The Commander's eyes shifted to a sheaf of papers. "General Winkham sent me your requests for Transportation and Exploration licenses. I'm supposed to endorse them." He swept the papers away and glared. "Snyder dies on an Earth rope in three days and no self-appointed god has the right to make it a minute sooner." "If you want my resignation--" Those papers had been his future. His and Johnny's ... tattered remnants of a star dream. "Damned your resignation," Bates roared. "You're going to be taught a lesson. You want Snyder--well, I'm giving him to you." The room rocked. "You're _what_--?" "You heard me." The older man snapped a piece of paper across his desk. "You're taking him to Earth for execution." "I'll kill--" Mike Logan forgot about sleep. "Go ahead," Bates challenged him. "He'll die anyway. If it happens while he's your charge, you'll be hanged in his place or psychoed out at the next exam. Johnny deserves a better tombstone. But maybe you haven't the decency to think of him." Logan was trapped. His future lay on the desk, a crumpled mass of applications under the other's hairy fist. It took an A-1 discharge and a Patrol recommendation to get the needed licenses and he owed it to Johnny to keep trying. "So this is a _last chance_," he breathed acidly. A believer in satanic justice, Bates always found a 'last chance' for the man who cracked. They were spawned in hell but never refused because there was no place in society for a Patrol 'wash out'. The wizened superior looked strange. "It takes guts on the outer planets, Logan. I was born on Neptune. At ten I watched drunken natives work a Mhulo Taag sacrifice on my mother after killing my father and tying me up." He paled. "The priest used a sharp razor. I never forgot it or his face. Twelve years later I brought him in over six thousand miles of ice when I'd have given my soul to kill him." * * * * * In the glare of the rocket field's giant arc lamps, Logan looked at his watch. In twenty minutes he was due to blast off. He watched the fueling of the small Patrol spacer and smoked a cigarette. His lips felt numb and the smoke drifted with a will of its own, sometimes drawn to the lungs with a breath, sometimes burning his nostrils. He wasn't aware. Odd how he had pursued an even course for twenty-eight years, driving toward a goal he and his brother had planned since childhood, then suddenly losing his props. The Patrol had been a prerequisite of the government licenses they needed. For his part, Logan had been able to face hell, crawl through the stink and the mud and the cold of the outer planets. Yet the five years of service had been a task apart from him, a bridge to an end. Even his black Patrol uniform had seemed alien and temporary. But the blood on Johnny's chest and the ugly dirk protruding from the flesh had struck home.