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Nelsen moved on to the rec area. He didn't go into a garishly splendid place, named The Second Stop. Thus, he didn't see its owner, whose identity he had already heard about, of course. Not that he wouldn't have liked to.
She was still working in the Survey Station hospital, which was swamped with injured from Pallastown. Nelsen could tag all of the fierce drives in him with single words. Home was the first.
Nelsen knew that, through the months, he had killed defensively at least twice. Once, with a long-range homing bullet weapons sanctioned by pious and cautious international agreement, were more lethal, now, to match the weapons of the predatory. Once by splitting a helmet with a rifle barrel.
Then, in the pressure of events, they had almost forgotten him. "I'll go look," Frank Nelsen said. Mitch Storey was there ahead of him. Mitch's helmet was off; his dark face was all planes and hollows in the moonlight coming through the thin, transparent walls of the vehicle. "Should we call the U.S.S.F. patrol, Frank?" he asked anxiously. "Have them take him off?
Frank Nelsen meant the journey to be vagabond escape, an interlude of to hell with it relief from the grind, and from the increasingly uncertain mainstream of the things he knew best. He rode with a long train of bubbs and great sheaves of smelted metal rods tungsten, osmium, uranium 238. The sheaves had their own propelling ionic motors. He lazed like a tramp.
Here were the relics left by people who had sought to spread out to safety, to find old goals of freedom from fear. Several times in Syrtis, Huth and Nelsen descended, using a barren hillock or an isolated spot of desert as a landing area. That was when Nelsen first heard the buzzing of the growths.
They had Ceres, the biggest of the asteroids, and their colonies were moving in on more and more others that were still untouched, closing them, against all agreements, to any competition. The new Archer Seven which Nelsen presently acquired, had a miniature TV screen set in its collar. Afield, he was able to pick up propaganda broadcasts from Ceres.
Maybe it was bad taste, but Nelsen felt like teasing. "Ever hear of a person named Miguel Ramos?" That didn't bother her. She shrugged. "Still around, though I hope not for long, the buffoon! Who could ever put up with a show-off small boy like that for more than ten minutes? Besides, he's wasting himself. Why should he pick me for a bad influence...? Now, your chapter, Frank."
They're crowding us, boy. Hell, what a junk heap this post is going to be, to sort out..." "Get to it," Nelsen commented. "You've got something in mind?" "Uh-huh. Coming in, I heard somebody address somebody else as Fan. Fanshaw, that would be. And I kind of remembered his voice, as he cracked out orders. He was with this group. I'm going after him."
Out in orbit, three reunited Bunch members inflated and rigged their bubbs. For Nelsen it seemed an old, splendid feeling. They lashed the supplies from the trader rockets into great bundles that they could tow. Before the rockets began to descend, the trio of beautiful, fragile rings, pushed by ions streaming from their centers, started to accelerate.
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