like a typist," objected Dudley.

"Oh, she wasn't," said Fisher, without elaborating. "I suppose if she was a little nuts, she was just a victim of the times. If it hadn't been for the sudden plunge into space, old Forgeron wouldn't have made such a pile of quick money. Then his granddaughter might have grown up in a normal home, instead of feeling she was just a target. If she'd been born a generation earlier or later, she might have been okay."

Dudley thought of the girl's pleading, her frenzy to escape her environment.

"So I suppose they dragged her back," he said. "Which loving relative won custody of the money?"

"That's still going on," Fisher told him. "It's tougher than ever, I hear, because she didn't go down with them. She talked somebody into letting her have a space-suit and walked out to the other side of the ringwall. All the way to the foothills on the other side."

Dudley stared at him in mounting horror. Fisher seemed undisturbed, but the pilot knew his friend better than that. It could only mean that the other had had three months to become accustomed to the idea. He was tenderly tucking away the stub of his cigar.

"Wasn't so bad, I guess," he answered Dudley's unspoken question. "She took a pill and sat down. Couple of rock-tappers looking for ore found her. Frozen stiff, of course, when her batteries ran down."

Dudley planted his elbows on the table and leaned his head in his hands.

"I should have taken her to Mars!" he groaned.

"She tried that on you, too?" Fisher was unsurprised. "No, Pete, it wouldn't have done any good. Would've lost you your job, probably. Like I said, she was born the wrong time. They won't have room for the likes of her on Mars for a good many years yet."

"So they hauled her back to Terra, I suppose."

"Oh, no. The relatives are fighting that out, too. So, until the judges get their injunctions shuffled and dealt, little Kathi is sitting out there viewing the Rockies and the stars."

He looked up at Dudley's stifled exclamation.

"Well, it's good and cold out there," he said defensively. "We don't have any spare space around here to store delayed shipments, you know. We're waitin' to see who gets possession."

Dudley rose, his face white. He was abruptly conscious once more of other conversations around them, as he stalked toward the exit.

"Hey," Fisher called after him, "that redhead, Eileen, told me to ask if you're taking her out tonight."

Dudley paused. He ran a hand over his face. "Yeah, I guess so," he said.

He went out, thinking, I should have taken her. The hell with regulations and Jack's theories about her being born too soon to be useful on Mars. She might have straightened out.

He headed for the tunnel that led to the loading domes.

Ericsson was a large crater, over a hundred miles across and with a beautifully intact ringwall, so it took him some hours, even with the tractor he borrowed, to go as far as the edge of the crater. Jack Fisher was waiting for him in the surface dome when he returned hours later.

"Welcome back," he said, chewing nervously on his cigar. "I was wondering if we'd have to go looking for you." He looked relieved.

"How did she look?" he asked casually, as Dudley climbed out of his space suit in the locker room.

Dudley peeled off the one-piece suit he had worn under the heating pads. He sniffed.

"Chee-rist, I need a shower after that.... She looked all right. Pretty cute, in a way. Like she was happy here on Luna."

He picked up towel and soap. "So I fixed it so she could stay," he added.

"What do you mean?"

He looked at Fisher. "Are you asking as a friend or as a cop?"

"What difference does it make?" asked Fisher.

"Well, I don't think you could have tracked me with your radar past the ringwall, so maybe I just went for a ride and a little stroll, huh? You didn't see me bring back a shovel, did you?"

"No," said Fisher, "I didn't see you