ere was a bad sign. It was a catcall--literally--in
their helmet phones. "Meow!" It was falsely plaintive and innocuous. It
was a maliciously childish promise of trouble.

A little later, there was a chuckle. "Be cavalier, fellas. Watch
yourselves. I mean it." The tone had a strange intensity.

Ramos was on lookout, then, with eyes, radar and rifle. But the spoken
message had been too brief to get a fix on the direction of its radio
waves.

Ramos stiffened. With his phone power turned very low, he said,
"Frank--lots of people say 'Be cavalier', nowadays. But that includes
one of the old Bunch. The voice _might_ match, too."

"Uh-huh--Tiflin, the S.O.B.," Nelsen growled softly.

For ten hours, nothing else happened. Then there were some tiny
radar-blips, which could have indicated meteors. Nelsen and Ramos
changed the angle of the ion guides of their ionic motors to move their
bubbs from course, slightly, and dodge. During the first hour, they were
successful. But then there were more blips, in greater numbers.

Fist-sized chunks flicked through their vehicles almost simultaneously.
Air puffed out. Their rings collapsed under them--the sealer was no good
for holes of such size. At once, the continued spin of the bubbs wound
them, like limp laundry, into knots.

While Nelsen and Ramos were trying to untangle the mess, visible specks
appeared in the distance. They fired at them. Then something slammed
hard into the fleshy part of Nelsen's hip, penetrating his armor, and
passing on out, again. The sealing gum in the Archer's skin worked
effectively on the needle-like punctures, but the knockout drug had been
delivered.

As his awareness faded, Nelsen fired rapidly, and saw Ramos doing the
same--until his hand slapped suddenly at his side...

After that there was nothing, until, for a few seconds, Frank Nelsen
regained a blurred consciousness. He was lying, unarmored, inside a
bubb--perhaps his own, which had been patched and reinflated. All around
him was loud laughter and talk, the gurgle of liquor, the smells of
cooked meat, a choking concentration of tobacco smoke. Music blared
furiously.

"Busht out shummore!" somebody was hollering. "We got jackpot--the whole
fanshy works! I almost think I'm back in Sputtsberg--wherever hell that
is... But where's the wimmin? Nothing but dumb, prissy pitchers! Not
even _good_ pitchers...!"

There were guys of all sizes, mostly young, some armored, some not. One
with a pim