 6 David Lester had resigned from archaeological survey. He was getting actually sharp. He was doing independent research, and was setting up his own business in belt antiques. Frank Nelson had another reason for coming to Palestine. A field? You avoided beam communication nowadays, whenever you could. Someone might trace your beam to its source and jump you for whatever you had. But Gimp Hines could tell Nelson about the absent bunch members and the old friends, while they both sat in the little K-R-N-H office in town. Paul Hendricks is still the same, Frank. New bunch around him. Too bad we can't call him now, because the earth is on the far side of the sun. Mitch's story just vanished into the Martian thickets, during one of his jaunts, almost a year ago now. I didn't see him when I stopped over on Mars, but he was back at the station once after that. Take it easy, Frank. They've looked with helicopters, and even on the ground. You couldn't do any more. I'll keep in touch to see if anything turns up. After a minute, Nelson relaxed slightly. Two and two? I guess he's OK, with Charlie Reynolds looking after him. Peculiar about Charlie, Gimp answered, looking awed and puzzled. Got the news from old Jay John, his granddad, when he acknowledged the receipt of our latest draft by letter. Hold your hat. Charlie got himself killed. I'll dig the letter out of the file. Nelson sat up very straight. Never mind, he said. Just tell me more. Anything can happen. Our most promising member, Gimp, mused. He didn't get much. The Venus expedition had to move some heavy equipment to the top of a mountain to make some electrostatic tests before a storm. Charlie had just climbed down from the helicopter. A common old lightning bolt hit him. Somebody played firestreak on the bagpipes, inside a sealed tent, while they buried him. Otherwise, he didn't even get a proper spaceman's funeral. Venus' escape velocity is almost as high as Earth's. Boosting a corpse up into orbit just for atmospheric cremation would have been too much of a waste for the expedition's rigid economy. Nelson had never really been very close to Charlie Reynolds, though he had liked the flamboyant good guy. Now it was all a long ways back. Besides, Nelson didn't feel exactly grief. Just an almost mystical bitterness, a shock, and an uncertainty, as if he could depend on nothing. So what about two and two, he growled, remembering how he used to avoid any responsibility for the big, good-hearted lug. But now he felt sure about himself, and things seemed different. I guess the expedition medic had to straighten him out. With devil killers, Heinz answered. He bubbed all the way back to Earth, alone, to see J. John about Charlie. I beamed him there before the Earth hid behind the sun. He was still pretty shaken up, funny too. Charlie's opportunity-laden Venus has turned out to be a bust, for two centuries at least, and less new methods, which aren't in sight, yet turn up. Sure, at staggering expense, and with efforts on the order of fantasy. Motion motors could be set up around its equator, to make it spin as fast as the Earth. Specially developed green algae have already been seeded all over the planet. They're rugged. They spread fast. But it will take the algae about two hundred years to split the carbon dioxide and give the atmosphere a breathable amount of free oxygen, to say nothing of cracking the poisonous formaldehyde. Two and twos back in Jarveston then, Nelson demanded? No, not any more. Just give me breath. Hines went on. He and Charlie had figured another destination of opportunity. Mercury, the planet nearest to sun. Everlasting frozen night on one side, eternal, sink-melting sunshine on the other. But there's the fringe zone between the two, the twilight zone. If you can live under Steline, you've got a better place there than Mars might have been. Scientists are going there, to quit the Earth, to get away from it all. Two and two was about to leave for Mercury when I last spoke to him. By now he's probably almost there. And even under the most favorable conditions, Mercury is hard to beam. Too much solar magnetic interference. The poor sap, Nelson gruffed. It probably isn't that bad any more, Hines commented. Sometime I might go to Mercury myself. When I get good and sick of sitting on my tail here, when I always was a man of action, Mercury does have possibilities. Plenty of solar power, certainly. Plenty of frozen atmosphere on the dark side. Interesting Frank. Oh, hell I forgot. There's a letter here for you, and a package. Just arrived. I'll scram now. Got to go down to the Quays. Hold the fort here, will you? Gimp Hines grinned as he left. Nelson was glad to be alone. The lonesomeness of the big vacuum was getting grimed into him. When he saw the return, name, and address on the package, and the $210 postage sticker, he thought, cripes, that poor kid, what did I start? Then the awful wave of nostalgia for Jarveston, Minnesota, hit him. As he fumbled to open the microfilmed letter capsule, and put it in the viewer. Hello, Frank. It has to be that, doesn't it, and not Mr. Nelson? Since you've sent me this miraculous bracelet, which I don't dare wear very much, since I don't want to lose an arm to some international, or even interstellar, jewel thief, it makes me feel like the queen of something, certainly not serene, since it implies calmness and repose, which I certainly don't feel. No offense to our Miss Sands, whom I admire enormously. In a very small way I am repaying you in kind, an item which I made myself, and which I know that some spacemen use inside their archers. You see, we are all informed in details. Paul, Otto, Chippy Potter and his dog, and other characters whom you won't remember, send their best greetings. Oh, I've got stardust fever, too, but I'll yield to my folks' wishes and wait and learn a profession that will be of some use out there. May you wear what I'm sending in good health, safety and fortune. Send no more staggering gifts, please. I couldn't stand it, but please do right. Tell me how it really is in the belt. You simply don't realize how much. Hans Cottes' missive rattled along, and the scrawled