of the lock. Quade reached out, caught a lever, and tried to anchor himself. He couldn’t.
But inside the ship there were weapons.
He struck out frantically at another lever. The inside port opened. The sealed ship became unsealed in an instant, and the lake poured in, carrying with it Quade and a dozen Zonals. By the time the water had settled, a steady stream of amphibians were swimming down through the open lock, and the water had changed color to streaky yellow and pink that gradually merged into an ambiguous darker hue.
Briefly puzzled, Quade noticed that two carboys of the concentrated aqueous dye had been smashed. Also, Kathleen had left the ship’s lights on, so the Zonals, temporarily distracted, were able to see Quade and to converge on him.
They got him down, clawing at his suit with their talons. That didn’t worry him. The armor was tough. But one of the Zonals, after breaking a tooth on Quade’s helmet, got a bright idea. He found a metal bar somewhere and began smashing it down on Quade’s head. He used it like a piston, so that water pressure was minimized, and the helmet began to show a webwork of fine cracks.
Quade twisted, got hold of the bar and tussled it free. He levered oxygen into his suit hurriedly. Buoyancy took over, and he shot up out of the heap of Zonals and bounced off the ceiling. But the amphibians instantly swam up after him.
It was then that Quade noticed the row of carboys in their wall-cradles beneath him. …
He broke them. Using the metal bar, he floundered and fought and smashed his way through the Zonals down the line, while blue and green and translucent orange flowed out from the carboys, staining the water brilliantly. It was tremendously concentrated, this aqueous dye.
And, while each dye had been made to blend transparently with water, there is a simple principle of the color-wheel that added up to complete opacity. If you mix a lot of colors, you get black. This wasn’t dead black, but it was darker and thicker than a Venusian fog on Darkside.
Within moments the Zonals were fighting by touch alone. Luckily for Quade, they had no scent-organs worth mentioning, or could not use them under water. And they did not know the spaceship, while Quade could have found his way from bow to stern blindfolded.
He was blindfolded. But the Zonals were in a worse predicament as Quade found when he opened the arsenal, abstracted a few weapons and dodged his way out of the dun-colored lake to shore. Some of the amphibians were emerging on land, but they were wandering around vaguely, with helpless, groping motions.
They had hollow eyeballs and used water for lenses. Thus, since they’d sucked in the dark-dyed lake-water by now, they were blinded until they could find clear liquid of some sort!
Hordes of them were emerging from the lake. They were grouping together now, stumbling up the valley toward the pool at the upper end. There they could regain their vision. But it would take time, and Quade, his arms loaded with blasters and thermo-pistols, grinned tightly and started back toward the castle.
No Zonals were visible when he reached it. Kathleen and Sherman ran forward to meet him. Quade let the guns fall.
“Wait’ll I take off this suit,” he said, and unzipped himself. Sherman was lovingly loading the weapons as Kathleen helpfully tried to pull off Quade’s helmet without loosening the bolts.
“Okay,” Quade said, beating her off. “I’ll do it. There! Now. Let me tell you what happened.” He explained. Sherman whistled.
“Blind man’s buff! That should hold the Zonals for a while. They’ll be all right after they get to the upper pool and rinse their eyeballs out, but it’ll take a while. And with these guns—” He touched a thermo-pistol with expert fingers. Then, suddenly, he looked at Quade.
“I just thought—I hadn’t realized it before! I’ll be getting out of here! After seven years—”
The big shoulders shook.
“I’ll take this gear inside,” Sherman said.
He didn’t finish. Carrying the guns, he went into the castle and the portal shrank behind him.
“Give him time,” Quade said slowly. “Let’s wait here for the ship.”
So they did. And when it loomed over the glaciers Kathleen sighed, relaxed against Quade’s shoulder.
“Now we’re all set, huh?”
“Right,” Quade told her. “Because you’re going back Sunward with Sherman. He’s got to report to Patrol headquarters and I’m going to have him take you with him.”
“Tony!” Kathleen said reproachfully. “You don’t love me any more!”
“I adore you madly,” Quade said, ignoring the sputtering girl as he signaled the approaching ship. “You hate me. Our engagement’s broken again. You’ll get Von Zorn to blacklist me. You’ll elope with a crooner. I know exactly what you’re trying to say. Just the same, you’re going Sunward with Sherman. I’ve got a picture to shoot! You hear me?”
“Of course, Tony,” murmured Kathleen, who was already laying new plans. “But I just happened to remember. What about the Planetary Quarantine laws? We’ve all been infected with this Titan virus and, even though we’ve got the antitoxin, we’ve got to stay on Titan for thirty days—or is it sixty? Don’t look at me like that! I can’t help it, Tony—honest I can’t—it’s the law—!”
Jerry Foster told the bartender that nobody loved him. The bartender, with the experience of his trade, said that Jerry was mistaken, and how about another drink.
“Why not?” said the unhappy Mr. Foster, examining the scanty contents of his wallet. “ ‘I’ll take the daughter of the vine to spouse. Nor heed the music of a distant drum.’ That’s Omar.”
“Sure,” the bartender said surprisingly. “But you want to look out you don’t go out by the same door that in you went. No brawls allowed here. This isn’t East Fifth, chum.”
“You may call me chum,” Foster said, reverting to the main topic, “but you don’t mean it. I’m nobody’s pal. Nobody loves me.”
“What about that babe you brought
