The little colony was absolutely dependent on the supplies they brought. This fact was obvious to everybody, but the Beldens made a deduction from it which was unprecedented on Callisto: they could threaten to withhold the supplies and thereby force the rest of the colonists to agree to whatever they asked--provided they could make the threat stick. They made the attempt. On one of their trips back from Earth, they put the ship into an orbit around Callisto instead of landing, and announced they would not land until their henchmen on Callisto were in control.
And the henchmen did a thorough job of taking control. All the details were taken care of: They quickly seized the radio transmitters that maintained contact with Ganymede, they confiscated all the reserves of spaceship fuel they could find, they clamped down as tightly as they could on communication between the domes; then they started keeping a close check on every tool that could be used as a weapon. There was just one place they slipped up. Their search for fuel wasn't good enough.
The people of No. 4 Dome pooled the fuel they had hidden from the Beldens; they seized from the Beldens' guards the Dome's tiny spaceship, which had been assembled on Callisto and which had never been intended to leave the Jupiter system; and they sent the ship off for Venus, with Garcia and Birkerod aboard. Venus was the only possible destination, with the planets' positions in their orbits as they were then: to reach Earth or Mars would have taken either more fuel than they had, or much more time than they could spare.
On Venus there was no hitch. Garcia and Birkerod went to the Liaison Office in Kreingrad, as planned, and were provided with the _Tang Chuh-Chih_, with a load of supplies--and with Nick Pappas, a former Callistan who wanted to return there. They followed the Liaison Office's suggestion and took Pappas aboard.
"We're all Callistans now," Birkerod repeated. "I wonder, Nick. How did you happen to leave Callisto in the first place? Just felt like visiting good old Saskatchewan? I doubt it. Let's see--you left before that business started with the Beldens, didn't you?"
Pappas licked his lips nervously. Garcia answered for him: "Yes, about ten months before, according to what they told us on Venus."
