, Joe. They'd spot two or more guys. One, they won't even believe in. This is a lone-wolf deal. Besides, it's personal... Shucks—I don't even think there's a risk..."

There, he knew he exaggerated—especially as, huddled up to resemble a small asteroid-fragment, he followed the retreating specks. His only weapon was a rapid-fire launcher, using small rockets loaded only with chemical explosive. He felt a tingle all through him. Scare, all right.

Ahead, as he expected, he saw three stolen bubbs blossom out. There'd be a real pirates' party, like he'd seen, once. They'd have a lookout posted, of course. But the enormity of the Belt made them cocky. Who could ever really police very much of it? One other advantage was that Jolly Lads were untidy. Around the distant bubbs floated a haze of jettisoned refuse. Boxes, wrappings, shreds of stellene. Nelsen had figured on that.

Decelerating, he draped a sheet of synthetic cellulose that he'd brought along, loosely over his armored shape. Then he drifted unobtrusively close. At a half-mile distance, he peered through the telescope sight of his launcher. The bubbs were close together. The lookout floated free. Him, he got first, with a careful, homing shot.

Immediately he fired a burst into each bubb, saw them collapse around their human contents. The men inside were like cats in limp bags, the exits of which could no longer be found. Calmly he picked the biggest lumps of struggling forms, and fired again and again, until there was no more motion left except an even rotation.

He soon located Fanshaw. His unarmored body was bloated and drying, his mouth gaped, his shovel teeth were exposed to the stars and the distant, naked sun. Nelsen had to think back to six dead young men and a girl, to keep from feeling lousy. Had Fanshaw been just another guy invading a region that was too big and terrible for humans?

With something like dread, Nelsen looked for Tiflin, too. But, of course, that worthy wasn't around.

Nelsen picked up some space-fitness cards. Quite a few nations were represented. Joe would have to turn in the cards to the respective authorities. Noting its drift course, Nelsen left the wreckage, and hurried back to Post Seven, before other Jolly Lads could catch up and avenge their pals.

"Fanshaw's groups will fight it out for a new leader, Joe," he said. "That should keep them busy, for a while..."

Succeeding months were quieter. But the Tovies had lost no advantage. They had Ceres, the biggest of the asteroids, and their colonies were moving in on more and more others that were still untouched, closing them, against all agreements, to any competition.

The new Archer Seven which Nelsen presently acquired, had a miniature TV screen set in its collar. Afield, he was able to pick up propaganda broadcasts from Ceres. They showed neat, orderly quarters, good food, good facilities, everything done by command and plan. He wondered glumly if that was better for men who were pitted against space. The rigid discipline sheltered them. They didn't have to think in a medium that might be too huge for their brains and emotions. Maybe it was more practical than rough-and-tumble individualism. He had a bitter picture of the whole solar system without a free mind in its whole extent—that is, if another gigantic blowup didn't happen first...

Nelsen didn't see Ramos' new bubb, nor did he see him leave for Saturn and its moons. The guy had avoided him, and gone secretive. But over a year later, the news reached Nelsen at Post Eight. A man named Miguel Ramos had got back, more dead than alive, after a successful venture, alone, to the immediate vicinity of the Ringed Planet. His vehicle was riddled. He was in a Pallastown hospital.

Frank Nelsen delegated his duties, and went to see Ramos. The guy seemed hardly more than half-conscious. He had no hands left. His legs were off at the knee. Frostbite. Only the new antibiotics he had taken along, had kept the gangrene from killing him. There was a light safety belt across his bed. But somehow he knew Nelsen. And his achievement seemed like a mechanical record fixed in his mind.

"Hi, Frank," he whispered hurriedly. "I figured it right. Out there, near Saturn, clusters of particles of frozen methane gas are floating free like tiny meteors. The instrumented rockets didn't run into them, and they were too light to show clearly on radar. But a bubb with a man in it is lots bigger, and can be hit and made like a sieve. That's what happened to those who went first. Their Archers were pierced too. I had mine specially armored, with a heavy helmet and body plating... The particles just got my gloves and my legs. Cripes, I got pictures—right from the rim of the Rings! And lots of data..."

Ramos showed the shadow of a reckless grin of triumph. Then he passed out.

Later, Nelsen saw the photographs, and the refrigerated box with the clear, plastic sides. Inside it was what looked like dirty, granular snow—frozen water. Which was all it was. Unless the fact that it was also the substance of Saturn's Rings made a difference.

Saturn—another of the great, cold, largely gaseous planets, where it would perhaps always be utterly futile for a man to try to land... Ramos, the little Mex who chased the girls. Ramos, the hero, the historical figure, now...

Cursing under his breath, Nelsen wandered vaguely to The Second Stop. There, he saw what probably every spaceman had dreamed of. Lucette of Paris swimming nude in a gigantic dewdrop—possible where gravity was almost nil. Music played. Beams of colored light swung majestically, with prismatic effects through the great, flattened, shimmering ovoid of water, while Lucette's motions completed a beautiful legend...

Two figures moved past Nelsen in the darkened interior. The first one was tall and lean. Then he saw the profile of a lean face with a bent nose, heard a mockingly apologetic "Oh-oh..." and didn't quite realize that this was Tiflin, the harbinger of misfortune, before it was too late to collar him. Nelsen followed as soon as he could push his way from the packed house. But pursuit was hopeless in the crowded causeway outside.

A few minutes later, he was in Eileen Sands' apartment. It was not his first visit. Eileen seldom danced or sang, anymore, herself. She was different, now. She wore an evening dress—soft blue, tasteful. Here, she was the cool, poised owner, the lady.

"Tiflin hasn't been around here for a long time, Frank," she was saying. "You know that his buddy entertained for me for a while. I have an interested nature, but Tiflin never gave me anything but wisecracks. There are lots of Tovies around—there's even a center for runaways. I don't ask questions of customers usually. And technically, all I can require of a comic is talent. This Igor had a certain kind. What is the difficulty now?"

Frank Nelsen looked at Eileen almost wearily for a second. "Just that Tiflin is somehow involved with most of the bad luck that I've ever had out here," he said, grimly. "And if Pallastown were destroyed, everybody but the Tovies might as well go home from the Belt. The timing seems to me to be about right. They'd risk it, feeling we're too scared to strike back at home. The Jolly Lads—who are international—could be encouraged to do the job for them."

Sudden hollows showed in Eileen's cheeks. "What are you going to do?" she asked.

"Nothing much for me to do," he answered. "I only happened to notice, while I was coming in to Pallas, that all the guard stations, extending way out, were quietly very alert. But is that enough? Well, if they can't cope with an attack, what good am I? We're vulnerable, here. I guess we just sit tight and wait."

She smiled faintly. "All right—let's. Sit, relax, converse. Stop being the Important Personage for a while, Frank."

"Look who's talking. Okay—what do you know that's new to tell?"

"A few things. I keep track of most everybody."

He took her slender hand, brown in his angular fist, that was pale from his space gloves. "Gimp, first," he said.

"Still on Mercury, with Two-and-Two. Two-and-Two was a bricklayer, a good beginning for a construction man. That seems to be paying off, as colonists move in. Gimp is setting up solar power stations."

"Encouraging information, for once. Here's a hard one—Jig Hollis. The real intelligent man who stayed home. I've envied him for years."

"Hmmm—yes, Frank. Intelligent, maybe—but he never quite believed it, himself. His wife stayed with him, even after he turned real sour and reckless. One night he hit a big oak tree with his car. Now, he is just as dead as if he had crashed into the sun at fifty miles per second. He couldn't take knowing that he was scared to do what he wanted."

"Hell!" Nelsen said flatly.

"Now who else should I gossip about?" Eileen questioned. "Oh, yes—Harv Diamond, hero of our lost youth, who got space fatigue. Well, he recovered and returned to active duty in the U.S.S.F. Which perhaps leaves me with just my own love life to confess." She smiled lightly. "Once there was a kid named Frankie Nelsen, who turned out to be a very conscientious jerk. Since then, there have been scads of rugged, romantic characters on all sides... You're going to ask about Miguel Ramos."

She paused, looked unhappy and tired. "The celebrity," she said. "Mashed up. But he'll recover—this time. I've seen him—sent him flowers, sat beside him. But what do you do with a clown like that? Lock him in the closet or look at him through a telescope? Goodbye—hello—goodbye. A kid with gaudy banners flying, if he lives to be forty—which he never will. They'll be giving him artificial hands and feet, and he'll be trying for Pluto. A friend. I guess I'm proud. That's all. Anything else you want to know?"

"Yeah. There was a cute little girl at Serene."

"Jennie Harper. She married one of those singing Moon prospectors. Somebody murdered them both—way out on Far Side."

Frank Nelsen's mouth twisted. "That's enough, pal," he said. "I better go do my sitting tight someplace else. Keep your Archer handy. Thanks, and see you..."

Within forty minutes David Lester was showing him some pictures that a hopper had brought in from a vault in a surface-asteroid.

On the screen, great, mottled shapes moved through a lush forest. Thousands of tiny, flitting bat-like creatures—miniature pterodactyls of the terrestrial Age of Reptiles—hovered over a swamp, where millions of insects hung like motes in the light of the low sun. A much larger pterodactyl, far above, glided gracefully over a cliff, and out to sea, its long, beaked head turning watchfully.

