"Things like the corridor we fust came through—well, they're not too essential, so I Just wait until they get reasonably uncomfortable before I bore a new one and fill in the old one."

  I was worried; an unsteady converter is something to worry a man. "But if the converter—if the converter keeps doing this, then everything in the ship must move around or float around or…"

  Gallagher guffawed, and his laugh echoed and tinkled in the ice cavern. Finally, he said "Well, yes and no. The cabins and things float, and like I showed you back when you first came aboard while I was building her, I just melt water from behind them and pump it under pressure in front of them to squeeze them back into place. But she does have one habit that's harder to manage—she expands radially, leaving a hollow in the center. Boy, does she get fat! Then I have to really go to work, put a plastic skin over her, melt the outside and pump it back inside. Five times out is about as big as I can let her expand and still keep her in kilter, before I have to pause and shrink her back down—put her back on a diet, so to speak. But this time, I'm ballooning her on purpose. That's what we're doing now, giving her a bigger belly so we'll have room for the people."

  "People?" The word came through to me finally.

  "They'll have plenty of room in the hold we're making, but not much in the way of comfort. The equipment that we'll take—it's to go into a second hold—will be for building the new planet, not for making planeteers comfortable."

  "What people?" I asked, though I was beginning to get an idea of what he had in mind.

  "The people of Stellamira, of course," he said in surprise. "You saw how rough it was there before. Well, it's twice as rough today, on account of your escape. We weren't planning this for another three months, but I reckon the deadline's sort of called."

  "But, but Dublin! I'm going to report it to the Space Commission. It will be…"

  "Sometimes," he interrupted, "I get to thinking you've got good sense underneath all that company learning of yours. But other times," he went on, keeping me from speaking, "I get despairing of you. Just how are you planning to get to Earth to report the situation as you call it, even if that would do any good?"

  "Why, the Starfire…"

  "The Starfire took off nearly twelve hours ago, while you were in prison. The ship is in the command of her executive officer, with word that you've been taken space hazy and were confined to a hospital on Stella-mira. They were planning to ship you back on the next ship through, and you'd have been nuts all right by then, real nuts."

  "But spacemen only go space hazy after… the sort of accident that leaves them in a suit too long, or…"

  Gallagher looked at me kindly. "Space nuts," he said softly, "is a disease that is manufactured in the psych wards, and only there. It's a convenient way to get rid of a man, and it's never been and never will be a real hazard of real space. A guy can go space nuts in a suit temporarily and get over it. What they call the space psycho is the one they manufacture. You were supposed to be it. Now," he said, dropping the subject as though it were completed to anyone's satisfaction, "you are, like it or not, stuck on the Glacier or stuck on Stella-mira. You've got that much choice, and only that much, and I'm not even going to ask you which you choose. So come on, and I'll show you what we're doing to hold the people that we're going to take off that devil-ridden planet tonight."

  He walked to the back of the engine room through another bulkhead, into another child's toy of a tunnel, and pushed through another bulkhead at its side. That bulkhead opened into a sort of spiral slide that led down to an ice floor much farther down than I had expected to find in the ship; it stretched a good kilometer from forward to back. It was a hold, circled around the central corridor, and the floor of the hold was about forty meters down.

  It wasn't so much the size of the hold, but the way it was rigged that got to me. There were ropes, not just a few ropes, but grids and nets of ropes. Gallagher swung out along them confidently.

  "Can't have people just sitting on the ice in here," he said, "and I didn't have enough material for proper decking. So I reckon this is about as good a crash deck as anybody could rig."

  The plane of interwoven "decking" that we were traversing was at an angle of about forty-five degrees to the current direction of gravity. Suddenly Gallagher sat down and allowed himself to protrude somewhat through the fairly wide mesh.

  "They can lie down like this and not be particularly uncomfortable whether we're on spin gravity or drive gravity. It's almost as good as a hammock."

