in. While the symphony--the
all-girl symphony--had been playing its engagement at Triton's
make-shift music hall, Hardesty had visited the place three times.

"Well, it wasn't the music, sure as heck," he told his critic now. "Who
ever saw a hundred girls in one place at one time on Triton?"

The stevedore rolled his eyes and offered Pitchblend a suggestive
whistle. Hardesty booted him in the rump, and the stevedore had all he
could do to stop from falling into the kettle drum.

* * * * *

Just then a loud bell set up a lonely tolling and Pitchblend Hardesty
exclaimed: "Prison break!"

The bell could be heard all over the two-hundred square miles of
inhabitable Triton, under the glassite dome which enclosed the small
city, the spaceport, the immigration station for nearby Neptune and the
Interstellar Penitentiary. The bell hadn't tolled for ten years; the
last time it had tolled, Pitchblend Hardesty had been a newcomer on
Neptune's big moon. That wasn't surprising, for Interstellar
Penitentiary was as close to escape-proof as a prison could be.

"All right, all right," Pitchblend snapped. "Hurry up and get her
loaded."

"What's the rush?" one of the stevedores asked. "The gals ain't even
arrived from the hotel yet."

"I'll tell you what the rush is," Pitchblend declared as the bell tolled
again. "If you were an escaped prisoner on Triton, just where would you
head?"

"Why, I don't know for sure, Pitchblend."

"Then I'll tell you where. You'd head for the spaceport, fast as your
legs could carry you. You'd head for an out-going spaceship, because it
would be your only hope. And how many out-going spaceships are there
tonight?"

"Why, just two or three."

"Because all our business is in the daytime. So if the convict was smart
enough to get out, he'll be smart enough to come here."

"We got no weapons," the stevedore said. "We ain't even got a
pea-shooter."

"Weapons on Triton? You kidding? A frontier moon like this, the place
would be blasted apart every night. Interstelpen couldn't hold all the
disturbers of the peace if we had us some guns."

"But the convict--"

"Yeah," Pitchblend said grimly. "He'll be armed, all right."

Pitchblend rushed back to the manifest shed as the bell tolled a third
time. He got on the phone and called the desk of the Hotel Triton.

"Hardesty over at the spaceport," he said. "Loading foreman."

"Loading foreman?" The mild, antiseptic vo