Jeron Roc, navigator of the Barihorn, was a native of Saturn. He was massively tall, dark-skinned, with the piercing eyes of intellectual power. He came of a proud and ancient family; his father had been the foremost astronomer of the solar system—until a new edict of the Emperor reserved scientific research for the robots alone.

"The will of Malgarth is now the law of the Empire," he explained. "For the Corporation owns nine tenths of the property in the Empire. Without the taxes paid by the robots, the Emperor and his bureaucrats would starve. Therefore the fleets of the Galactic Guard support the outrageous claims of the Corporation."

The proud old savant, anyhow, had refused to surrender his observatory. A mob of robots from the local agency stormed the building, smashed priceless instruments, and killed the old astronomer.

Returning from the great university on Titan—because another imperial edict had closed it to human students—Jeron Roc found the burned ruins of the observatory still smoking, and saw his father's body under the iron heel of a robot policeman.

The disruptor gun had flamed of itself in his hand. The technomaton exploded with a blue flicker of hydrogen. Dazed by his audacity, Jeron fled—for he had destroyed Corporation property and resisted the Space Police, hence was twice liable to death—and at last escaped into space.

Of the two others, I had not learned so much. But Rogo Nug, who served the atom-converter generators and space-contraction drive of the Barihorn, was a veteran "space-rat." A brown little wisp of a man, thin lips purpled with the roots called goona-roon which he chewed incessantly, he cursed picturesquely if sometimes lewdly by the anatomical divisions of the Emperor and the mechanical parts of Malgarth. He could not recall the planet of his birth. But his father, a stevedore of space, had been executed for the crime of striking against the Corporation; his mother, cut off relief for "harboring traitorous sympathies," perished; and Rogo Nug had become an orphan waif of the space-ways.

The cook, Zerek Oom, was inordinately fat, totally bald, and extremely white—being a native of one of the cloud-veiled worlds of Canopus. He was decorated with the most brilliant and remarkable tattooing I had ever seen. He had inherited vast estates, but the "technomitanization" laws had forced him to discharge his human laborers to starve, and rent robots in their stead; then, when a hungry world had no money to buy his crops, he went bankrupt, and the Corporation took his lands in lieu 

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