g business,
their prices high between shipments on the spacers from the inner
worlds; bars and gambling houses stayed open all night; rooming houses
and restaurants and laundries displayed crude handlettered signs along
the streets.

Rynason pushed his way through a jostling crowd outside the door of a
bar. He was supposed to meet the head of his Survey team here--Rice
Manning, who had been pushing the survey as hard as he could since the
day they'd set foot on Hirlaj. Manning was hard and ambitious--a leader
of men, Rynason thought sardonically as he surveyed the tables in the
dim interior. The floor of the bar was a dirty plastic-metal alloy,
already scuffed and in places bloodstained. The tables were of the
cheap, light metals so common on the spacer-supplied worlds of the Edge,
and they wobbled.

The low-ceilinged room was crowded with men. Rynason didn't know many of
them by name, but he recognized a lot of the faces. The men of the Edge,
though they lacked money, education, often brains and usually ethics, at
least had the quality of distinctiveness: they didn't fit the half-dozen
convenient molds which the highly developed culture of the inner worlds
fitted over the more civilized citizens of the Terran Federation. These
men were too self-interested to follow the group-thoughts which
controlled the centers of empire, and the seams and wrinkles of their
faces stamped a rough kind of individuality even more visually upon
them.

Of them all, the man who was instantly recognizable in any crowd like
this was Rene Malhomme; Rynason immediately saw the man in one corner of
the room. He stood six and a half feet tall, heavily muscled and a bit
wild-eyed; his greying hair fell in disorder over his dirty forehead and
sprayed out over his ears. He was surrounded by laughing and shouting
men; Rynason couldn't tell from this distance whether he was engaged in
one of his usual heated arguments on religion or in his other avocation
of recounting stories of the women he had "converted". He waved a
black-lettered sign saying REPENT! over his head--but then, he always
did.

Rynason found Manning in the back, sitting under a cheap print of a
Picasso nude with cold light trained on it in typically bad taste. He
had a woman with him. Rynason recognized her--Mara Stephens, in charge
of communications and supplies for the survey team. She was a strange
girl, aloof but not hard, and she carried herself with a quiet dignity.
What w