With the others Jansen went outside and piled onto one of the half dozen swamp-buggies which came for them. The buggies were surplus Army amphibian vehicles and rattled noisily over dry ground. They formed a line, single file, and headed through the domed corridor that connected Sun-side city, which was actually in the twilight zone, with the bogs themselves, which were on the sun-side of Mercury. If it had been hot in the city, despite man's best air-conditioning efforts, it was murderously hot in the bogs. The sun burned down on the dome and through it; the irrigation water evaporated rapidly, so rapidly that the dehumidifiers could not carry it away quickly enough. As a result, the bogs were not only terribly hot, but humid as the inside of a Turkish bath. Jansen felt washed out before he'd even begun his work. The swamp-buggies took them to a field of chlorella, the valuable plant growing like a thick coating of slime on the bogs. The men, moving slowly to conserve energy in the heat, climbed down from the buggies and attacked the chlorella by sweeping the surface of the bogs with their muscle-powered harvesters. Jansen smiled in spite of himself. Agricultural methods five thousand and more years old! It couldn't be helped on Mercury, of course. Most available machinery was needed on Earth, for Earth's billions. The metal for machinery was at a premium; the great iron mines of two centuries before were almost exhausted and no new supply had been found on any of the planets--at least none which could be mined productively at slight enough cost. Result: the outworlds got along with primitive methods or didn't get along at all. Dinnison, Jansen discovered, had a rating of Six. It was not as bad as it could have been, but a good deal worse than Jansen's own twelve. At least Dinnison wasn't a harvester. Instead, Dinnison had been assigned to the packing platforms, and that was where Jansen found himself working. Here the chlorella was dried in the fierce sun and baled. The baling, of course, was done by hand and the chlorella, dry enough for baling but still sodden, was heavy. Afterwards, Jansen knew, it would be taken to the sub-space tunnel and shipped to Earth without even the necessity of dehydration. All morning Jansen worked in hot, stifling silence. Whenever a supervisor came in his direction he half-expected a heavy hand to fall on his shoulder and an accusing voice to call out his real name. At lunch hour he wandered off, all but exhausted, into the scant shade of one of the compound shacks. He sat there, popping energy tablets into his mouth. He was too weak to eat food although he saw it being served from big trays perhaps fifty yards away. "Jansen," a voice called softly. * * * * * He looked up quickly, his eyes taking seconds to focus in the almost blinding glare. It was Wendy Hilliard, looking amazingly cool in her insulsuit and shorts.