thing--mayhem. Whether the latter is to be inflicted on
the attacked or the attacker remains the only question mark.

"I'll get you, Alf Neely!" Endlich snarled. "Right now! And I'll get all
the damned, hell-bitten rest of you guys!"

Endlich was hardly lacking in vigor, himself. Like a squat but
streamlined fighting rooster, rendered a hundred times more agile by the
puny gravity, he would have reached the hold-port threshold in a single
lithe skip--had not Rose, despairing, grabbed him around the middle to
restrain him. Together they slid several yards across the dried-out
surface of the asteroid.

"Don't, Johnny--please don't!" she wailed.

Her begging could not have stopped him. Nor could her physical
interference--for more than an instant. Nor could his conscience, nor
his recent determination to keep out of trouble. Not the certainty of
being torn limb from limb, and not hell, itself, could have held him
back, anymore, then.

Yet he was brought to a halt. It certainly wasn't cowardice that
accomplished this. No.

Suddenly there was no laughter among the miners. But in a body they
arose from their traveler-seats aboard the ship. Suddenly there was no
more humor in their faces beyond the view-ports. They were itching to be
assaulted. The glitter in Alf Neely's small eyes was about as reassuring
as the glitter in the eyes of a slightly prankish gorilla.

"We're waitin' for yuh, Mr. Civilization," he rumbled softly.

* * * * *

After that, all space was still--electrified. The icy stars gleamed in
the black sky. The shrunken sun looked on. And John Endlich saw beyond
his own murder. To the thought of his kids--and his wife--left alone out
here, hundreds of millions of miles from Earth, and real law and
order--with these lugs. These guys who had been starved emotionally, and
warped inside by raw space. Coldness crawled into John Endlich's guts,
and seemed to twist steel hooks there, making him sick. The silence of a
vacuum, and of unthinkable distances, and of ghostly remains which must
be left on this fragment of a world that had blown up, maybe fifty
million or more years ago, added its weight to John Endlich's feelings.

And for his family, he was scared. What hell could not have
accomplished, became fact. His almost suicidal impulse to inflict
violence on his tormenters was strangled, bottled-up--brutally
repressed, and left to impose the pangs of neurosis on his tormented