"Hey!" Nelsen said mildly, as his jaded mind responded.

Lester nodded. "They were on Earth, too—as the Martians must have been—exploring and taking pictures, during the Cretaceous Period. Oh, but there's a perhaps even better sequence! Like the Martians, they had a world-wrecking missile, which they were building in space. Spherical. About six miles in diameter, I calculate. Shall I show you?"

"No... I think I'll toddle over to the offices, Les. Keep wearing those Archers, people. Glad the kid likes to play in his..."

Nelsen had donned his own Seven, with the helmet fastened across his chest by a strap. At the KRNH office, there was a letter, which luckily hadn't been sent out to Post Eight. The tone was more serious than that of any that Nance Codiss had sent before.

"Dear Frank: I'm actually coming your way. I'll be stopping to work at the Survey Station Hospital on Mars for two months en route..."

He read that far when he heard the sirens and saw the flashes of defending batteries that were trying to ward off missiles from Pallastown. He latched his helmet in place. He was headed for the underground galleries when the first impacts came. He saw four domes vanish in flashes of fire. Then he didn't run anymore. He had his small rocket launcher, from the office. If they ever came close enough... But of course they'd stay thousands of miles off. He got to the nearest fallen dome as fast as he could. Everybody had been in armor, but there were over a hundred dead. Emergency and rescue crews were operating efficiently.

He glanced around for indications. No explosive, chemical or nuclear, had yet been used. But there was the old Jolly Lad trick: Accelerate a chunk of asteroid-material to a speed of several miles per second by grasping it with your gloved hands, while the shoulder-ionic of your armor was at full power. Start at a great distance, aim your missile with your body, let it go... Impact would be sheer, blasting incandescence. A few hundred chunks of raw metal could finish Pallastown... Were these just crazy, wild slobs whooping it up, or real crud provided with a purpose and reward? Either way, here was the eternal danger to any Belt settlement.

Nelsen could have tried to reach an escape-exit into open space, but he helped with the injured while he waited for more impacts to come. There was another series of deflecting flashes from the defense batteries. Two more domes vanished... Then—somehow—nothing more. Evidently some of the attackers had been only half hearted, this time. Reprieve...

Almost four hundred people were dead. It could have been the whole Town. Then spreading disaster. All Nelsen's friends were okay. The Posts called in—okay, too. Nelsen waited three days. He wanted to help defend, if the attack was renewed. But now the U.N.S.F. was concentrating in the vicinity. For a while, things would be quiet, Out Here. Just the same, he felt kind of fed up. He felt as if the end of everything he knew had crept inevitably a little closer.

He beamed Mars—the Survey Station. He contacted Nance. He had known that she should have arrived already. He was relieved. He knew what the region between here and there could be like when there was trouble.

"It's me—Frank Nelsen—Nance," he said into his helmet-phone, as he stood beyond the outskirts of the Town, on the barren, glittering surface of Pallas. "I'm still wearing the sweater. Stay where you are. I've never been on Mars, either. But I'll be there, soon..."

His old uncertainties about talking to her evaporated now that he was doing it.

"For Pete's sake—Frank!" he heard her laugh happily, still sounding like the neighbor kid. "Gosh, it's good to hear you!"

He left for Post One, soon after that. Nowadays, it was almost a miniature of the ever more magnificent—if insecure—Pallastown. He kept thinking angrily of Art Kuzak, getting a little overstuffed, it seemed. The hunkie kid, the ex-football player who had become a big commercial and industrial baron of the Belt. Easy living. Cuties around. And poor twin Joe—just another stooge...

Nelsen went into the office, his fists clenched overdramatically. "I'm taking a leave, Art—maybe a long one," he said.

Art Kuzak stared at him. "You damned, independent bums—you, too, Nelsen!" he began to growl. But when he saw Nelsen's jaw harden, he got the point, and grinned, instead. "Okay, Frank. Nobody's indispensible. I might do the same when you come back—who knows...?"

Frank Nelsen joined a KRNH bubb convoy—Earthbound, but also passing fairly close to Mars—within a few hours.



VII

Frank Nelsen meant the journey to be vagabond escape, an interlude of to hell with it relief from the grind, and from the increasingly uncertain mainstream of the things he knew best.

He rode with a long train of bubbs and great sheaves of smelted metal rods—tungsten, osmium, uranium 238. The sheaves had their own propelling ionic motors. He lazed like a tramp. He talked with asteroid-hoppers who meant to spend some time on Earth. Several had become almost rich. Most had strong, quiet faces that showed both distance- and home-hunger. A few had broken, and the angry sensitivity was visible.

Nelsen treated himself well. He was relieved of the duty of eternal vigilance by men whose job it was. So, for a while, his purpose was almost successful.

But the memory—or ghost—of Mitch Storey was never quite out of his mind. And, as a tiny, at first telescopic crescent with a rusty light enlarged with lessened distance ahead, the ugly enigma of present-day Mars dug deeper into his brain.

Every twenty-four hours and thirty-eight minutes—the length of the Martian day—whenever the blue-green wedge of Syrtis Major appeared in the crescent, he beamed the Survey Station, which was still maintained for the increase of knowledge, and as a safeguard for incautious adventurers who will tackle any dangerous mystery or obstacle. His object was to talk to Nance Codiss.

"I thought perhaps you and your group had gotten restless and had started out for the Belt already," he laughed during their first conversation.

"Oh, no—a lab technician like me is far too busy here, for one thing," she assured him, her happy tone bridging the distance. "We came this far with a well-armed freight caravan, in good passenger quarters. If we went on, I suppose it would be the same... Anyway, for years you didn't worry much about me. Why now, Frank?"

"A mystery," he teased in return. "Or perhaps because I considered Earth safe—instinctively."

But he was right in the first place. It was a mystery—something to do with the startling news that she was on the way, that closer friendship was pending. The impulse to go meet her had been his first, almost thoughtless impulse.

He was still glad that she wasn't out between Mars and the Belt, where disaster had once hit him hard. But now he wondered if the Survey Station was any better for anybody, even though it was reputed to be quite secure.

The caravan he rode approached his destination no closer than ten million miles. Taking cautious note of radar data which indicated that space all around was safely empty, he cast off in his Archer with a small, new, professional-type bubb packed across his hips. Inside his helmet he lighted a cigarette—quite an unusual luxury.

It took a long time to reach Phobos. They gave him shots there—new preventative medicine that was partially effective against the viruses of Mars. Descent in the winged rocket was rough. But then he was gliding with a sibilant whistle through a natural atmosphere, again. Within minutes he was at the Station—low, dusty domes, many of them deserted, now, at the edge of the airfield, a lazily-spinning wind gauge, tractors, auto-jeeps, several helicopters.

He stepped down with his gear. Mars was all around him: A few ground-clinging growths nearby—harmless, locally evolved vegetation. Distant, coppery cliffs reflecting the setting sun. Ancient excavations notched them. Dun desert to the east, with little plumes of dust blowing. Through his Archer—a necessary garment here not only because the atmosphere was only one-tenth as dense as Earth-air and poor in oxygen, but because of the microscopic dangers it bore—Nelsen could hear the faint sough of the wind.

The thirty-eight percent of terrestrial gravity actually seemed strong to him now, and made him awkward, as he turned and looked west. Perhaps two miles off, past a barbed-wire fence and what must be an old tractor trail of the hopeful days of colonization, he saw the blue-green edge of Syrtis Major, the greatest of the thickets, with here and there a jutting spur of it projecting toward him along a gully. Nelsen's hide tingled. But his first glimpse was handicapped by distance. He saw only an expanse of low shagginess that might have been scrub growths of any kind.

Dug into the salt-bearing ground at intervals, he knew, were the fire weapons ready to throw oxygen and synthetic napalm—jellied gasoline. Never yet had they been discharged, along this defense line. But you could never be sure just what might be necessary here.

A man of about thirty had approached. "I meet the new arrivals," he said. "If you'll come along with me, Mr. Nelsen..."

He was dark, and medium large, and he had a genial way. He looked like a hopper—an asteroid-miner—the tough, level-headed kind that adjusts to space and keeps his balance.

"Name's Ed Huth," he continued, as they walked to the reception dome. "Canadian. Good, international crowd here—however long you mean to stay. Most interesting frontier in the solar system, too. Probably you've heard most of the rules and advice. But here's a paper. Refresh your memory by reading it over as soon as you can. There is one thing which I am required to show everybody who comes here. Inside this peek box. You are instructed to take a good look."

Huth's geniality had vanished.

The metal box was a yard high, and twice as long and wide. It stood, like a memorial, before the reception dome entrance. A light shone beyond the glass-covered slot, as Nelsen bent to peer.

He had seen horror before now. He had seen a pink mist dissolve in the sunshine as a man in armor out in the Belt was hit by an explosive missile, his blood spraying and boiling. Besides, he had read up on the thickets of Mars, watched motion pictures, heard Gimp Hines' stories of his brief visit here. So, at first, he could be almost casual about what he saw in the peek box. There were many ghastly ways for a man to die.

