The Angel in the House

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rading tramps alike, she was haven; drink and drugs, women and diversions unspeakable lured to her space ports the cream and scum, adventures and riffraff of half a dozen worlds. Sailors and pirates paid off at her and stayed as long as their wages lasted in the Street of the Sailo

tering welter of dark, rutted byways extending all the way to the comparative orderliness of the short, narrow Street of the Merchants, itself flanked by the drunken bedlam of the Street of the Sailors. It can be understood why these men who flew, who needed a whole solar system for elbow room, disdain

ous space port rested in the heart

e, some reptilian and comparable only to the giants that roamed Earth in her prehistoric ages. Eating, fighting, breeding in the humid gloominess of the vegetation shrouded swamps, their bellows and roars sometimes at night thundered right through Porno, a rem

res, half human in intelligence, blind from their unlit habitat, but larger than a man and stronger; fiercer, too, when cornered.

eying of all entertainments. In them were a score of snares for the buccaneer with money in his pocket and dope in his blood. The open doors on the Street of the Sail

s aloft in gilded cages, where all of them, young and old, pale and painted, gia

g, with the planet's universal weapon, the skewer-blade, sheathed at their sides; tall, sweaty Martians, powerful brutes, wearing the air-rarifying mask that was necessary for them in Satellite III's Earthlike atmosphere. Business men and sight-seers, except

f-human savagery and mystery; above, in the very shadow of their might

t o' Porno of a

liot Leithgow for very good reasons had told Hawk C

ort that day the elderly exile waited in vain

oying tropical darkness, heavy with the odors of town and exotic products and the damp, lush vegetation of the impinging jungle. The nig

st to the confusion around them. They were slant-eyed men, with smooth saffron faces, and strongly built, and they were armed, each one, with both a ray-gun and a two-foot black, pointed tube. But it was not their numbers, formation or weapons that caused the carousin

ing lifeless, dumb, machinelike in the man. Ahead, an isuan-maddened Earthling fell foul of a Venusian; a circle cleared in the mob, a ray-gun spat and missed, and the Venusian closed, the gleam of a skewer-bla

they were gone down ano

finally before a low, steel-walled house, typical of the strongholds of prude

t of revelry from the Street of the Sailors; once the ports of an outbound space-ship flashed overhead for an insta

rom his slash, crept up to the front entrance-port and held the tip to it. Blue light sparkled fantastically, revealing his impassive face,

A challenge, shouts volleying forth, a scream, another, and the peculiar

ance-port. They were carrying something

and was