the two men
watched the scene below for a few moments. Then one of the men around
the table raised his head, revealing a thin face, with watery blue eyes
and a straggly goatee.

The two men inside the wall gasped as one man.

"_Father!_"

The single loud word was torn from Dark's throat without his volition,
without his actually realizing he had spoken.

The heads of the men in the room jerked up at the cry, and they looked
around and at each other, with puzzled expressions. Old Beard clapped a
firm hand over Dark's mouth and hissed in his ear:

"Fool! Let's get out of here!"

As quietly as possible, they made their way back. Through the ventilator
behind them came the murmur of querulous voices.

When they had climbed back down the stairs and, with Happy and Shadow,
made their way back through the fissure, Old Beard fixed penetrating
eyes on Dark and said:

"I told you to keep quiet up there! What was that exclamation all
about?"

"It's something very strange," murmured Dark, his face thoughtful and
bemused. "But you evidently recognized that man, too. Who is he?"

"Yes, I know him very well," answered Old Beard, with deep bitterness in
his tone. "That's Goat Hennessey. But that's the first time I've seen
him in twenty-five years. He must have just come here recently."

"Goat Hennessey? I heard of him when I was in Mars City."

"Goat Hennessey was one of my most trusted friends," said Old Beard. "If
you bear my earlier memories, I'm surprised you didn't recognize him as
Goat Hennessey, too."

"I recognized him as someone else," said Dark in a low voice.

"We worked together," went on Old Beard. "I was a leader in the effort
to solve our problem through extrasensory perception, and he was the
major scientist in the group attempting to solve it by genetic change.
We worked together and we went into the desert together with the others
when the government banned our experiments.

"But Goat was the man who sold out. He betrayed us to the
government--for what price I don't know. And when government agents
raided us and broke up our organization and captured me, Goat Hennessey
kidnapped my young and pregnant wife, and I never saw her again.

"I'm glad Goat Hennessey is here, because now I can get to him. And when
I can reach him, I'm going to kill him. I'd like to kill him as slowly
and painfully as he killed the heart inside of me!"

As Old Beard spoke these last words, his face was tense, his fists
cl