“And I’d rather be up there,” Trent said as another shower of debris rained down from the loose soil layer, “Give me a hand out of here.”

“Right.” There was some muffled conversation overhead, then at last the rope sailed down and hit him in the face. He grabbed it tight and walked his way up the curved bowl until it was too steep for that, then let his feel drop out from under him and hand-over-handed it up the rest of the way. Two cops met him at the rim and hauled him out to stand on the pavement.

Donna just about knocked him back into the hole when she crabbed him in a hug and buried her fate against his chest. He was a muddy mess, but she didn’t seem to care. He wrapped his arms around her and rested his bearded cheek on the top or her head. “It’s all right,” he said. “I’m okay.” The cops stood behind her, embarrassedly looking away.

“I thought I’d lost you. Just like that, I thought I’d lost you.

“It’ll take a lot more than some piss-ant bank robber to—wait a minute. I know who that was.”

“Who?” Donna said, just as both lops asked the same thing.

Trent hesitated. He’d never met the guy, but he knew him by reputation, and he was apparently a pretty good sort, for a thief. But Trent didn’t owe him anything, and the guy had damned near gotten him killed. Besides, Trent had already opened his mouth. So he said, “Dale Larkin. The guy who bankrolled Allen Meisner and Judy Gallagher’s first spaceship.”

One of the cups. Bill Tanner, was an old high school buddy of Trent’s. He said, “The same spaceship you helped ’em build in your garage?”

“Yeah.” Trent grinned sheepishly. He had never been much of a science geek, but he and Donna had been in the right place at the tight time and they had wound up in the middle of things.

Bill said. “Well, what goes around comes around, doesn’t it?”

“I didn’t have nothing to do with the money,” Trent said. “I just hid ’em out when the whole damned country was after ’em for no good reason, and—”