Taclos bordered by the thousand-mile-long, towering mountain chain of the Aljontors passed beneath them. On the other side was the seemingly endless red desert expanse that sloped into the artificial Cehlaz Sea and the ancient city of Marsport, formerly Ogolkor.

“I think we can crash-land,” said the Ensign faintly. “We could be lighter though.” Ward looked down. They were cutting through incredibly rarefied air. The sky was cloudless, of an intensely dark blue shade that spoke at once of a thinned atmosphere. They were crashing directly into the great clay desert. Well, that’s where he’d been trying to get all the time, but now he didn’t have his mercenaries with him.

The desert—a blazing expanse of ferric oxidized clay, a brilliant red, glazed by centuries of heat and wind until it glistened like the side of a vast porcelain bowl. Veins of millions of cracks that were really gigantic chasms crossed it like the roadways of millions of mad engineers. Deep down in those catacombs were the intricate, unexplored regions of the Mo-Sanshon and practically the whole insect species remaining on Mars. Part of the folklore and legend of the earliest known history of surface tribes, they had been feared, revered, studied, ignored, and ridiculed by successive stages of surface civilization.

A strained, paralyzed silence pervaded the spheroid. Not even a whimper broke it.

“This is it,” shouted the Ensign hysterically, and Ward closed his eyes as a long horrible jarring grind seemed to rip his nerves to pieces....

The red desert was an incredible desolation of dehydrated, shimmering emptiness before Ward’s blurred and burning eyes. Dry, gasping heat, enhanced by thin air filled with fine particles of rust. The ancient, devastated planet kept clinging to life; Ward had often wondered why.

The clay on which he was outstretched was like burning metal against his bruised body. Through pain-mist, he saw the twisted wreckage of the air-sled about a hundred feet away. Low hills that looked unbelievably far away—everything wavering feverishly through the shimmering haze. Then he looked down the length of his body at his right leg. It was crushed, swollen, blue, with little sharp bone splinters edging through tattered flesh.

He unscrewed his helmet and unzippered his pressure suit, to crawl out of it painfully with the shattered leg. He lay, gasping, his fingers scraping along the glazed clay. Phobos was setting in the East again. Deimos was a crimson-rimmed eye, hesitating above the 

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