an, there
came an equal period of raw and biting cold to replace the heat. As bad
or worse, that would be.

There were perhaps three hundred prisoners here, Luke guessed, and a
guard allotted to each squad of fifteen men. Not many guards for so
large a number of convicts--but enough. The weird gravity of Vulcan had
taken care of that, and the flashlight things they always carried--queer
lights that would instantly neutralize the insulating property of his
clothing and render a man helpless.

* * * * *

Luke was working high up on the slope, with rock drill and pick. The
group to which he had been assigned was composed entirely of new
prisoners, mostly white men, but with a few blacks and one
coppery-skinned drylander of Mars. Whimpering, hopeless creatures, all
of them; not worth his notice. All day he labored without speaking to
any of them and the quantities of ore he removed gave mute evidence of
his tireless vigor. If Kulan, the giant Martian guard, took any notice
of it he gave no sign.

During the sleeping period, which they persisted in calling night,
things were different. No guards were needed in the escape-proof huts
and there was some surreptitious fraternizing among the prisoners. As
long as they made no undue noise, they were left to their own devices.
But for the most part they went to sleep heavily and wordlessly as soon
as they flung into their bunks. A broken-spirited lot.

Luke saw men suffering from some horrible malady that made them cough
and scream and bleed from nose and mouth. Old-timers, these were, men
who had survived for as many as three of four months. He saw them, in
their agony, beg the guards for merciful death; heard the brutal
laughter of their tormentors. Only when they were no longer able to rise
from their bunks were they put out of their misery by one of the singing
darts from the senior guard's gun.

Novak had it, this malady known as X.C.--Novak, the scar-faced,
yellow-fanged rat who occupied the bunk beneath Luke's and who talked to
him in hoarse whispers long after the others had gone to sleep. It was
from Novak that Luke was learning, and the knowledge he gained by
listening to the doomed man served only to intensify the flame of hate
that smoldered deep in his barrel-like chest.

After three red-lit days of grueling labor and three similarly red-lit
nights of listening to Novak, he reached the grudging conclusion that
escape fr