words got to be like small, happy bells inside Nelson's skull. His crooked grin came out. He unpacked the sweater. Craylon wool, very warm, bright red, a bit crude in workmanship here and there, but imagine a girl bothering these days. He donned the garment and decided it fit fine. Then he tried to write a letter. Hi, Nance. I just put it on first time. Beautiful. It'll stay right with me. Thanks. Talk about being staggered. There he bogged down, some wondering how much she had changed, wondering just what he ought to say to her and who these characters that he wouldn't remember might be. Cripes how old was she now, 17? He ended up taking her at her word. He described Palestine rather heavy-handedly. And bought some microfilm postcards to go along with his missive as soon as he went out to mail it. But a few hours later, from deep in space, he looked back at the town, shining in the distance. And in the blue mood of thinking about Charlie Reynolds' mid-story and two and two, he wondered how much longer it, or Nance, or anything else could last. Then he glanced down at the bright sweater and chuckled. Unexpectedly, Ramos remained an active member of K-R-N-H Enterprises for over a year. But the end had to come. I told Art I'd let my dough ride, Franky said to Nelson in the lounge, of post one. I'll only draw enough earnings to build me a real, deep-space bub, nuclear propelled, and with certain extra gadgets. A few guys have tried to follow the unmanned, instrumented rockets out to the system of Saturn. Nobody got back yet. I think I know what they figured wrong. The instruments showed. Well, skip it. I'm going into town to prepare. It'll take quite a while, so I'll have some fun, too. Ramos' eyes twinkled with a secret triumph before the fact. You don't argue a fighting rooster out of fighting, Nelson laughed. Besides, it wouldn't be destiny or any fun to succeed. To accept the complementary comparison, if it fits, which maybe it doesn't, you egotistical bonehead. Good luck. Bueno suerta, amigo. I'll look you up in town if I get a chance. Nelson was always busy to the gills. Progress was so smooth for another couple of years that the hunch of big trouble building up became annoying certainty in his nerves. Of course, there were always the jolly lads to watch out for, the extreme individualists, space-twisted and wild, robbing and murdering, could seem easier than digging. Take your loot into Palestine. Who knew you hadn't grubbed it yourself? Sell it. Get the stink blown off you. Forget some terrible things that happen to you. Have yourself a time. Strike out again, repeat. Nelson knew that. Through the months, he had killed defensively at least twice. Once with a long-range homing bullet. Weapons sanctioned by Pius and cautious international agreement were more lethal, now, to match the weapons of the predatory. Once by splitting a helmet with a rifle barrel. When he was out alone, exploring a new post-site on a small asteroid, a starved, tovy runaway had jumped him. Maybe he should regret the end of that incident. Trips to Palestine were increasingly infrequent. But there was one time when he almost had come especially to see Ramos's new bub, still under wraps, supposedly. Well that erratic character had it out on a long test run, damn him. As usual, time was crowding Nelson. He had to get back on the job. He had just a couple of hours left. He wrote a letter to Nance Cottis answering one of hers. Funny. He'd never yet tried to contact her vocally. Being busy, being cautious about using a beam, these were good reasons. Now there was hardly enough spare time to reach twice across the light minutes. Maybe the real truth was that men got strangely shy in the silences of the belt. Dear Nance, you seem to be making fine headway in your new courses. All the good words for that. There were plenty of good words, but he didn't put many of them down. He didn't know if the impulse to write darling was just his own loneliness, which any girl with a kind word would have filled. He didn't know her or that part of himself very well. He kept remembering her as she had been. Then he realized that memory wasn't a stable thing to hang on to. Everything changed. How well he had learned that. She was older now, intelligent, and at school again. Study in some kind of medical laboratory technology. Certainly she had become more sophisticated and elusive. Her gay letters were just a superficial part of what she must be. And certainly there were dates and boyfriends in all the usual phases of getting out of step with a mere recollection like himself. Nelson had some achy emotions. Should he ask for her picture? Should he send one of himself? He just scribbled on, rambling as usual. Yet in a new Archer 7 you could undo a few clamps, pull a foot out of a boot, and actually change your socks, inconsequential nonsense like that. He ended by telling her not to worry about any knick-knacks he might send. That they came easy out here. He micro-posted the letter, and mailed a square of soft glass silk of many colors. Then he pronounced a few cuss words, laughed at himself for getting so serious, shrugged, and with the casualness of hopper, with his pockets loaded, moved toward the wreck area, which was some distance off. It was night over this part of rapidly growing Palestine. Moving along a lighted causeway, he saw the man with his shoveled teeth. Glory! Had he managed to survive so long, his mere presence here seemed like a signal of the end of peace. Captain Ramos used to practice close contact tactics at zero G in space, so Nelson didn't even wait for the man to notice him. He leaped and sped like an arrow, thudding into the guy's stomach with both his boot heels. Shoveled teeth was hurled fifty yards backwards. Nelson hurling with him all the way. Unless Nelson wanted to kill him, there wasn't any more to do. Partial revenge. He wasn't worried about anybody except the guy's jolly, lad henchman. There was nobody close by. Now he did a quick fade, sure that nobody had seen who he was during the entire episode. No use to call the cops. There were too many uncertainties about the setup in wild, polyglot Palestine. Nelson