that big lunkhead.... You ain't kiddin', Muir. I was glad to see his
face splatter like a rotten tamata...."

Okay--fine. It was good to know you had some sensible guys on your side.
But what good was it, when the camp as a whole was boiling over from its
internal troubles? There were more than enough roughnecks to do a mighty
messy job--fast.

Panting with tension, Endlich swooped down before his greenhouse, and
dragged Neely inside through the airlock. For a fleeting instant the
sights and sounds and smells that impinged on his senses, as he opened
his face-window once more, brought him a regret. The rustle of corn, the
odor of greenery, the chicken voices--there was home in all of this.
Something pastoral and beautiful and orderly--gained with hard work. And
something brought back--restored--from the remote past. The buzzing of
the tay-tay bug was even a real echo from that smashed yet undoubtedly
once beautiful world of antiquity.

But these were fragile concerns, beside the desperate question of the
immediate safety of Rose and the kids.... Already cries and shouts and
comments were coming faintly through his helmet phones again:

"Get the yokel! Get the bum!... We'll fix his wagon good...."

The pack was on the way--getting closer with every heartbeat. Never in
his life had Endlich experienced so harrowing a time as this; never, if
by some miracle he lived, could he expect another equal to it.

To stand and fight, as he would have done if he were alone, would mean
simply that he would be cut down. To try the peacemaking of appeasement,
would have probably the same result--plus, for himself, the dishonor of
contempt.

So, where was there to turn, with grim, unanswering blankness on every
side?

* * * * *

John Endlich felt mightily an old yearning--that of a fundamentally
peaceful man for a way to oppose and win against brutal, overpowering
odds without using either serious violence or the even more futile
course of supine submission. Here on Vesta, this had been the issue he
had faced all along. In many ages and many nations--and probably on many
planets throughout the universe--others had faced it before him.

To his straining and tortured mind the trite and somewhat mocking
answers came: Psychology. Salesmanship. The selling of respect for one's
self.

Ah, yes. These were fine words. Glib words. But the question, "How?" was
more bitter and derisive than ever.

Still,