subside as quickly as it began. She permitted them to make the plasti-shield secure. Her face, through the greenish-gray mask, had the texture and shading of a corpse. Zombie-like, she had lost all individuality.

"Check your thermiteens," Morrissey snapped to the patrol, "and let's get out of this place."

The men quickly filled their light-weight thermiteens with water from the supply in the humidi-hut, fastened their own plasti-shields securely over head and shoulders, put on their asbesti-mittens and stepped into the vac-lock.

Sixty seconds later, the party stood in the weird, dust-filled world outside. A hot wind pressed its dusty fingers against their protective hoods and tugged with an eerie persuasiveness at their padded jackets. Through the murk an orange sun burned in the sand-strewn sky. Rocks pitted and pocked from centuries of relentless persecution stood stark sentinel on every side. This was Venus.

Walking slightly behind Selo, shoulders hunched, head down, Morrissey worried the enigma of this strange Venusian woman and the two men who had known her. Two men—now both dead—wind-dried mummies fallen in the wastes of the Desert Rouge.

Victims of the desert, Morrissey wondered, or victims of a woman with deep-set violet eyes and blue-black hair.

The Earth colonies on Venus, Mars and the satellites of Jupiter are filled with men like Yancey Ritter. They're men who seem to be born with a weight of bitterness on their backs. They look at the Universe early in life and decide that things are set against them—that they are the persecuted and misunderstood. You've heard them talking in bars.

"If I just had a chance I'd make it. I just never get the breaks."

Yancey Ritter said that a thousand times in his life. He said it when he was prospecting for brakion on Mars, when he tried lumbering on Europa, and finally, when he took the assignment to the humidi-hut on Venus.

That job, of course, was to be only a stepping stone. When Yancey wasn't preoccupied with the relatively simple routine of maintaining the humidi-hut he planned to search for quollas. The edge of the Desert Rouge, near the humidi-hut to which Yancey had been assigned, was reputed to be an ideal locale for such a search.

The quolla, an amazingly beautiful gem burnished to a glowing loveliness by the wind and sand, 

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