moved on to the wreck area. He didn't go into a garishly splendid place named the Second Stop. Yes, he didn't see its owner, whose identity he had already heard about, of course. Not that he wouldn't have liked to, but there wasn't any time to get involved in a long chat with a woman. Nor did he see the tall, skinny, horse-faced comic known only as Igor go through slapstick acrobatics that once would have been impossible. By a roundabout route he proceeded to the catapults where Gimp Hines was waiting for him. They had been conversing just a short while ago. Did you drop in on Eileen, Gimp asked right away? No, there'll be other occasions, Nelson laughed. Someday, if we live, she'll own all the joints in the solar system. Uh-huh, I'd bet on it. By the way, there's a great fine yarn around. Somebody kicked the fanshaw, the jolly, lad big shot in the belly. You perhaps? Don't listen to the gossip, Nelson said primely. Are you serious about going to Mercury? Of course. There are people to take over my office duties. I'll be on my way in a couple of weeks. I think you'd like to come along, Frank. Nelson felt an urge that was like crying for freedom. Sure I would, but I'm bound to the wheel. Cripes, though. Watch yourself, fella. Don't you get into a mess. Hell, you're the mess-specialist, Frank. Fanshaw isn't here for fun. And there's been that new trouble at home. A tovy-bub loaded with people, and a stateside-bub, both in orbit around the earth had collided. No survivors. But there was plenty of blaming and counter-blaming. Another dangerous incident. Glory, with all that massed, destructive power there was, could luck really last forever? Frank Nelson got back to post one OK. But later, writing in the post three, just in an archer's six, with a couple of guards for company, he picked up a long, lost voice, falsely sweet, then savage at the end. I'm a jinx, aren't I, Frankie? Ofulture. Nice and cavalier you are. I bet you hoped I was dead. OK, sucker. Tiffin didn't even answer when Nelson tried to beam him. Nelson was able to save post three. The guards and most of the personnel were experienced and tough. They drove the jolly lads back and deflected some chunks of aimed and accelerated asteroid chips with new defense rockets. Joe Cusack at post seven wasn't so lucky. Though Frank had tipped him off. Half of the post was scattered and pirated. Six fellows and the wife of one of them, a bunch from Baltimore, were just drying shreds that drifted in the wreckage. Big Joe, though he had a rocket chip through his chest, had been able to beat off the attackers, with the help of a few asteroid hoppers, and his novice crew, which turned out to be more rugged than some people might have expected. Frank got to him just as it was over, except for the cursing. The masculine tears of grief and rage, the promise of revenge, luckily none of the women had been captured. Joe Cusack, 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-bub. Several were in Tobi armor. Runaways are agents. They're crowding us, boy. Hell, what a junk heap this post is going to be, to sort out. Get to it, Nelson commented. You've got something in mind? Uh-huh. Coming in I heard somebody address somebody else as fan. Fanshawe 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 wouldn'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 specs. 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 bubs blossom out. There'd be a real pirates party, like he had 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 bubs floated a haze of jettisoned refuse. Boxes, wrappings, shreds of steline. Nelson had figured on that. Deseclerating, he draped a sheet of synthetic cellulose they had brought along, loosely over his armoured shape. Finally he drifted unobtrusively close. At a half a mile distance, he peered through the telescope site of his launcher. The bubs were close together. The lookout floated free. Him, he got first, with a careful homing shot. Immediately he fired a burst into each bub, 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. Eventually he picked the biggest lump of struggling forms, and fired again and again, until there was no more motion left, except an even rotation. He soon located Fanshawe. His unarmoured body was bloated and drying. His mouth gapped. His shovel teeth were exposed to the stars and the distant naked sun. Nelson had to think back to six dead young men and girls to keep from feeling lousy. Had Fanshawe just been another guy, invading a region that was too big and terrible for humans? With something like dread, Nelson looked for Tiflin too, but of course that worthy wasn't around. Nelson 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, Nelson left the wreckage and hurried back to post-7, before other jolly lands could catch up and avenge their pals. Fanshawe's group 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 Tovys 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 7, which Nelson presently acquired, had a miniature TV screen set in its collar. The field, he was able to pick up propaganda broadcast 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 blow-up didn't happen first. Nelson didn't see Ramos's new bub, 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 Nelson at Post-8. 