helpless fury. He decided to knock off the lamenting and get good and
drunk instead. And he would make it a drunk to top all drunks on this
happy anniversary night.

But he hadn't done that either. He had everything set up, downright
festively--glasses, crushed ice, a formidable little squad of fresh
bottles. But when he looked at the array, he suddenly felt sick in
advance. Then there was a wave of leaden heaviness, of complete
fatigue. He hadn't had time to think of sealing the cabin. He had
simply fallen into the bed then and there, and for all practical
purposes passed out on the spot.

Barney Chard lay wondering about that. It had been, one might say, a
rough year. Through the long days in particular, he had been doing his
level best to obliterate his surroundings behind sustained fogs of
alcoholism. The thought of the hellishly brilliant far-off star around
which this world circled, the awareness that only the roof and walls
of the cabin were between himself and that blazing alien watcher,
seemed entirely unbearable. The nights, after a while, were easier to
take. They had their strangeness too, but the difference wasn't so
great. He grew accustomed to the big green moon, and developed almost
an affection for a smaller one, which was butter-yellow and on an
orbit that made it a comparatively infrequent visitor in the sky over
the valley. By night he began to leave the view window in operation
and finally even the door open for hours at a time. But he had never
done it before when he wanted to go to sleep.

Alcoholism, Barney decided, stirring uneasily on the sweat-soiled,
wrinkled sheet, hadn't been much of a success. His body, or perhaps
some resistant factor in his mind, let him go so far and no farther.
When he exceeded the limit, he became suddenly and violently ill. And
remembering the drunk periods wasn't pleasant. Barney Chard, that
steel-tough lad, breaking up, going to pieces, did not make a pretty
picture. It was when he couldn't keep that picture from his mind that
he most frequently had sat there with the gun, turning it slowly
around in his hand. It had been a rather close thing at times.

Perhaps he simply hated McAllen and the association too much to use
the gun. Drunk or sober, he brooded endlessly over methods of
destroying them. He had to be alive when they came back. Some while
ago there had been a space of several days when he was hallucinating
the event, when McAllen and the association s