George Weiss said, firmly, "We want you to go in and talk to him. You were his best friend. He'll listen to you. Tell him it's no use." Hale said, "That's what I figured." He turned to look at the temple, squat and white in the gloom. The doorway was tall and thin and dead black, and behind it, part of the blackness, was Randy and his gun. And he'd be desperate. As Hale turned back he caught a faint, acrid odor, and he knew that a Martian was nearby, crouching, waiting to see that this was done right. "There've been a hundred temples stripped of their twin-stones in the past year," Weiss said. "Our redboys are getting fed up with it. The C. A.'s too busy whipping the climate to tend to looters, and the Patrol buys its liquor and mammas with loot money. Half the law is too damned busy, and the other half's crooked--and we're in the middle. The redboys have run out of patience." Hale nodded. "My own redboys are ready to go on the warpath. Okay. So Randy's the goat elect. So relax and starve him out." "They want him tonight. We promised--" "All right, go keep it. Hell, I didn't promise anything. Damned if I'll risk my neck to--" "--promised to deliver," Weiss went on flatly, "because we had to. We're in a nut-cracker, Hale. The _Lhrai_ priests are set to trigger another Green Spot unless they get Randy to play with. Deadline's dawn." Hale remembered Green Spot. It was a bloody, terrible memory. Green Spot had been one of the earliest and largest farm-settlements on Mars. One night, for some other-worldly reason that the Colonial Authority was still puzzling about, the Martian workers had slit two hundred Terrestrial throats and vanished into the red desert. The _Lhrai_ priests had conveyed regrets, assuring the Authority at the same time that there had been adequate provocation for the act. And the Authority, horrified for its sixty thousand colonists, had admitted that there must have been. Hale thought back, in conflicting terms of personal friendship and unit survival. These men in the shadows; most of them were his friends. He had worked with them, leaning on hoes in the fields or sitting in the enclosed warmth of a back porch discussing the perversities of Martian geochemistry. He had helled around Firstport with them, had often led them in the helling. His wife was the friend of their wives. While Randy-- Randy was five years ago. Randy was thirty acres of crops dumped in Hale's lap when they'd needed working. Randy was a bitter girl named Susan who waited on tables in New Chicago halfway across Mars, and the son he never cared that he'd given her before he went away. "Wait here," said Hale in a sour voice, and tossed away his cigarette. "I'll see what I can do." * * * * * The temple was hexagonal, featureless save for the black slit of the doorway, smooth native marble gleaming under Phobos' dim silver.