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 Palestine hospital. Frank Nelson 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, frost-spite. Only the new antibiotics he had taken along had kept the gang green from killing him. There was a light safety belt across his bed. But somehow he knew Nelson, and his achievement seemed like a mechanical record fixed in his mind. Hi, Frankie, whispered hurriedly. I figured it right. Out there, near Saturn, clusters of particles of frozen methane gas are floating free, like tiny meteors. The instrumentate rockets didn't run into them, and they were too light to show clearly on radar. But a bub with a man in it is a lot 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 especially armored, with a heavy helmet and body plating. The particles just got my gloves and my legs, cripes I've 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, Nelson 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. Then 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 mechs who chased the girls, Ramos the hero, the historical figure now. Cursing under his breath, Nelson wandered vaguely to the second stop. There he saw what probably every spaceman had dreamed of, Lucette of Paris swimming nude in a gigantic dew-drop, 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 Nelson 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 mocking apologetic, uh-oh, and didn't realize that this was Tiflin, the harbinger of misfortune, before it was too late to collar him. Nelson 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 Sand's apartment. It was not his first visit. When seldom danced or sang any more 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 interest in nature, but Tiflin never gave me anything but wisecracks. There are a lot of Tobi's 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 Nelson looked at Eileen almost weirdly for a second. Just that Tiflin is somehow involved with most of the bad luck I've ever had out here, he said grimly. Even if Palestine were destroyed, everybody but the Tobi's 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 hallows 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 the palace, 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. Who's talking? OK. 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. 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, Nelson 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 USSF, which perhaps leaves me with just my own love life to confess. She smiled lightly. Once there was a kid named Frankie Nelson 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 a closet, or look at him through a telescope. Good-bye, hello, good-bye, 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? Yes, there was a cute little girl at Serene. Jenny Harper, she married one of those singing moon prospectors. Somebody murdered them both, way out on the far side. Frank Nelson's mouth twisted. That's enough, pal, he said. I'd 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 modeled 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, this long, beaked head turning watchfully. Hey, Nelson said mildly, as his jade at mine responded. Lester nodded. They were on earth, too, as the Martians must have been, exploring and taking pictures during the Christacius period. Oh, 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 less. Keep wearing those archers, people. Glad the kid likes to play in his. Nelson had donned his own seven, with the helmet fastened across his chest by a strap. At the K-R-N-H 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 Cottes had sent before. Dear Frank, I'm actually coming your way. I'll be stopping the work at the Survey Station Hospital on Mars for about two months and 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 Palestine. He lashed 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 any more. He had a small rocket launcher from the office. If they ever came close enough. But of course they stayed 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 Palestine. Were these just crazy wildish slobs whooping it up or real crud provided with a purpose and reward? Either way, here was the eternal danger to any belt settlement. Nelson 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 defensive 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 Nelson's friends were OK. The posts called in, OK too. And waited three days. He wanted to help defend if the attack was renewed. But now the UNSF 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 Nelson 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 a 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 evaporate it 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, Palestine. He kept thinking angrily of Art Cusack, getting a little overstuffed, it seemed. The hunky kid, the ex-football player, who had become a big commercial and industrial barren of the belt, easy living, cuties around, and poor twin Joe, just another stooge. Nelson went into the office, his fist clenched over dramatically. I'm taking a leave, Art, maybe a long one, he said. Art Cusack stared at him. You damned independent bums, you two, Nelson. He began the growl, but when he saw Nelson's jaw harden he got the point and grinned instead. OK, Frank, nobody's indispensable. I might do the same when you come back, who knows. Frank Nelson joined a K.R.N.H. Bub convoy, Earthbound, but also passing fairly close to Mars within a few hours. END OF CHAPTER 6 PART 2 CHAPTER 7 PART 1 OF THE PLANET STRAPPERS This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. THE PLANET STRAPPERS BY RAYMON Z. GALLON CHAPTER 7 PART 1 Frank Nelson met 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 bubs and great sheaves of smelted metal rods, tungsten, osmium, uranium-238. The sheaves had their own propelling ionic motors. He lays 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. Nelson 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's story 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 Citrus 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 Coddus. 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. Taken 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 bub 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 preventive medicine, that was partially effective against the viruses of Mars. Descent in the winged rocket was rough. But then he was gliding with a silibent 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 lazy spinning wingage, 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, done 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. Everything could hear the faint sound 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 the barbed-wire fence and what must be an old tractor-trail of the hopeful days of colonization he saw the blue-green edge of Sirtus Major, the greatest of the thickets, with here and there a jutting spur of it projecting toward him along a gully. Nelson'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 there were