Before Hawthorne finished barking the command, O'Dea's hand shot down, releasing the seizure beams. The ship catapulted skyward as the weight was suddenly dropped. The pilot fought the pounding rockets. When it was under control, Hawthorne circled back over the valley. They stared at the mass of earth that tumbled down the mountain side in a gathering avalanche. Their asteroid plunged bouncing into the valley below, shaking the entire volcano each time it hit. New avalanches started in its wake. Then the volcano exploded. A thousand feet of rocky cone disappeared in a fiery murderous cloud. Flaming lava and flying rock filled the air for miles. Hawthorne worked frantically for altitude as molten crimson streamers of hell streaked skyward. In Avignon's stratosphere, they looked down through the glaring lava that hid the valley. An anguished voice broke in: "Oh I cannot believe it of you!" And Morguma started to cry. O'Dea pulled the pilot's chair to one side, reached into an opening in the floor beneath it. He drew forth two bundles of clothing. The two men stripped off their greasy coveralls, put on the clean clothes. Morguma stared unbelievingly at the crisp olive green uniforms of Earth's space force. The grimy faces of Hawthorne and O'Dea grinned happily from under the jaunty caps. On the shoulders of each were the twin platinum bars of space captains. "Spies! Oh you unnatural men, to bite the very hand that fed you--" "--and cracked the whip," O'Dea finished sharply. "If you want to be technical, we were in uniform all the time--those coveralls are regulation work clothes. And all is fair in love and war, you know. We came to Centauri on a reconnaissance job, and ran into some luck." He sighed happily, turned his eyes to the portrait above the control board. Hawthorne chuckled. He was reading a thin tape that ran through his fingers. "I have the ethertype machine running," he said. "News from Earth. And look at the very first item!" He passed it over. O'Dea's grin disappeared as he read. He growled at the tape, flung it from him. "So she married a rocket hand while my back was turned! Well--" He frowned for a moment. Then his shoulders rose and fell in a carefree shrug. "I go bigger for blondes, anyway. First thing I'm going to do after we report is head for Lidice, Venus, and go on the biggest tear in the history of the space guard. That'll be--" There was a faintly disturbed look in Paul Hawthorne's eyes. But he soothed his conscience with the thought that O'Dea would be just as well off without Mercedes. So he saw no reason to tell Captain Lance O'Dea that he had typed out the story on the ethertype himself. Because all is fair in love as well as in war. And Captain Paul Hawthorne was in love with Mercedes, too. End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Men Without a World, by Joseph Farrell