At last, abruptly, he realized that he was alone and in silence. He saw that he was still on the rocketfront, but in the Tycho-ward side of the city. He huddled in a dark corner of a loading platform and lit a cigarette. A thousand stars--a thousand motionless balls of silver fire--shone above him through Luna City's transparent dome. He was sorry he'd hit Cobb, of course. He was not sorry he'd run. Escaping at least gave him a power of choice, of decision. _You can do two things_, he thought. _You can give yourself up, and that's what a good officer would do. That would eliminate the escape charge. You'd get off with voluntary manslaughter. Under interplanetary law, that would mean ten years in prison and a dishonorable discharge. And then you'd be free._ _But you'd be through with rockets and space. They don't want new men over thirty-four for officers on rockets or even for third-class jet-men on beat-up freighters--they don't want convicted killers. You'd get the rest of the thrill of conquering space through video and by peeking through electric fences of spaceports._ _Or--_ There were old wives' tales of a group of renegade spacemen who operated from the Solar System's frontiers. The spacemen weren't outlaws. They were misfits, rejectees from the clearing houses on Earth. And whereas no legally recognized ship had ventured past Mars, the souped-up renegade rigs had supposedly hit the asteroids. Their headquarters was Venus. Their leader--a subject of popular and fantastic conjecture in the men's audiozines--was rumored to be a red-bearded giant. _So_, Ben reflected, _you can take a beer-and-pretzels tale seriously. You can hide for a couple of days, get rid of your uniform, change your name. You can wait for a chance to get to Venus. To hell with your duty. You can try to stay in space, even if you exile yourself from Earth._ After all, was it right for a single second, a single insignificant second, to destroy a man's life and his dream? * * * * * He was lucky. He found a tramp freighter whose skipper was on his last flight before retirement. Discipline was lax, investigation of new personnel even more so. Ben Curtis made it to Venus. There was just one flaw in his decision. He hadn't realized that the memory of the dead man's face would haunt him, torment him, follow him as constantly as breath flowed into his lungs. But might not the rumble of atomic engines drown the murmuring dead voice? Might not the vision of alien worlds and infinite spaceways obscure the dead face? So now he sat searching for a perhaps nonexistent red-bearded giant, and hoping and doubting and fearing, all at once. "You look for someone, _senor_?" He jumped. "Oh. You still here?" "_Oui._" The Martian kid grinned, his mouth full of purple teeth. "I keep you company on your first night in Hoover City, _n'est-ce-pas_?" "This isn't my first night here," Ben lied. "I've been around a while." "You are spacemen?"