Palanth's violet eyes narrowed in amusement. "They no doubt have a surprise for us in store--how poetic that we should be the ones to surprise them!" The Martian waved his perfumed kerchief and the sparkling iciness of the breeze was scented with fresh jasmines. III Mark's hand tightened on the hard object he carried in a lower pocket of his tunic. It seemed to him as if an immeasurably distant vibration reached the very top of his brain where the most difficult thinking is done. It was a fleeting thought, the barest sidereal whisper, that was gone almost the instant it impinged upon his mind. Could the final answer lie there for them? With Terra gone, or made uninhabitable, they would be homeless children of space, unless they subjected themselves to the prosaic, uninspiring existence of the planetarian settlements, limited by space, rigidly under Council control--their lives but pawns in a gigantic game that was planned for centuries to come with a cold, mathematical impersonality that reduced life to a mechanical phenomenon. Mark shuddered slightly. "Yes, Palanth, poetic justice indeed! Come to my apartment at International House, I want to tell you a story ... the story of what happened on Europa when I was Mark the daredevil, recorded as Hugh Betancourt--the surname of my Mentor before I earned my rank and the right to use my own name. Jim Brannigan was my second in command, when he crashed our ship on Europa...." He was smiling with a distant look in his eyes. Later, they met Doctor Fortun. She was still sheathed in the filmy tunic of silver-violet she had worn at Havanol. The fragrance of Venusian butterfly-orchids was a faint invitation to desire. But her firm, capable hands at the controls, sent the luxurious helio-plane hurtling through the stratosphere at a dizzy speed above a continental cloud bank. Dawn was beginning in a young flood of opalescent fire; the ship was dipping and the clouds were swirling. Doctor Fortun sat silent with an enigmatic smile on her lips. Mark Lynn didn't speak lest he break the spell, while Palanth leaned back in his mullioned seat, eyes closed, recapturing the past memorable hours. At last the terrain became visible. It seemed only seconds and they were hovering above the immense interplanetary field where vast spacers awaited launching. Built to accommodate hundreds of thousands, their titanic proportions dwarfed everything around them. Doctor Fortun touched the controls of her helio-plane, and instantly the ship veered and aimed straight for one of the spacers. She flicked a lever and locked the controls. Calmly, she released another lever, and the robot pilot took over. She leaned back with a sigh, her shoulders slumped, silent still.