just confirming some of my fears by calling you. I've just sent Miss Longacre to get him."

"Pray that she hurries," said Rober. "Redmond is the guy made from the same mold as the Sorcerer's Apprentice."

"You mean the kind of student we used to explain the process of making nitroglycerine to carefully because we knew they'd make it anyway, and blow hell out of themselves if they didn't violate the rules correctly?"

"More'n that," said Rober. "I said Sorcerer's Apprentice and I meant just that. Redmond is the kind of dope who would start manufacturing negative space and not be able to stop the process."

"Someone—or something—has done it."

"Yeah. But they—and Maculay alone on earth—knows what they're doing. And Maculay when I last saw him knew enough to leave it alone."

"Well, it's up to Ava Longacre."

"Hope she's successful."

Hanson remembered the girl's new attitude. "She'll get him," he said.

Doctor Hanson would not have been able to locate Maculay at all. But he had equipped Ava with the same set of ideas, plus the desire to catch up with the physicist wherever he might have gone; because she was thus equipped, Ava went where Maculay would—and had—gone.

Melaxis, Venus, was a mad mixture of culture and frontier. It boiled with the same sort of teeming millions as New York City; it was a modern city, with white granite buildings, subways, and broad streets filled with racing traffic. But along these broad streets went the rough-shod colonists. They were, for the most part, cut of the same cloth as the colonists of Early America. Men who went to Venus to escape whatever particular hell they felt on earth. Men who objected to taxes, laws, responsibilities, oppressions, regimentations, legalities, religions, and the rest. They were a hardy lot, a bit quick on the trigger and quite inclined to stand upon their own personal integrity. They were just, but their justice was hard-boiled. A man was innocent—or he was guilty enough to get the works.

And it was among this churning metropolis that Ava Longacre landed to seek out Maculay.

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