said one, trying to peer past the Peterbilt's lights.

"He musta run," said another one defensively. "The (bleepard) came out of that cab like a God (bleeped) rocket!"

They were all converging toward the red anorak.

I heard some very small rattling sounds close to Heller.

One of the men, carrying a shotgun, turned the body over with his foot.

In a shocked voice somebody said, "It's Benny!"

Heller's right arm blurred!

Something whistled through the air!

It was spinning!

It hit the man with the shotgun in the face!

Heller glanced down. He was holding an assortment of wrenches. He grabbed a box wrench a foot long!

Heller threw!

Spinning, the deadly steel sizzled through the air!

A man saw it coming, tried to deflect it. His gloved hand spouted blood!

A flashing object!

Another box wrench! The man was down.

One tried to get a shotgun into action to fire into the dark garage. A spinning blur of steel! His forehead burst apart!

A man tried to flee. Heller's arm blurred! A spinning missile slashed his parka hood off and half his head with it.

The last man had reached the van. He was struggling to open the door but slipped.

Heller lunged forward at speed. He threw a wrench as he ran. It broke the driver's wrist.

Heller was on him. The man was hitting out with his remaining good hand. Heller brought a heavy socket wrench down on his skull! It burst like a melon!

Then there was only the whisper of falling snow.

Heller looked into the back of the van. Nobody. He stepped along the road and listened. Nothing.

He surveyed the bodies in the snow. There were six lying there, including Benny. He went from one to another, kicking their guns aside, checking. They were all very dead.

He went over to the garage door, put his ear up against it and listened. He kicked it a couple of times. Nothing happened.

Heller pulled the Peterbilt hand throttle down to idle and then drove it ahead a few feet and put the brake back on. He put on his asbestos gloves again and pushed the stack up straight and, with a piece of wire, fastened it in place.

He went back to the door again and listened. Nothing. He went to its lock. It wasn't really closed. He took the padlock off, threw the locking bar over and pulled the door up from the bottom, leaping aside at the same time.

Clouds of diesel smoke billowed out. Although he was well clear of it, he fanned it away from himself. He couldn't see into the darkness well. He turned on the tractor's side back lights.

There were four dead men in there!

Their faces were blue except for patches of pink on their cheeks.

Flurries of wind and snow were blowing into the interior. Heller approached the men more closely. They were very dead.

He picked up some straps and coils of rope they had been carrying. One had had a curious weapon: an air gun with injector darts.

Heller checked the trailer and Caddy out for bombs. He found nothing.

He went outside. It was snowing even harder and very dark. He glanced at his watch. It was only 5:20 A.M.

Heller started moving fast.

He took the red anorak off the late Benny. He checked it for blood, found none and threw it in the cab. He went all around and recovered his wrenches. He verified he had them all. Then he cleaned them and put them back in his tool boxes in the shop.

Then he began to drag bodies to the van. He threw the monoxide-corpses in the back and then, bending down under the van, using a screwdriver's blade, he stabbed a hole in the exhaust muffler.

The two with the most obvious face injuries he put in the passenger side of the van cab. He dragged the other four and put them in the back.

He collected up all their weapons and equipment, quite a pile, and tossed them into the back of the van.

Then he verified that he had left no evidence about.

He stood thinking for a bit. Then he went into the shop and found a black plastic garbage sack. He went to the van and, one by one, began to remove all I.D., wallets and whatever from the corpses. It was a somewhat grisly job although the blood had long since frozen. He put all items in the garbage bag. He threw the sack into the cab of the Peterbilt.

Then he went into the shop and found some pellets. He picked up three jerrycans full of gasoline and put them in the back of the van.

He looked the scene over again. He went and got some snow boots and pulled them on over his spikes.

He got into the van and drove it away.

The snow was so heavy it was very hard to see where he was going. He evidently knew. The brush was closer and closer in beside the road. He drove for quite a while. Then he stopped and got out.

A picnic table was to his right. He walked ahead. He was at the edge of a precipice. A dark gully yawned blackly just beyond the picnic spot. Obviously, he was in some part of the recreation park near the sea, a very deserted part amongst the gullies and dunes.

He got into the back of the van. He opened the three gasoline cans. He looked at his watch. Into each can he dropped a pellet. He recapped the cans.

Aha! I got it. They were Voltar time-dissolvable explosion caps!

He got in the van, put it in gear and started it ahead toward the precipice.

He stepped out. The van went on.

It sailed over the edge and vanished in the darkness and snow. A thud below in the blackness and then a rattle of stones. The engine quit.

Heller began to run with a distance-eating pace. The snow was falling so thickly and it was so black that I would have been lost in seconds. But I had no hope that he would get lost. Not Heller with that built-in compass brain of his.

He had gone some distance. He made his watch wink the time. He went a little further and then looked back.

The faintest sort of greenish flash, hardly visible in this snow. And then a faint WHOOSH!

Three seconds, three-fifths of a mile away.

Was he kneeling in the snow? He was speaking in Voltarian. "O God of voyagers, thank you for deliverance this day. I know it is your way to test the souls of spacers with such trials to make them more worthy in a future life. But, O God of voyagers, did you have to make the natives of this planet so combative to an effort to land and give them help? I think you overdid it just a little bit on Blito-P3. All Hail."

He shifted to English. "Forgive me, Jesus Christ, for rubbing out some of your people. I don't think I gave them time to turn the other cheek. Please accept these souls from their funeral pyre and find it in your heart not to give them more than they deserve. Amen."

He stood up.

Heller turned on a pocket light. A pencil of windblown snow. His footprints on the back trail were filling so rapidly they would be totally gone in minutes. Satisfied, he turned the light off and went speeding on his way.

Ah, now at last I could see something. And hear something, too. The tractor lights and the tractor engine.

He slowed down and made a wide sweep, very silent, scouting the place for any more unwanted visitors. Satisfied, he closed in.

The falling flakes, turned bluish in the tractor lights, made a curtain all around that waved this way and that, stirred by puffs of wind. The bitter cold turned his breath white around his face mask.

He looked at his watch. It flashed that it was 6:15 A.M.

Heller rapidly got to work.

He dug up an opaque silver, plastic car cover and put it over the Caddy. Then he went and got a spray can of black paint from the semi and on both sides of the cover, working very fast and being very neat, he put SUICIDE RHODES in big letters.

I was mystified. There was no such driver listed in the starting lineup copy I had.