The Earth colonies on Venus, Mars and the satellites of Jupiter are filled with men like Yancey Ritter. They're men who seem to be born with a weight of bitterness on their backs. They look at the Universe early in life and decide that things are set against them—that they are the persecuted and misunderstood. You've heard them talking in bars.
"If I just had a chance I'd make it. I just never get the breaks."
Yancey Ritter said that a thousand times in his life. He said it when he was prospecting for brakion on Mars, when he tried lumbering on Europa, and finally, when he took the assignment to the humidi-hut on Venus.
That job, of course, was to be only a stepping stone. When Yancey wasn't preoccupied with the relatively simple routine of maintaining the humidi-hut he planned to search for quollas. The edge of the Desert Rouge, near the humidi-hut to which Yancey had been assigned, was reputed to be an ideal locale for such a search.
The quolla, an amazingly beautiful gem burnished to a glowing loveliness by the wind and sand, brought an increasingly fancy price in the jewel markets of the System. A few sizeable finds and Yancey would have a little capital with which to work. Given fifty thousand credits he was certain that he could, in time, become one of the really big investors on Venus.
Such projects always assumed a false simplicity in Yancey's mind. Aboard the space tramp that brought him to Athens his sudden rise to power and position seemed quite feasible. But when he gazed out across the tortured wastes of the Desert Rouge he felt a momentary tremor of doubt.
Such spasms passed quickly. Like most men of his temperament Yancey compensated for the failures of past and present with roseate dreams of the future. Now, it appeared, that future was at hand.
The commandant in Athens was brutally frank.
"It would appear to me, Ritter," he said wryly, "that tenacity is not one of your cardinal virtues."