He bowed from the hips. "When a lady wishes to be taxied to the place of her choice, who am I to do other than see to it that her wishes are obeyed?" he said with a grin. "But the hire of the taxi must be paid, and I've come to collect my fare." With that, he picked her up unceremoniously and headed up the stairs with her, Suzie giving a few little kicks of token protest, but obviously pleased.

  I didn't know what was expected of me; but I didn't have long to wonder. One of the girls, the one who'd been on a crutch at Stellamira and who seemed to walk with a slight limp still, appeared at my elbow and offered me a drink. We made our way to the bar. I took the drink and played with it, and we made polite conversation. It was made clear to me that a trip upstairs would be available, but I refused that and continued to play with my drink. Our conversation remained light, although we had shared danger together.

  Though the company was good, it was a long wait, and I may have grown a trifle nervous. I sat outwardly calm and feeling warm with the bonds between me and the girls who came to chat with me one by one. My back, as I sat at the bar, felt naked, and the hairs at the nape of my neck felt stiff and standing. I felt watched by cold eyes and sure that there were company spies in the room.

  When Gallagher came down, he was obviously tipsy. I was sober, having played with one drink all evening I had assumed that he, too, would be careful. I was furious, but I hid it well.

  "Come along, Harald," he said jovially, swatting me on the back so hard I swayed over the bar with the blow. "Come along, for the hour is early yet, and we've a bit of pub crawling to do before the night is out."

  I rose, unsteady from the blow, and grasped his arm. "Maybe we'd best go back to the lander for a bit of sleep first?" I suggested, cautiously.

  He threw his head back and laughed with a bellow that turned every head in the room. "Go back to bed, and me so long away from the space lanes, so cramped yet from the months of settling in colonists who are serious and sober and God-fearing? Why no, Harald. You sleep if that is to your liking, but me, I thought I'd see the town, maybe even beard the governor in his lair." He leered down into my face, and I became really worried.

  We made our way boisterously to the street. He stopped everyone we passed to exchange a greeting or to gainsay an offer of a drink.

  He took me by the arm and led me through the main part of the town. I realized that we were being followed.

  I made it my policy to try to steer Gallagher to the most brightly lighted spots, for I'd more than a suspicion that the company goons who were following us had nothing better in mind than getting us into a dark alley and leaving our bodies to be found there. But it became more and more obvious as we made our way along the streets that the town was full of dark allies. The joints were getting scarcer and scarcer, with longer stretches of dark pavement between.

  Then, with a great shout, Gallagher dragged me off the main thoroughfare.

  'Tis Tiny's place we're forgetting," he said as he headed me up one of the darkest alleys we'd passed.

  We were into the alley before I'd quite gathered my wits.

  As the darkness surrounded us, Gallagher's tipsy gait left him, and he moved like a cat.

  "Hold this over your nose," he whispered, and thrust a light-weight square of greasy cloth into my hand.

  The greasy texture caused my hand to hesitate on the way to my nose; I was almost too late following his instructions. There was a faint tinkle behind us, near my heels and a faint hiss, and I forced the square of cloth firmly over my nose and mouth.

  It seemed anticlimactic that we strolled on at a reasonable, unexcited pace, then stopped and waited, scarcely ten meters from the entrance. I was about to take the cloth from my mouth and ask Gallagher what was happening, when a half dozen figures appeared in the mouth of the alley.

  Cautiously, as though feeling their way, searching and unsure, the men came into the narrow way after. us and then began to disappear, dropping one by one.

  I'd not been noticing Gallagher's faint count, "… and five and six. Okay, that took care of them, but there's more of them outside." His voice was low. "They didn't all come in, and by now they'll have the other end of this alley sealed up too."

  You could touch the walls on each side of the narrow way by stretching, and Gallagher did just that, feeling along until he reached a door on his left. He centered on the door and then began scrabbling with his fingers along the pavement. Abruptly, he began heaving on something, whispering at the same time, "Give me a hand."

  I moved beside him just in time to catch hold of the rim of a manhole cover. The two of us heaved it up and balanced it on edge next to the hole.

  "Down you go."

  My feet found the rungs of a ladder, and I made my way half way down, then reached back a hand to support the lid as Gallagher moved onto the ladder beside me, then carefully replaced the lid over the hole.

  "Safe to breathe yet?" I asked softly.

  "Keep the cloth over your nose a while longer; I used strong stuff. We've got to move quickly now, for they'll be all over that alley in another fifteen minutes. The gas may hold 'em off that long."

  We felt our way down the blackness of a tunnel scarcely a man's height; the wires, pipes and various boxes that my fingers passed over told me its use.

  Then ahead of us there was light, and the passage broadened into a dimly-lighted, underground room.

  "Junction terminal," Gallagher said succinctly. I was about to move ahead when he held me back. "It'll have personnel relays in it," he said, "and I hadn't time to get hold of the necessary electronics to knock one out."

  We paused only a few meters from the lighted room, and I was wondering whether it would be wise to go back. Apparently Gallagher was thinking of something else, for a small flame appeared in his hand, and he began carefully tracing some of the cables that ran along the wall beside us.