fire-weapons ready to throw oxygen and synthetic napalm, jellied gasoline. For 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. Nelson. He was dark and medium-large, and 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. Seems ad-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 shown beyond the glass-covered slot, as Nelson bent to peer. He had seen horror before now. He had seen a pink mist dissolve in the sunshine as a man in armour, out when 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 Heinz's 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 Nelson knew that plant successors to the original Martians had the rugged power of revival. This one showed the usual paper-dry whorls of 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. Nelson 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. Nelson 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 fibered masses of animal or human nerve and brain cells. Except that chemically, they were starch and cellulose rather than protein. First 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 a dark, cold drama, like something from another galaxy, like a horribly effective piece of sculpture. The tableau in the box preserved the last gasp of an unconscious 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 Nelson was aware that they were sharper than the hypodermic needles they resembled. In another approach to science. Now Nelson 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 Nelson 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? Nelson smiled. I am wondering, he said. I promised to do a lot more of it as soon as I'd get squared away. I could inflate my bub and sleep in the yard in it if I had to. Then as usual, off the earth, you'd 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, huffed, 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 infusion, 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. Nelson passed through an airlock where live steam and a special silicon oil accomplished the all-important disinfection of his archer, his bub, and the outside of his small sealed baggage roll. Armor and bub he left wracked with rows of others. It wasn't till he got into the reception dome lounge that he saw Nance Cottis. She didn't rush at him. Herb had dropped over them both again, as if in reconsideration of a contact made important to suddenly. He clasped her fingers, then just stood looking at her. Lately they had exchanged a few pictures. Your photographs don't line, Nance, he said at last. Yours too, 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 robe 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 Jarvison and then about here. This 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. Pissetti, 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?� Nelson 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. She followed her along a covered causeway to another dome. In a gallery there, a series of dry specimens was 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 field glasses. Wrapping it was a spiny, brown tendril, from which grew two sucker-like organs shaped like egg-corn 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, a waxy vegetable tissue, detailed with thousands of tiny ducks and hair-like feelers. Some saddler dropped that piece of brass out on a trail, incitrus 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 any more. The suckers aren't a usual part of them, either. But the suckers grow for a special purpose, Dr. Pisetti believes. A test, perhaps an analysis. They exclude 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 odd quaver at the end. Frank Nelson 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. Busetti 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 contain 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 Nelson and Nance Cottis moved 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 faint metallic sheen, laminated or separated by narrow air spaces, as in a capacitor, for instance. Balls of masked fiber 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 admit 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, earn-like growths, sectioned like the other specimens. Frank Nelson grinned slightly. All right, let me tell it, he said. Because this is something I've 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 cirrhitus 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 antivirus shots, testing them on bits of human tissue growing in a culture bath. An even partially effective antivirus 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 anymore 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 frost work on a Minnesota window pane in January was across his lean, handsome face. Maybe he was 20, 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, Siritus. He wants to be home with his girl. I guess you know that nostalgia. Yarning 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 are 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 and find out just what happened to Mitch's story. Natch, I remember him. So I looked the incident up. He disappeared deep in Siritus Major over three years ago. He 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, Nelson said, in mild startlement. Yes, talk to Ed Huth. There are still 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 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, Nelson, 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. End of Chapter 7 Part 1 Chapter 7 Part 2 of The Planet Strapers. