had penetrated even here.

"We've got to steal a ship," he voiced the thought uppermost in his mind. Already he had accepted this girl as a partner in his venture, for she too was a fugitive from the tyranny of the Martian Exploitation Company.

Her body jerked suddenly at his words, and then he had to fumble for her in the darkness and shake her with brutal insistence until her hysterical laughter stopped.

"Just steal a ship!" she gasped finally, her voice still unsteady. "Dad and I tried for a year, ever since the Exploiters came and wrecked our Trailblazer. And now they've killed him!" She began to sob, but this time in sadness rather than hysteria.

Nick was frantic for the missing fragments of the puzzle, but he knew it would be useless to question her now. She began to shiver in the chill, so he removed his torn jacket and slipped it around her naked shoulders. After a while she sobbed herself to sleep, too exhausted and grief-stricken to care any more what happened to her.

Nick dozed too, but the dregs of Gravinol still in his system denied him the release of complete forgetfulness. In disconnected, nightmarish flashes his mind reviewed the chain of events that had made him a hunted outlaw upon an alien planet.

There was a bittersweetness to his thoughts of Earth, a nostalgic homesickness for the planet of great cities and green foliage and free-flowing water it had been before the War—and might some day be again.

And then the War itself. The boyish, unthinking enthusiasm with which he had enlisted in the Special Corps. The new drug, Gravinol, touted by the laboratories of the great Harmon Enterprises as the discovery that would win the War. Twisting, writhing rocket fights high above the atmosphere, pilots of the Corps immersed in hypnotic, Gravinol-induced blind loyalty to the Cause, immune to fatigue and pain and fear.

City after city crumbling to atomic dust. Rocket bases blasted out of existence and no more targets worth bombing. Complex weapons giving way to more primitive ones as industrial systems broke down. The Special Corps transferred from air to ground duty. Crumbling battle lines, disintegration of organized warfare into deadly confusion in which friend and foe were indistinguishable.

Peace. Peace without victory, without decision. Peace of destruction. Battles dying into scattered skirmishes that 

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