Coffin for Two by Winston K. Marks He returned to Earth after three years, with stars in his eyes and Gwen in his heart. But Gwen had no heart--and a star on her brow! When I saw the lights of Albany Field below me I just about cried. It takes guts to live anywhere by yourself for three years, but that itchy, stinking garden of hell out on Venus does things to you that aren’t worth money. Not even the kind of money I’d get for the two tons of refined uranium concentrate I prospected out of Callispo Valley. Well, that was all over, and I just sat there at the controls trying not to bawl. I set her down, gunned up to the Import Shed, checked in my cargo by short-wave--God, but that first voice sounded good,--and turned the 40-ton crate over to the Port Receiver. And then the first human eyes in three years watched me shake out fourteen inches of beard and climb down on good old U. S. A., Earth, dirt. He was the surface jockey, a blond young man in a black jumper, and I almost hugged him I was so glad to see flesh and blood again. I was especially glad, although a little surprised they hadn’t sent out one of those gangly robot jockeys they were beginning to use at the ports when I left for Venus. It would have been a hell of a homecoming, staring into those fish eyes for a welcoming committee. I pumped his hand and said, “Boy, do you look good to me! How come no robots on duty around here? And what’s the red star on your forehead for?” “Welcome home, mister,” he said. “You must have been out there for quite a while. You’ll find things changed, I imagine. If you want I’ll take over now.” Sure. Things were bound to be changed after three years. But not certain people, not Tommy and Alec and Forest and--and maybe not even Gwendolyn. I didn’t dare to expect that Gwen was still waiting for me, but I couldn’t help hoping. I knocked the glass out of a phone booth getting in and started punching coins into the slot. Tommy was out, but Alec answered and swore a grand welcome. He’d have the gang rounded up at his flat in two hours. “I’ll be there soon as I get my lawn mowed,” I told him. “And say, how about, uh, is Gwen still around?” “Of course. She’ll be there.” Just like that. I noticed everyone on the taxi ramp wore red stars, five-pointed affairs about an inch across, right smack in the middle of their foreheads. Funny kind of a fad, I thought. Nobody had paid much attention to me around the Port, but when I got out of the cab at the Vilt Hotel I got long goings-over. The driver wore a red star. So did the hotel clerk, and a woman in an ermine wrap, and about nine-tenths of the people in the lobby. I stared as hard at them as they did at me. I got a room and took a bath. Then, feeling self-conscious in my out-of-date clothes, I went down to the barbershop. Here I got a real surprise. The barbers were barbers! The shoe-shine boy and the porter were amiable looking darkies!