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The Planet Strapers by Raymond Z. Gollum. Chapter 7 Part 2 For a week about all Nelson did was right along with Huth in the heli. At intervals he'd call, Mitch, Mitch Story, 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 hallow roots the irrigation water of the otherwise mythical canals. The huge south polar cap of whorefrost melting, blackening the soil with brief moisture, while the frosts line retreated towards the highlands. This 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 wind-blown spores with mere fire? The broken-down trains of tractors and trailers now almost hidden. The sterling garden dome said 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 Citrus Huth and Nelson descended, using a barren hillock or an isolated spot of desert as a landing area. That was when Nelson first heard the buzzing of the growths. Twice working wearily with machetes and holding their flame weapons ready, they chopped armored mummies from enrapping 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, Nelson was flying the copter. Then he was out on his own, watching, searching. For a couple of weeks he hangered 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 Citrus 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 let each other on, in to in caution. Out in the lonely fastness of Mars they seemed to find the sort of peace and separation from danger on the hectic earth that 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, Nelson 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 Nelson and Nance Cottis were fierce souls. They'd stand by the heli, and look out over Citrus, 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 of 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, Nelson 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 hill-crest. That's when it happened. Two dull plopping sounds came almost together. If a thinking animal can use the pressure of confined gas to repel 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. They were still found puncturable areas, and struck through silicone rubber and fine steel wire cloth into flesh. Penetration was not deep, but deep enough. Nance screamed. Nelson wasn't at all sure that he didn't scream himself, as the first anguish dizzyed and half blinded him. From the start it was really too late. Nelson was as hardy and determined as any. He tried to get Nance to the copter. Less than half way 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 venon. 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 star-shot night closed in, Nelson 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 Jarveston. He yelled to 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. Demos, 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 Cirta's 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 the switchet 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. Huff's voice spoke in his helmet-phone. We hear you, Nelson. Hold on. We'll be there in forty minutes. Yeah, forty minutes. It's silly to be scared, Frankie, he heard Nance stammer, almost apologetically. 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, some way. 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, noisome holes of suffocation, across deserts, up endless walls, and past buzzing sounds that were mixed incongruously with strange harmonic 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 the back and bottom of gaudy fabric. Above him was a narrow, sealed roof of stelline. 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 him was Nance, her eyes closed, her face thin in 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 sealed with stelline. 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 the strange Shangri-La. Nelson 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's story was there in a moment, dressed in dungarees and work-shirt like he used to be, but taller, even leaner and unsmiling. Nelson got up. Thanks, Mitch, he said. Their voices stayed low and intense. For nothing, Frank, I'm damn glad to see you, but you still shouldn't have come nosing. Kos, I've 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. Nelson felt angry and exasperated, but he had a haunting thought about a lanky-colored kid in Jarveston, Minnesota, a guy with a dream or perhaps a prescient glimpse of his own future. What's the pal supposed to do, he growled? For a hell of a 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 certis. 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? Nelson remarked with a dash of mockery. All the modern conveniences, in the middle of the forbidden wilds of certis major. Sure, Frank, cost maybe I'm selfish. Though it's just stuff that 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. People wouldn't say that they were so friendly, but they might have thought I'd be useful, a guinea pig to study, or otherwise. For all I know, examining my body may have helped them improve their weapons. Anyhow, you won't believe this, cost it sort of fantastic. But you know, they worked best with living tissue. They fixed that leg, bound it tight with tendrils, went through the steel cloth of my archer with hallow 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. Stories 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 some time. They are from the planets of the stars, Frank. Serious, 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. Nelson 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 Nancy 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, damn it, I want to go home. That's regular, Frank. Plus, you've got the 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 fellow named Miguel Ramos, with nerve-controlled clamps for hands, got a new special bub and took off for Pluto. No, damn fool. Almost as loony as you are, Mitch. Lest wake up, Nance, dinner, chicken, raised right here. That same afternoon Frank Nelson and Nance Cottes 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 you, Frank, kept saying. Love you, sweetie. Two days later, before the fridge had dawn, they saw the last of Mitch's story 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, has 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, Nelson agreed with the logic and the justice. We'll make up a story, Summer, 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, needs, danger, economics. I don't know Mitch, Nelson 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 last thing 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 Nelson'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 the wrong man, Nelson, 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 Spicetti. They were asked a lot of questions. They fibbed at 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 Cirta's 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. Nelson 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 Palestine. Rescue units were to be organized and rocketed out in high velocity UNSF and USSF bubs. 