sure he had the power to beat off any attack.

The survivors were handicapped in only one respect: all the food on the post had been destroyed with the commissary. However, Tchassen did not consider that a serious problem. He was sure they could reach the coast by the following morning.

Shortly before three o'clock—nearly two hours after the supply robot crashed—the survivors left the station. They headed west on a highway unused since the conquest. Tchassen and Tynia sat together in back. The Captain kept all the weapons. Briggan's warning couldn't be ignored; one of the other three might be an Earthman. Unless they faced an actual emergency, Tchassen did not intend to let any of the others carry arms.

The sedan lumbered over cracked and crumbling asphalt. The tireless rims made a nerve-wracking din that prevented all conversation. Tchassen was unused to any sort of surface transportation. The civilized galaxy had outgrown it centuries ago; the flight beam, safe and inexpensive, was universally used. With equal ease the beam could move a one-man runabout or a cargo freighter over any distance—a few feet or the light years gapping between planets. Twice Tchassen revised his estimate of the sedan's speed. At this rate, it would be twenty-four hours or more before they reached the coast. That made their shortage of food far more significant.

Through the shattered side window Tchassen scanned the arid soil. It was remotely possible that they might stumble across a native food cache, but he couldn't count on that. He wasn't even sure the caches existed, although the theory was a basic factor in the occupation policy.

The galactic council of scientists estimated that one-tenth of the Earth people had never been rounded up and resettled in the prison compounds; bandit raids increased that number steadily. How the rebels survived no one knew, for any large scale food production would have been spotted by the patrols and wiped out. One or two crackpot theorists said the bandits fed themselves by hunting wild game, but that was absurd. It was common fact throughout the civilized galaxy that any culture which evolved as far as the Power Age would, in the normal process of growth, eliminate all planetary animal life. The accepted explanation was the food cache theory. According to it, the Earthmen—sometime after the conquest and before the prison compounds were set up—had raided their own cities and hidden the packaged food in remote mountain areas. The supply was decidedly limited. When it was gone, the rebels faced 

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