Piacentelli. "Send a Decontamination Vehicle after us, Lieutenant. No telling what those Stinker devils have cooked up with Piacentelli." Back to Hartford: "You're in command of the Guard, I'll observe and offer suggestions."

"Tain-HUT!" Platoon Sergeant Felix saluted the scarlet-clad colonel and the blue-clad lieutenant as they stepped from the elevator into the electric atmosphere of the Hot Gut. The Guard snapped to, their plastic-packaged Dardick-rifles at order arms.

"Take 'em out, Felix," Hartford said. "Two personnel carriers, a .50-caliber m.g.-mounted jeep fore and aft. You and the colonel take the rear jeep; I'll lead. Have the men unbag their weapons the instant we're outside. Any questions?"

"No, sir."

"Move out," Hartford said.

IV

The squads peeled off and double-timed down the Hot Gut. Man by man they dipped into the Wet Gut for their swim outside. They'd been drilled for speed in exiting. If the Regiment were needed outside, the Syphon could become a literal bottle-neck. As the last squad splashed into the antiseptic solution, Hartford turned to Colonel Nef. "Sir, I have a question," he said.

"Hurry it up, Mister."

"Isn't this a bit extreme, sir? We're going out to take one man out of a primitive village where we're not even sure he's in trouble. And we're carrying enough firepower to blast into an armed city."

"I don't trust the Gooks," the colonel said. "Their bucolic way of life may be a fraud, designed to lull us into complacency. Tonight we may discover that they're plotting the overthrow of the Garrison, using weapons and tactics they've kept secret. I hope such is the case, Lieutenant. It would give us adequate cause to wipe the Stinkers off Kansas and make this as clean a world as Titan."

"Sir...."

"Move, Mister," Nef said. "Piacentelli has been in Stinkerville for fifty minutes. Let's get him out."

The four trucks roared down the plateau toward the Indigenous Hominid hamlet at its foot. When the first Axenite Pioneers landed on the planet, bacteria-free as all men in space had to be, they'd set up camp near the spot where First Regiment Barracks now stood. They saw the fields of sunflowers, grown for food and cloth, and heard the natives call the nearest 

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