d their spacesuits for better
freedom of movement. It was the regulation thing to do; always
considered safe. But they had been caught by the sudden dropping of
pressure around them to almost zero. And by the terrible cold of the
Titanian night.

For a grief-stricken second Bert Kraskow looked down again at the body
beside which he stood. You could hardly see that the face had been
young. The eyes popped. The pupils were white, like ice. The fluid
within had frozen. The mouth hung open. In the absence of normal
air-pressure, the blood in the body had boiled for a moment, before
the cold had congealed it.

"Your kid brother, Nick, eh, Bert?" an air-conditioning mechanic named
Lawler said, almost in a whisper. "About twenty years old, hunh?"

"Eighteen," Bert Kraskow answered into his helmet-phones as he spread
the youth's coat over the distorted face.

Old Stan Kraskow, metal-worker, was there, too. Bert's and Nick's dad.
He was blubbering. There wasn't much that anybody could do for him.
And for the other dead, there were other horrified mourners. Some of
them had been half nuts from homesickness, and the sight of harsh,
voidal stars, even before this tragedy had happened.

It was Lawler who first cut loose, cursing. He was a big, apish man,
with a certain fiery eloquence.

"Damned, lousy, stinkin' obsolete equipment!" he snarled. "Breathe on
it and it falls apart! Under old Bill Lauren, Space Colonists' Supply
used to make good, honest stuff. I worked with it on Mars and the
moons of Jupiter. But now look what the firm is turning out under
Trenton Lauren, old Bill's super-efficient son! He was so greedy for
quick profits in the new Titan colonization project, and so afraid of
being scooped by new methods of making these fizzled-out worlds
livable, that he didn't even take time to have his products decently
inspected! And that, after not being able to recognize progress! Hell!
Where is that dumb, crawlin' boob?"

[Illustration]

There was a moment of silence. Then somebody muttered: "Speak of the
devil!..."

* * * * *

With eyes that had grown quietly wolfish, Bert Kraskow saw Trenton
Lauren arrive at last from the administration dome. He was plump,
maybe thirty-five, and somehow dapper even in a spacesuit. That he was
here on Titan at all, and not in a pressurized settlement on Mars, or
at the main office of his firm in Chicago, was a cocky gesture of
bravado, a leaf torn fr