The voice of Arzt came harshly through the quiet. He was a short, immensely powerful man, with reddish features stamped with the cast of brutality. There was a slovenliness to him, a brutal arrogance that was betrayed by every ugly twist of his mouth as he spoke.
"Lolan, you'll give the order," he snapped. "These filthy revolutionists won't be looking for trouble if you handle it right. We'll have them before they know what's happened. I told you Ars Lugo would get in touch with his cronies as soon as he thought he wasn't being watched. Come on!"
They left the ship on the roof and groped down an outside stairway to the narrow street. A light fog hung yellowish in the streets. For a moment after their feet touched the slimy cobblestones, the eight Martians huddled together by a single impulse—revulsion at the sordidness of the lower-class quarter.
Sickly gleams kindled on their uniforms where stray beams from dingy windows found them. The stench of rotting offal insulted their nostrils, mingled with the musty, revolting odors peculiar to the south side of Areeba, principal city of Venus. A place of drunken, tottering buildings and vice and sickness that festered like a raw sore, the south side was the abode of the diseased, the degenerate, the lawless.
With a muttered curse, Lolan swung down the street. It didn't have to be like this. It was commanders like Arzt who let the Venusians suffer for their own enrichment. Inwardly, a resolution was taking possession of the young officer that this was his last duty on Venus. Tomorrow ... his letter of resignation would be handed in.
In a dark alley across the street from a crumbling, one-story hovel, he slipped into the shadows. His eyes were riveted to the yellow cracks of light opposite him, where bolted shutters guarded some furtive scene within that house. Then he was moving swiftly backwards as two forms reeled from the fog. His eyes narrowed to careful slits that raked the pair.
They had not seen him, nor, apparently, the other hidden Martians they had just passed. Their bellies were so full of cheap Martian gyla that all they could see was the heaving stones under their feet. Lolan's slim, dark fingers fell from the sadon pistol at his side. The fog swallowed the derelicts.
Ragged nerves leaping, Lolan strode across the street, knocked softly at the door. Frightened gasps found their way through the portal. Someone gruffed:
"Who is it? What do you want?"