ngle that rimmed the port. There only the cunning
and strong could live. Ray-guns were the surest law. Modern scientific
progress stood side by side with murderous lawlessness as old as man
himself.

The hell town had grown with the strides of a giant, rising rapidly from
a muddy street of _tio_ shacks to a small cosmetropolis. She was
essentially a place of contrasts. Two of the big Earth companies had
modern space-ship hangars there, well-lighted, well-equipped, but under
their very noses was a festering welter of dark, rutted byways extending
all the way to the comparative orderliness of the short, narrow Street
of the Merchants, itself flanked by the drunken bedlam of the Street of
the Sailors. It can be understood why these men who flew, who needed a
whole solar system for elbow room, disdained setting to order the measly
few acres of dirt they stopped at, but it is a mystery why, when used to
living through vast leagues of space, they endured such narrow streets
and cluttered houses. Probably, tired from their long cramped cruises,
impatient for their fling, they just didn't care a whoop.

The whole jumble that was this famous space port rested in the heart of
Satellite III's primeval jungle.

* * * * *

Tall electric-wired fences girdled Port o' Porno to keep the jungle
back. It was equivalent to a death sentence to pass unarmed outside
them; the monstrous shapes that lived and fought in the jungle's swampy
gloom saw to that. Hideous nightmare shapes they were, some reptilian
and comparable only to the giants that roamed Earth in her prehistoric
ages. Eating, fighting, breeding in the humid gloominess of the
vegetation shrouded swamps, their bellows and roars sometimes at night
thundered right through Porno, a reminder of Nature yet untamed.
Occasionally, in the berserk ecstasy of the mating season, they hurled
their house-high bodies at the guarding fences; and then there was panic
in the town, and many lives ripped out before a barrage of rays drove
the monsters back.

They were not the only inhabitants native to Satellite III. Deep
underground, seldom seen by men, lived a race of man-mole creatures,
half human in intelligence, blind from their unlit habitat, but larger
than a man and stronger; fiercer, too, when cornered. Their numbers no
one knew, but their bored tunnels, it had been found, constituted a
lower layer of life over the whole satellite.

Probably mo