The words fairly snapped and snarled with bitterness. No Callistan heat-bomb, dropped into the center of the little gathering itself, could have produced more emotional startlement. Two hundred pairs of haggard eyes turned as one toward the man who had broken a spell. Surprise was too great to allow anger to awaken, yet. There was only wonder as to who this rude traitor could be. He stood there at the edge of the side-walk, with half his gaunt weight leaned against a maple sapling. But his eyes glowed tensely, under a broad-brimmed colonial hat, denying the indolence of his posture. A crooked smile showed white teeth, and traced a line of derision in one narrow, bronzed cheek. Youth and strength and sadness and broken dreams, were in the curve of his brow and lips. But above all, there was realism--the will to do the best, most reasonable thing, in the face of heart-breaking defeat. A girl, as forceful as himself--in her own pert way--was the one who answered him. "You!" she stormed. "You--Ron Leiccsen--nephew of the man who explored this world, and died from the effects of hardships here, soon after his return to Earth! The man who made our Titanian Colony possible! And you tell Arne Reynaud to shut up, when he talks patriotism! You're not fit to bear the same name as Jan Leiccsen!" The girl was Anna Charles, a teacher in the school at the village. There was a moment of strained silence, after her furious, accusing words tumbled out. Her tiny fists were clutched so firmly that the knuckles showed white. Her heart-shaped face had gone pale with fury, defiance, contempt! Her dark eyes blazed narrowly, and her whole, small, reckless body trembled with emotion. Anna Charles, daughter of a champion space pilot, killed several years before, was a tornado from her golden head to the tips of her tiny boots! * * * * * But she was only part of the situation, now. Everyone, among those hard, bristly-cheeked colonists, waited for Ron Leiccsen to answer the girl's withering challenge. Ron had been a respected machinist bearing an honored name--before. But his caustic attitude, now, made a difference. Most of those grim men scowled at him. Many of them fingered their smooth, trim-barreled atom-rifles in a silent threat to a dissenter. Even old Arne Reynaud, on his impromptu orator's rostrum before the Community Bank, said nothing. His withered features only looked startled. His thin shoulders sagged in his shapeless overcoat. The nearest great sun-ray globe, rising on its tall, steel-girdered tower above Leiccsendale, purred softly, shedding its warmth and brilliant light, and its special, invisible radiations, which acted as a stimulus to all vegetable growth, over the scene. Smoke from rich, ripe cornfields nearby, tanged in the cool air, like a questioning ghost. Even the far-off sun itself, scarcely more than a great star in the vast distance, seemed to wait, to see what would happen during the next tense moment.