small and glittering, and her face was hardened and thin-lipped.

"You're Charles Farradyne?" she asked in a flat voice. Beneath the tone of dislike and distrust the voice had what could have been a pleasant throatiness if it had not been strained.

Farradyne nodded.

"Farradyne—of the Semiramide?"

"Yes." He felt a peculiar mixture of gratification and resentment. He had been recognized at last, but it should have come from a better source.

She shut him out by turning to Martin. "Do you know whom you've hired?" she asked in the same flatness of tone. Profile-wise, she was not much more than a girl. Maybe twenty-three at the most. Farradyne could not explain how a woman that young could possibly have crammed into the brief years all the experience that showed in her face.

Martin fumbled for words. "Why, er—" he started, lamely.

"This rum-lushing bum is Charles Farradyne, the hot-rock that dumped his spacer into The Bog."

"Is this true?" demanded Martin of Farradyne.

"I did have an accident there," said Farradyne. "But—"

The woman sneered. "Accident, you call it. Sorry, aren't you? Reeking with remorse. But not so grief stricken that you'll not take this man out and kill him the way you killed my brother."

Farradyne grunted. "I don't know you from Mother Machree," he said. "I've had my trouble and I don't like it any more than you do."

"You're alive, at least," she snarled at him. "Alive and ready to go around skylarking again. But my brother is dead and you—"

"Am I supposed to blow out my brains? Would that make up for this brother of yours?" demanded Farradyne angrily. Some of the anguish of the affair returned. He recalled all too vividly his own mental meanderings and the feeling that suicide would erase that memory. But he had burned himself out with those long periods of self-reproach.

"Blow your brains out," advised the girl, sharply. "Then the rest of us will be protected against you."

"I suppose I'm responsible for you, too?" he asked bitterly.

Timothy Martin gulped his drink down. "I think I'd better 

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