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 of poisoned men kicking off the lid in a spree of hell-raising humor and fun. Nelson 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 Cirta's fever, a recruiting physician told him, but you know the belt that makes a big difference. All right, you're going. Nance caught us didn't have the experience. Her lab background wasn't enough. So she was stuck on Mars. Nelson had been pestering her to marry him. Now in a corner of the crowded lounge she tried again. But she shook her head. You 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 G.O. rocket, shooting up the Phobos to join the assembling rescue team. He wondered if this was the beginning of the end. End of Chapter 7, Part 2. Frank Nelson missed the first shambles at Palestine, 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 a heavy safety partition between them. The resulting blast and fountain of fire had jolted even the millions of tons of palace's 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 Nelson'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 of wreckage which he helped to pick up, like any of the others, Palestine had been like a 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. Ha-ha! Nelson 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 effetness and missed what it represented to them. Nelson remembered very well how a man's attitudes can 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, Palestine 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 only for a few days of fun now and then. The jolly lads had been routed. Some must have fled chuckling and cursing almost sheeplessly. Like infants, the magnitude of whose mischief had surpassed their intentions and has awed and frightened them at last. They had been followed even before the various late-coming space forces could get into action. Nelson 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 Tovi 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 to. 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-surface portion of Palestine that had not been seriously damaged. Frank Nelson also killed, during a trip to Post 1, of the K-R-N-H 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 Fanshawe. This was a curious thing. There was another name in Fess, 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 Palestine 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 Palestine was still largely a man's city, but pursuit and revenge still went on. Post one was intact. Art Cousac 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 on Nelson, Art roared angrily as soon as Frank had entered his office. A fact we should accept, not discuss, Nelson responded dryly. You know the things we need. Uh-huh, Nelson, to rescue and restore Palestine, when its 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 Cousac, 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 Cousac had the gift of both big dreaming and of practice. He had talked of such things before. Nelson Smirk was rye. 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 Palestine above the surface, and considerably more underground, including shops, installations, and 70% 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 kinds 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 and 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 Syrene, in a not yet forgotten song, sitting on a lump of yellow alloy splashed up from the surface of the palace, where a chunk of mixed metal and stone had struck at a speed 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 will keep needing entertainment, if it's only in a sterling 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 earth, and build myself a retreat and retire. I'd become a space woman, like I wanted to, in the first place. I'll bet, Nelson Joshed, otherwise what have you heard and seen? There's a certain fella. Right away she thought he meant Ramos. A damn fool, 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 a skip it. Nelson smiled with half of his mouth. I wanted to know about Ramos, too, Eileen, thanks, but I was talking about Tiflin. Hmm, you're right. He and Pal Egor 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 Egor ealed away before my customers could break their necks. Nelson showed his teeth. Thanks again, I wondered, he said. He stayed in Palestine 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 series, 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 palace and series. Again, there was blaming and counter-blaming about an incidence, the exact source 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? Or 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 radioactive free waves and ripples, disrupting pendant areas of food producing sea, and lapping at last at far shores. Both sides disclaimed the 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 sort 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 built. Frank Nelson might have continued to make himself useful in Palestine, or he might have rejoined the Cusacks, who had moved their mobile posts back into a safer zone on the other side of the palace. But his instincts now all pointed along another course of action. Only a course that seemed to make any sense just then. He approached Art Cusack 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're springing up all around like thoughts of food in a famine. If anything will approach answering all problems, they will. When K.R.N.H. is as well able to put them into effect as anybody. So unless you've got some better suggestions. Art Cusack looked the sketches over shrewdly for half an hour. All right, Frankie 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? This Nelson 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'd 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 ones shops can turn them out fast. All they are, mostly, is just steline, 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 Nelson 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. Even of Nance Cottis, Nelson 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, and was swamped with injured from Palestine. Nelson 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 stilling 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? Wunderlust. The adventurous, distant drive, part of any wild-blooded vagabond mail. 