He felt like cursing Ertene, and then remembered that without the nomad world, he would have been dead. And yet, what had he gained from life? It was a hard thing to balance and justify. He'd had his day of success and power. Regardless of what they said about him, he had made his good mark on history. He realized the life was a continuous succession of rises and falls, and by all the rules he had been heading for the fall. But to have fallen so far--was that really fair? How should he have treated Laura Greggor? And what of Joan? Could he have changed that, really? Mephisto? Well, he'd found the tenth planet for them because he wanted power himself. He'd fought the tenth planet, and had given Terra another planet to colonize, and in carrying on the long incident of the tenth planet, had succeeded in losing something that could not be calculated in the mean terms of money. He wondered whether he was any better than the rest. Had he been satisfied to remain as he was, Mephisto would have been discovered by someone else, and that would have lessened his chances of getting involved in this present situation. But no. He had to strike high and hard, so that he could fling the insignia of the Patrol Marshal in Laura Greggor's face with an "I told you so!" Laura Greggor didn't deserve it. And then what had he done? He'd pinned them on himself. Guy smiled glumly. "Superstition," he snorted. And yet it had happened. The first time he'd pinned his own lapel ornaments on, trouble had claimed him for its own. "Superstition!" he growled. Perhaps superstition was just the human-equation coming to the fore. Those unexplainable factors of human behavior. In walking under a ladder, one might get hit by falling tools; in breaking a mirror one might cut himself; one was fortunate to find a four-leaved clover because they were rare, one so fortunate might repeat. In having disaster fall upon an officer that had no friend to pin his insignia on--it meant that he had no true friends. At least, no friends among the opposite sex. And Maynard knew that a man of that character, whose friends did not include one member of the opposite sex, was possessed of a warp in his get-together and quite capable of speeding blindly into some form of disaster. A man should be balanced in all things--even to the sex of his friends. Guy felt a tiny pang of jealousy. Who, he wondered, had been the lucky man to pin the caduceus on Joan's uniform? * * * * *