As Besan held the soft warmth of the terrified girl in his arms a great gladness fought with the despair in his heart. Relsa Dav, whose least glance in the classrooms of Rhilg University made him more aware of his hopeless love, was alive.... And he was an Earthman, a renegade son of an alien race who could never hope to mate with a Garro!

The System that ruled Terra, and a score of other lesser and greater worlds, was responsible for their exile. The System's rigid code of controls over all the activities of its citizens—even to what they ate, and wore, and what they thought—inevitably produced a diminishing handful of rebels with every generation.

The punishment for any infraction of the rules was invariably amnesia; the child-like result of this operation being trained again in the frozen tenets of the System until the least spark of individuality was extinguished. There was no bloodshed in all the System's worlds and prisons were forgotten mounds of crumbling masonry and metal. Instead there were the gentle blanking rays of the System Police and the inevitable hospitalization afterward.

From this threat of complete forgetfulness Besan Wur's father and mother had escaped by spacer to this forbidden jungle planet of Saaar. Her RZX rating and that of Besan's father had not coincided within the narrow limits prescribed. But they had mated and stolen a System police craft in making their getaway.

They found that Saaar was a tropical savage world alive with ferocious and gigantic animals. The System's aversion for shedding blood—even animal blood—had led them to bypass Saaar until the semi-civilized natives of that world would have tamed it. So it was a safe refuge for the parents of Besan ... as long as they could evade the bloodthirsty denizens of the steaming jungles and broad grasslands!

Strangest of all was the discovery that the cooler uplands of Saaar supported a well-advanced civilization: the Saaaran bi-peds who called themselves Garros. Their cities were underground, in the cavern-honeycombed cliffs and deep canyons, and they were linked together by highways that ran through great tubes of a rustless metal mesh. These tubes were designed to prevent the encroachment of vegetation and wandering animals on the roadway—no animal would face the threat of the stripe-headed men's scent but their vehicles were so swift they had little warning of the Garros' approach.

And so they had disguised themselves, as other Terrans before them had done, and mingled 

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