"Ah, shut up," snapped Stiffy. "Who can think with you blabbering around?"
Smith danced in rage. "Who's blabbering? I got a good mind to...."
He doubled up his fist and started toward Stiffy.
And once again Oliver Meek did something he never would have thought of doing back on Earth. He put out his gloved hand, deliberately, and pushed Smith in the face. Pushed hard, so hard that Smith thumped down in the dust of the street and sat there, silenced by surprise.
Without even looking back, Meek strode purposefully down the street toward the Prowler. What he meant to do he did not know. What he possibly could do he had no idea. But anything was better than standing there while the crowd screamed at him and men shook their fists at him.
Why, they might even lynch him! He shivered at the thought. But men still did things like that. Especially when someone monkeyed around with the very things they depended on for life out here in naked space. Maybe they'd turn him out on Juno with only an hour or two of oxygen. Maybe they'd....
Stiffy was yelling at him. "Come back, you danged old fool...."
Suddenly the ground leaped and bucked beneath Meek's feet. The power plant reeled before his startled eyes and then, somehow, he was on his back, watching the dome wheel and weave above him.
Fighting for breath that had been knocked out of him, he clawed his way to his knees, tried to stand erect, but the ground still was crawling with motion.
It was like an earthquake, he told himself, startled that he could even think. But it couldn't be an earthquake. Juno didn't have earthquakes, there was no reason for Juno to have earthquakes. The little planetoid eons ago had cooled through and through, each rock, each strata had found its place. Juno was dead, dead as the reaches of space itself, and earthquakes don't happen on dead planets.