PLANET OF SAND

By Murray Leinster

Tossed into the trackless Cosmos by his mortal enemy, shipwrecked on an unfriendly star, he determined to defy the dangers of numberless nights, and, hunted turned hunter, keep a tryst with Hate....

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Famous Fantastic Mysteries, February 1948. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

He debated straggling farther under the shelter of the monstrous roof....

There was bright, pitiless light in the prison corridor of the Stallifer. There was the hum of the air-renewal system. Once in every so often there was a cushioned thud as some item of the space ship's machinery operated some relay somewhere. But it was very tedious to be in a confinement cell. Stan Buckley—Lieutenant, J.G., Space Guard, under charges and under restraint—found it rather more than tedious.

He should have been upheld, perhaps, by the fact that he was innocent of the charges made against him by Rob Torren, formerly his immediate superior officer. But the feeling of innocence did not help. He sat in his cell, holding himself still with a grim resolution. But a deep, a savage, a corrosive anger grew and grew and grew within him. It had been growing in just this manner for weeks.

The Stallifer bored on through space. From her ports the cosmos was not that hostile, immobile curtain of unwinking stars the early interstellar travelers knew. At twelve hundred light-speeds, with the Bowdoin-Hall field collapsing forty times per second for velocity control, the stars moved visibly. Forty glimpses of the galaxy about the ship in every second made it seem that the universe was always in view.

And the stars moved. The nearer ones moved swiftly and the farther ones more slowly, but all moved. And habit made motion give the feeling of perspective, so that the stars appeared to be distributed in three dimensions and from the ship seemed very small, like fireflies. All the cosmos seemed small and almost cosy. The Rim itself appeared no more than a few miles away. But the Stallifer headed for Earth from Rhesi II, and she had been days upon her journey, and she had come a distance which it would stagger the imagination to compute.

In his cell, though, Stan Buckley could see only four walls. There was no variation of light; no sign of morning or night or afternoon. At intervals, a 

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