The crash had caused a small avalanche. Rubble littered the smooth width of the runway. Of the spaceboat, there was nothing to be seen but a scar on the mountainside.

John Bridge and the two servants had vanished.

"That crazy old fool," said Walter Pellinger. "I might have known he'd mess things up."

"It wasn't him," Gillian Murray replied. "I think it was the servants. I'm sure I heard him shout a warning at them."

"You think! You think!" Walter Pellinger shook his head vigorously from side to side. His ears were still ringing from the blast. "He's dead, Miss Murray. You hear me? He's dead! He doesn't need a champion now!"

Gillian Murray flushed. "Why, you ungrateful—"

"Shut up, both of you!" said Jason Tarsh angrily. "Can't you see there's work to be done? We've got to clear the runway."

Curtis Delman left the veranda rail and came toward them. "And just how do you propose to do that, Mr. Tarsh?" he asked quietly.

All of them looked at the lawyer in amazement. Jason Tarsh laughed derisively.

"Listen to him!" he exclaimed. "The Great Man! Wants to know how you remove a few small stones!"

"You damned idiot!" said Delman savagely. "Use your eyes! Why were this house and the storage sheds prefabricated? Just for the hell of it? Dozens of useless trips when you could build what you wanted from rock? Until today, there wasn't a loose pebble in this godforsaken place! Didn't that strike you as odd? Well, didn't it?"

Tarsh made no reply.

The lawyer moved back to the veranda rail. "There!" he said, pointing at a near-lying stone the size of a tennis ball. "Go ahead, try your strength. Throw it over the side!"

Uncertainly, Jason Tarsh walked into the open. They watched him as he bent down to pick up the small purple lump. For nearly a minute, he strained and tugged at the dead, unyielding weight in front of him. Then, slowly, he straightened up and returned to the veranda.

"You're right," he said grudgingly. "I couldn't lift it."

Delman nodded. "Considering it's more than ten times the weight of lead, that's not surprising."

"Anyhow, there's one consolation," said Jason Tarsh. "We weren't on that spaceboat."

The lawyer regarded him with pity. "No, we weren't," he said, "but whether it's a consolation remains to be seen."

"What are you driving at?" demanded Walter Pellinger. "They'll send a rescue party. They must know there's something wrong."

"Oh, yes," Delman agreed. "But they don't know what and we can't tell them. And, even if they did know, what could they do?" He began to stroll up and down the veranda. "As far as they're concerned, Ross hasn't reported to Algon. Perhaps his transmitter failed. Perhaps he blew up in space. There are plenty of possibilities. If they treat the matter as an emergency, the relief boat may get here in twenty-eight days instead of thirty. But it can't land and it can't hover, so what good is it to us?"

"Now wait, Delman. You know the reputation of Rejuvenal Enterprises. A company like that can't afford to take a risk. They'll send for a patrol ship—"

"And those patrol ships are equipped with heli-cars," Tarsh interjected. "They can launch a couple and pick us up in no time. It's not difficult."

Pellinger nodded in agreement. "There you are. And Jason ought to know; he's spent most of his life dodging them."

Delman looked at Tarsh with distaste. "I remember now. You were the man who shipped girls to Mercury and got run in under Section 7 of the White Slavery Act. Ten years, wasn't it?"

"That's right," Jason Tarsh answered, "but there's no need to be nasty about it. Just fulfilling the old commercial custom of supply and demand." His thin lips broke into a smile. "Know what they used to call me in the camps? 'The Miner's Best Friend.' Nice of them, eh?"

"Was it? They gave the same name to their canaries in the old days—and most of those were killed by fire-damp. But to get back to your mythical patrol ship—where do you expect it to come from? You know as well as I do, they keep to the main spaceways. We're tucked away in a remote corner of the Galaxy. There's one chance in a thousand that a patrol ship is within forty-five days of here."

The color drained from Walter Pellinger's face. "Why forty-five?" he whispered.

The lawyer paused before replying. They were grouped around him in a half-circle, three frightened people waiting for an answer, yet knowing in their hearts what that answer would be.

He shrugged. "I should have thought it was obvious," he said. "Of course, I've no wish to alarm you and there is a method that might get us out of here, but we've got to face the facts. I was the only one among you whose legs had already begun to fail, so it's safe to assume I'm the oldest inhabitant. In forty-five days, I shall be ten—the rest of you will be less—and I can't guarantee to look after you any longer than that." He fell silent, allowing the implication to sink in.

"Seven million dollars!" cried Walter Pellinger. "I've paid seven million dollars just to die!" He began to laugh hysterically.

"Stop it, you fool!" Jason Tarsh caught him by the shoulders and began to shake him violently. "You've paid seven million dollars to die young. Why, you ought to be tickled pink. Remember the slogan of Galactic Stores—'Originality is the Test of Taste!'"

Gillian Murray seized the lawyer's hand. "Curtis, you said something about a method."

He pointed at the emergency hangar over on the far side. "There's a lifeboat in there. It may have been damaged by the blast, so don't pin your hopes on it. But if we can shift the loose stones and get the doors open, we'll soon know."

Arm in arm, they walked across the landing strip.

Twice the relief boat shot low over the runway, sweeping round in a gigantic circle. Then it changed course and climbed steeply into the stratosphere. They watched it disappear out of sight—the last link with the world they knew.

In the center of the landing strip, a dense column of smoke billowed up from a pile of smoldering moss—a warning that no pilot could fail to observe. In the stillness, it rose in a tall spiral, twisting and turning, signaling to the winds.

"You should've let it land." Walter Pellinger was almost in tears; he blinked miserably.

Delman had never pictured him like this, small, myopic, with fair hair and sloping shoulders. The structure of his eyes had changed during the intervening weeks and the contact lenses he'd worn until recently were quite useless to him. Now, at twenty-one, he was half-blind and of little practical help to them.

"They didn't stand a chance," the lawyer replied.

"Oh, but they did! On the Law of Probability, they had one in sixty-seven—and our lives are worth a thousand of theirs."

"Yes, I know. Our lives are essential to humanity. You've said it all before and I still disagree with you."

"Have I? I don't remember."

"You have. But it doesn't matter. Come on back. We've got to clear those stones. There aren't many left."

As he strode toward the hangar, the lawyer knew that the days were running short. True, the launching ramp was intact and one door of the hangar was already open; but it would take at least a week to remove the chunks of rejuvenite blocking the remaining door. Tarsh and himself had done most of the heavy work. Yet even Tarsh, with all his feline strength, was beginning to tire. The constant effort to make use of every scrap of daylight was proving too much for them.

According to Gillian, the lifeboat was unharmed. Delman hadn't the time to inspect it properly. But the very position of the hangar, squeezed tight against the cliffside, had given it the best protection possible. No, if only they could remove those stones!

Delman exhaustedly picked up his discarded crowbar. He inserted the point under a slab of rejuvenite, thrust down and pried