  I'd been carefully matching Gallagher as we made our way across the thing, trying to keep my mind from actually confronting what he'd told me about the Starfire. Now I tried the webbing. It looked comfortable, but in actual practise it wasn't. I stretched out, and the ropes were soft, but there weren't enough of them. I could prop my feet and not slide, or I could even let my feet dangle through. But I couldn't get the idea that it would be anything but an awkward way to travel.

  "Don't think I'd be comfortable here," I said, and Gallagher swung back up into position for leaving.

  "Doesn't make the best accommodations you could think of, does it? But really, the company didn't leave us much choice. We managed to get this rope from one of their warehouses. It's actually cable they use for mining. It's soft and plastic, but extremely strong. Anybody that can manage to bring himself along a hammock or something of the sort will be ahead of the game, and lord knows those people have already had enough problems without facing them with a mode of transportation like this. But it was the best we could do with the materials at hand."

  Beyond the ropes, there were men working around the floor of the hold, and there was a glare from infrared heaters strung in a seemingly haphazard manner around the floor. A blast of heat rose from that surface that I certainly wouldn't expect to be compatible with ice. The melt was running off in channels and being pumped, I assumed, to the outside.

  Gallagher stood on the ropes surveying the scene. "We've got it nearly big enough already," he said with some satisfaction. Then he turned and started back to the bulkhead; I followed. But now I could no longer keep my mind blanked. The Starfire was gone. I had lost my commission; I was a space nut, theoretically, if not in the bleak actuality that had almost happened. But I was not a space nut, and I was captain of the Starfire. I was determined to find a way to get to Earth to reestablish myself properly.

  We reached the bridge, and Gallagher flung himself into the captain's seat, but I remained standing.

  "You're taking the people off Stellamira, evacuating it?" I asked, rather forlornly, I'm afraid.

  "What would you do, abandon them to the company finks who are out for blood now you've been rescued?" Gallagher's voice was hard.

  I shook my head. "Even so, it's piracy," I said, "or something like it."

  "It's a rescue mission," he said shortly. "That planet's murder, the way it's being run."

  "The way it's being run could be changed," I said weakly. "It beclouds the issue, just hauling them off like this," I added stubbornly. "The company would have the right to send armed ships after them."

  I paused, and then in spite of my better sense I went on. "The colonists have rights, including the right to leave, fair enough. But they do owe a debt to the company, and if they just leave without paying the debt, then the Space Commission has to go after them, or the company can take military measures of redress. And there are other planets in the same fix, or at least nearly so. So if you becloud the issue, legally that is…"

  Gallagher looked at me curiously. "You're right," he said, "in a sort of half-assed legal way. There's some might even hesitate because of that fact. But they're being treated like animals, and that no man can tolerate."

  "They could acknowledge the debt," I said desperately.

  He thought about that for a minute, then his face broke into a huge grin. "Sign an I.O.U? By God, Har-ald, that they could! On the planet I've in mind for them, they can set up and repay the debt before any Space Commission that ever existed could even get through the first investigation, much less issue permits for armed intervention. With me to handle their shipping and their marketing for them, they could," he added.

  Gallagher generously offered to let me stay aboard the Glacier during the evacuation proceedings—war would be a better term for it. "No use you and your ideals getting mixed up in a pirate operation," he said soothingly.

  I refused point blank. "It's a legal operation, handled, I'll admit, somewhat illegally; but there will only be violence if the colonists* right to leave is obstructed." I said. "I'm proud to be part of it, and will be able to report the details more exactly, as an eyewitness, when I appear before the Space Commission as soon as I can find transport to Earth."

  "Your faith in the Space Commission is touching," he answered sarcastically, but he made me second in command aboard the Glacier, and gave me the coordinates of the planet he had in mind for the Stellamirans before we went down. "Just in case," he said, "a Gallagher's luck turns black."

  IV

  There are no guns on a planet where the populace is as subjugated as it was on Stellamira, except those .in the hands of the company police; and, since officials tend to think of weapons in terms of guns, the populace was considered unarmed.