Even the thicket plant in the box seemed dead, though Nelsen knew that plant successors to the original Martians had the rugged power of revival. This one showed the usual paper-dry whorls or leaves, and the usual barrel-body, perhaps common to arid country growths, everywhere. Scattered over the barrel, between the spines, were glinting specks—vegetable, light-sensitive cells developed into actual visual organs. The plant had the usual tympanic pods of its kind—a band of muscle-like tissue stretched across a hollow interior—by which it could make buzzing sounds. Nelsen knew that, like any Earthly green plant, it produced oxygen, but that, instead of releasing it, it stored the gas in spongy compartments within its horny shell, using it to support an animal-like tissue combustion to keep its vitals from freezing during the bitterly frigid nights.

Nelsen also knew that deeper within the thing was a network of whitish pulp, expanded at intervals to form little knobs. Sectioned, under a microscope, they would look like fibred masses of animal or human nerve and brain cells, except that, chemically, they were starch and cellulose rather than protein.

Worst to see was the rigid clutch of monster's tactile organs, which grew from the barrel's crown. It was like a powerful man struggling to uproot a rock, or a bear or an octopus crushing an enemy. It was dark-hole drama, like something from another galaxy. Like some horribly effective piece of sculpture, the tableau in the box preserved the last gasp of an incautious youth in armor.

The tendrils of the thicket plant were furred with erect spines of a shiny, russet color. They were so fine that they looked almost soft. But Nelsen was aware that they were sharper than the hypodermic needles they resembled—in another approach to science. Now, Nelsen felt the tingling revulsion and hatred.

"Of course you know that you don't have to get caught like that poor bloke did," Huth said dryly. "Just not to disinfect the outside of your Archer well enough and then leave it near you, indoors, is sufficient. I was here before there was any trouble. When it came, it was a shambles..."

Huth eyed Nelsen for a moment, then continued on another tack. "Biology... Given the whole universe to experiment in, I suppose you can never know what it will come up with—or what is possible. These devils—you get to hate them in your sleep. If their flesh—or their methods—were something like ours, as was the case with the original Martians or the people of the Asteroid Planet, it wouldn't seem so bad. Still, they make you wonder: What would you do, if, in your own way, you could think and observe, but were rooted to the ground; if you were denied the animal ability of rapid motion, if you didn't have hands with which to fashion tools or build apparatus, if fire was something you could scarcely use?..."

Nelsen smiled. "I am wondering," he said. "I promise to do a lot more of it as soon as I get squared away. I could inflate my bubb, and sleep in the yard in it, if I had to. Then, as usual, off the Earth, you'll expect me to earn my breathing air and keep, after a couple of days, whether I can pay instead or not. That's fine with me, of course. There's another matter which I'd like to discuss, but that can be later."

"No sleeping out," Huth laughed. "That's just where people get careless. There are plenty of quarters available since the retreat of settlers almost emptied this world of terrestrial intrusion—except for us here and the die-hard desert rats, and the new, screwball adventurers... By the way, if it ever becomes important, the deserts are safe—at least from what you just saw—as you probably know..."

Nelsen passed through an airlock, where live steam and a special silicone oil accomplished the all-important disinfection of his Archer, his bubb, and the outside of his small, sealed baggage roll. Armor and bubb he left racked with rows of others.

It wasn't till he got into the reception dome lounge that he saw Nance Codiss. She didn't rush at him. Reserve had dropped over them both again as if in reconsideration of a contact made important too suddenly. He clasped her fingers, then just stood looking at her. Lately, they had exchanged a few pictures.

"Your photographs don't lie, Nance," he said at last.

"Yours do, Frank," she answered with complete poise. "You look a lot less grim and tired."

"Wait," he told her. "I'll be right back..."

He went with Ed Huth to ditch his roll in his sleeping cubicle, get cleaned up and change his clothes.

She was beautiful, she had grave moods, she was wearing his fabulous bracelet—if only not to offend him. But when he returned, he met two of the girls who had come out to Mars with her—a nurse and another lab technician. They were the bubbly type, full of bravado and giggles for their strange, new surroundings. For a moment he felt far too old at twenty-four for Nance's twenty. He wondered regretfully if her being here was no more than part of his excuse for getting away from the Belt and from the sense of ultimate human disaster building up.

But much of his feeling of separation from her disappeared as they sat alone in the lounge, talking—first about Jarviston, then about here. Nance had available information about the thickets pretty well down pat.

"You can't keep those plants alive here at the Station, Frank," she said quietly. "They make study difficult by dying. It's as if they knew that they couldn't win here. So they retreat—to keep their secrets. But Dr. Pacetti, our head of Medical Research, says that we can never know that they won't find a way to attack us directly. That's what the waiting napalm line is for. I don't think he is exaggerating."

"Why do you say that?" Nelsen asked.

He was encouraging her, of course. But he wasn't being patronizing. Frost tingled in his nerves. He wanted to know her version.

"I'll show you the little museum we have," she replied, her eyes widening slightly. "This is probably old hat to you—but it's weird—it gives you the creeps..."

He followed her along a covered causeway to another dome. In a gallery there, a series of dry specimens were set up, inside sealed boxes made of clear plastic.

The first display was centered around a tapered brass tube—perhaps one of the barrels of an antique pair of fieldglasses. Wrapping it was a spiny brown tendril from which grew two sucker-like organs, shaped like acorn tops. One was firmly attached to the metal. The other had been pulled free, its original position on the barrel marked by a circular area of corrosion. The face of the detached sucker was also shown—a honeycomb structure of waxy vegetable tissue, detailed with thousands of tiny ducts and hairlike feelers.

"Some settler dropped the piece of brass out on a trail in Syrtis Major," Nance explained. "Later, it was found like this. Brass is something that people have almost stopped using. So, it was new to them. They wouldn't have been interested in magnesium, aluminum, or stainless steel anymore. The suckers aren't a usual part of them either. But the suckers grow—for a special purpose, Dr. Pacetti believes. A test—perhaps an analysis. They exude an acid, to dissolve a little of the metal. It's like a human chemist working. Only, perhaps, better—more directly—with specialized feelers and sensing organs."

Nance's quiet voice had a slight, awed quaver at the end.

Frank Nelsen nodded. He had examined printed pictures and data before this. But here the impact was far more real and immediate; the impact of strange minds with an approach of their own was more emphatic.

"What else?" he urged.

They stood before another sealed case containing a horny, oval pod, cut open. It had closed around a lump of greenish stone.

"Malachite," Nance breathed. "One kind of copper ore. They reduced it, extracted some of the pure metal. See all the little reddish specks shining? It is pretty well established that the process is something like electroplating. There's a dissolving acid—then a weak electric current—from a kind of battery... Oh, nobody should laugh, Frank—Dr. Pacetti keeps pointing out that there are electric eels on Earth, with specialized muscle-tissue that acts as an electric cell... But this is somewhat different. Don't ask me exactly how it functions—I only heard our orientation lecture, while we toured this museum. But see those small compartments in the thick shells of the pod—with the membranes separating them? All of them contained fluids—some acid, others alkaline. Mixed in with the cellulose of the membranes, you can see both silvery and reddish specks—as if they had to incorporate both a conductor and a difference of metals to get a current. At least, that was what was suggested in the lecture..."

Frank Nelsen and Nance Codiss moved on from display case to display case, each of which showed another kind of pod cut in half. The interiors were all different and all complicated... Membranes with a faint, metallic sheen—laminated or separated by narrow air spaces as in a capacitor, for instance... Balls of massed fibre, glinting... Curious, spiral formations of waxy tissue...

"They use electricity as a minor kind of defense," Nance went on, her tone still low with suppressed excitement that was close to dread. "We know that some of them can give you a shock—if you're fool enough to get so close that you can touch them. And they do emit radio impulses on certain wavelengths. Signals—communication...? As for the rest, perhaps you'd better do your own guessing, Frank. But the difference between us and them seems to be that we make our apparatus. They grow them, build them—with their own living tissue cells—in a way that must be under their constant, precise control. I suppose they even work from a carefully thought-out design—a kind of cryptic blueprint... Go along with the idea—or not—as you choose. But our experts suspect that much of what we have here represents research apparatus—physical, chemical, electrical. That they may get closer to understanding the ultimate structure of matter than we can, because their equipment is part of themselves, in which they can develop senses that we don't possess... Well, I'll skip any more of that. Because the best—or the worst—is still coming. Right here, Frank..."

The case showed several small, urn-like growths, sectioned like the other specimens.

Frank Nelsen grinned slightly. "All right—let me tell it," he said. "Because this is something I really paid attention to! Like you imply, their equipment is alive. So they work best with life—viruses, germs, vegetable-allergy substances. These are their inventing, developing and brewing bottles—for the numerous strains of Syrtis Fever virus. The living molecule chains split off from the inner tissue walls of the bottles, and grow and multiply in the free fluid. At least, that's how I read it."

"And that is where my lab job begins, Frank," she told him. "Helping develop anti-virus shots—testing them on bits of human tissue, growing in a culture bath. An even partially effective anti-virus isn't found easily. And when it is, another virus strain will soon appear, and the doctors have to start over... Oh, the need isn't as great, any more, as when the Great Rush away from Mars was on. There are only half a dozen really sick people in the hospital now. Late comers and snoopers who got careless or curious. You've got to remember that the virus blows off the thickets like invisible vapor. There's one guy from Idaho—Jimmy—James Scanlon. Come along. I'll show you, Frank..."

