“Who the devil are you?” he said faintly, as the taxidriver closed the window to the Verdict Cube and dropped down beside him in the front seat of the open air tourist taxi.

He grinned thinly, recklessly. “Another psycho the Council hasn’t labeled yet. Name’s Red. Red Formica. To be pedantic, you might call me a victim of regression, an atavist. Things have got to have a tag, you know.” He released the magnetic grapplers, and punched the controls. The air-taxi darted out into a traffic beam, and lunged downward.

Before Ward could formulate further questions the taxi dropped heavily down on a dark, small rooflanding on the lowest, cheapest level of the city. He allowed himself to be led down a shabby, creaking escalator and through a narrow corridor into an ill-lighted room, thick with the reeking heavy drug of the Venusian bluerose. The occasional gurgle of mind-burning selir-whiskey and the dull monody of a three-piece Ionian orchestra completed the morbid setting.

A forbidden underground escapeasy!

Here, men of the lower income brackets, who couldn’t afford the far-flung exotic worlds of the System, came to escape their monotonous, colorless lot.

Ward gaped. Back in his small, provincial midwest college laboratory he had never, of course, expected to end up in an escapeasy. Dim, lethargic shadows stirred in the drugged gloom and from somewhere a girl’s soft laughter called. The scrofulous dive was permeated with a heavy air of solemn, self-induced asphyxiation.

Red led Ward to a table, and they became a part of the vaporous shadows. “Two glasses of satho,” said Red familiarly. A vague form, apparently the barkeep, glided away and returned almost immediately with the cold, stealthy liquor.

“A toast, Doc,” said Red tightly. “To a quick victory over the Mo-Sanshon—all ten trillion or so of them.”

Ward nodded numbly, and wondered how his thirty-eight years of academic research could have qualified him for this. He had sweated out a hermit’s life on the burning Martian Deserts for four years, gathering his data on the Mo-Sanshon who filled the countless miles of catacombs under the red clay surface. And he had considered that an all time low—at the time.

He drank. The liquor scorched his throat and started quickly on his brain. He belched and wiped tears from his eyes. Finally he managed to whisper, “I’d appreciate a sort of hint as 

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