with pain. He fell to the tracks and lay dying.

But the process was slower than he anticipated. A full minute passed and he had not yet expired. This puzzled him. How could you live with all this pain? With every bone broken? It just didn't make sense. Tommy waited.

But death proved remarkably stubborn. It refused to drop its black mantle over his tortured body. Finally Tommy moved an arm—a foot—a leg. Odd. They all worked. He got to his feet. He conceded that maybe the agony was not as great as it had first seemed. Now that he could breathe again, things were better. There was only one bad place, really; a vicious bloody abrasion along his right forearm.

The lights of a platform loomed ahead. Tommy crawled over the car and stepped gingerly around the body of the dead Martian. Then he hurried forward and climbed on the deserted platform.

Here the light was better and he examined his arm. It was an angry, bloody mass but the blood was oozing out rather than flowing. No deep wound had been suffered but it hurt like fury. He could not bear to have anything touch it so he put his arm out at an awkward angle and left it there while he looked around, wondering what this place was and also how hard you had to get hit and how much it had to hurt before you got killed.

His ponderings were interrupted by the sound of footsteps. In the face of this, there was nothing to do, he decided, but pick a direction and run. Back up the tracks? No. While the lights from the overhead bulbs were dim, they would still reveal him at quite a distance. The platform had two exits. The running footsteps were approaching along one of these. That left the other. Tommy plunged into it and ran.

He ran a long way and his surroundings changed swiftly. The rail platform had been crude and uninspiring but now he was fleeing along a beautiful marble corridor.

He stopped for breath, backed into a partially secluded niche and admired his surroundings. Was this the kind of place the Martians lived in? It certainly didn't fit into his preconceived notions of a place where backward ice people would dwell.

As his breathing lessened, a tantalizing sound asserted itself upon his ears. An odd, singing sound, both pleasant and mysterious. He wondered where it came from.

He peeked out into the corridor and found it deserted.

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