stank in Venus.

An hour later he sat morosely in a tiny tavern he had long known, hidden up the blind alley known as Artemis Lane. For half a century it had been familiar to him as the hangout for his kind.

"So you see how it is," the bartender was concluding. "At this rate there won't be any more. With all the old-timers dead or in the Swamp, how in hell can I keep running. No sir, this joint is for sale—for what it'll bring. Drink up and have another."

Captain Karns took the proffered drink from the grizzled tavern-keeper, but despite its cheering nature—for it was purest "comet-dew"—he took it glumly. Never in all his long and active life had he heard so much evil news at one sitting. Another of his old pals had come to grief, and all because he had touched at Mercury. Mercury, it appeared, was poison to all his tribe. The record was too consistent to be accounted for by coincidence. Coincidents do not occur in strings.

"And what makes it stink all the worse," persisted the indignant bartender, bitterly, "not a damn finger is lifted to stop the flow of trilibaine. The town is lousy with it. Half these natives stay hopped up all the time."

"I thought the Federals had cleaned that up ten years ago," commented Hank Karns.

"It's back," was the laconic retort.

Hank Karns said nothing. The fact that three of his buddies were languishing in the malarial swamps of Venus, continually subject to the indignities of brutal guards was uppermost in his mind. And besides that, two others—Bill Ellison and Jed Carter—had died on Mercury when their ships mysteriously blew up on the take-off. That, too, had an especial significance, for those two were the only members of the trader tribe who had any sort of reputation as fire-eaters. In their youth, of course, all of them had been bolder and more truculent, but as they gained in experience they learned that there is more to be gained by soft words than bluster. If Hank was to secure the release of his friends it must be by guile, the use of a cunning superior to that employed by their common enemies.

If he was to secure! There was no if about it. He must. For it was Bob Merrill and Ben Wilkerson who had once rescued him, Hank Karns, from an even more deadly situation. More than twenty years ago that had been, on far-off Io, and Hank Karns winced at the memory of it. On that occasion he had, through the machinations of the notorious Von 

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