"Why, yes!" Mark assented hurriedly. It wouldn't do for this Venusian to suspect he was an operative. "To put it briefly, I am classified as too individualistic for the new order of 'controlled endeavor'. Also typed as irreconcilable--and you know what _that_ means!" "Perfectly!" The enigmatic smile hovering on the Venusian's lips faded slowly. "I, too, am a 'political'. My father was Bedrim, the Liberator. All we of Venus asked was real independence instead of the mock freedom your Earth grants us; in reality we are a vassal state with no voice but Earth's." "Bedrim!" Mark exclaimed, aghast. For more than a decade that name had made history, engulfing three planets in a suicidal struggle that had ended in a stalemate. Bedrim was dead now, Mark knew; but in Venus and even on Mars, the name was a glorious legend. It was only with the greatest effort and vigilance that Earth was able to enforce the peace. "So _this_ is what became of you!" Mark said slowly, softly. "The three worlds do not know, they still wonder--" Then he caught himself and bit his lip. "Yes," Aladdo murmured bitterly. "The worlds do not know. I was to be given amnesty, I was so young; but your inner Council decided that as long as I lived I would be a rallying point for irreconcilables of Venus, and so I was hunted from planet to planet until ... well, here I am on my own world, but as far away from my people as if I were on Betelgeuse. Here I do not live." "But surely there must be some way of convincing the Council that you're harmless! And if that fails, well ... of getting you out of here!" "Out of Paradim?" Aladdo's smile had all the despairing bitterness of a soul damned for all eternity; all the tears and the anguish and the wracking sorrow of the condemned since the world began seemed to be frozen for an instant in that smile. "Look about you, Earthman!" It was true. Mark had to acknowledge the psychological genius who had devised the Venusian Prison System. For five hundred miles the swamp Paradim extended in either direction, impassable, pitted with sink holes into which a man would disappear without trace. And beyond were the impenetrable jungles, alive with lurking carnivora, lurking monsters of the night, red in tooth and claw. Only on the opposite hemisphere were the two larger and hospital continents of Venus.