The enemy dead too. He had killed several of them--more than his share, he thought savagely. They too were young despite the ragged beards some of them cultivated. Treb felt like an old man. And he _was_ old. He was twenty-nine. He had a son also named Gram, a boy of five, and little Alse, who was two. Had little Alse's mother lived he would never have volunteered for this third United Nations' war duel. He would have been with her in the mountain valley of Krekar working hard, and gradually erasing those other ugly episodes here on Earth Satellite One.... Minutes crawled by, lumped together into hours. Birds sang in the trees so laboriously maintained here in the satellite's disk-shaped heart. And, a hundred feet overhead, where the true deck of the man-made island in space began, other birds nested in the girders. An ant crawled over Treb's earth-stained hand and passed under his outstretched carbine's barrel. There was a movement in the clustering trees off to his right. Neilson had circled and was coming in from an opposite angle. Treb thumbed off the safety and waited. An earth-colored helmet, with a trace of long pale hair around its rim, came slowly into view. Could be a dummy, Neilson was clever at rigging them to draw fire. And he had exactly two cartridges. After that it would be his three grenades, his two-foot needle-knife, that doubled as a bayonet, and the steel bow he had contrived from a strip of spring steel. He held his fire. The trees made grenade lobbing a touchy business. And his bow was back in one of the dozens of foxholes he had spotted in both the inner and outer rings of trees. In the fantasy stories of adventure in space that he enjoyed reading, the hero could always whip up a weird paralysis ray, a deadly, invisible robot bullet, or an intelligent gaseous ally from the void would appear. And out of scrap glass, metal and his shoestrings he could contrive a solar-powered shell that stopped any missile, deadlier than a marshmallow, cold. In actual life he was finding it difficult enough to contrive a primitive sort of bow, a knife-lashed spear, and snares for the increasingly wary rabbits. Lack of sleep and lack of food supplies were sapping his lanky body of the whiplash swiftness and wiry strength it once possessed. Nor was the week-old wound any aid to his dulled wits.... The helmet advanced; he could almost see the twig-stuffed gray shirt's pockets, and he let his nostrils expand as he sucked in a steadying breath. Now, a yard behind the fake Andilian, he could see the moving shoulders and skull of Harl Neilson--or so his bloodshot eyes told him. He squeezed the trigger. There was a subdued yip, and then a derisive jeer. Missed again--or had he? "Sour rocketing, Grampaw," Neilson laughed. "Try again. And then I'm coming after you."