through the valley of desert that was the Hot Gut, and down into the birth-canal that was the Wet Gut, to emerge in the evening air of Kansas. The motor sergeant, stationed outside to guard the vehicles, saluted. "Going for a walk, sir?" he asked.

"If you'll lend me a jeep, I'll go for a ride," Hartford said. "I'd like to see how things look, down in the village."

"It's against regulations, but if you'll have the truck back by dark I can let it go, sir."

"Thank you, Sergeant." Hartford returned the salute and drove off downhill, toward Kansannamura.

What would happen to Hartford-the-deserter? he wondered. At best, he'd be booted out of the troopers and grounded on Titan, or Luna or one of the M'Bwene planets, to serve the rest of his life as a paper-pusher, the bureaucratic equivalent of an endless Kitchen Police. At worst, he'd be exiled to Earth.

That meant exposure to bacteria, a gradual contamination till he'd been exposed to the full dirtiness in which earthlings daily lived, till he'd equipped himself with antibodies and a Stinker's immune-response.

The Service Police would be after him soon. Once out of sight of the Barracks, he turned his jeep off the road, onto one of the numberless paths used by camelopard riders on their trips between Stinker villages. He was headed upgrade, now, toward the mountains. On either side of the jeep were the fields of sunflowers, silent in the twilight calm. In a few moments the cool winds from the sea would flow into the land, stirring the billions of heart-shaped sunflower-leaves into the whisper that filled the evening and early-morning hours of Kansas.

His heart filled with hope and hopelessness, feeling like a happy suicide, Hartford sang to himself as the sunflower heads and leaves tattooed against his windshield. Pioneers! O Pioneers he sang, the anthem of the Axenites, the fellowship he was leaving forever:

The crunching of the jeep over the narrow track, the whipping of the plants against the vehicle and his singing all combined to drown out whatever noise it was the girl might have made. Hartford didn't see her till the jeep, rearing like a startled pony, climbing the flank of the camelopard the girl rode, tossed him into a tangle of green stalks and golden flowers.

VII

The riding camelopard bleated only a moment and was dead, its great neck broken by the jeep's charge. The girl, 

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