He lay behind plastic glass, in a small cubicle. A red rash, with the pattern of frostwork on a Minnesota windowpane in January, was across his lean, handsome face. Maybe he was twenty—Nance's age. His bloodshot eyes stared at terrors that no one else could see.

Nance called softly through the thin infection barrier. "Jimmy!"

He moaned a little. "Francy..."

"High fever, Frank," Nance whispered. "Typical Syrtis. He wants to be home—with his girl. I guess you know that nostalgia—yearning terribly for old, familiar surroundings—is a major symptom. It's like a command from them—to get out of Mars. The red rash is something extra he picked up. An allergy... Oh, we think he'll survive. Half of them now do. He's big and strong. Right now, even the nurses don't go in there, except in costumes that are as infection-tight as armor. Later on, when the fever dwindles to chronic intermittence, it will no longer be contagious. Even so, the new laws on Earth won't let him return there for a year. I don't know whether such laws are fair or not. We've got a hundred here, who were sick, and are now stranded and waiting, working at small jobs. Others have gone to the Belt—which seems terrible for someone not quite well. I hope that Jimmy bears up all right—he's such a kid... Let's get out of here..."

Her expression was gently maternal. Or maybe it was something more?

Back in the lounge, she asked, "What will you do here, Frank?"

"Whatever it is, there is one thing I want to include," he answered. "I want to try to find out just what happened to Mitch Storey."

"Natch. I remember him. So I looked the incident up. He disappeared, deep in Syrtis Major, over three years ago. He had carried a sick settler in—on foot. He always seemed lucky or careful, or smart. After he got lost, his wife—a nurse from here whose name had been Selma Washington—went looking for him. She never was found either."

"Oh?" Nelsen said in mild startlement.

"Yes... Talk to Ed Huth. There still are helicopter patrols—watching for signs of a long list of missing people, and keeping tabs on late comers who might turn out to be screwballs. You look as though you might be Ed's type for that kind of work... I'll have to go, now, Frank. Duty in half an hour..."

Huth was grinning at him a little later. "This department doesn't like men who have a vanished friend, Nelsen," he said. "It makes their approach too heroically personal. On the other hand, some of our lads seem underzealous, nowadays... If you can live up to your successful record in the Belt, maybe you're the right balance. Let's try you."

For a week, about all Nelsen did was ride along with Huth in the heli. At intervals, he'd call, "Mitch... Mitch Storey...!" into his helmet-phone. But, of course, that was no use.

He couldn't say that he didn't see Mars—from a safe altitude of two thousand feet: The vast, empty deserts where, fairly safe from the present dominant form of Martian life, a few adventurers and archeologists still rummaged among the rust heaps of climate control and other machines, and among the blasted debris of glazed ceramic cities—still faintly tainted with radioactivity—where the original inhabitants had died. The straight ribbons of thicket growths, crossing even the deserts, carrying in their joined, hollow roots the irrigation water of the otherwise mythical "canals." The huge south polar cap of hoarfrost melting, blackening the soil with brief moisture, while the frost line retreated toward the highlands. Syrtis, itself, where the trails, once burned out with oxygen and gasoline-jelly to permit the passage of vehicles, had again become completely overgrown—who could hope to stamp out that devilishly hardy vegetation, propagating by means of millions of windblown spores, with mere fire? The broken-down trains of tractors and trailers, now almost hidden. The stellene garden domes that had flattened. Here were the relics left by people who had sought to spread out to safety, to find old goals of freedom from fear.

Several times in Syrtis, Huth and Nelsen descended, using a barren hillock or an isolated spot of desert as a landing area. That was when Nelsen first heard the buzzing of the growths.

Twice, working warily with machetes, and holding their flame weapons ready, they chopped armored mummies from enwrapping tendrils, while little eye cells glinted at them balefully, and other tendrils bent slowly toward them. They searched out the space-fitness cards, which bore old dates, and addresses of next of kin.

In a few more days, Nelsen was flying the 'copter. Then he was out on his own, watching, searching. For a couple of weeks he hangared the heli at once, after each patrol, and Nance always was there to meet him as he did so.

Inevitably the evening came when he said, "We could fly out again, Nance. For an hour or two. It doesn't break any rules."

Those evening rides, high over Syrtis Major, toward the setting sun, became an every other day custom, harmless in itself. A carefully kept nuclear-battery motor didn't conk; the vehicle could almost fly without guidance. It was good to look down at the blue-green shagginess, below... Familiarity bred, not contempt, but a decline of dread to the point where it became a pleasant thrill—an overtone to the process of falling in love. Otherwise, perhaps they led each other on, into incaution. Out in the lonely fastnesses of Mars they seemed to find the sort of peace and separation from danger on the hectic Earth that the settlers had sought here.

"We always pass over that same hill," Nance said during one of their flights. "It must have been a beautiful little island in the ancient ocean, when there was that much water. Now it belongs to us, Frank."

"It's barren—we could land," Nelsen suggested quickly.

They visited the hill a dozen times safely, breaking no printed rule. But maybe they shouldn't have come so often to that same place. In life there is always a risk—which is food for a fierce soul. Frank Nelsen and Nance Codiss were fierce souls.

They'd stand by the heli and look out over Syrtis, their gloved fingers entwined. If they couldn't kiss, here, through their helmets, that was merely comic pathos—another thing to laugh and be happy over.

"Our wind-blown hill," Nance chuckled on that last evening. "Looking down over a culture, a history—maybe arguments, lawsuits, jokes, parties; gossip too, for all we know—disguised as a huge briar patch that makes funny noises."

"Shut up—I love you," Nelsen gruffed.

"Shut up yourself—it's you I love," she answered.

The little sun was half sunk behind the Horizon. The 'copter was only a hundred feet away, along the hillcrest. That was when it happened. Two dull, plopping sounds came almost together.

If a thinking animal can use the pressure of a confined gas to propel small missiles, is there any reason why other intelligences can't do the same? From two bottle-like pods the clusters of darts—or long, sharp thorns—were shot. Only a few of them struck their targets. Fewer, still, found puncturable areas and struck through silicone rubber and fine steelwire cloth into flesh. Penetration was not deep, but deep enough.

Nance screamed. Nelsen wasn't at all sure that he didn't scream himself as the first anguish dizzied and half blinded him.

From the start it was really too late. Nelsen was as hardy and determined as any. He tried to get Nance to the 'copter. Less than halfway, she crumpled. With a savage effort of will he managed to drag her a few yards, before his legs refused to obey him, or support him.

His blood carried a virus to his brain about as quickly as it would have carried a cobra's venom. They probably could have made such protein-poisons, too; but they had never used them against men, no doubt because something that could spread and infect others was better.

For a while, as the black, starshot night closed in, Nelsen knew, or remembered, nothing at all—unless the mental distortions were too horrible. Then he seemed to be in a pit of stinking, viscous fluid, alive with stringy unknowns that were boring into him... Unreachable in another universe was a town called Jarviston. He yelled till his wind was gone.

He had a half-lucid moment in which he knew it was night, and understood that he had a raging fever. He was still clinging to Nance, who clung to him. So instinct still worked. He saw that they had blundered—its black bulk was visible against the stars. Phobos hadn't risen; Deimos, the farther moon, was too small to furnish appreciable light.

Something touched him from behind, and he recoiled, pushing Nance back. He yanked the machete from his belt, and struck blindly... Oh, no!—you didn't get caught like this—not usually, he told himself. Not in their actual grip! They were too slow—you could always dodge! It was only when you were near something not properly disinfected that you got Syrtis Fever, which was the worst that could happen—wasn't it...?

He heard an excited rhythm in the buzzing. Now he remembered his shoulder-lamp, fumbled to switch it on, failed, and stumbled a few steps with Nance toward the hill. Something caught his feet—then hers. Trying to get her free, he dropped his machete...

Huth's voice spoke in his helmet-phone. "We hear you, Nelsen! Hold out... We'll be there in forty minutes..."

Yeah—forty minutes.

"It's—it's silly to be so scared, Frankie..." he heard Nance stammer almost apologetically. Dear Nance...

Screaming, he kicked out again and again with his heavy boots, and got both her and himself loose.

It wasn't any good. A shape loomed near them. A thing that must have sprung from them—someway. A huge, zombie form—the ugliest part of this night of anguish and distortion. But he was sure that it was real.

The thing struck him in the stomach. Then there was a biting pain in his shoulder...

There wasn't any more, just then. But this wasn't quite the end, either. The jangled impressions were like split threads of consciousness, misery-wracked and tenuous. They were widely separated. His brain seemed to crack into a million needle-pointed shards, that made no sense except to indicate the passage of time. A month? A century...?

It seemed that he was always struggling impossibly to get himself and Nance somewhere—out of hot, noisesome holes of suffocation, across deserts, up endless walls, and past buzzing sounds that were mixed incongruously with strange harmonica music that seemed to express all time and space... He could never succeed though the need was desperate. But sometimes there was a coolness answering his thirst, or rubbed into his burning skin, and he would seem to sleep... Often, voices told him things, but he always forgot...

