hidden in the ashes and the ruins.

But for Anna Charles and Ron Leiccsen, this was the beginning of slavery. Within a hundred hours of their capture, Callistan heat-rays and shells and heat-bombs had put down the last resistance of the terrestrial colonists. They were all either chattels or dead—those who had not left Titan in time. The colony had possessed enough ships to remove everyone to Earth; but those that had not been used had fallen into Acharian hands.

The captives were herded into their barracks—the few half-ruined farm-buildings which still stood, after the conflict was over. They were put to work repairing damaged sun-towers, re-cultivating desolated fields, and helping the Callistan engineers erect the burnished metal structures which duplicated in architecture the buildings of that distant moon of Jupiter. Rapidly, Mado Achar—New Callisto—was being born. Bizarre cactiform vegetation, from the flowerless mother-world, began to sprout from spores, under the stimulus of the radiations from Bart Mallory's sun-ray towers.

And among the chattels, the whip was not spared. Frequently a slave, driven to vengeful mania by maltreatment and overwork, was blasted down with a heat pistol, by some furry, laughing overseer.

Ron Leiccsen saw Anna Charles only rarely, at assembly roll-call periods. Always she looked tired from endless hours in the fields. Still sweet and beautiful, though, even through the grime that covered her face and tattered clothing. Luckily Callistans were not attracted to Earth-women.

Once Ron got a chance to talk with her for a few minutes, in the shadow of a fire-charred warehouse.

"I can't stand it much longer, Ron," she whispered raggedly, her face strained with horror. "At the end of the last work-period, I saw Joe Kerrin killed, his head and shoulders burned off with a heat pistol, simply because he was too weak to carry a heavy box of tools. Kerrin was an old man, Ron, and a neighbor of mine. And that isn't all! Not long ago, Ollie Marvick, only eleven years old, was kicked to death by one of the overseers, because he was too ill to work. Ollie was a student of mine at school, and one of the few kids that wasn't gotten out of Titan in time. I tell you I can't endure it, Ron! I'll go crazy! So—well—some of us have been thinking of making a break for the hills."

The hills! Ron Leiccsen had seen horror, too; horror that there was no way to fight, downtrodden and disarmed as the Earthians here now were. The hills that rimmed 

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