Charlie blinked and thought hard. Then a smile crossed his face. "Nothing," he said. "We were given orders by an Amnesty-bearer, and all we have to do is carry them out to be in the clear." "Oh, yeah?" I grunted. "Five'll get you ten Baxter thinks differently!" The one who wasn't Charlie hesitated, and his grip, hitherto vise-tight on my upper arm, went suddenly slack. "Disobeying an Amnesty-bearer is unprecedented," he said carefully. "So is the theft of the Amnesty!" I shouted in exasperation. The other one looked at Charlie. "Maybe we ought to call Baxter, just in case." "In my book," Charlie muttered, "that's not holding a guy incommunicado!" "The hell it's not," I snorted. "I won't communicate with him. You two guys do it. Do it any way you can square it with your sense of duty. Either tell Baxter you have a man in custody by the name of Jery Delvin or that the Amnesty is in the possession of a blue-eyed blonde girl, and see what he says!" * * * * * Two hours later, I was facing the image of a purple-faced Chief Baxter on an interplanetary videoscreen. "Sorry to be so long, Delvin," he said apologetically. "But I'd left orders not to be disturbed. Anyway, I've given the men instructions to return the collapser to you, and an authorization permit for it, in case you meet any more agents." "Which heaven forbid!" I growled. "No red tape with an Amnesty. Ha!" "Uh. Yes. So you can continue with your search, Delvin. Have you found anything interesting?" "Full report when I get back, Baxter," I said. "Right now, I have a date with a beautiful blonde." "A date?" he choked out. "But--" "Signing off," I said, and cut the circuit. I belted the collapser into place around my waist, and started off for the city proper. Somewhere in Marsport there was a lovely blonde girl named Snow White, who could do anything, anything at all, and get away with it. Anything but one thing. She couldn't get within a foot of me again! Not if I had anything to say about it. 8 Marsport, the largest--if you excluded the prospecting encampments within a hundred-mile radius of the place--city on the Planet, had grown fast, from the time of its founding in 2014. Originally simply a mining site for the Tri-Planet Refining Corporation, it had spread backward from the area of the original mines in a rough circle, beginning with the monotonous quonset huts of the miners, and modulating in its move toward the perimeter to smart iron-and-adobe structures. Some of these, thanks to the less-than-half Earth's normal gravity, as high as fifteen stories. The planet, barely half the diameter of Earth and a tenth of Earth's mass, was a minerologist's paradise. The rusty red sands of the Martian desert were almost pure ferrous oxide, a source of both iron for the profitable refineries and oxygen for the inhabitants of Marsport.