It wasn't true that he came out of the hot fog suddenly, but it seemed that he did. He was sitting in dappled sunshine in an ordinary lawn chair of tubular magnesium with a back and bottom of gaudy fabric. Above him was a narrow, sealed roof of stellene. The stone walls showed the beady fossils of prehistoric Mars. More than probably, these chambers had been cut in the living rock, by the ancients.

Reclining in another lawn chair beside his was Nance, her eyes closed, her face thin and pale. He was frightened—until he remembered, somehow, that she was nearly as well as he was. Beyond her was a doorway, leading into what seemed a small, modern kitchen. There was a passage to a small, neat garden, where Earthly vegetables and flowers grew. It was ceiled with stellene; its walls were solid rock. Looking up through the transparent roof above him, he saw how a thin mesh of fuzzy tendrils and whorls masked this strange Shangri-la.

Nelsen closed his eyes, and thought back. Now he remembered most of what he had been told. "Mitch!" he called quietly, so as not to awaken Nance. "Hey, Mitch...! Selma...!"

Mitch Storey was there in a moment—dressed in dungarees and work shirt like he used to be, but taller, even leaner, and unsmiling.

Nelsen got up. "Thanks, Mitch," he said.

Their voices stayed low and intense.

"For nothing, Frank. I'm damned glad to see you, but you still shouldn't have come nosing. 'Cause—I told you why. Looking for you, Huth burned out more than five square miles. And if folks get too smart and too curious, it won't be any good for what's here..."

Nelsen felt angry and exasperated. But he had a haunting thought about a lanky colored kid in Jarviston, Minnesota. A guy with a dream—or perhaps a prescient glimpse of his own future.

"What's a pal supposed to do?" he growled. "For a helluva long time you've answered nobody—though everyone in the Bunch must have tried beaming you."

"Sure, Frank... Blame, from me, would be way out of line. I heard you guys lots of times. But it was best to get lost—maybe help keep the thickets like they are for as long as possible... A while back, I began picking up your voice in my phones again. I figured you were heading for trouble when you kept coming with your girl to that same hill. So I was around, like I told you before... Sorry I had to hit you and give you the needle, but you were nuts—gone with Syrtis. Getting you back here, without Huth spotting the old heli I picked up once at a deserted settlers' camp was real tough going. I had to land, hide it and wait, four or five times. And you were both plenty sick. But there are a few medical gimmicks I learned from the thickets—better than those at the Station."

"You've done all right for yourself here, haven't you, Mitch?" Nelsen remarked with a dash of mockery. "All the modern conveniences—in the middle of the forbidden wilds of Syrtis Major."

"Sure, Frank—'cause maybe I'm selfish. Though it's just stuff the settlers left behind. Anyway, it wasn't so good at the start. I was careful, but I got the fever, too. Light. Then I fell—broke my leg—out there. I thought sure I was finished when they got hold of me. But I just lay there, playing on my mouth organ—an old hymn—inside my helmet. Maybe it was the music—they must have felt the radio impulses of my tooting before. Or else they knew, somehow, that I was on their side—that I figured they were too important just to disappear and that I meant to do anything I could, short of killing, to keep them all right... Nope, I wouldn't say that they were so friendly, but they might have thought I'd be useful—a guinea-pig to study and otherwise. For all I know, examining my body may have helped them improve their weapons... Anyhow—you won't believe this—'cause it's sort of fantastic—but you know they work best with living tissue. They fixed that leg, bound it tight with tendrils, went through the steel cloth of my Archer with hollow thorns. The bone knit almost completely in four days. And the fever broke. Then they let me go. Selma was already out looking for me. When I found her, she had the fever, too. But I guess we're immune now."

Storey's quiet voice died away.

"What are you going to do, Mitch? Just stay here for good?"

"What else—if I can? This is better than anything I remember. Peaceful, too. If they study me, I study them—not like a real scientist—but by just having them close around. I even got to know some of their buzzing talk. Maybe I'll have to be their ambassador to human folks, sometime. They are from the planets of the stars, Frank. Sirius, I think. Tough little spores can be ejected from one atmosphere, and drift in space for millions of years... They arrived after the first Martians were extinct. Now that you're here, Frank, I wish you'd stay. But that's no good. Somebody lost always makes people poke around."

Nelsen might have argued a few points. But for one thing, he felt too tired. "I'll buy it all, your way, Mitch," he said. "I hope Nance and I can get out of here in a couple more days. Maybe I shouldn't have run out on the Belt. Can't run—thoughts follow you. But now—dammit—I want to go home!"

"That's regular, Frank. 'Cause you've got Syrtis. Chronic, now—intermittent. But it'll fade. Same with your girl. Meanwhile, they won't let you go Earthside, but you'll be okay. I'll fly you out, close enough to the Station to get back, any morning before daylight, that you pick... Only, you won't tell, will you, Frank?"

"No—I promise—if you think secrecy makes any difference. Otherwise—thanks for everything... By the way—do you ever listen in on outside news?"

"Enough. Still quiet... And a fella named Miguel Ramos—with nerve-controlled clamps for hands—got a new, special bubb and took off for Pluto."

"No! Damn fool... Almost as loony as you are, Mitch."

"Less... Wake up, Nance. Dinner... Chicken—raised right here..."

That same afternoon, Frank Nelsen and Nance Codiss sat in the garden. "If I blur, just hold me tight, Frankie," she said. "Everything is still too strange to quite get a grip on—yet... But I'm not going home, Frank—not even when it is allowed. I set out—I'm sticking—I'm not turning tail. It's what people have got to do—in space more than ever..."

Even when the seizure of fever came, and the sweat gathered on her lips, and her eyes went wild, she gritted her teeth and just clung to him. She had spunk—admirable, if perhaps destructive. "Love yuh," Frank kept saying. "Love yuh, Sweetie..."

Two days later, before the frigid dawn, they saw the last of Mitch Storey and his slender, beautiful wife with her challenging brown eyes.

"Be careful that you do right for Mitch and—these folks," she warned almost commandingly as the old heli landed in the desert a few miles from the Station. "What would you do—if outsiders came blundering into your world by the hundreds, making trails, killing you with fire? At first, they didn't even fight back."

The question was ancient but valid. In spite of his experiences, Nelsen agreed with the logic and the justice. "We'll make up a story, Selma," he said solemnly.

Mitch looked anxious. "Human people will find a way, won't they, Frank?" he asked. "To win, to come to Mars and live, I mean—to change everything. Sure—some will be sympathetic. But when there's practical pressure—need—danger—economics...?"

"I don't know, Mitch," Nelsen answered in the same tone as before. "Your thickets do have a pretty good defense."

But in his heart he suspected that fierce human persistence couldn't be stopped—as long as there were humans left. Mitch and his star folk couldn't withdraw from the mainstream of competition—inherent in life—that was spreading again across the solar system. They could only stand their ground, take their fearful chances, be part of it.

One of the last things Mitch said, was, "Got any cigarettes, Frank? Selma likes one, once in a while."

"Sure. Three packs here inside my Archer. Mighty small hospitality gift, Mitch..."

After the 'copter drifted away, it seemed that a curtain drew over Nelsen's mind, blurring the whole memory. It was as though they had planned that. It was almost as though Mitch, and Selma, as he had just seen them, were just another mind-fantasy of the Heebie-Jeebie Planet, created by its present masters.

"Should we believe it?" Nance whispered.

"My cigarettes are gone," Frank told her.

At the Survey Station they got weary looks from Ed Huth. "I guess I picked a wrong man, Nelsen," he said.

"It looks as though you did, Ed," Frank replied. "I'm really sorry."

They got worse hell from a little doctor from Italy, whose name was Padetti. They were asked a lot of questions. They fibbed some, but not entirely.

"We sort of blanked out, Doctor," Nance told him. "I suppose we spent most of our time in the desert, living in our Archers. There were the usual distorted hallucinations of Syrtis Fever. A new strain, I suspect... Four months gone? Oh, no...!"

She must have had a time evading his questions for the next month, while she worked, again, in the lab. Maybe he did divine half of the truth, at last. Maybe he even was sympathetic toward the thickets that he was trying to defeat.

Nelsen wasn't allowed to touch another helicopter. During that month, between brief but violent seizures of the fever, he was employed as a maintenance mechanic.

Then the news came. There had been an emergency call from Pallastown. Rescue units were to be organized, and rocketed out in high-velocity U.N.S.F. and U.S.S.F bubbs. There had been sabotage, violence. The Town was three-quarters gone, above the surface. Planned attack or—almost worse—merely the senseless result of space-poisoned men kicking off the lid in a spree of hell-raising humor and fun?

Nelsen was bitter. But he also felt the primitive excitement—almost an eagerness. That was the savage paradox in life.

"You still have the dregs of Syrtis Fever," a recruiting physician told him. "But you know the Belt. That makes a big difference... All right—you're going..."

Nance Codiss didn't have that experience. Her lab background wasn't enough. So she was stuck, on Mars.

Nelsen had been pestering her to marry him. Now, in a corner of the crowded lounge, he tried again.

She shook her head. "You'd still have to leave me, Frank," she told him. "Because that's the way strong people have to be—when there's trouble to be met. Let's wait. Let's know a little better where we're at—please, darling. I'll be all right. Contact me when you can..."

Her tone was low and tender and unsteady. He hugged her close.

Soon, he was aboard a GO-rocket, shooting up to Phobos to join the assembling rescue team. He wondered if this was the beginning of the end...



