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“It’s good. Hell, I wouldn’t go back to some of the pestholes I’ve lived in for pay. But still...”

These pestholes are the contemporary equivalent of buccaneer hangouts in the 18th century.

Newlin thought of dying Mars, the burnt-out husk of Venus, the political and economic pesthole of Earth—even the grim, gray, terrible frontiers on the further planets and moons.

Reorientation will pull them out of that pesthole in a couple of months, and another decade will see them raising cattle and wheat again outside.

In some moister climate La Corrala would have been a nest of contagion: the wind and sun of Madrid, however,—that sun which brings blisters to the skin,—saw to the disinfection of that pesthole.