out of the hazy cloud canopy, a desert at periaston and quagmire at apastron. Barren ground and a turbulent, sulphuric sea.

The three suns blazed through the overcast as the prison ship settled into the steaming mud that was the spaceport. Scalding rain sluiced down the long flanks of the vessel, corrosive and fetid.

Aram Jerrold knew of Atmion IV. No officer in the Fleet did not. It was a foul planet, a world unwanted by any of the many Bureaus, and as such the perfect prison world. The planet of the Greens. On all its vast hulk there was only one settlement. The Green Fortress. Political exiles and condemned prisoners from all over the Tetrarchy of the Thirty Suns were brought to the Fortress on Atmion IV. None ever returned.

Aram remembered that Atmion lay in the Twenty Ninth Decant, only four light years from Kaidor on the very periphery of the Tetrarchy. These were the outpost systems, the suns far from mighty Terminus and the center of the teeming life of the galaxy. These were the hinterlands of empire, sullen, unknown, unwanted.

The Green Fortress proper stood on a high crag, etched against the smoky grey of Atmion IV's eternal overcast. Standing in the open port of the prison ship, Jerrold could see the black bulk of the turreted stronghold through the curtain of driving rain. The spaceport was a sea of mud that still boiled in places from the heat of the great starship's landing jets.

Chained in a long line, the human cargo of the vessel was herded through the rain and mud toward an electrified wire enclosure. Aram smiled wryly at that evidence of "Security." What need was there for it on this world? Where could a prisoner go if he should find himself on the other side of the wire barrier? It was likely, Jerrold thought, that there was a Directive on it from Terminus, and that accounted for the electrified wire.

He estimated that there were perhaps nine hundred men and women in the human chain that stretched from the starship to the long reception buildings within the enclosure. The chaff of heterodoxy—cast off by the single-track machinery of galactic bureaucracy.

The Greens drove the sodden prisoners through the gates without rancor or interest. It was as though the prisoners had ceased to be human once they crossed the line that excluded them from the society of free men.

Inside the long, draughty shelters, the prisoners were stripped naked, men and women alike, run through cleansing water jets, dried, 

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