air-conditioning mechanic named Lawler said, almost in a whisper. "About twenty years old, hunh?"

"Eighteen," Bert Kraskow answered into his helmet-phones as he spread the youth's coat over the distorted face.

Old Stan Kraskow, metal-worker, was there, too. Bert's and Nick's dad. He was blubbering. There wasn't much that anybody could do for him. And for the other dead, there were other horrified mourners. Some of them had been half nuts from homesickness, and the sight of harsh, voidal stars, even before this tragedy had happened.

It was Lawler who first cut loose, cursing. He was a big, apish man, with a certain fiery eloquence.

"Damned, lousy, stinkin' obsolete equipment!" he snarled. "Breathe on it and it falls apart! Under old Bill Lauren, Space Colonists' Supply used to make good, honest stuff. I worked with it on Mars and the moons of Jupiter. But now look what the firm is turning out under Trenton Lauren, old Bill's super-efficient son! He was so greedy for quick profits in the new Titan colonization project, and so afraid of being scooped by new methods of making these fizzled-out worlds livable, that he didn't even take time to have his products decently inspected! And that, after not being able to recognize progress! Hell! Where is that dumb, crawlin' boob?"

There was a moment of silence. Then somebody muttered: "Speak of the devil!..."

ith eyes that had grown quietly wolfish, Bert Kraskow saw Trenton Lauren arrive at last from the administration dome. He was plump, maybe thirty-five, and somehow dapper even in a spacesuit. That he was here on Titan at all, and not in a pressurized settlement on Mars, or at the main office of his firm in Chicago, was a cocky gesture of bravado, a leaf torn from the book of his more worthy sire, and perhaps more particularly an attempt to counteract the consequences of his bad business judgment, personally.

The fear of one who sees how his haste and breed can be called punishable criminal negligence, was in his face. The things that had been human, sprawled stiff before him, accusing him. But the worst was the presence of those grim, silent men, who might add him forcibly to the death-list. That moment held crystallized in it the conflict of an urge to win vast profits, with the payment in human lives that had been exacted this time.

Near-dead Titan was the present step in mankind's outward march of colonial dominion toward the 

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