nd rots lungs. So the engine
room had the air pumped out of her, and the stokers who tended the dials
and set the cathode attitudes had to wear suits, smelling themselves for
twelve hours at a time and standing a good chance of cooking where they
sat when the drive arced. _Serenus_ was an ugly old tub. At that, we
were the better of the two interstellar freighters the human race had
left.

"You're bound over the border, aren't you?"

MacReidie nodded. "That's right. But--"

"I'll stoke."

MacReidie looked over toward me and frowned. I shrugged my shoulders
helplessly. I was a little afraid of the stranger, too.

The trouble was the look of him. It was the look you saw in the bars
back on Earth, where the veterans of the war sat and stared down into
their glasses, waiting for night to fall so they could go out into the
alleys and have drunken fights among themselves. But he had brought that
look to Mars, to the landing field, and out here there was something
disquieting about it.

He'd caught Mac's look and turned his head to me. "I'll stoke," he
repeated.

I didn't know what to say. MacReidie and I--almost all of the men in the
Merchant Marine--hadn't served in the combat arms. We had freighted
supplies, and we had seen ships dying on the runs--we'd had our own
brushes with commerce raiders, and we'd known enough men who joined the
combat forces. But very few of the men came back, and the war this man
had fought hadn't been the same as ours. He'd commanded a fighting ship,
somewhere, and come to grips with things we simply didn't know about.
The mark was on him, but not on us. I couldn't meet his eyes. "O.K. by
me," I mumbled at last.

I saw MacReidie's mouth turn down at the corners. But he couldn't
gainsay the man any more than I could. MacReidie wasn't a mumbling man,
so he said angrily: "O.K., bucko, you'll stoke. Go and sign on."

"Thanks." The stranger walked quietly away. He wrapped a hand around the
cable on a cargo hook and rode into the hold on top of some freight. Mac
spat on the ground and went back to supervising his end of the loading.
I was busy with mine, and it wasn't until we'd gotten the _Serenus_
loaded and buttoned up that Mac and I even spoke to each other again.
Then we talked about the trip. We didn't talk about the stranger.

* * * * *

Daniels, the Third, had signed him on and had moved him into the empty
bunk above mine. We slept all in a bunch on t