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. It 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. In the era of prospecting and exploration in the asteroid belt seemed destined soon to come to an end in any event. Frank Nelson'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 Nelson had ever performed in space, the jockeying of a bub from its blast-off drum, inflating it, rigging it, spinning it for centrifugal gravity, and fitting in its internal appointments. Nelson looked at the fifty odd stilling 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. Nelson had always thought that bubs were beautiful, and these were still bubs, but they were bigger, safer, more complicated. A bantam-sized hopper named Hank Jans spoke from beside Nelson as they floated near each other. Pop! Zizzle! 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. Hank Nelson 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 will it be, Nance? Maybe we can feel a little shorter 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 palestin-convalescence 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. As 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 Cusack. First phase about completed art, finger to thumb, in spite of the troubles elsewhere, so let it roll. Art Cusack'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 Cusack'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 sterling rings, storage and factory of post three. Also there were over a hundred men and thirty-three wives, many of them were palestin refugees. Nelson helped Joe through the airlock of the ring that he had hoped would be his and Nance's. Bubtown, 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 their 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 a sudden a 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 it once. Might as well gamble, he growled from the distance. Space and terrestrial forces are still poised. If we lose it 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 Tovys 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, doubt was sneaking up on Frank Nelson, 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 earth days later that another member of the old bunch showed up. I had the bub 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 any more? 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. You left the back door unlatched for you two and two, Nelson laughed, and you crept in quietly. Swell to see you. Sitting showered and in fresh clothes on Frank Nelson's sun-deck, any changes in two and two veins were less evident than one might have supposed. His eyes had a much sureer, farther look, otherwise he was still the same large hulk, with much the same lugubrious humor. Mercury's OK, Frankie, he said. About four thousand people are living in the twilight zone already. I could show you pictures, but I guess you know. Ho-farms in little towns under Stilleen. Made me some dough doing lots of the building. Could have been more, but who cares? Oh, Gimp, he'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 going to be, huh? With some additions, sure. Factories, supermarkets, cornfields, pig farms, parks, playgrounds, beauty parlors, all encased in Stilleen, and orbiting in clusters around the sun, huh? Hey, Pop, some small fry, we'll say to his old man. Give me ten bucks, please, for an ice cream cone down at the soda-bub. And his mom will say to his dad, George, dear, is the Iano car nice and shiny. I have to go play bridged with the girls over in Nelsonville. 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. Figured out to the end, Frankie, no planets left. All the materials in them used up to build these bub towns. They'll be just big, shining, magnificent rings made up of countless little floating Stilleen houses all around the sun. A zillion people, maybe more. Gardens, flowers, everything beautiful. Everybody free to move anywhere. Uh-huh. 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. Nelson burst out laughing at last. You sly slob. Anyhow, that extreme is Millennium's 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 in hope. Me? I'm a bit bored with adventure, just at the present. So am I, two and two, affirmed fervently. Now, have you got me a job, Frankie? There'll be something, Nelson 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 caught us arrived a week later, with a group of recent Palestine convalescents. Some signs came with her. But the fact got lost, and she hugged Nelson quickly there in the dwelling he had set up with the thought that it would be their home. At once she went on a feminine, exploring expedition of the Prefabs interior and its new gleaming appointments. Kitchen, living room, sun-deck, Nelson'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're 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. Guess 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. She held her close. Sure, Nancy 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, some time. 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. Where there were other bub towns. There were policing space forces, too. But for millions of miles around this cluster of eight hundred prefabs and the numerous larger bubs that served them were all alone. Nelson looked out from his sun-deck and saw dangerous contrasts. The worst, perhaps, was the spherical bubble of Steline. Inside it was a great globe of water surrounded by air, a colossal dew-drop. Inside it a man and two small boys, no doubt father and sons from Palestine, were swimming, horsing around, having as well time, only a few feet from nothing. Nelson spoke softly into his radio-phone. Leland closed down the pool. End of Chapter 8, Part 1