 What did the dead man compare the Spacemen to in disgust?
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. He was like a red-skinned marionette with pipestem arms and legs, clad in a torn skivvy shirt and faded blue dungarees. Several times, Ben glimpsed the bulky figures of CO 2 -breathing Venusians, the first he'd ever seen. The Martians were fragile, doll-like creatures with heads too large for their spindly bodies. Even when they played an Earth tune, it still seemed a song of old Mars, charged with echoes of lost voices and forgotten grandeur. He was stout and flabby and about forty and he hated spacemen. "Spacemen," he muttered, "are getting like flies. Everywhere, all you see's spacemen." "If it weren't for spacemen, you wouldn't be here." "Spacemen in their white monkey suits. 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. 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. You can try to stay in space, even if you exile yourself from Earth. After all, was it right for a single second, a single insignificant second, to destroy a man's life and his dream? He found a tramp freighter whose skipper was on his last flight before retirement. So now he sat searching for a perhaps nonexistent red-bearded giant, and hoping and doubting and fearing, all at once.
 Flies
 Bees  Garbage  Maggots  Flies