Karns turned slowly and viewed the new speaker. He was a big man, with piercing black eyes and a hawk nose, and heavily bearded—a strange sight for super-tropical Venus where men kept clean shaven for coolness. But the man turned abruptly away and entered an inner office, slamming the door behind him. Hank Karns' eyes followed him all the way—they were fixed on the back of the fellow's neck. There, oddly enough, just above the shoulder line, peeped a line of color demarcation. Above the line, which was made visible by the fact that its wearer had pulled open his collar for comfort, the skin was the normal pallor usually seen on Venus; below, it was a mottled chocolate color.
"Didja hear what the collector said?" snarled the clerk. "Scram!"
Without a word, Hank Karns turned and left the office. He passed through the thronged corridors almost in a daze. There was Cappy Wilkerson, gone to the Swamp, virtually condemned to death. There was his ship sold, even before the trial which was to condemn it. And everywhere there was high-handed insolence, seemingly inspired by this overbearing man with the duplex complexion. What did it mean? And the fact that he could not yet place those sharp eyes and that predatory nose, though somewhere, sometime, he had encountered them before, puzzled Hank Karns still more. Something stank in Venus.
An hour later he sat morosely in a tiny tavern he had long known, hidden up the blind alley known as Artemis Lane. For half a century it had been familiar to him as the hangout for his kind.
"So you see how it is," the bartender was concluding. "At this rate there won't be any more. With all the old-timers dead or in the Swamp, how in hell can I keep running. No sir, this joint is for sale—for what it'll bring. Drink up and have another."
Captain Karns took the proffered drink from the grizzled tavern-keeper, but despite its cheering nature—for it was purest "comet-dew"—he took it glumly. Never in all his long and active life had he heard so much evil news at one sitting. Another of his old pals had come to grief, and all because he had touched at Mercury. Mercury, it appeared, was poison to all his tribe. The record was too consistent to be accounted for by coincidence. Coincidents do not occur in strings.
"And what makes it stink all the worse," persisted the indignant bartender, bitterly, "not a damn finger is lifted to stop the flow of trilibaine. The town is lousy with it. Half these natives stay hopped up all the time."
"I thought the Federals had cleaned that up ten years ago," commented Hank Karns.
"It's back," was the laconic retort.