  "This should do it," he decided with the air of a man talking to himself, as his other hand came out of his pocket holding a small knife. He made short work of slicing through the protective plastic cover and picking out a couple of the color-coded wires beneath. These he peeled carefully without breaking, and then twisted them together.

  "Okay. That'll give them enough to worry about for a while."

  "How do you know you didn't just short out somebody's telephone?" I asked.

  "Advantage of being a floating engineer," he answered "I spent a couple of months working on this underground system between space hops once. That's when I got to know the problems here on Durango. I just shorted out the alarm that will tell them every warehouse in the neighborhood, as well as all the runnels and other guarded areas, have been invaded. We just became an army," he said grinning.

  "But won't that mean they'll have people swarming all over these tunnels looking for intruders?"

  "Not really. They'll search the warehouses first. Then, after ten or fifteen hours they may find out exactly what happened. But come on, I'm not sure we've got that long."

  There was a plan to the tunnels that was undoubtedly logical and easily remembered by anyone who ever worked on it. But for me, it was a matter of walking and crawling, twisting and turning. Eventually there was another manhole cover. We heaved it out of our way, and crawled out into another alley.

  "Took you long enough," said a nearby feminine voice. Suzie was leaning out the door of her skimmer, and Seth was in front at the wheel. I felt myself pulling back, as though to avoid that roller's tap at the back of my neck, but Gallagher replaced the manhole cover and got in, with me right after him. The skimmer took off, slowly at first, turning and twisting through areas of fewer and fewer houses until we were away from the town. Then Seth threw it into high speed operation; and I turned to Gallagher.

  "The company was just hoping we'd go back to our lander," he told me happily. "If they didn't have it booby-trapped, I don't know company minds. They want us dead, but they want us dead unofficially. When we didn't head right back for it, they decided to take further action, but there's enough independence in this town, that they didn't want to be open about it. And we had to take the heat off Suzie's Place by being lon^g gone from there before we disappeared."

  "But if they've got our lander," I felt foolish asking, because I thought I already knew the answer, "how the devil are we going to get off of here?"

  "That's what's been worrying a lot of people for the last few years," Suzie answered me. "We've got some independence, some of us, and we've got parts of the planet more-or-less under control. But how to get on and off—well, that's gotten more difficult every week since the Stellamira uprising. The port's theoretically free, but time after time independents have had accidents at the port."

  "But if you've got ground control…"

  "Ground control means you control an area. But the company controls the space around that area. Any time they've a mind to, they can drop something on one of our installations, and who's to say it wasn't an accident? Controlling the ground and being able to use it—well, that's two different things."

  But it was a standoff, because the company couldn't use the planet either. With two and a half million independents scattered around the planet, there wasn't a safe thing the company could do, any more than there was a safe thing the independents could do.

  In all my experience I've never had a ride like the one I had that night. Seth drove with a sure control that was beautiful to watch, and I soon got over thinking of him as the stumble-word I'd remembered him to be. But at our speed, even sure control wouldn't be enough, unless he knew the country like the palms of his hands.

  The upper speed limit of a skimmer on a straight run over a flat plain is reputed to be five hundred kilometers an hour, though no one in his right mind would drive one half that fast on anything rougher than a mirror.

  How far or how fast we traveled that night I don't know, but the next morning we were well into a range of mountains that are not even visible from the port; we had passed over totally unimproved territory.

  There was a tiny cabin that we got to just at dawn, and there we stayed. I'd thought it a stopover point when we first arrived, but it was not. It was to be our headquarters, I discovered, from which we were to organize a revolution.

  At least, it would be headquarters for me; for Gallagher, Suzie and Seth it would be headquarters when they were there.

  I was put in charge of creating an intelligence system from among the guerrilla fighters. It was decided that no one who was not directly concerned know about their activities. Should my intelligence men or I be captured, we could not give away what we did not know.

  Gallagher and Suzie were seldom there. When they were, it was to drain me of all the information I could give them, with them both keeping their mouths shut for fear of giving me information, and me doing my best to throttle my own inquisitiveness.

  About two and a half months later, when I was thoroughly engrossed in the business of gathering data and drawing a picture of company activities on the planet, I got two pieces of news that frightened me.

  One of my most reliable runners came in with word that a strange craft had been seen outback. It had been near the areas where I knew, but had not been told, that Gallagher and Suzie were operating.

  It was a huge, silent vehicle, nearly two hundred meters in length according to the report, with a shape like a stingray. It had come slowly drifting out of a cloud bank and had silently progressed up the valley. The vehicle had been reported from at least a dozen good sources, and all the descriptions were nearly the same. The companies seemed to have had something really new, and probably very dangerous to us.

  Word of this had to get to Gallagher at once. I debated sending the runner on to him, thought better of it, and decided to go myself. But before I got to the skimmer, I heard another skimmer coming, and I waited. There were five of them, but Seth's was in the lead, and so I knew it was all right. I saw that Gallagher was driving the second skimmer and knew I could report directly to him. Suzie was driving the third. But when I saw who was driving the fourth skimmer, I ran to where she'd pulled up beside the cabin and opened the door for Cricket.

