Asteroid now within protection reach of Mercury and Terra bases. Your escort no longer required. Proceed immediately Titan, take on cargo and personnel. The commander sighed. "Looks like I'll never get to Earth long enough to see my family." Rip sympathized. "Tough, sir. Perhaps the cargo from Titan will be scheduled for Terra." "That's what I hope," O'Brine agreed. "Well, here's where we part. Is there anything you need?" Rip made a mental check on supplies. He had more than enough. "The only thing we need is a long-range communicator, sir. We'll need one to contact the planet bases." "I'll see that you get one." The Irishman thrust out his hand. "Stay out of high vack, Foster. Too bad you didn't join us instead of the Planeteers. I might have made a decent officer out of you." Rip grinned. "That's a real compliment, sir. I might return it by saying that you have the makings of a Planeteer officer yourself." O'Brine chuckled. "All right. Let's declare a truce, Planeteer. We'll meet again. Space isn't very big." A short time later Rip stood in front of his asteroid base and watched the great cruiser drive into space. A short distance away a snapper-boat was lashed to the landing boat. O'Brine had left it, with a word of warning. "These Connies are plenty smart. I don't like leaving you unprotected, even within reach of Mercury and Terra, but orders are orders. Keep the snapper-boat, and you'll at least be able to put up a fight if you bump into trouble." The asteroid sped on its lonely way for two days, and then a cruiser came out of space, its nuclear drive glowing. The Planeteers manned the rocket launcher, and Rip and Santos stood by the snapper-boat, just in case, but the cruiser was the _Sagittarius_, out of Mercury. Capt. Go Sian-tek, a Chinese Planeteer officer, arrived in one of the cruiser's boats with three enlisted men. Captain Go greeted Rip and his men, then handed over a plastic stylus plate ordering Rip to deliver six cubic meters of thorium for use on Mercury. While Koa supervised the cutting of the block, Rip and the captain chatted. The Mercurian Planeteer base was in the twilight zone, but the Planeteers always worked on the sun side, wearing special alloy suits to mine the precious nuclite that only the hot planet provided. At some time during its first years, Mercury had been so close to the sun that its temperature was driven high enough to permit a subatomic thermonuclear reaction. The reaction had shorn some elements of their electrons and left a thin coating of material composed almost entirely of neutrons. The nuclite was incredibly dense. It could be handled only in low gravity because of its weight. But nothing else provided the shielding against radiation and meteors half so well, and it was in great demand.