He had saved enough to buy his own mining ship. Under the circumstances the Belt was glad to have him. He learned caution before the Belt killed him, and he earned enough to keep his ship in repair and himself in food and tobacco.

Now he was the only man in the fleet who could recognize Lucas Garner's voice. When the radio burst to life he listened carefully to the message, then called Lew to report that it really was Garner.

For Smoky, the broadcast removed all doubt. It was Garner himself. The old man was not above a judicious lie, but he was not prone to risk his life. If he was near Neptune in a leaky terran Navy crate, he must have an outstanding reason to be there.

Thoughtfully Old Smoky checked through his arsenal of two radar missiles, one heat seeker, and a short-range laser "cannon." The war of the worlds was here at last!

Kzanol was baffled. After six hours of searching, the slave Masney had covered the entire planet. The suit wasn't there!

He let the slave begin his second search, for the sake of thoroughness. He took his own ship to Triton. The Brain could not compute the course of moons; one of them may have gotten in the way of the ship as it speared toward Neptune. Very likely it had been Triton. That moon was not only closer than Nereid, it was far bigger: 2500 miles thick as compared to 200.

A nerve-wracking hour later, an hour of flying upside down over Triton's surface with the jet firing outward and the lightly pitted moon showing flat overhead, Kzanol admitted defeat. No white flash had shown itself on the radar screen, though Neptune itself had glowed through the transparent image of the larger moon. He turned his attention to the small moon.

"So that's it!" Anderson's face glowed. "They thought it was on the surface and it wasn't. Now they don't know where it is!" He frowned in thought. "Shouldn't we get out of here? The honeymooner's aiming itself at Nereid, and we're too close for comfort."

"Right," said Garner. "But first we turn the missile loose. The one that's homed on the alien. We can worry about Greenberg later."

"I hate to do it. There're two other people on the Golden Circle." A moment passed. Lengthened. "I can't move," said Anderson. "It's that third button under the blue light."

But Luke couldn't move either.

"Who'd have thought he could reach this far?" he wondered bitterly. Anderson couldn't help but agree. The ship continued to fall toward Nereid.

To the Power, distance was of little importance. What mattered was numbers.

Nereid was a bust. The deep radar went through it as through a warped window pane, and showed nothing. Kzanol gave it up and watched the half-asleep slave for a while. His tiny flame burned bravely against the Neptunian night.

Kzanol was in a bad state of mind. It seemed that his ship had missed not only Neptune but both its moons. What could have gone wrong with the Brain? Probably it had never been intended to last three hundred years. But deep in the bottom of his mind, he knew better. The Brain had missed deliberately. Kzanol had ordered it to commit suicide, not realizing what he asked. The Brain- which was a machine, not a slave, not subject to the Power- had disobeyed. His ship must have hurtled through the solar system and gone on into interstellar space at.97 light. By now it would be beyond the curve of the universe.

He felt the muscles pulling at his mouth, flattening the eating tendrils against his cheeks to protect them, opening his jaws as wide as they would go, and wider, pulling his lips back from the teeth until they were ready to split. It was an involuntary reaction, a reaction of fear and rage, automatically readying the thrint for a battle to the death. But there was nothing to fight. Soon Kzanol's jaws closed and his head drooped between his massive shoulders.

All in all, the only pleasure he had was to watch the last ship searching Neptune for the third time and to see its bright flame suddenly lengthen, then shorten again. The sleepy slave had given up.

Then Kzanol knew that he too was going to Triton. A feeling of noble pity stole over him, and he remembered the tradition that the family of Racarliw had never mistreated a slave. Kzanol went to meet the sleeper at Triton.

"One… two… I can't find Garner's ship. He must have landed somewhere, or turned off his drive. The others are just milling around."

"Funny he hasn't called us. I hope nothing's happened to him."

"We'd have seen the explosion, Smoky. Anyway, he was going for Nereid when his drive stopped. If it failed, we can find him later."

When Kzanol was close enough, he Told the sleeper to turn ship and join him. In an hour the Navy ship and the Golden Circle were alongside.

Kzanol's pilot and copilot were worried about the fuel situation, so as soon as the sleeper's ship was close enough Kzanol Told him to transfer his fuel to the Golden Circle. He waited while various clanking and banging sounds rang through the ships. Fortunately the cards were magnetized, and there was webbing to hold him in his seat. He followed- the movements of his three personal slaves with the back of his mind: the sleeper near the tail, the pilot and copilot motionless in the cockpit. He didn't want to risk their lives by letting them help the sleeper.

Naturally he jumped like a terrified gazelle when his airlock door swung open and a slave walked in.

A slave with a mind shield.

"Hi!" it said, incomprehensibly in English. "I guess we'll need a translator." And it coolly walked forward to the control room. At the door it stopped and gestured with Kzanol's disintegrator.

A man of Leeman's talent and education should never have been given such a boring job. Leeman knew it could never have happened in the Belt. Someday soon he would migrate to the Belt, where he would be appreciated.

Meanwhile, Geoffrey Leeman was the foreman of the Lazy Eight III's skeleton maintenance crew.

Leeman envied the crew of the other section, the drive section at Hamburg. Busybodies with good intentions were constantly ordering minor changes in the starship's drive while they waited for politics to let them launch. The Lazy Eight III's life system hadn't been altered in two years.

Until today.

Now Leeman and his three subordinates watched a horde of technicians doing strange things to the number three "stateroom." A complete balloon of fine wire mesh was being strung over the walls, floor, and ceiling. Heavy machinery was being welded to what would be the ship's floor and was now the outer wall. Taps were let into the power system. Leeman and his men found themselves running errands through the ring-shaped corridor, bringing coffee and sandwiches and detail diagrams, tools and testing machinery and cigarettes. They had no idea what was going on. The newcomers were willing to answer questions, but the answers were gibberish. As:

"We'll be able to triple the number of passengers!" said the man with a head like a speckled brown egg. He shook an ammeter for emphasis. "Triple!"

How?

The man waved his ammeter to include the room. "We'll have them standing in here like rush-hour commuters in an elevator," he confided. When Leeman accused him of levity he became mortally offended and refused to say another word.

By the end of the day Leeman felt like a flatworm in a four-dimensional maze.

Somehow he managed it so that the entire group went to dinner together, for mutual brain-picking. Things became clearer during dinner. Leeman's ears went up when he heard the phrase "retarder field."

Dinner turned into a party. It was almost two hundred before Leeman could make a phone call. The other man almost hung up. But Leeman knew the words to stop him.