  She came out and into my arms, and it may have been quite a while before I was thinking again.

  Then, hanging onto Cricket's hand, I dragged her to where Gallagher, Seth, Suzie and a man I didn't know were unloading hundreds of cartons, and I began to tell them about the new craft.

  I noticed that Gallagher was barely listening. I took a big grip on myself, dropped Cricket's hand, and got between Gallagher and the skimmer he was unloading.

  "You've got to listen," I said, "this is important."

  He smiled at me, then. "Yes," he said, "it's important; it just happens we already know about it. I didn't mean to be impolite."

  "Well then, for God's sake, tell me what it is," I said desperately.

  "Why, it's a new kind of landing craft, for landing people and freight from interstellar ships," he said. "It's far more efficient than the landers we've been using."

  "It's too big," I said flatly.

  "It's two hundred and twenty-eight meters long," he told me, "and it can carry one hell of a lot of freight and equipment."

  "It can't be a lander." There was doubt in my voice now, though I knew that a vehicle that size, making little or no noise couldn't possibly be launched with an in-ertial drive.

  Gallagher looked at me solemnly. He said softly, "It's an L.T.A."

  I must have looked blank, for he went on, "Lighter than air, it floats."

  "Like a balloon?" I asked inanely.

  "Yes. And radar won't pick it up, because radar circuits reject anything that slow."

  I could have gone on questioning Gallagher as long as he'd have let me, but it was at this point that the real blow fell.

  A skimmer came over the hills, and Suzie and Gallagher ducked inside the hut. It skidded to the ground and I headed towards it. The hatch opened and Jane, the girl with the limp, jumped out, and came towards me as fast as she could go.

  "Earth's sending a shipload of Space Marines,"' she called, panting.

  I turned to find Gallagher, but he and Suzie were already coming towards us as fast as they could. "When?" he asked.

  "They got word to me at the house last night. It's already lifted from Earth. I got away as soon as I could. Nobody knows why, but the gossip is that you've been in the outback so long, and Stellamira was so drastic, that they're going to take a hand in settling the matter. The excuse is that Durango has been plagued with outlaw raids and has asked the Space Commission for assistance in subduing the outlaws."

  Gallagher looked grim. Suzie was standing back with a waiting look on her face. Cricket must have come up while I wasn't noticing, for now she slipped her hand into my arm.

  "What are we going to do?" I asked, trying to keep the hopelessness out of my voice.

  "What you are going to do," Gallagher said fiercely, "is to change your intelligence network over into a distribution network as fast as it can be done." He waved back to where Seth and the other man were still unloading the skimmers, "Get those things to every independent you can get them to. They came in on the L.T.A. lander you spotted, and we've got them now, but they've got to get to where they'll do us some good. By the time your men get these distributed, there will be more. You've got a week; then I'll come get you."

  Jane looked at Gallagher, and her face was strained and tired. "What's my job?" she asked.

  "Take a load of these, all you can carry, to the house," he said.

  Then he, Suzie and Cricket ran to the skimmers from which the last of the packages had just been unloaded, and they took off.

  I felt empty, looking after them.

  Slowly I walked over to the piles of packages. There were three kinds: a huge pile, nearly two-thirds of the lot, of one kind, a smaller pile of a second kind and a very small pile of the third.

  I opened one of the cartons from the big pile and relief flooded me as I pulled out one of the tiny guns that it contained. The thing fitted my hand as though it were tailored for me, and it had the sort of beauty that comes from precision parts intricately fitted together.

  Carefully, I slipped it into my pocket and went to the second pile. Those cartons held communicators, thousands of them. I didn't even pull one out. They solved most of the problems of my information network, I knew without examining them.

  I turned to the third pile, and when I opened a carton there, I think my heart broke. They contained lamps that could be powered only by broadcast power.

  Once I'd seen the globes, I didn't have to pull the gun from my pocket to know that it, too, was a broadcast-power device. Later I tested all three devices.

  It seemed the corporations had discovered solar taps and were about to turn one on. Even with some of their supplies, we would be much weaker than they.

  VIII

  My sense of dejd, vu was strongest when, a week later, I jerked from the papers I was working on in the cabin about twilight. Abruptly worried, I ran outside. Then the feeling disappeared and life was new and exciting again.

  The L.T.A. lander hung about a hundred meters away and six meters off the ground, with Gallagher climbing down a rope ladder from an underslung cabin in its middle and eight men from it anchoring it to trees.

  I was still gawking when Gallagher reached ground. "Time to go now, Harald," he said.

  I shook my head. "You may do as you like," I said, "since you seem to have captured the means to do it, and I hope you're taking Cricket with you. But I've helped start something here, and just because they've gotten ahead of us, I'm not about to run like a scared rabbit—unless everybody else on our side can run, too."

  Gallagher shook his head. "Damn it," he said, "the Earth cruiser will be landing Space Marines in a couple of days now. We've got things to do meantime. Take my word for it, we're not running like scared rabbits. I haven't time to argue; come along."

  I came. He wouldn't even let me go back to the hut to get the papers I'd drawn up with the latest information. "You have everything we'll need in your head," he said, as he practically shoved me up the ladder.