The sudden shrill blast of a whistle broke the twilight silence somewhere to his left. Someone had seen the attack. Kendall didn't wait for further discussion. He ran at top speed through the gate and into the gathering darkness beyond.

Fifteen minutes later he was in Mojave City.

The city, which had grown up around the spaceport, was a sprawling, busy place. Stone headed straight into the heart of town.

He stopped in at the first store he met, and before the shopkeeper could say anything, he burst out with, "I'm in a hurry, friend. Can you tell me how to get to the Governor?"

The merchant, a small, pale man wearing a greasy apron, smiled and said, "You won't be able to get to him easily, my good sir. You'll have to see his Secretary. It's the way it's done."

"All right, where's his Secretary to be found?" Stone barked. He received full directions on how to reach the Secretary's residence, and snapped a "Thanks" and left.

It was a short trip by bus, but Stone decided to walk. Walking would work off some of the nervous energy that was accumulating in him, making him tense and keyed-up.

He reviewed the situation bitterly as he strode through the brightly-lit streets.

The Rastolians were a peculiar race. They looked something like reptiles walking on their hind feet, but they had warm blood and were mammalian in several respects. The Government of Earth knew that much about them.

What the Government didn't seem to know much about was the Rastolian moral code. The Rastolians did not believe that any government had a right to kill one of its citizens. Even murder could be punished only by life imprisonment. Usually, though, a Rastolian convicted of murder was simply given a gun with one shot in it and left alone in his cell. Regardless of how despicable his crime may have been, no Rastolian was so completely without honor that he would refuse to take the proper steps to punish himself.

Galth of Rastol had been convicted and condemned. He had, the jury found, murdered an Earthman in cold blood over a gambling dispute. But if Earth sent him to the execution chamber, his fellow beings, outraged over the injury and the insult to their way of life, would take steps to avenge him. And that would be the end of the small colony of humans on Rastol III.

Stone thought of his wife—who 

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