She'd come to Finchburg thirty years ago at the height of the psithium rush. She'd been young and pretty then, and desperately in love with her prospector-spouse Mike O'Neill. Mike had been a roistering giant, but he hadn't lasted long on Venus. The acid dust had eaten his lungs away, and in less than a year he'd been laid to rest down in an abandoned mine. Almost immediately the veins of psithium had petered out. The mine-owners closed the shafts and took away their expensive equipment imported nut-by-bolt by rocket from Earth. Finchburg became a ghost-town. All the miners except for die-hards like Horseface had moved far away to the more promising strikes of Satterlee, Guzil Banks and Storington. But Trixie remained at Finchburg. "My Mike's buried here, ain't he? Awright--where he stays, I stay!" And she went on doggedly doing Mike's work until a cave-in crushed one of her legs, after which she set up a hostelry which was a one-woman service-bureau--she washed the miners' clothes, served their meals, kept their books, sold supplies to them and most of all kept up their morale. She provided the woman's touch, and the men adored her. But the touch which they worshiped abjectly was of Terra itself--half of a blistered blast-tube filled with Terrestrial soil and growing genuine Terrestrial dandelions, rather scrubby and colorless ones, but from good old Terra just the same. When you thought you'd choke on one more whiff of the bitter Venus-dust, when you remembered the green lushness of Terra and wished you were back there, knowing you could never find enough psithium to pay your passage--then you went to Trixie's place, looked at her dandelions and maybe touched your finger to the dirt in which they grew--and you went away feeling better somehow. You'd been home again for a little while. And if anybody saw a tear in your eye, he looked the other way. Because maybe tomorrow he'd be doing the same. Why, there hadn't been a Mercurian in camp for years. They were afraid to come here ever since the earthmen had run out of town that one who'd got drunk on _vhubi_, upset the tube and tried to trample the plants. No man, you didn't treat Trixie or her dandelions lightly. They were sacred. * * * * * "Hey," Horseface asked Elmer, "is that a rocket down there? A rocket--in Finchburg?" Elmer peered forward and said, "Wak, wak!" in a meshed-gears voice, meaning yes. "A rocket!" Horseface marvelled. "Maybe it's visitors from Terra! Or maybe it's news of a new strike! Gee-jup, Elmer! Time's a-jettin'!" They started down the hillside's hairpin turns. The shouting grew more strident, and at times Horseface heard the raucous yowl of blaster-guns. Celebration! "Yippity!" Horseface bellowed, firing his own gun in the air.