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 hands were trembling with inner conflict as he measured the killing lash against the stack of yellow Yarotian kiroons, and the pleasures it would buy him. He drank, dribbling a little of the wine down his grimy chin, and then returned to the subject of seeing the note, with drunken persistence.

"I got to see it first."

"It's in a language you wouldn't—"

"Let him see it," a new voice cut in. "Translate it for him, Mr. Ransome."

t was a woman's voice, cold and contemptuous. Ransome looked up quickly, and at first he didn't recognize her. The gunner never took his eyes from the stack of kiroons on the table.

"Let him see how a man murders a woman to save his own neck."

"You're supposed to be dancing at Mytor's place," Ransome said. "That's your business; this is mine."

He closed his hand over the gunner's wrist as the man reached convulsively for the money, menaced now by the angry woman.

"Half now, the rest later." Ransome's eyes burned into the crewman's. The latter looked away. Ransome tightened his grip, and pain contorted the gunner's features.

"Look at me," Ransome said. "If you cross me you'll wish you could die by flogging."

The woman Mytor had called Irene was still standing by the table when the gunner had left with the note and his money.

"Aren't you going to ask me to sit down?"

"Certainly. Sit down."

"I'd like a drink."

She sipped her wine in silence and Ransome studied her by the flickering light of the