soul. Narrowing domesticity had won a battle.

Except, of course, that what he had already said to Alf Neely and
Friends was sufficient to start the Juggernaut that they represented,
rolling. As he picked himself and Rose up from the ground, he saw that
the miners were grimly donning their space-suits, in preparation to
their coming out of the ship to lay him low.

"Oh--tired, hunh, Pun'kin-head?" Alf Neely growled. "It don't matter,
Dutch. We'll finish you off without you liftin' a finger!"

In John Endlich the rage of intolerable insults still seethed. But there
was no question, now, of outcome between it and the brassy taste of
danger on his tongue. He knew that even knuckling down, and changing
from man to worm to take back his fighting words, couldn't do any good.
He felt like a martyr, left with his family in a Roman arena, while the
lions approached. His butchery was as good as over....

Reprieve came presumably by way of the good-sense of the pilot of the
space ship. The hold-port was closed abruptly by a mechanism that could
be operated only from the main control-board. The rocket jets of the
craft emitted a single weak burst of flame. Like a boulder grown agile
and flighty, the ship leaped from the landscape, and arced outward
toward the stars, to curve around the asteroid and disappear behind the
scene's jagged brim. The craft had gone to make its next and final
stop--among the air-domes of the huge mining camp on the other side of
Vesta--the side of torn rocks and rich radioactive ores.

But before the ship had vanished from sight, John Endlich heard Alf
Neely's grim promise in his helmet radiophones: "We'll be back tonight,
Greenhorn. Lots of times we work night-shift--when it's daytime on this
side of Vesta. We'll be free. Stick around. I'll rub what's left of you
in the dust of your claim!"

Endlich was alone, then, with the fright in his wife's eyes, the
squalling of his children, and his own abysmal disgust and worry.

For once he ceased to be a gentle parent. "Bubs! Evelyn!" he snapped.
"Shud-d-d--up-p-p!..."

The startled silence which ensued was his first personal victory on
Vesta. But the silence, itself, was an insidious enemy. It made his ears
ring. It made even his audible pulsebeats seemed to ache. It bored into
his nerves like a drill. When, after a moment, Rose spoke quaveringly,
he was almost grateful:

"What do we do, Johnny? We've still got to do what we're supposed to do,
don't