tended three hundred miles along the coast,
and sixty miles inland. And every day the progress continued. A large
percentage of the energy and resources of the world were devoted to that
essential expansion.

The reclam crews filled and sodded the sterile rock, planted binding
grasses, grain and trees, and diverted rivers to keep it fertile. When
there were no rivers to divert they blasted out springs and lakes in the
foothills to make their own. Biologists developed the necessary germ and
insect life from what they found in the sea. Where that failed, they
imported microorganisms from Earth.

Three rubber-tracked crawlers picked their way down from the mountains
until they joined the road passing the belt. They were loaded with ore
that would be smelted into metal for depleted Earth, or for other
colonies short of minerals. It was St. Martin's only export thus far.

Zarwell pulled his sun helmet lower, to better guard his hot, dry
features. The wind blew continuously on St. Martin's, but it furnished
small relief from the heat. After its three-thousand-mile journey across
scorched sterile rock, it sucked the moisture from a man's body,
bringing a membrane-shrinking dryness to the nostrils as it was breathed
in. With it came also the cloying taste of limestone in a worker's
mouth.

Zarwell gazed idly about at the other laborers. Fully three-quarters of
them were beri-rabza ridden. A cure for the skin fungus had not yet been
found; the men's faces and hands were scabbed and red. The colony had
grown to near self-sufficiency, would soon have a moderate prosperity,
yet they still lacked adequate medical and research facilities.

Not all the world's citizens were content.

Bergstrom was waiting in his office when Zarwell arrived that evening.

He was lying motionless on a hard cot, with his eyes closed, yet with
his every sense sharply quickened. Tentatively he tightened small
muscles in his arms and legs. Across his wrists and thighs he felt
straps binding him to the cot.

"So that's our big, bad man," a coarse voice above him observed
caustically. "He doesn't look so tough now, does he?"

"It might have been better to kill him right away," a second, less
confident voice said. "It's supposed to be impossible to hold him."

"Don't be stupid. We just do what we're told. We'll hold him."

"What do you think they'll do with him?"

"Execute him, I suppose," the harsh voice said matter-of-factly.
"They're probabl