VIII

Frank Nelsen missed the first shambles at Pallastown, of course, since even at high speed, the rescue unit with which he came did not arrive until days after the catastrophe.

There had been hardly any warning, since the first attack had sprung from the sub-levels of the city itself.

A huge tank of liquid oxygen, and another tank of inflammable synthetic hydrocarbons to be used in the manufacture of plastics, had been simultaneously ruptured by charges of explosive, together with the heavy, safety partition between them. The resulting blast and fountain of fire had jolted even the millions of tons of Pallas' mass several miles from its usual orbit.

The sack of the town had begun at once, from within, even before chunks of asteroid material, man-accelerated and—aimed, had begun to splatter blossoms of incandescence into the confusion of deflating domes and dying inhabitants. Other vandal bands had soon landed from space.

The first hours of trying to regain any sort of order, during the assault and after it was finally beaten off, must have been heroic effort almost beyond conception. Local disaster units, helped by hoppers and citizens, had done their best. Then many had turned to pursuit and revenge.

After Nelsen's arrival, his memory of the interval of acute emergency could have been broken down into a series of pictures, in which he was often active.

First, the wreckage, which he helped to pick up, like any of the others. Pallastown had been like froth on a stone, a castle on a floating, golden crag. It had been a flimsy, hastily-built mushroom city, with a beautiful, tawdry splendor that had seemed out of place, a target shining for thousands of miles.

Haw, haw...! Nelsen could almost hear the coarse laughter of the Jolly Lads, as they broke it up, robbed it, raped it—because they both sneered at its effeteness, and missed what it represented to them... Nelsen remembered very well how a man's attitudes could be warped while he struggled for mere survival in an Archer drifting in space.

Yet even as he worked with the others, to put up temporary domes and to gather the bloated dead, the hatred arose in him, and was strengthened by the fury and grief in the grim, strong faces around him. To exist where it was, Pallastown could not be as soft as it seemed. And to the hoppers—the rugged, level-headed ones who deserved the name—it had meant much, though they had visited it for only a few days of fun, now and then.

The Jolly Lads had been routed. Some must have fled chuckling and cursing almost sheepishly, like infants the magnitude of whose mischief has surpassed their intention, and has awed and frightened them, at last. They had been followed, even before the various late-coming space forces could get into action.

Nelsen overheard words that helped complete the pictures:

"I'll get them... They had my wife..."

"This was planned—you know where..."

It was planned, all right. But if Ceres, the Tovie colony, had actually been the instigator, there was evidence that the scheme had gotten out of hand. The excitement of destruction had spread. Stories came back that Ceres had been attacked, too.

"I killed a man, Frank—with this pre-Asteroidal knife. He was after Helen and my son..."

This was timid David Lester talking, awed at himself, proud, but curiously ashamed. This made another picture. By luck the Lesters lived in the small above-the-surface portion of Pallastown that had not been seriously damaged.

Frank Nelsen also killed, during a trip to Post One of the KRNH Enterprises, to get more stellene and other materials to expand the temporary encampments for the survivors. He killed two fleeing men coldly and at a distance, because they did not answer his hail. The shreds of their bodies and the loot they had been carrying were scattered to drift in the vacuum, adding another picture of retribution to thousands like it.

Belt Parnay was the name of the leader whom everybody really wanted to get. Belt Parnay—another Fessler, another Fanshaw. That was a curious thing. There was another name and face; but as far as could be told, the personality was very similar. It was as if, out of the darker side of human nature, a kind of reincarnation would always take place.

They didn't get Parnay. Inevitably, considering the enormity of space, many of the despoilers of Pallastown escaped. The shrewdest, the most experienced, the most willing to shout and lead and let others do the dangerous work, had the advantage. For they also knew how to run and hide and be prudently quiet. Parnay was one of these.

Some captives were recovered. Others were found, murdered. Fortunately, Pallastown was still largely a man's city. But pursuit and revenge still went on...

Post One was intact. Art Kuzak had surrounded it with a cordon of tough and angry asteroid-hoppers. It was the same with the other posts, except Five and Nine, which were wiped out.

"Back at last, eh, Nelsen?" Art roared angrily, as soon as Frank had entered his office.

"A fact we should accept, not discuss," Nelsen responded dryly. "You know the things we need."

"Um-hmm—Nelsen. To rescue and restore Pallastown—when it's pure nonsense, only inviting another assault! When we know that dispersal is the only answer. The way things are, everywhere, the whole damned human race needs to be dispersed—if some of it is to survive!"

It made another picture—Art Kuzak, the old friend, gone somewhat too big for his oversized britches, perhaps... No doubt Art had had to put aside some grandiose visions, considering the turn that events had taken: Whole asteroids moved across the distance, and put into orbit around the Earth, so that their mineral wealth could be extracted more conveniently. Space resorts established for tourists; new sports made possible by zero-gravity, invented and advertised. Art Kuzak had the gift of both big dreaming and of practice. He'd talked of such things, before.

Nelsen's smirk was wry. "Dispersal for survival. I agree," he said. "When they tried to settle Mars, it was being mentioned. Also, long before that. Your wisdom is not new, Art. It wasn't followed perhaps because people are herding animals by instinct. Anyhow, our side has to hold what it has really got—one-fourth of Pallastown above the surface, and considerably more underground, including shops, installations, and seventy per cent of its skilled inhabitants, determined to stay in the Belt after the others were killed or wounded, or ran away. Unless you've quit claiming to be a practical man, Art, you'll have to go along with helping them. You know what kind of materials and equipment are needed, and how much we can supply, better than I do. Or do I have to withdraw my fraction of the company in goods? We'll take up the dispersal problem as soon as possible."

Art Kuzak could only sigh heavily, grin a lopsided grin, and produce. Soon a great caravan of stuff was on the move.

There was another picture: Eileen Sands, the old Queen of Serene in a not-yet-forgotten song, sitting on a lump of yellow alloy splashed up from the surface of Pallas, where a chunk of mixed metal and stone had struck at a speed of several miles per second, fusing the native alloy and destroying her splendid Second Stop utterly in a flash of incandescence. Back in Archer, she looked almost as she used to look at Hendricks'. Her smile was rueful.

"Shucks, I'm all right, Frank," she said. "Even if Insurance, with so many disaster-claims, can't pay me—which they probably still can. The boys'll keep needing entertainment, if it's only in a stellene space tent. They won't let me just sit... For two bits, though, I'd move into a nice, safe orbit, out of the Belt and on the other side of the sun from the Earth, and build myself a retreat and retire. I'd become a spacewoman, like I wanted to, in the first place."

"I'll bet," Nelsen joshed. "Otherwise, what have you heard and seen? There's a certain fella..."

Right away, she thought he meant Ramos. "The damfool—why ask me, Frank?" she sniffed, her expression sour and sad. "How long has he been gone again, now? As usual he was proposing—for the first few days after he set out. After that, there were a few chirps of messages. Then practically nothing. Anyway, how long does it take to get way out to Pluto and back, even if a whole man can have the luck to make it. And is there much more than half of him left...? For two bits I'd—ah—skip it!"

Nelsen smiled with half of his mouth. "I wanted to know about Ramos, too, Eileen. Thanks. But I was talking about Tiflin."

"Umhmm—you're right. He and Pal Igor were both around at my place about an hour before we were hit. I called him something worse than a bad omen. He was edgy—almost like he used to be. He said that, one of these days—be cavalier—I was going to get mine. He and Igor eeled away before my customers could break their necks."

Nelsen showed his teeth. "Thanks again. I wondered," he said.

He stayed in Pallastown until, however patched it looked, it was functioning as the center of the free if rough-and-tumble part of the Belt once more—though he didn't know for how long this would be true. Order of one kind had been fairly restored. But out of the disaster, and something very similar on Ceres, the thing that had always been most feared had sprung. It was the fact of opposed organized might in close proximity in the region between Pallas and Ceres. Again there was blaming and counter-blaming, about incidents the exact sources of which never became clear. What each of the space forces, patrolling opposite each other, had in the way of weapons, was of course no public matter, either; but how do you rate two inconceivables? Nor did the threat stay out in the vastness between the planets.

From Earth came the news of a gigantic, incandescent bubble, rising from the floor of the Pacific Ocean, and spreading in almost radioactivity-free waves and ripples, disrupting penned-in areas of food-producing sea, and lapping at last at far shores. Both sides disclaimed responsibility for the blast.

Everybody insisted hopefully that this latest danger would die down, too. Statesmen would talk, official tempers would be calmed, some new working arrangements would be made. But meanwhile, the old Sword of Damocles hung by a thinner hair than ever before. One trigger-happy individual might snap it for good. If not now, the next time, or the next. A matter of hours, days, or years. The mathematics of probabilities denied that luck could last forever. In this thought there was a sense of helplessness, and the ghost of a second Asteroid Belt.

Frank Nelsen might have continued to make himself useful in Pallastown, or he might have rejoined the Kuzaks, who had moved their mobile posts back into a safer zone on the other side of Pallas. But his instincts, now, all pointed along another course of action—the only course that seemed to make any sense just then.

