g, it looked badly tangled in vines,
and its gun was gone. There was no need to shoot, but he wondered
suddenly, if he had, what kind of a curve would the bullet have
followed?

There was no sound from the other, but Bryce hesitated to climb the
stairs and put his head above floor level of the corridor. A voice
might give the other direction for a snap shot if that was what he was
waiting for. Bryce chanced speaking.

"I've got this one, Pierce. How's the other?"

The televiewer in the entrance hall replied, "Lying on his back with
his gun five feet away. You all right?"

"Yes." Bryce walked around the circumference of the globe and searched
in the vines for the missing weapon of number one. The body in the
spacesuit nearby was quite definitely a corpse. He saw the gun
glittering a little further on and picked it up, wiping off leaf pulp
on a clean patch of moss. It was a heavy duty police pacifier, a
distance stunner, adjusted to a narrow beam.

He climbed to the corridor and collected the other weapon. It was a
police pacifier too. They had not meant direct murder then, but only
to stun him and deliver him to Orillo, C. O. D.

"How are you doing with their ship?" Bryce asked, "Is it armed?"
Armament for spaceships was illegal, and careful official inspection
made it rare.

"I didn't wait to see," Pierce's voice came apologetically after a
pause in which some background noise sounding like a crash came over
the televiewer speaker. "It started swinging around when I came in
sight, so I just rammed it with that pretty ornamental nose spike. I'm
backing off now with the forward braking jets."

"Then whoever's inside is probably either spacefrozen or cooked.
Jockey that ship around on the spike and give her a four minute shove
toward Earth, then push that button that collapses the ornamental
vanes on the spike and let it pull loose when you start braking. I
don't want any ship hulks floating around here."

"Aye-aye, Cap."

"Go slow on those braking jets when you pull loose. The back wash
could touch your hull."

Pierce returned and came in to help Bryce drag the corpses through the
airlock and into space.

They braced against the silver curve of the floating spaceship and
gave the body a combined strong shove towards Earth. Spinning slowly
end over end it dwindled into a dark speck against the glowing orb of
Earth, destined to be a meteorite and make a small bright streak in
the Earth sky several days late