it were
somehow a source of strength and consolation.

I patted him gingerly on the arm. "Now John. You've just had too much
beer, that's all. Let's go out and get some air and some strong black
coffee. C'mon now."

We staggered out into the morning darkness, the three of us. John, the
_Zloomph_, and I.

I was hanging on to him trying to see around and over and even under
the _Zloomph_--steering by a sort of radar-like sixth sense. The
street lights on Marsport are pretty dim compared to Earthside. I
didn't see the open manhole that the workmen had figured would be all
right at that time of night. It gets pretty damned cold around 4: A.M.
of a Martian morning, and I guess the men were warming up with a
little nip at the bar across the street.

Then--he was gone.

John just slipped out of my grasp--_Zloomph_ and all--and was
gone--completely and irrevocably gone. I even risked a broken neck and
jumped in the manhole after him. Nothing--nothing but the smell of
ozone and an echo bouncing crazily off the walls of the conduit.

"--is it.--is it.--is it.--is it."

John Smith was gone, so utterly and completely and tragically gone it
was as if he'd never existed....

* * * * *

Tonight is our last night at _The Space Room_. Goon-Face is scowling
again with the icy fury of a Plutonian monsoon. As Goon-Face has said,
"No beeg feedle, no contract."

Without John, we're notes in a lost chord.

We've searched everything, in hospitals, morgues, jails, night clubs,
hotels. We've hounded spaceports and 'copter terminals. Nowhere,
nowhere is John Smith.

Ziggy, whose two fingers have healed, has already bowed to what seems
inevitable. He's signed up for that trip to Neptune's uranium pits.
There's plenty of room for more volunteers, he tells us. But I spend
my time cussing the guy who forgot to set the force field at the other
end of the hole and let John and his _Zloomph_ back into his own time
dimension. I cuss harder when I think how we were robbed of the best
bass player in the galaxy.

And without a corpus delecti we can't even sue the city.

... THE END

End of Project Gutenberg's The Holes and John Smith, by Edward W. Ludwig

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