 Where was the rumored headquarters for the group of renegade spacemen?
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction May 1956. With never a moment to rest, the pursuit through space felt like a game of hounds and hares ... or was it follow the leader? The place was like an evil caldron steaming with a brew whose ingredients had been culled from the back corners of three planets. Most of the big room lay obscured behind a shimmering veil of tobacco smoke and the sweet, heavy fumes of Martian Devil's Egg. He could not tell if they were Earthmen, Martians or Venusians. Several times, Ben glimpsed the bulky figures of CO 2 -breathing Venusians, the first he'd ever seen. Even when they played an Earth tune, it still seemed a song of old Mars, charged with echoes of lost voices and forgotten grandeur. It had begun a week ago in Luna City. Everywhere, all you see's spacemen." "Spacemen in their white monkey suits. He was twenty-four and dressed in the white, crimson-braided uniform of the Odyssey's junior astrogation officer. He was three months out of the Academy at White Sands and the shining uniform was like a key to all the mysteries of the Universe. At fourteen, he'd converted an abandoned shed on the government boarding-school grounds to a retreat which housed his collection of astronomy and rocketry books. At sixteen, he'd spent every weekend holiday hitchhiking from Boys Town No. 5 in the Catskills to Long Island Spaceport. There, among the grizzled veterans of the old Moon Patrol, he'd found friends who understood his dream and who later recommended his appointment to the U. S. Academy for the Conquest of Space. And a month ago, he'd signed aboard the Odyssey —the first ship, it was rumored, equipped to venture as far as the asteroids and perhaps beyond. A thousand stars—a thousand motionless balls of silver fire—shone above him through Luna City's transparent dome. Under interplanetary law, that would mean ten years in prison and a dishonorable discharge. They don't want new men over thirty-four for officers on rockets or even for third-class jet-men on beat-up freighters—they don't want convicted killers. Or— There were old wives' tales of a group of renegade spacemen who operated from the Solar System's frontiers. They were misfits, rejectees from the clearing houses on Earth. And whereas no legally recognized ship had ventured past Mars, the souped-up renegade rigs had supposedly hit the asteroids. Their headquarters was Venus.
 Venus
 Venus  Mars  Earth  exiled in the Solar System