red with shame and so was expunged from the
record of time. But I remember it well. It was an era compounded of
stupidity and grandeur, of brilliant discovery and grimy political
maneuver. We, the greedy men of space--and that includes Jaq
Merril--saw it end with sorrow in our hearts, knowing that we had killed
it.

If you will think back to the years immediately preceding the Age of
Space, you may remember the Iron Curtain. Among the nations of the Earth
a great schism had arisen, and a wall of ideas was built between east
and west. Hydrogen bombs were stockpiled and armies marched and
countermarched threateningly. Men lived with fear and hatred and
distrust.

Then, suddenly, came the years of spaceflight and the expanding
frontiers. Luna was passed. Mars and Venus and the Jovian Moons felt the
tread of living beings for the first time since the dawn of time. The
larger asteroids were taken and even the cold moonlets of Saturn and
Uranus trembled under the blast of Terran rockets. But the Iron Curtain
still existed. It was extended out into the gulf of space, an intangible
wall of fear and suspicion. Thus was born the Wall Decade.

Jaq Merril was made for that epoch. Ever in human history there are
those who profit from the stupidity of their fellows. Jaq Merril so
profited. He dredged up the riches of space and took them for his own.
And his weapon was man's fear of his brothers.

* * * * *

It was in Yakki, down-canal from the Terran settlement at Canalopolis,
that Merril's plan was born. His ship, the _Arrow_, stood on the red
sands of Syrtis Major, waiting for a payload to the Outer System. It
stood among a good many like it: the _Moonmaid_, the _Gay Lady_, the
_Argonaut_, and my own vessel, the _Starhound_.

We, the captains, had gathered in the Spaceman's Rest--a tinkling
gin-mill peopled with human wrecks and hungry-eyed, dusty-skinned women
who had come out to Mars hoping for riches and had found only the same
squalor they had left behind. I remember the look in Merril's eyes as he
spoke of the treasures of space that would never be ours, of the gold
and sapphires, the rubies and unearthly gems of fragile beauty and great
price. All the riches of the worlds of space, passing through our hands
and into the vaults of the stay-at-homes who owned our ships and our
very lives. It seemed to me that Merril suffered as though from physical
pain as he spoke of riches. He was nothing