was down to a lone grenade, but that was
poor strategy. Now he must withdraw, make Neilson think him injured or
dead, and trap him in turn.

They were the last of the belligerents here within Earth Satellite. For
two months, since what would be May on Earth, they had carried on this
mad duel. Of the other eighteen who had started the war in November of
the preceding year, only four had survived their wounds. The United
Nations' supervisory seconds had transported them to their homes in
Andilia and in Baryt....

Treb wormed his way as noiselessly as possible into the undergrowth,
sprawling at last in the shelter of an earthen mound thirty feet from
the grenade's raw splash. He waited--and thought.

Memories can be unpleasant. He could see his comrades of the three
battles as they had fallen, wounded or gray with death. Too many of them
had he helped bury. He remembered the treasured photos.

The draining wound in his right forearm throbbed....

The enemy dead too. He had killed several of them--more than his share,
he thought savagely. They too were young despite the ragged beards some
of them cultivated.

Treb felt like an old man. And he _was_ old. He was twenty-nine. He had
a son also named Gram, a boy of five, and little Alse, who was two. Had
little Alse's mother lived he would never have volunteered for this
third United Nations' war duel.

He would have been with her in the mountain valley of Krekar working
hard, and gradually erasing those other ugly episodes here on Earth
Satellite One....

Minutes crawled by, lumped together into hours. Birds sang in the trees
so laboriously maintained here in the satellite's disk-shaped heart.
And, a hundred feet overhead, where the true deck of the man-made island
in space began, other birds nested in the girders.

An ant crawled over Treb's earth-stained hand and passed under his
outstretched carbine's barrel.

There was a movement in the clustering trees off to his right. Neilson
had circled and was coming in from an opposite angle. Treb thumbed off
the safety and waited.

An earth-colored helmet, with a trace of long pale hair around its rim,
came slowly into view. Could be a dummy, Neilson was clever at rigging
them to draw fire. And he had exactly two cartridges. After that it
would be his three grenades, his two-foot needle-knife, that doubled as
a bayonet, and the steel bow he had contrived from a strip of spring
steel.

He held his fire. The trees mad