The bodies were lying in a row beneath an overhanging ledge of sandstone. They had burrowed deep into a miniature jungle of thick leaved canal weeds, and it had taken him a long time to find them. The gleam of four shiny new B-type spacesuits, less carefully concealed, had finally ended the search. Kent and Ray had been busy this morning.
Standing where he was, Joe could look down the green and red dotted slope and see the ashes of the picnic fire, the scatterings of food that the night-crawling nolls had found unpalatable. And, blown by Mars' occasional winds—or taken by alien hands—to a spot only a few feet from where it had been thrown away, was the scrap of paper with his letterhead on it. The paper that he and Kent had marked up during their discussion of tomorrow night's flight to Aarn, Callisto.
If they didn't actually hear us talking, Joe thought, it was that paper that started the whole thing.
He said loudly: "Are you here, Uarnl? You thought it was perfect, didn't you? You thought you could repossess your bodies as the liner went off-world. Well, look at this!"
With executival thoroughness, he blasted the four bodies into cinders.
Sarah came out of the kitchen as Joe opened the canal door and let himself in. He turned and paid the cabby and the skimmer moved off.
"Hello, darling," she said, and tugged at his arm. "I've got a swell supper fixed!"
Joe smiled at her as he shrugged out of his tunic. He flung it casually over her favorite potted Zinhaeat. She didn't grab it off. I should have been a detective, he thought. He followed her into the kitchen.
"Anything interesting happen today?" Sarah began to arrange the table, moving things here and there fussily. She looked at Joe from the corner of her eye. "That's about how you like it, isn't it?" she asked.