* * * * *

The night air was cold against Ransome's cheek when he went out an
hour later, surrounded by Mytor's men. Yaroto's greenish moon was
overhead now, but its pale light did not help him to see more clearly.
It only made shadows in every doorway and twisting alley.

Mytor's car was only a few feet away but before he could reach it he
was shoved aside by one of the Venusian's guards. At the same moment
the night flamed with the blue-yellow glare from a dozen blasters.
Ransome raised his own weapon, staring into the shadows, seeking his
attackers.

"That's our job. Get in," said one of the guards, wrenching open the
car door.

Then the firing was over as suddenly as it had begun. The guards
clustered at the opening of an alley down the street. Mytor's driver
sat impassively in the front seat.

When the guards returned one of them thrust something at Ransome,
something hard and cold. He glanced at it. A long knife.

There was no need to read the inscription on the hilt. He knew it by
heart.

"Death to him who defileth the Bed of the Dark One. Life to the Temple
and City of Darion."

Once Ransome would have pocketed the knife as a kind of grim keepsake.
Now he only let it fall to the floor.

In the brief, ghostly duel just over he had neither seen nor heard his
attackers. That added, somehow, to the horror of the thing.

He shrugged off the thought, turning his mind to the details of the
plan by which he would save his life.

It was quite simple. Ransome had been in space long enough to know
where the crewmen went on a strange world. Half an hour later he sat
with a gunner from the _Hawk of Darion_, in one of the gaudy pleasure
houses clustered on the fringe of the city near the spaceport and the
desert beyond.

"Will you take the note to the Captain's woman?"

The man squirmed, avoiding Ransome's ice-blue stare.

"Captain killed the last man who looked at his woman," the gunner
muttered sullenly. "Flogged him to death."

"I'm not asking you to look at her," Ransome reminded him.

The gunner sat looking at the stack of Mytor's money piled on the
table before him. A woman drifted over.

"Go away," Ransome said, without raising his eyes. He added another
bill to the stack.

"Let me see the note before I take it," the gunner demanded.

"It would mean nothing to you." Ransome pushed a half-empty bottle
toward the man, poured him out another drink.

The man's han