Hale tried to duck, but Randy had the edge. The gun-barrel slammed into his temple. Agonized, he threw up an arm. It chopped against Randy's wrist, and fire and thunder erupted in the blackness. The gun clattered on stone and from somewhere came Randy's furious cursing, "Damn you, Hale, you did that! Now I'll never--" Then Hale was alone in the temple with his pain. He heard the click of bootheels as Randy leaped over the trench, the hollow thudding down the corridor doorway--then the shouts and the roar of blasters and the intolerable glare, a stark wavering white rectangle that washed across the floor from the doorway to flicker upon the stony wings and beast-face of _Lhrai_--and the spasmic scream of a man dissolved in flame. He got to his feet and leaned wearily against the wall, face gaunted by pain, wondering if Randy had known only at the last how ruthless he had become. Life was cheap enough out here on a red world where red insects bred in your eyes and red beasts swallowed you and let their juices do the killing, and it took a good man to fight the alien fight. But when the wrong kind of man came along, it was a knife in the back and life had no price at all. That kind of man had to be reckoned on, Hale thought bleakly--the bad penny that wouldn't even go away, hard and shiny and newly made, like Randy--for values slipped in the rat-race that was any frontier, and the urge to prey, for profit, for power, lay close under a man's skin. Hale sighed. He had hoped for a while--but no; Randy's stamp had been the bloody stamp of the canals, and that stamp would sooner or later have cancelled out other lives, on Venus or wherever he took it. Better now, Hale thought, than hunted down the years.... George Weiss said, from close by in the darkness, "We got him, Hale. Are you bad hurt?" Hale pressed his temple, and said, "I'll get over it," and meant the pain in his head. Time would have to work to erase the deeper ache.