  A preconceived notion like that will do more to keep authority comfortable and unsuspicious than any other factor, and Suzie had seen to it that a complacent attitude prevailed.

  A man with a laser gun is absolutely helpless when he's writhing under a jolt of ten or twenty thousand volts of electricity being applied by a contraption that is essentially a battery-powered water pistol. No one in authority noticed or cared when the colonists started making their kids water pistols with two tiny jets spaced four to eight centimeters apart. The tiny atomic batteries they have these days are so useful for powering things like flashlights that authority didn't bother about them either. Yet tiny batteries are equally useful for powering high-energy circuits if the circuit is pulsed and applied to a dual stream of slightly salt water. It makes an efficient little electrocution circuit. The power isn't enough to kill, but it can make a man dance while you knock the pistol out of his hand with a stick or other non-conductive agent.

  There was also a ghastly weapon, borrowed from history, a combination of palmitic acid and naptha, originally called Napalm. It hadn't been particularly difficult for the colonists to get the materials for that either. For palmitic acid they substituted common soap and for the naptha, light oil that burns freely. There were plenty of those around, the fuels commonly used in ground cars, oils and gasolines.

  They had come up with a brown, sticky jelly which, if you got it on you, was very difficult to get off and would burn where it stuck. A small paper sack of the stuff thrown at almost anything, personnel or building, would stick and burn a hot, deadly flare, for three or four minutes.

  Then there were rocks. Stellamira is practically made of rocks. Man, woman, boy and girl, the Stellamiran colonists had formed the habit of taking out their frustrations by throwing rocks. It was target practice. They threw rocks on the way to and from the mines; they threw rocks in any free time they might have; they made games centered around throwing rocks in the bits and pieces of time they had free. The games had names and were competitive.

  The complacent belief that they were dealing with unarmed colonists was a major factor in the revolution. The authorities were not really alerted until they were already defeated.

  It started while we were on our way down, timed to the instant when we would be just outside detection range but well on our way to port. The internal timing of the revolution had been planned in detail; it was only the date that had changed.

  The company armory and communications systems were the first targets; the riot control equipment was in the armory; and the guards and their corporation executives depended on communications from telephone to walkie-talkie. The colonists didn't depend on communications: with the kind of furious purpose there, all that was necessary was advance planning so everybody knew the general outline. After that, runners were sufficient.

  Suzie gave an impromptu party that night; and since the thing had been planned for a year, she'd made a habit of impromptu parties. They were accepted as normal. That was at the glittery part of Suzie's. It was mostly for off-duty guards, though a number of executives always came.

  At the height of the party, as had become a custom, some of Suzie's girls were dispatched to take refreshments and the pleasure of their company to the guards at the armory and the police station.

  The dope went into all the drinks at the same time. Where a guard didn't drink fast enough, there was a sufficiency of the roller's taps around to finish the job, and the girls were alert and watching to see which was needed where.

  There were a few of the guards and even one or two of the executives, that the girls had decided were "franks" instead of "finks," and for this Suzie was prepared, too. A big lipsticked F went on each forehead. The official franks weren't trusted too far, though. They were marked and locked in a small room at Suzie's until take-off time.

  Almost as the guards went down to the dope and the taps, the girls inside opened the barred doors and colonists assigned to those jobs moved into the armory and the police station.

  At the same moment, a group of colonists were frantically digging down to a main communications and power cable. The power cable was left until last. It was the communications cable that they tackled, and the two best technicians among the colonists had been put on that job, surrounded with an armed mob for possibly-needed protection.

  They didn't cut the cable. That would have presented the finks with a simple problem, recognizable for what it was. Instead, they set up a random pulser that caused the automatic equipment associated with the land wires to go berserk. The random pulser kept initiating a few hundred simultaneous calls, and it not only put the com-munications lines out of order quite effectively, it tied corporate brains up at a critical point.