He approached Art Kuzak at Post One. "About deployment," he began. "I've made up some sketches, showing what I'd like the factories to turn out. The ideas aren't new—now they'll spring up all around like thoughts of food in a famine. If anything will approach answering all problems, they will. And KRNH is as well able to put them into effect as anybody... So—unless you've got some better suggestions?"

Art Kuzak looked the sketches over shrewdly for half an hour.

"All right, Frank," he said after some further conversation. "It looks good enough. I'll chip in. Whether they're sucker bait or not, these things will sell. Only—could it be you're running away?"

"Perhaps," Nelsen answered. "Or following my nose—by a kind of natural compulsion which others will display, too. Two hundred of these to start. The men going with me will pay for theirs. I'll cover the rest of this batch: You'll be better than I am at figuring out prices and terms for later batches. Just on a hunch, I'll always want a considerable oversupply. Post One's shops can turn them out fast. All they are, mostly, is just stellene, arranged in a somewhat new way. The fittings—whatever can't be supplied now, can follow."

Fifty asteroid-hoppers, ten of them accompanied by wives, went with Nelsen as he started out with a loaded caravan toward an empty region halfway between the orbits of Earth and Mars. Everyone in the group was convinced by yearnings of his own.

Thinking of Nance Codiss, Nelsen planned to keep within beam range of the Red Planet. He had called Nance quite often. She was still working in the Survey Station hospital, which was swamped with injured from Pallastown.

Nelsen could tag all of the fierce drives in him with single words.

Home was the first. After all his years away from Earth, the meaning of the word would have been emphatic in him, even without the recurrent spasms of hot-cold weakness, which, though fading, still legally denied him the relief of going back to old familiar things. Besides, Earth seemed insecure. So he could only try to make home possible in space. Remembering his first trip, long ago, from the Moon to Mars, he knew how gentle the Big Vacuum could sometimes seem, with just a skin of stellene between it and himself. Home was a plain longing, too, in the hard, level eyes around him.

Love. Well, wasn't that part of the first item he had tagged?

Wanderlust. The adventurous distance drive—part of any wild-blooded vagabond male. Here in his idea, this other side of a human paradox seemed possible to answer, too. You could go anywhere. Home went with you. Your friends could go along, if they wished.

Freedom. In the billions of cubic miles could any system ever be big enough to pen you in, tell you what to think or do, as long as you hurt no one? Well—he thought not, but perhaps that remained to be seen.

Safety. Deployment was supposed to be the significant factor, there. And how could you make it any better than it was going to be now? Even if there were new dangers?

The future. There was no staying with the past. The Earth was becoming too small for its expanding population. It was a stifling, dangerous little world that, if the pressures were not relieved, might puff into fire and fragments at any moment during any year. And the era of prospecting and exploration in the Asteroid Belt seemed destined soon to come to an end, in any event.

Frank Nelsen's drives were very strong, after so much had passed around him for so long a time. Thus, maybe he became too idealistic and—at moments—almost fanatically believing, without enough of the saving grain of doubt and humor. The hoppers with him were much like himself—singly directed by what they had lacked for years.

The assembly operation was quickly accomplished, as soon as they were what they considered a safe distance from the Belt. On a greater scale, it was almost nothing more than the first task that Nelsen had ever performed in space—the jockying of a bubb from its blastoff drum, inflating it, rigging it, spinning it for centrifugal gravity, and fitting in its internal appointments.

Nelsen looked at the fifty-odd stellene rings that they had broken out of their containers—the others, still packed, were held in reserve. Those that had been freed glistened translucently in the sunlight. Nelsen had always thought that bubbs were beautiful. And these were still bubbs, but they were bigger, safer, more complicated.

A bantam-sized hopper named Hank Janns spoke from beside Nelsen as they floated near each other. "Pop—sizzle—and it's yours, Chief. A prefab, a house, a dwelling. A kitchen, a terrace, a place for a garden, a place for kids, even... With a few personal touches, you've got it made. Better than the house trailer my dad used to hook onto the jalopy when I was ten... My Alice likes it, too, Chief—that's the real signal! Tell your pals Kuzak that this is the Idea of the Century."

Frank Nelsen kind of thought so, too, just then. The first thing he did was to beam the Survey Station on Mars, like he was doing twice a week—to communicate more often would have courted the still dangerous chance of being pinpointed. For similar reasons he couldn't explain too clearly what his project was, but he hoped that he had gotten a picture of what it was like across to his girl.

"Come see for yourself, Nance," he said enthusiastically. "I'll arrange for a caravan from Post One to stop by on Phobos and pick you up. Also—there's my old question... So, what'll it be, Nance? Maybe we can feel a little surer of ourselves, now. We can work the rest out. Come and look, hang around—see how everything shakes down, if you'd rather."

He waited for the light-minutes to pass, before he could hear her voice. "Hello, Frank..." There was the same eager quaver. "Still pretty jammed, Frank... But we know about it here—from Art... Some of the Pallastown convalescents will be migrating your way... I'll wrangle free and come along... Maybe in about a month..."

He didn't know quite whether to take her at her word—or whether she was somehow hedging. In the Big Vacuum, the human mind seemed hard put, quite, to know itself. Distances and separations were too great. Emotions were too intense or too stunned. This much he had learned to understand. Perhaps he had lost Nance. But maybe, still—in some bleak, fatalistic way—it would be just as well in the end, for them both.

"Sure, Nance," he said gently. "I'll call again—the regular time..."

Right after that he was talking, over a much greater span, to Art Kuzak. "First phase about completed, Art... Finger to thumb—in spite of the troubles elsewhere. So let it roll...!"

Art Kuzak's reply had an undercurrent of jubilance, as if whatever he knew now was better than he had expected. "Second phase is en route. Joe will be along... Don't be surprised..."

Joe Kuzak's approach, a few hundred hours later, made a luminous cluster in the sky, like a miniature galaxy. It resolved itself into vast bales, and all of the stellene rings—storage and factory—of Post Three. Also there were over a hundred men and thirty-three wives. Many of them were Pallastown refugees.

Nelsen helped Joe through the airlock of the ring that he had hoped would be his and Nance's. "Bubbtown, huh, Frank?" Joe chuckled. "The idea is spreading faster than we had believed, and we aren't the only ones that have got it. The timing is just right. People are scared, fed up. Out Here—and on Earth, too... Most of the guys that are single in this crowd have girls who will be on the way soon. Some of the tougher space-fitness tests are being junked. We're even screening a small batch of runaways from Ceres—to be included in the next load. An experiment. But it should work out. They're just like anybody... Art is all of sudden sort of liberal—the way he gets when things seem to break right."

Everything went fine for quite a while. Art Kuzak was out playing his hunches, giving easy terms to those who couldn't pay at once.

"Might as well gamble," he growled from the distance. "Space and terrestrial forces are still poised. If we lose at all, we lose the whole works, anyway. So let's bring them from all around the Belt, from Earth, Venus and from wherever they'll come. Give them a place to work, or let them start their own deal. It all helps... You know what I hear? The Tovies are letting men do things by themselves. To hold their own in room as big as this, they have to. Their bosses are over a barrel. Just organized discipline ain't gonna work. A guy has to want things his own way..."

In a more general view, doubts were sneaking up on Frank Nelsen, though as far as KRNH was concerned, he had started the ball rolling. "We'll keep our fingers crossed," he said.

It was only a couple of Earth-days later that another member of the old Bunch showed up. "I had to bubb all the way from Mercury to Post One to get your location from Art, Frankie," he complained. "Cripes—why didn't anybody ever try to beam Gimp and me, anymore? Solar radiation ain't that hard to get past... So I had to come sneak a look for myself, to see what the Big Deal on the grapevine is."

"We left the back door unlatched for you, Two-and-Two," Nelsen laughed. "And you crept in quietly. Swell to see you."

Sitting showered and in fresh clothes on Frank Nelsen's sundeck, any changes in Two-and-Two Baines were less evident than one might have supposed. His eyes had a much surer, farther look. Otherwise he was still the same large hulk with much the same lugubrious humor.

"Mercury's okay, Frankie," he said. "About four thousand people are living in the Twilight Zone, already. I could show you pictures, but I guess you know. Whole farms and little towns under stellene. Made me some dough doing lots of the building. Could have been more, but who cares? Oh, Gimp'll be along out here sometime, soon. He was putting up another solar powerhouse. But he's beginning to say, what the hell, the future ain't there, or on any planet... So this is how it's gonna be, huh? With some additions, sure. Factories, super markets, cornfields, pig farms, parks, playgrounds, beauty parlors, all encased in stellene, and orbiting in clusters around the sun, eh...? 'Hey, Pop!' some small fry will say to his old man. 'Gimme ten bucks, please, for an ice cream cone down at the soda bubb?' And his mom'll say to his dad, 'George, Dear—is the ionocar nice and shiny? I have to go play bridge with the girls over in Nelsenville...' No, I'm not ribbing you, Frankie. It'll be kind of nice to hear that type of talk, again—if they only include a place for a man to be a little bit himself."

Two-and-Two (George) Baines sighed rapturously and continued. "Figure it out to the end, Frankie. No planets left—all the materials in them used up to build these bubbtowns. There'll be just big shining, magnificent rings made up of countless little floating stellene houses all around the sun. A zillion people, maybe more. Gardens, flowers, everything beautiful. Everybody free to move anywhere. Uh-uh—I'm not making fun, Frankie. I'm joining in with all the relief and happiness of my heart. Only, it'll be kind of sad to see the old planets go—to be replaced by a wonderful super-suburbia. Or maybe we should say, superbia."

