desert before blinking out. He’d been out for quite a while. No other figures were stirring in the yellow moonlight, the startlingly bright moonlight as clear as Earth dusk. Probably all the passengers were dead, or there would be some sign of life, unless those who survived had wandered away.

He gritted his teeth as tears of pain smarted in his eyes; he commenced dragging himself along. He kept crawling. Deimos had set. A thick darkness settled over him, and bitter cold. And, sometime later, just as Phobos rose brightly in the rarefied air, he was stopped by a gaping dark depth of fissure. He had gone as far as he could go toward—

—Where? There wasn’t a place for him now. He wanted to see the end of the Mo-Sanshon’s dreams of conquest, and he wondered if he ever could, now.

The whining of a jet-car spiraled toward him. The sound of it died, as he saw its shadow settle on the gleaming surface of the desert clay. A Martian make, from the sound, new style. A figure emerged and walked toward him. Soon she was close enough to distinguish in the soft glow of the moonlight.

An unattractive girl was very exceptional. But no less exceptional than beauty such as this girl displayed boldly and proudly. She was running swiftly toward him, the thin gauze garments styled by Martian women moulding her body like wet silk. The soft thin boots of desert jhan’s hide made no sound on the stone-hard clay. Her shadow elongated across the softly glowing brilliance of the surface like shading in a Rulahn three-dim painting.

Suddenly, intuitively, Ward’s skin crawled with horror, and he tried to drag himself away to the edge of the bottomless crevice. Then her arms were reaching down. Her shadow covered him like a shroud. Her hands clutched his jacket and pulled him away from the brink of the abyss.

Ward could sense them now even before they touched him. Their alien radiations impinged on his raw nerves now like a mental file. She appeared so human. But then you touched her, and felt those terrible alien tendrils in your brain, and you knew—

And from some deep reservoir he summoned the strength to act. He grabbed frantically for those shapely, but synthetic legs.

One of them jerked out of reach, but both his hands closed over the other. He heaved sidewise, and the beautiful bronzed torso went over him. Half of it dangled down into the crevice. Her legs flailed for traction. A low grunting as of effort came up stolidly from the 

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