  Then too, a self-powered, random-pulse sweep generator was turned on. Walkie-talkies, planetary and off-planet communications were instantly Jammed, except for a single narrow band that would allow the port control facility to stay in contact with Gallagher's Glacier and the landing tugs as soon as the port was captured.

  It was then that the power cables were cut; and that alerted the corporation to the real danger.

  The war was on; but the armory and the police station were already in the hands of the colonists and a good many guards were out of action.

  There were two major points that the corporation would, by its nature, defend first and with the greatest ferocity. Of these, the first would be their "treasure house," the warehouses where the starstones and rare earths waited for shipment. The second would be the port itself, where twenty freighter tugs waited to load incoming ships.

  The port we had to have, but the "treasure house" was so much dross to us. The minerals would be too difficult to handle or to sell. The corporate executives should have known that, but Suzie and Gallagher gambled that the instinct to protect the treasure would be stronger than any logical reasoning they might have.

  So the attack on company headquarters was a two-pronged instead of a three-pronged attack. The colonists came in through the entrances at the port and at the colonists' area, but they left the way to the warehouses open. Like sheep, the corporates ran to the treasure house. It was beautiful. They followed the instinct to guard the treasure and they followed the path of least resistance. The two were the same.

  It was comparatively easy to keep them there, although the fight was not over.

  There was one odd advantage the colonists had; that was the short focus of the corporate lasers. To be effective, a laser has to be focused, and it's a delicate job requiring at least half an hour. Therefore, they're pre-focused. The people who had armed the guards had considered a short focal range to be optimum, as it prevented accidental destruction of company property under riot conditions.

  A ground skimmer gave the advantage of range, since one could come at a target at sixty kilometers an hour; but the skimmers were in the hands of both sides by the time things were underway.

  We set down, and the others scattered to their assigned tasks, whatever they were. Gallagher had given me orders to stay at the port; to see that the freighter tugs were operational and to supervise the actual evacuation. The port was swarming with colonists, and though I had a red lipstick F on my forehead, I had little else to tell them I was on their side. I wasn't in uniform, which may have helped.

  I headed for the nearest tug. Nobody opposed me until I reached it and was opening the hatch, when about sixteen cobbers all had their hands on me at once. There was scatterlight, but that's an eerie kind of light, and it felt like a million people grabbing me.

  "Gallagher," I shouted, "gave me orders—"

  The hands became gentler, and I was set on my feet, unharmed as yet. Instantly I went into captain's gear.

  "Can any of you men handle a tug?" I asked. "We've got to get these tugs operational."

  A big fellow next to me, examining the F on my forehead, grunted. "Don't know you, Cobber," he said grimly.

  "I'm Dundee, formerly of the Starfire. I came down from the Glacier with Gallagher."

  The big man gestured to an only slightly smaller one nearby. "Get in the tug with him, Brant. If he does anything wrong, kill him."

  That was all. I climbed in the hatch, Brant right behind me, but before he slammed the hatch shut I saw a company car shoot onto the field, gunning people down and heading straight our way.

  I jumped to the pilot's couch and switched on the warmup, calling to Brant at the same time. "Strap down. We'll get the atomic motors bearing on that skimmer."

  There wasn't time, but it didn't matter. Brant seemed to trust that answer, for he strapped in. As the screens lit they showed one of the strangest sights I've ever seen. Instead of running away, the big man and his gang had run towards the vehicle. A wave of men seemed to surge towards it, as others on the field answered his shouted instructions and joined. There were bright flashes of guns from three or four in the car, but then the skimmer was onto the wave of people, and every man within reach grabbed at its tail and flipped. The thing flipped over, its momentum barely slowed, and skated along on its top losing speed rapidly. The men ran to catch up. As they reached it, they jumped onto it, and the next time I saw the skimmer clearly, it looked like a can that had been stomped flat. There were parts of guards sticking out all over it.