He waited so long that the darkness of deep space seemed to seep into his spacesuit. With that darkness, part of it, came fear, which is in itself the lesser death. He was weightless and nauseated, almost too weak to fight the fear. Hunger and thirst had weakened him. He wanted to scream, but brain and muscles did not respond in the oxygen thin atmosphere of the suit. Limply, he retched, lungs churning for air. He swore again, faintly, dubiously. If this were the end, there seemed no point to anything that had gone before. His mind veered back to Mars, to the strange girl, Elshar, and what he had done for her. He wondered again why he had interfered. She was nothing to him, could never be anything. Love was not the emotion she roused in him. Not love, not even desire. Not anything he could name unless it was fear. He pushed the thought of her from his mind. He had felt fear before. He should know that sensation. He was feeling it now. But he had always dealt with fear by using it to put an edge on his soul. One could not deal with this situation so easily. A man should not die like this. A poor man in sight of wealth, a starving man in sight of food, a suffocating man in the midst of sealed tanks of oxygen. Anger roared in him. He called out to the dark gods of space to have done with their torture.... * * * * * Following numerous orbits between Jupiter and Mars are the uncounted asteroids. Some of these fragments of a long-vanished planet are named, and even most of the lesser fry are catalogued by numbers. One of them, since the earliest days of space travel and interplanetary survey, has three official numbers, two names, and at least a dozen colorful nicknames. It is on the IPS spacemaps, named and numbered, but by interplanetary treaty it is marked in red letters: _Restricted! Warning! Do Not Land!_ This asteroid, commonly known as the Pelican, is the Alcatraz Island of space. It is a prison for the most hardened and hopeless of convicts. Outside of official circles, few people have ever heard of it and fewer still dwell there. No spaceships ever set down, and none blast off from its scarred and pitted surface. The few inhabitants form a highly exclusive social group, their numbers limited by highly specialized requirements for membership. The original Alcatraz was a small island in San Francisco Bay, on Earth, used as prison for only grade-A malefactors. In Spanish, the word means Pelican, and those curious birds formerly made the tiny bare rock their roosting ground. More curious birds roosted there since; but by now, with the very existence of the city of San Francisco a myth, the island has been returned to the pelicans and other fauna of the sea, sky and ground. Only some spiders and lowly insects inhabit the ruins of prison buildings, and birds and seals have the pinpoint of barren rock to themselves.