He snapped his fingers to one of his big-eared breed. "Phorey, you drive the jeep over to Ssaturday." Trixie started toward the jeep and he halted her--very courteously, of course. "No, my dear lady, we will let the jeep go firsst. Then we can be certain that nobody followss after it to rob you of your lovely flowerss. We will leave later." The jeep chugged away. Trixie was very red-faced and unable to look at her erst-while Finchburg admirers. Perhaps, Horseface hoped, she was relenting. But if she were, Goreck knew how to prevent it. "Ssuch clods, to sstare sso at a lady!" he purred, and Trixie glared relentlessly at the men who had adored her so long--and apparently, so vainly. * * * * * Since Goreck's rocket was damaged beyond immediate repair, he rode off with Trixie on the town borer, a community-owned tractor equipped with a giant blaster and used in boring mine-tunnels. It was not intended for general travel and rumbled away very slowly, kicking up a great deal of dust. The other Martians had come on gwips, which they now mounted, then made off in a hurry. "You'll get your borer back when I get my rocket back!" Goreck called from the wake of dust. The Finchburgers stayed as they were, every spine an S of dejection. "With Trixie gone," Candy Derain mourned, "there ain't no use our staying here. We'll all starve!" Baldy Dunn said, "Maybe we was bad-mannered accepting things off of her, but I always meant to pay her back as soon as I found me some psithium. If I'd of thought--" Horseface said, "Of course Goreck is just giving Trixie the runaround. All he's really after is her dandelions, 'cause he knows what they mean to us. He'll keep 'em till we go to his diggings to work for him, that's what! He'll charge us real money every time we want to touch 'em--and where are we going to get money? It's like he's holding 'em for ransom!" He set his jaw. "Well, we ain't going to let him get away with it! When Trixie finds out what a nopper he is, she'll be sorry, sure--but she won't never come back here on account of she's too proud! She'll just stay in Saturday being Goreck's slave, her poor heart meanwhiles busting--and I ain't going to let her!" He started briskly for the stable, the others hesitantly trailing along. "I'm getting on Elmer and going after her. Dandelions be desubricated, I'm going to save Trixie in spite of herself!" But it seemed that everybody was having that identical idea at once. Not all of them owned gwips, so the party of rescuers set off on a peculiar assortment of vehicles--Candy on his vacuum-cup bicycle meant for scaling precipices, Baldy Dunn and several others on pick-wielding ore-cars, some on the psithium-detectors, and Digby on the mowing-machine which cut and baled grasses for the feeding of the gwips. About a third of the expedition had to go afoot.