"Stop it, for God's sake, stop it!" Piacentelli shouted, his unamplified voice coming from a smoke-filled alley. Hartford plunged into the dark smoke—a tear-gas grenade had set afire some of the sun-flower-paper room dividers, and kindled with them a row of wooden houses—and shouted for Piacentelli. A blabrigar, as blind in the smoke as the men, blundered against Hartford's helmet. "Yuke! Yuke!" the bird screamed, grabbing hold of the transceiver-antenna that horned up from the helmet. Hartford grabbed the blabrigar and tossed it up above the melee. He heard it flying in circles, searching for its Stinker owners, chanting the last words they'd said to it: "Yuke! Yuke! Yuke!"—"Go!"

Everything was burning. Even through the safety-suit Hartford suffered from the heat. He retracted his i-r goggles, useless in all this smoke. Nef called. "I'm coming in, Mister." Hartford acknowledged. Great. One more blind man wandering in the smoke was what he needed.

He tongued his bitcher loud and shouted; "Gabe! Come this way. Gabe! Gabe!" The heat was intolerable. He positive-pressured his suit, ballooning the fabric away from his skin. How hot, he wondered, would the rounds packed into the butt of his Dardick-pistol have to get before they exploded?

As though in answer, a snap of gunfire sounded from the fog ahead. Some meat-head had spooked. There were more shots as other troopers fired at their fantasies. "Cease fire, damn it!" Nef shouted over the command-circuit. "If anyone was hurt by you idiots, I'll court-martial every man with smoke in his gun barrel." Hartford hurried on. Ahead of him in the alley he heard Colonel Nef's voice, uncharacteristically soft. "Hartford, join me. I've found Piacentelli." Ahead in the smoke was a pinkness: the scarlet-suited commander kneeling above a body on the bricks.

Here in the open of planetary air, available to all the microscopic beasts of Kansas, Piacentelli was wearing only Class B's; his sneakers, shorts and tee-shirt. The center of the shirt sopped blood from the bullet-hole that funneled into Axenite Lieutenant Piacentelli's chest.

Nef stood. "The Decontamination Vehicle should be standing by," he said. "Get Piacentelli outside. We may be able to save him." He sounded unhopeful.

Hartford draped his friend's body across his shoulder. The smoke was bad, but he'd memorized his course through it. The air sucked in through his filter was clean, but hot. His helmet steamed opaque. As he stumbled out, blind, but guided by the colonel's voice, two men came forward to take 

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