gift to the decadent Centaurians, who once had possessed a fine atomic civilization but had lost it a thousand years before Earthmen took to the stars. Then Drexell Tolliver said they could lease the mine back and work it. The galaxy would get its uranium, Centauri VII would get much-needed galactic credits, and the partnership of Tolliver-Haven would still run the mine.

But this way, the way it worked out, thought Haven, the galaxy gets all the uranium from me. The whims of the strange Centaurians didn't matter. It was for the good of the galaxy, wasn't it? Haven smiled, remembering. Galaxy, hell. Why didn't he admit it, at least to himself? It was for the good of George Haven. And in the process, in bringing about that good, Drexell Tolliver had had to die.

"... go out and visit the old mines," Angus MacCready was saying.

The last course was served. Vorhees suggested they could start for the mines in the morning, and they all agreed. Even Louise seemed fascinated by the idea, and this surprised Haven. Louise had never showed much interest in his enterprises—except, now that he thought of it, for the Centaurian mine.

Out there, Haven thought. A hundred miles from nowhere in the high ice mountains north of this city, there is a glacier. The ice is crystal clear, astonishing clear. And there, entrapped in the ice and perfectly preserved by it for all time and perfectly visible too, was Drexell Tolliver's body. Haven had, fifteen years before, melted the ice with a heat blaster and dropped Tolliver's body in. Then the ice had frozen over. For fifteen years, except when it snowed—and it did not snow often, despite the cold, on Centauri VII—the corpse had been perfectly visible for whoever wanted to see it. Fortunately, the viewers had only been Centaurians, and the Centaurians never bore testimony against one another, nor against outworlders, either.

Now he had to reach that body, had to hide it some way, with the help of these six men he'd been paying off for fifteen years because they'd been working for him and Tolliver and knew what he knew....

"I'd just love to go out there," he heard Louise saying.

"No, Louise," he said firmly. "I don't think you'd like it. Cold. Nothing to see, really. Why don't you just stay in the hotel when we get started in the morning?"

"But I insist," Louise said, smiling at him sweetly.

"Let the little lady go," 

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