Nelsen burst out laughing, at last. "You sly slob...! Anyhow, that extreme is millenniums off—if it has a chance of happening, at all. Even so, our descendants, if any, will be going to the stars by then. There won't be any frustration of their thirst for danger... Just as there isn't any, now, for us. Except that we can keep our weapons handy, and hope... Me—I'm a bit bored with adventure, just at present."

"So am I," Two-and-Two affirmed fervently. "Now, have you got me a job, Frankie?"

"There'll be something," Nelsen answered him. "Meanwhile, to keep from feeling regimented by civilization, you could take your rocket launcher and join the perimeter watchers that range out a thousand miles..."

Nance Codiss arrived a week later, with a group of recent Pallastown convalescents. Bad signs came with her, but that fact got lost as she hugged Nelsen quickly there in the dwelling he had set up with the thought it would be their home. At once she went on a feminine exploring expedition of the prefab's interior, and its new, gleaming appointments. Kitchen, living room, sundeck. Nelsen's garden was already well along.

"Like the place?" he asked.

"Love it, Frank," she answered quietly.

"It could have been more individual," he commented. "But we were in a hurry. So they are all identical. That can be fixed, some, soon. You're thinking about improvements?"

Her eyes twinkled past the shadow in her expression. "Always some," she laughed. Then her face went solemn. "Let them ride, for now, Frank. It's all wonderful and unbelievable. Hug me again—I love you. Only—all this is even more fantastically new to me than it is to you. Realize that, please, Frank. I'm a month late in getting here and I'm still groping my way. A little more time—for us both... Because you might be fumbling, some, too."

Her tone was gentle. He saw that her eyes, meeting his, were honest and clear. He felt the careful strength behind them, after a moment of hurt. There was no rushing, one-way enthusiasm that might easily burn out and blow up in a short time.

He held her close. "Sure, Nance," he said.

"You probably know that our group from Mars was followed, Frank. I hope I'm not a jinx."

"Of course you're not. Somebody would have followed—sometime. We're watching and listening. Just keep your Archer handy..."

The faint, shifting blips in the radar screens was an old story, reminding him that certain things were no better than before, and that some were worse. Somewhere there were other bubbtowns. There were policing space forces, too. But for millions of miles around, this cluster of eight hundred prefabs and the numerous larger bubbs that served them, were all alone.

Nelsen looked out from his sundeck, and saw dangerous contrasts. The worst, perhaps, was a spherical bubble of stellene. Inside it was a great globe of water surrounded by air—a colossal dewdrop. Within it, a man and two small boys—no doubt father and sons from Pallastown, were swimming, horsing around, having a swell time—only a few feet from nothing. Nelsen spoke softly into his radio-phone. "Leland—close down the pool..."

It wasn't long before the perimeter watch, returning from a patrol that had taken them some distance out, brought in a makeshift dwelling bubb made from odds and ends of stellene. They had also picked up its occupant, a lean comic character with an accent and a strange way of talking.

"Funny that you'd turn up, here—Igor, is it?" Nelsen said dryly.

Igor sniffed, as if with sorrow. He had been roughed up, some. "Very funny—also simple. You making a house, so I am making a house for this identical purpose. People from Ceres are already being here; in consequence, I am also arriving. Nobody are saying what are proper doing and thinking—so I am informed. I am believing—okay, Igor. When being not true, I am going away again."

The tone was bland. The pale eyes looked naive and artless, except, perhaps, for a hard, shrewd glint, deep down.

Joe Kuzak was present. "We searched him, Frank," he said. "His bubb, too. He's clean—as far as we can tell. Not even a weapon. I also asked him some questions. I savvy a little of his real lingo."

"I'll ask them over," Nelsen answered. "Igor—a friend named Tiflin wouldn't be being around some place, would he?"

The large space comedian didn't even hesitate. "I am thinking not very far—not knowing precisely. Somebody more is being here, likewise. Belt Parnay. You are knowing this one? Plenty Jollies—new fellas—not having much supplies—only many new rocket launchers they are receiving from someplace. You are understanding this? Bad luck, here, it is meaning."

Nelsen eyed the man warily, with mixed doubt and liking. "I don't think you can be going away again, right now, Igor," he said. "We don't have a jail, but a guard will be as good..."

The watch didn't give the alarm for several hours. Three hisses in the phones, made vocally. Then one, then two more. North, second quadrant, that meant. Direction of first attack. Ionic drives functioned. The cluster of bubbs began to scatter further. Nelsen knew that if Igor had told the truth, the outlook was very poor. Too much deployment would thin the defenses too much. And against new, homing rockets—if Parnay really had them—it would be almost useless. A relatively small number of men, riding free in armor, could smash the much larger targets from almost any distance.

Nelsen didn't stay in his prefab. Floating in his Archer, he could be his own, less easily identifiable, less easily hit command post, while he fired his own homing missiles at the far-off radar specks of the attackers. He ordered everyone not specifically needed inside the bubbs for some defense purpose to jump clear.

In the first half-minute, he saw at least fifty compartmented prefabs partly crumple, as explosives tore into them. A dozen, torn open, were deflated entirely. The swimming pool globe was punctured, and a cloud of frosty vapor made rainbows in the sunshine, as the water boiled away. Far out, Nelsen saw the rockets he and his own men had launched, sparkling soundlessly, no doubt scoring, some, too.

The attackers didn't even try to get close yet. Far greater damage would have to be inflicted, before panic and disorganization might give them sufficient advantage. But such damage would take only minutes. Too much would reduce the loot. So now there was a halt in the firing, and another component of fear was applied. It was a growling, taunting voice.

"Nelsen! And all of you silly bladder-brains...! This is Belt Parnay...! Ever hear of him? Come back from hell, eh? Not with just rocks, this time! The latest, surest equipment! Want to give up, now, Nelsen—you and your nice, civilized people? Cripes, what will you cranks try next? Villages built in nothing and on nothing! Thanks, though. Brother, what a blowout this is gonna provide!"

Parnay's tone had shifted, becoming mincingly mocking, then hard and joyful at the end.

Maybe he shouldn't have suggested so plainly what would happen—unless something was done, soon. Maybe he shouldn't have sounded just a little bit unsure of himself under all his bluff. Because Nelsen had made preparations that matched a general human trend. Now, he saw a condition that fitted in, making an opportunity... So he began to taunt Parnay back.

"We've got a lot of the latest type rockets to throw, too, Parnay. You'd have quite a time, trying to take us. But there's more... Just look behind you, Parnay. And all around. Not too far. Who's silly? Who's the jerk? Some new guys are in your crowd, I hear? Then they won't have much against them—they aren't real outlaws. Do you think they want to keep following you around, stinking in their armor—when what we've got is what they're bound to want, right now, too? They can hear what I'm saying, Parnay. Every one of them must have a weapon in his hands. Why, you stupid clown, you're in a trap! We will give them what they need most, without them having to risk getting killed. In space, there'll have to be a lot of things forgotten, but not for you or for the rough old-timers with you... Come on, you guys out there. There's a folded bubb right here waiting for each of you. Take it anywhere you want—away from here, of course... Parnay—big, important Belt Parnay—are you still alive...?"

Nelsen had his own sneering tone of mockery. He used it to best advantage—but with fear in his heart. Plenty of his act was only counter-bluff. But now, as he paused, he heard Two-and-Two Baines' mournful voice continue the barrage of persuasion.

"Flowers, Parnay? We ain't got many, yet. But you won't care... Fellas—do you want to keep being pushed around by this loud mouth who likes to run and lets you sweat for him, because he's mostly alone and needs company? Believe me, I know what it's like out there, too. At a certain point, all you really want is something a little like home. And the Chief ain't kidding. It was all planned. Try us and see. Send a couple of guys in. They'll come out with the proof..."

Other voices were shouting. "Wake up, you suckers...! You'll never take us, you stupid slobs...! Come on and try it, if that's what you want to be..."

What happened, could never have happened so quickly if Parnay's doubtless considerably disgruntled following hadn't been disturbed further by intrigue beforehand. Nelsen heard Parnay roar commands and curses that might have awed many a man. But then there was a cluster of minute sparks in the distance, as rockets, not launched by the defenders, homed and exploded.

There was a pause. Then many voices were audible, shouting at the same time, with scarcely any words clear... Several minutes passed like that. Then there was almost silence.

"So—has it happened?" Nelsen growled into his phone.

"It has," came the mocking answer. "Be cavalier, Nelsen. Salute the new top outlaw... Don't faint— I knew I'd make it... And don't try anything you might regret... I'm coming in with a couple of my Jolly Lads. You'd better not welsh on your promises. Because the others are armed and waiting..."

The guys with Tiflin looked more tired than tough. Out from under their fierce, truculent bravado showed the fiercer hunger for common things and comforts. Nelsen knew. The record was in his own memory.

"You'll get your bubbs right away," he told them. "Then send the others in, a pair at a time. After that, go and get lost. Make your own place—town—whatever you want to call it... Leland, Crobert, Sharpe—fit these guys out, will you...?"