buster," he said, and reached for the brake. "I'll give you five minutes
to get into coveralls and helmet and out through the airlock."

Gordon needed less than that; he'd practiced all the way from Earth. The
transparent plastic of the coveralls went on easily enough, and his
hands found the seals quickly. He slipped his few possessions into a bag
at his belt, slid the knife into a spring holster above his wrist, and
picked up the bowl-shaped helmet. It seated on a plastic seal, and the
little air compressor at his back began to hum, ready to turn the thin
wisp of Mars' atmosphere into a barely breathable pressure. He tested
the Marspeaker--an amplifier and speaker in another pouch, designed to
raise the volume of his voice to a level where it would carry through
even the air of Mars.

The driver swore at the lash of sound, and grabbed for the airlock
switch.

* * * * *

Gordon moved down unpaved streets that zig-zagged along, thick with the
filth of garbage and poverty--the part of Mars never seen in the
newsreels, outside the shock movies. Thin kids with big eyes and sullen
mouths crowded the streets in their airsuits, yelling profanity. The
street was filled with people watching with a numbed hunger for any kind
of excitement.

It was late afternoon, obviously. Men were coming from the few bus
routes, lugging tools and lunch baskets, slumped and beaten from labor
in the atomic plants, the Martian conversion farms, and the industries
that had come inevitably where inefficiency was better than the high
prices of imports. The saloons were doing well enough, apparently, from
the number that streamed in through their airlock entrances. But Gordon
saw one of the bartenders paying money to a thickset person with an
arrogant sneer; he knew then that the few profits from the cheap beer
were never going home with the man. Storekeepers in the cheap little
shops had the same lines on their faces as they saw on those of their
customers.

Poverty and misery were the keynotes here, rather than the evil
half-world the drummer had babbled about. But to Gordon's trained eyes,
there was plenty of outright rottenness, too.

He grimaced, grateful that the supercharger on his airsuit filtered out
some of the smell which the thin air carried. He'd thought he was
familiar with human misery from his own Earth slum background. But there
was no attempt to disguise it here.

Ahead, Mother Corey's reare