is that a hundred people a lot quicker with a dicto-typer than I am have already done the job. I'll just leave that part of it and take up with my first contact with my fellow Terrans on Mars.

One of the old gags is to the effect that when Greek meets Greek they start a restaurant. Okay, maybe, but I do know this, that when man in general starts up a new colony one of the first buildings he puts up is a bar.

At any rate, as soon as I was settled at the Biltless Hotel—the name, of course, is a gag, but the place lived up to it—I made my way to Sam's.

Now, there's something that invariably happens to people who get around. It's happened to you, if you're one of us. Maybe you're walking through the Congo Game Preserve, figuring there isn't another man, white or otherwise, within a hundred kilometers. Suddenly you run into another party and somebody yells, "Hello Nap! What in kert are you doing here?" The last time you saw him was in San Francisco. Or maybe you're doing some solitary drinking in some obscure bar in Guatemala. The guy next to you looks over and says, "Say, aren't you Nap Prescott, the brother of—" and, of course, you are.

Well, that was it. I hadn't any more got up to the bar and told Sam, "Let me have some of this Martian woji I've been hearing so much about," when I heard somebody yelp, "It's Nap! I'll be a grinning makron if it isn't Nap!"

I turned around and there was Mike Holiday, as big as life and twice as drunk.

He waddled his bulk over to me—Mike always waddles when he's soused—from the table where he'd been sitting.

"By the Holy Jumping Wodo," he crowed, "I'll bet my left arm you came to get a zloor."

I'd been grinning and holding out my hand to clasp his, but that stiffened me.

He saw it and began to laugh uproariously. "Another joiner of the club!" he yelped. "Come on over and meet your fellow members. You got one of them Westley contracts too?"

That did it.

I went over and met the boys. Mike Holiday wasn't the only acquaintance of mine in Fort Mars. In fact, it was like a convention of the outstanding professional hunters of Earth.

They all shouted their greetings, some of them laughing so hard tears rolled down their cheeks. Evidently they got a big kick every 

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