"Who would I meet on Sunside? Beautiful lightly-clad maidens? After all, you know, it's only four hundred degrees Centigrade there, and practically no atmosphere, and nothing much else but solar radiation and hot rock and volcanoes. I tell you, the radar record is worthless." Halfrich was studying him with that mild estimating look that Kellard knew well, and didn't like at all. It was the look that came into Halfrich's face when friendship didn't matter and the good of the Survey did. "You're still lying," he said. "You met or saw something there. And it did something to you--something that made you resign. Something that's taken all the life and eagerness out of you." "Oh, hell, be reasonable!" said Kellard angrily. "You know no kind of life can exist on Sunside. My mission was the second time even Survey has landed there. Pavlik's mission, the first, didn't see anything. Neither did I. Quit dreaming it up. Go back to Mojave and your job, and leave me be." * * * * * Halfrich rose. "All right," he said. "I'll go back to the base. And you're going with me." "Oh, no," said Kellard. "I'm through, quit, resigned." "Your resignation has not been accepted," Halfrich told him. "You're still liable to Survey discipline. You'll obey orders just as you always did, or you'll go up before a court-martial." "So that's it," said Kellard. Halfrich nodded. "That is it. I don't like to do this. You're an old friend. But--" "But the Survey comes first," Kellard said, between his teeth. "The Survey," said Halfrich, "comes first. It has to. It's why we've got stations on Venus and Mars and Ganymede, not to say the Moon. It's why we'll someday be able to hit for deep space and the starworlds. And when one of my best officers suddenly goes off the deep end and won't say why, I'll damn well wring it out of him. Whatever you found on Mercury doesn't belong to you, it belongs to us, and we'll have it." Kellard looked at him and started to say something and didn't, and then turned his back on Halfrich and looked out the window at the sea. In a low voice he said, "Let it be, John. I'm telling you now, you'll be sorry if you don't." There was no answer to that at all, and the silence was his answer. He turned back around. "All right, you have a rope around my neck. I'll go back to base with you. I'll tell you not one thing more than here." "In which case," Halfrich said, "we'll go on out to Sunside, and you'll go right along with us." A rage born of desperation came to Kellard. He had tried to spare people this--Halfrich, the Survey, the whole human race. But they would not let it be so. Damn them, he thought, if they must do this, they have it coming to them. "All right," he said flatly. "I'll get my jacket. I take it that you have a flier waiting." * * * * *